I generally either reward or ignore well thought out and linked /respectful comments even when I disagree with them. After all, I don't downvote hardly any of Anne's posts even when I (as I often do) disagree with them because she usually is a respectful and thoughtful commenter who links many of her assertions. But I know such fair rating of posts is  not what gives some here who like to play ideological clique games any happiness, so feel free to downvote a "Happy Holidays" post from me.

Feel much better about the Knickerbockers after Melo came alive and took charge in the 4th Quarter of Game 2.  My man JR Smith still lost though...but we got Shumpert and Pablo "Priggy Smalls" Prigioni playing well.  Need to get at least one in Indy.

I see you are fine with inequality before the law, Kdog.

That IS why we supposedly punish people, punishment being ONE of the reasons (but not the only reason) for incarceration.

I agree we need much less laws and the laws we end up with should be for important things and not victimless crimes.

But punishment also has to be swift, PROPORTIONAL (that word is big for a reason) and relatively certain for the crimes we do have.

I didn't have any ammo for them, and they had trigger locks so I felt comfortable leaving them there.

It wasn't too long after I inherited the guns that I really started really taking note of stories like the one in your comment.

So one day, after reading another of this type of a story here on TL, I bought a gun cabinet on the way home from work, installed it, and locked the guns in there.

I can't imagine I'm alone in this type of reaction to these types of stories.

I grew up in an area of what's often called the Rust Belt.  In those days - the 70s - there were tens of thousands of industrial, manufacturing jobs.  Trucks, steel, machine tools, basic industries.  All unionized, good paying, good benefits and stable.

At that time, if memory serves, most of the murders were part of a murder-suicide - one spouse solving their problem with the other and then solving their own problem with their self.  And even those were few and far between.  On a "percentage of households" basis, gun ownership might have been higher in that region in the 70s than now.  Hard to tell - a lot of people don't like to let on whether they do or don't own guns, for lots of reasons.

Well, outsourcing and offshoring and general corporate looting have resulted in something on the order of 90 percent of those jobs being gone - vanished into thin air - with little to replace them.  The jobs that replaced them have far less in the way of benefits and many of them pay fewer dollars per hour than did the jobs of 30 years ago - my Dad made about $43k in 1980 (plus full union benefits, pension, medical, etc.) and the folks doing his job today would be ecstatic to get that $43k.

When you treat people like dirt and grind them into poverty, they start behaving that way.  Now, there are parts of the same cities where I grew up where one felt safe walking at any hour, that feel too dangerous to walk through in mid-afternoon.  The economy in that area stinks and has for 15 or 20 years.  And every day or two, someone is getting shot, having a gun pulled on them in a robbery, or something similar.  

This is a remarkable and somewhat mysterious trend. Some scholars have attributed the decline in gun-related homicides and other violent crimes to rising rates of incarceration; the U.S. has by far the highest rates in the world. But the decline has continued since 2007 as incarceration rates have fallen slightly and as the U.S. economy has tanked. "This would also be the last time to expect a crime decline," legal scholar Frank Zimring told The New York Times last year.

Some surveys suggest only 50 million Americans own guns. Others, depending on how they are interpreted, point to a number closer to 90 million. The National Rifle Association puts the total at 100 million. Household estimates are similarly varied.

Some researchers say gun owners may be less inclined to tell pollsters about their guns than they used to be. Here, guns displayed on a table at a gun show in Albany, N.Y., in January.

Some surveys show ownership rates declining, but whether that's simply because Americans have become less likely to tell strangers they own guns is "an open question," said Arthur Kellermann, a policy analyst at the think tank RAND Corporation.

My print column examines why the number of gun owners in the U.S., and the number of households with guns, are so hard to pin down. Different polls point to very different totals.
[...]

The polling discrepancies have baffled pollsters.

Questions about gun ownership don't fit neatly into typical polling categories, pollsters say. On the one hand, the question of whether the respondent owns a gun, or whether there is a gun in the respondent's home, should be "really cut-and-dry," Dimock said. But some guns may have been inherited and may hardly be used. "It's there but not present in people's mind or their lives," he said.

Who answers the phone in the household could affect responses. "We know that in a survey where respondents are randomly selected from adults in the household, a household headed by a married couple is substantially more likely to report guns in the home if the husband is selected than if the wife is selected," said Philip Cook, an economist and gun-violence researcher at Duke University.

Also, some gun owners may be reluctant to tell researchers they own guns, because of legal and political considerations, which makes the question more like behavioral or attitudinal questions than like questions that ask basic facts about respondents. "This is an unusual demographic-type question," said Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of Gallup.

What is beyon dispute now...

A) Hillary rejected calls for more security.  No longer able to deny that.
B) administration and Hillary pushed the video talking points while they knew it wasn't true.  Hillary going as far as to tell the victims families that she would get the guy that made the video when she knew it had nothing to do with it.  She knew at 2 am it was an attack but chose for whatever reason to push a lie.

Maybe the wingnuts think that by repeating false allegations and calling them "beyond dispute now", it will actually make them true and, in fact, beyond dispute.

Is anyone going to deny that both Hillary and Obama lied to us after the fact because it was politically inconvenient to admit that terrorists killed out Ambassador because of their incompetence?

On August 6, 2001, the Bush administration received a President's Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S." The memo warned:

We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a --- service in 1998 saying that Bin Laden wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release of "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held extremists.

Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.

Moreover, the Federal Aviation Administration "had indeed considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon," and in 2001 it distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the possibility of a suicide hijacking.

In response to that threat warning, the Bush administration did nothing. link

" Clinton lied but no one died."