peacefuljeffrey

This woman, for her feeble attempt to shift the true blame from her son to the company that is not truly culpable, should be taken out back, shot by people who illegally possess "semi-automatic assault weapons," and then run over by drunk drivers in unregistered automobiles. Really, though, this is disgusting. It's an extension of the bullshit tobacco and gun lawsuits. A WARNING: No matter WHAT industry you are in, YOU SHOULD OPPOSE THE TYPE OF LAWSUIT THAT SEEKS TO HOLD MANUFACTURERS LIABLE FOR THE MISDEEDS, ACCIDENTS, OR ILLEGAL ACTS OF OTHERS. We who have been in the corner of the gun manufacturers against the reckless and frivolous lawsuits against them have been telling those in other industries that "YOU ARE NEXT." If this kind of bullshit lawsuit is allowed to succeed, it will open the floodgates to sue ANY industry for ANYONE'S actions. Someone's skull is bashed in with a baseball bat? Sue Louisville Slugger. Someone is cut with a pocket knife at an ATM robbery? Sue Victorinox. Someone runs a stop sign and runs an old lady down? Sue Chevrolet. Someone gets too fat eating six TV dinners a day? Sue Swanson. Someone is stabbed with a sharpened screwdriver? Sue Craftsman. It is coming. And it will come because everyone said they didn't care that the legal precedent was established because the judgments were against unpopular industries like tobacco and guns. The attitude is "who gives a shit, those manufacturers are scumbags." What these idiots don't realize is that the legal precedent goes wider than just against those two industries, and eventually will be used to sue ALL industries. This is BULLSHIT. The lawyers know it. The judges know it. The juries know it. The plaintiffs know it. Anyone who is honest knows it. But eeeeeveryone involved is in it for the fast buck. Everyone thinks that the money to pay these judgments comes from some magic fountain. And NO ONE believes in individual personal responsibility anymore. After all, it precludes the means to sue to get rich, so it's something they don't want to think about or insist upon. Well, a lot of people have stood by, smugly laughing while the gun manufacturers have been victimized by predatory lawsuits perpetrated by predatory mayors and DAs and greedy trial lawyers -- even though the cases have never had any commonlaw legal merit. Now those people will begin to see the price of their smugness and their apathy, because these bullshit lawsuits are coming their way. Now it's OUR turn to be smug and say, "We fuckin' told you so, and you said, 'Nah nah it's only the gun companies.' " Well, we fuckin' told you so. -

There's no "clear loophole problem here." There IS no way to prevent someone who buys something legally from selling it illegally to someone who may not legally purchase it. How would YOU "fix" this "loophole"? Should a firearm that someone purchases be cable-locked to his body, and the only keys are held by the police, who would then unlock the cable lock only when it came time to sell the gun to a buyer who checks out? I mean, really. What "mechanism" is in place that would stop a person from illegally reselling prescription drugs after he obtains them legally? Answer: there is nothing that can be done except provide for punishment for those who break that particular law. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Comments like this are why leftists are derided as being elitist and atrociously SMUG. I thought you liberals were supposed to be all mush touchy-feely compassionate? I guess that goes out the window when you feel like gloating, huh. Would you make the same crass, smug comments about the kids who died at Columbine High School? Dance in blood somewhere else. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

John, I am steadfast against the notion of anyone but the shooter being culpable for gun violence... but... at this point I don't know what details there are about the circumstances surrounding the sale of this gun. There seems to be some fishy shit going on that is simply not listed in the story, but probably is detailed in the lawsuit. I think it will really come down to "did the dealer know or have reason to know that this straw-purchaser was reselling guns to criminals." I don't know that he did, I don't know that he didn't. If he did, though, he's a scumbag (witness the fact that he DID plead guilty to gun trafficking). If this dealer were one of several who had sold to the trafficker, that would diminish the chance that this dealer knew of his practices, or how many of the same or similar guns he had purchased recently. But if the same exact dealer sold ten identical or similar guns to one guy in a short-ish time, that should raise eyebrows and questions. Not saying that should mean he says, "Sorry buddy I won't sell any more to you," and not saying that means he should be liable as the lawsuit alleges, just that it raises questions. Now, in cases like the Nathaniel Brazill one here in Florida, the gun shop and distributor were sued (along with the school district where the kid shot his teacher dead), the dealer was clearly removed several times from the eventual possessor of the gun (Brazill) who stole it to commit the murder. There is no question that the dealer has no culpability in such a case. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

How about the guy that actor played in ROBOCOP -- Clarence Boddicker! "Just gimme my fuckin' phone call." - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

You forgot Spenser -- not the Robert Urich Spenser but the other guy, what'sisname? Joe Mantegna. They did a t.v. movie adaptation of one of the Robert B. Parker novels a few years ago, called Small Vices SPENSER is a BADASS! (The Spenser character in the novels is really really cool, and way harder than that 24 pussy. I watched the first episode of 24 and decided I thought the writing/acting/dialogue were all shit, so I've never watched it since. Hokum cliche, the whole show.) Eugene Lipinski played an assassin called the Gray Man, also a very hard dude. -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Isn't Tiger from South Florida? Maybe if he likes it enough, he'll buy an Otter and endow SoBe to get up and running again! ...Well, one can dream. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I don't know who Holly was. Please tell us something about her, okay? I'm sure that if she meant enough to you to make you mention this anniversary, there's some story you could tell that might make those who knew her and those who did not smile in remembrance. Thanks. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

All I know is, I jumped at SoBe in mid March, went away for my brother's wedding, heard some ultra-vague rumors on dropzone.com while I was up at my sister's place in NY (it was still too cold and dreary to jump at SDLI but I brought my gear just in case), and now that I'm back in Florida I understand that there's just nothing at all going on over there. I was told that they were trying to hook up with another Otter, but so far nada. Someone please let me know if there's a chance that skydiving will be going on at SoBe any time soon... Things had seemed to be going so cool out there... I was loving the place and the people... It was a home-away-from-home... - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Don't forget that we also went back there to keep their asses from coming under Nazi rule... and now they impose police-statism on themselves and then tell us here how much they lurrrrrve it! What a fuckin' world. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I agree with you. It's the cops job to gather evidence. They can ask for you to voluntarily give them anything they want. And you have the right to refuse. Just as courts have said the police must "mirandize" arrestees because there is no guarantee they are fully aware of their rights when arrested, I believe many people who are "asked" (in the setting of what seems like an arrest: "Hold out your hands"?!) to submit DNA will not be aware that they can legally refuse. And who does not believe that the cops would perhaps then threaten to "find" something in the suspect's pockets, or otherwise harass him or haul him away for something that they otherwise would not have? If they want someone to "volunteer" their DNA, they ought not to be doing it in the form of what seems like an arrest stop; they ought to do it in the form of a letter to the person's home address requesting that they contact the police department. I agree that this whole "proving yourself innocent" thing is bullshit that must stop! - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

As it was, 'e did a deal with the blancmange, and the blancmange et 'is wife. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Umm... Don't leave a $1500 Sony Handicam at the DZ if you ever want to see it again. Some people are the kind of scumbag who will take it on home even though they clearly know they never bought it. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

PICTURES!! WE WANT [I]PICTURES[/I]!!! The farther south, the better! - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I think you're misreading his meaning. I take him to mean NOT that "anything that's okay to force on the military is then okay to force on civilians," I take him to mean that it's way out of line to force something on the public that the police and military are themselves not willing to be subject to. That's not the same thing as saying that as long as the military's willing to have it done, civilians should be also. -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

LOL!! I also have not voted on this one... I can't bring myself to go 100% for or against. I will say that I don't like seeing it, but society and human civilization DO grant certain rights and powers of parents over their children. Maybe that's an idea whose time is past, I dunno. I think it's kind of sick, in a way, that just because a child is too young to be totally responsible for itself that people older than the child, even parents, can make absolutely life-changing decisions for or about them. But parents mold children's thinking: there is no way around that. How much worse damage can some ranting nutjob uneducated antisocial drug abusing loser parent do to a child just by saying and doing the wrong things around the kid, than someone just poking holes in the earlobes? I'd say that a kid with pierced ears is a whole lot better off than a kid with a psychologically abusive or physically abusive parent -- even though those latter may not leave scars or holes. How does this poll bear on the idea of parents having skin on their kids' PENISES cut off?! Did you know that they do that with an electric cauterizer in some cases -- and that it sometimes GOES WRONG?! There was a gender identity crisis case I saw a show about, where a boy was raised AS A GIRL (until major identity problems arose later on) because the doctor botched the circumcision and essentially BURNED HIS PENIS TO A CRISP when he was an infant! Far beyond the "damage" to a kid that early ear piercing can do, why is the question not, "Should parents be allowed to cut their kids' genitals?" Now, I myself am circumcised, and I have no particular objection to being so -- but I still have to wonder why it is okay for parents to do. What about parents who give their kids [I]STUPID, STUPID NAMES[/I]?? THAT is something that a kid has no control over that can also mess him up... Overall, I agree with the quoted response. Yes, they should be allowed. No, they shouldn't do it. Leave it to the kid. If the kid won't make a decision on it til she's 12 or 15, so be it. The kid is not a trophy to show off. If you're a parent and you want to show off little diamond earrings, put 'em in your own fuckin' ears if you're so vain and in search of status symbols. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

How the hell did you make that quantum leap of logic? As far as I'm concerned, if he made a statement about one issue, that does not prejudice his feelings or his right to believe differently about any other subject. Could you show us where he said that because he sets the benchmark on whether the police and military are willing to use smart guns, he is willing to have everything else that is forced upon military personnel to be forced on civilians? Get a grip, Bill! - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Are you actually unaware that many police units in the U.K. now DO carry guns? I have a newspaper clipping at home from Newsday (Long Island, NY) quoting a London police chief as saying, "We have to police the real world," in a story about London police now carrying guns (as opposed to keeping guns in the trunks of cars, as previously). The story appeared in the paper in 1995! LOTS of your police now carry guns. By the way, it's not necessarily about "curbing gun crime" that we argue to allow carry of concealed weapons. It's to enable those who wish to protect themselves against violent criminals to have the means to do so. Crime tends to go down as a collateral benefit. Besides, how would allowing honest non-criminal citizens to get licensed to carry a gun do much to increase gun crime if at all? We're not talking about giving gun-carrying amnesty to street criminals. Over here, the population of civilians who get permits to carry concealed firearms have criminal arrest rates that are lower than that of the overall population at large! You must be kidding. You think the cameras and the gun ban have resulted in criminals being unwilling to a) victimize you or b) carry and use guns? Don't you read your country's own newspapers, or BBC online? Besides, is it a comfort that the criminal might not use a gun, but instead might use a knife? Knife wounds are less survivable than gunshot wounds. That is medical fact. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

So far, nothing has cured society of "these two evils," so I can't quite see your point. Everything attempted thus far has proved to be futile, as far as combating illicit drug trade and terrorism. Have either of these things been ground to a halt -- or even stymied whatsoever? Of course not. So if you're using "combating these two evils" as a rationale for the intrusiveness of modern government surveillance and infringements on individual rights, I have to wonder what your criterion for determining success is. Surely you're not saying that using the aforementioned infringements we now stand atop a pile of drug dealers and terrorists with our fists raised in victory. All I see is that even despite the efforts of all goverments, including all this surveillance, nothing has stopped evil from being perpetrated in the world -- and of course nothing will. The best we can really hope for is to remain vigilant and to strike evildoers in defense, either by bombing strongholds of terrorists, or on a street-level by using defensive weapons (including handguns) against the common mugger. But it is asinine to forego the ability to do so (i.e. surrendering guns or banning defensive weapons) on the assumption that society at large is somehow taking care of the problem for us. For every claim that "the police are there to protect us so we shouldn't prepare to do the job ourselves," there is a person who has actually been victimized, disproving the notion that the police can and will keep us safe. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Now that's a strange way of looking at it. Charlton Heston was laughed out of the Oxford Union a few years back advocating thinking like that. Let's think of an optimum: No concealed hand-guns (legal or otherwise) = no shootings So why do you want to increase the number of guns in circulation??? Well, would that it were that simple. See, the problem is that the guns already are out there. Criminals have them. No one has an accounting of who has which. And the most problematic aspect of your statement "No concealed hand-guns (legal or otherwise) = no shootings" is that parenthetical part. Obviously it's easy to get rid of the LEGAL guns -- since law abiding people, by their nature, obey the laws when the laws say you can't have guns. (i.e. they don't go out to the streetcorner to buy a black-market gun from a smuggler. Those inclined toward criminal behavior, on the other hand, do. So as has been stated mannnny times before, the laws that say "no guns" end up taking guns away only from those who were never a problem with them (for the most part) in the first place. It's folly to pretend, as you seem to above, that with the stroke of a pen in a statute book we would simply have no guns whatsoever. Do you have a practical plan to implement that would eradicate all the currently existing guns? Thought not. Your armed robbery rate and murder rate are both on the rise, and have been steadily since, oh, around about the time they passed that "no one can have any guns" law back in '97. Your statements are false. Part of the problem just may be that criminals are emboldened when they can get handguns but they know that honest people cannot. A study I read about found that a person is SIX TIMES more likely to be mugged in London than in New York City. John, help me out here were a link to that study or a story about it, please.

You and someone else said that you like the cameras because of the deterrent of being filmed making others not willing to harm you. Oh, you must mean like the same way that knowing they're filmed every time stops people from robbing banks. The idea that a camera stands between you and getting robbed, raped or killed is laughable. If a person wants to harm you, he will. What if he's wearing a hood to disguise himself, so he won't worry about eventually getting caught because his likeness was recorded. Some people who want to break the law simply say "What the fuck" to the notion of getting caught, and those are the ones against whom your surveillance society is useless. And as far as why we Americans care? It's because people here will see your country's example (particularly leftists) and will push for it to be instituted here. It's harder to argue for shit like that here if it isn't in use elsewhere. As soon as some other society starts doing something intrusive and/or abusive, it's easier for proponents of it in this society to say, "See? See? They're doing it -- what's your big objection?!" My big objection is that I'm not a criminal, so the government shouldn't have the power to fuckin' watch me like a hawk at all times as though I were. There are some things that should not be sacrificed on the altar of promised government-provided safety, and privacy is one of them. The government is never going to make you safer, but you'll still lose the rights you cede to it, regardless. - - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I believe that the point has more to do with whether these systems will be reliable and whether they will adequately and safely serve the user -- particularly at crunch-time when the firearm is brought to bear. If the police and military REFUSE to use these guns (and they have already in some jurisdictions indicated that attitude is prevalent) specifically because of the risk of failure ending up having catastrophic results, then it is not fair to force civilians to use only these guns. The point is, "You first, Mr. Government Agent Person; and if you're willing to wager your life on this machine's reliability, then maybe I'll consider being so bound." - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

You felt hypoxic...but then did the skydive? - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

I agree with the two above posts in particular. We all, who skydive, accept the risks involved or we simply should not be skydiving at all. There are sooo many questions and variables involved in determining who or what was at fault in your wife's unfortunate accident (I hope she gets 100% healed soon!). That is part of the reason why no one can ever possibly guarantee the safety of a skydiver. The manufacturer obviously does what it can to provide safe equipment that will work as designed and intended. They are not infallible. You enter the sport knowing they are not infallible. How many times have you read, heard -- and taught people -- that a skydiver ASSUMES ALL RISK AND RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE SKYDIVE? That famous disclaimer (the bearded guy on the video) stipulates "even if certain actors are negligent"! (words to that effect) You can't get much clearer than that, when it comes to warning a skydiver about who's gonna be culpable in the event of an accident. Essentially, when you skydive, you admit that anyone else involved with your skydive could fuck up egregiously and YOU are still the only one you can blame. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. Once again, I hope your wife recovers as soon as possible, and NO, I think you should NOT sue. - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"

Ahh, my favorite jump is a benchmark for me but no big thing for experienced freeflyers. It was on March 13, a 3-way with Lisa and Jason Moyer at SoBe. A few weeks prior, our pilot, Mickey, approached me and said, "We gotta get you jumping with other people," and he said he would help get me interacting. He had observed that I was doing lots of solo jumps -- and these were not wasted time or anything, I was just practicing skills I was learning and developing -- but of course you really learn more when you're with others! So I did begin to get asked if I wanted to jump with other people. I have since done a few two-ways, and two three-ways. Lisa had been telling me she wanted to jump with me ever since I was on AFP. I finally cornered her and told her I was ready for her, so we arranged to do a 3-way Horny Gorilla exit, and then sit-fly the skydive. I've been working on my sit and it's coming along well. This skydive was a lot of fun for me. I like exiting in a group and doing a loop or two as we get stable off the hill. It's like this weird time-warpy protracted wait while you watch the world tumble and feel yourself accelerate to terminal. Once we got stable with our legs all linked, we separated and I did my best to simply stay near them. Of course, we had varying sink rates and I am not yet real good at adjusting mine, but I can use my hands and feet to turn in a sit, so I was at least able to keep them in sight. And when they got fast on me, I amazed myself by going into a stand and jetting on down to meet them again. The only thing was, I held the stand until I was adjacent to them and then sat again, which put me then lower than them. Lisa told me later that I have to start decelerating before I've met their level, otherwise I'd do what I did and shoot past them. Live and learn. I felt real good about that stand-flying, because other times when I had practiced it, I didn't hold the position for very long before my legs corked in one direction or another. Of course, those were times I was either not in a freefly suit or in a really baggy ill-fitting one I bought second-hand. I have an Ouragan suit on order and I am really looking forward to flying in that thing! (Not only will it feel better and in control, it's gonna be a stylin' suit, to be sure!) - -Jeffrey "With tha thoughts of a militant mind... Hard line, hard line after hard line!"