Posts by gibbleth

'There has never been a right to absolute privacy' – US Deputy AG slams 'warrant-proof' crypto

Re: There's a difference

Actually, there is. Since the right to own a gun is a 'strictly interpreted' constitutional right here in the US, all contributory rights are similarly protected, including the right to sell a gun, because prohibiting that right would infringe on the right to own a gun, as you can't own a gun if you can't buy one and you can't buy one if nobody can sell one. There's been actual court cases on this, the last one on gun ranges in Chicago, for instance.

Anyway, I'd guess that, if the right to encryption is considered protected by the first amendment, the right to sell such encryption would be protected as well, as the first amendment right is also 'strictly interpreted'.

Smart guns are a neat idea on paper. They'll never survive reality

Re: technology probably isn't the answer here

Let me put your mind at ease. Possessing a gun while drunk is a crime where I live and nearly everywhere in the US. That's merely having one, let alone shooting one, which is often a felony. I live in Tejas, one of the 'gun culture' states, and it is illegal to have a gun of any sort where a minor can get to it, period. Also, if you shoot someone that isn't your target, in this state, you can be charged with manslaughter. There have been cases where such a person went to jail for a long time for doing that. We take guns very seriously here.

I don't know why you think that anyone would shoot over 'might be a danger'; these are people carrying the guns, not psychopaths. I do know that if you shoot someone for any reason, here in Tejas, the odds are very, very good you are going to jail while the police sort it all out. Not prison, if you were justified, but you will very likely spend the night in the county lockup.

Also, if you have a concealed handgun license, as I do, you have been repeatedly instructed that you are not the police and you may only use it to prevent imminent danger of life and limb and if you use it in any other way, you are very likely to be prosecuted and do time in real prison. If you have purchased a gun and not apprised yourself of the laws, you are in the same boat as anyone else who has done something dangerous and not bothered to figure out what his legal risk was. Many people are not aware, for instance, that killing someone negligently on the highway leads to jail time in this state.

Were the other side at all interested in any sort of compromise, I would happily sign up for shall-issue permits to own a gun so long as there was any reason to believe they would not immediately be hijacked to make owning a gun impossible and so long as such a permit became a federal right-to-carry. However, the other side is in no mood to compromise, so neither am I. The right to self-defense is self-evident, is selectively incorporated in the supreme court decision 'McDonald', and is far to precious to fritter away.

It always amazes me that those who would put restrictions on us gun owners are surprised to find that most of them already exist.

The one child killed every half hour due to accidental discharge is, pure and simple, a lie. It's a lie that those who originated it have to know is a lie and anyone can easily find out is a lie. It is a statistic created by including all the deaths up to age 20 in one 'study' and it makes no special effort to determine what was actually an accidental discharge and what was a intentional discharge. Surfing around the web, the number seems to run between around 70 and around 150 per year.

Also, my kids won't touch a gun, period, without permission from an adult. Why is that? They've all shot a gun and seen what it can do. I took them out to a nice wide open space and we spent a pleasant afternoon exploding things with bullets. After that, they had a very healthy respect for what a gun can do. We also have gun rules in my family and anyone can call anyone on not being safe. Other kids coming into my house will happily pick up a gun and play with it, but my kids won't.

If you are serious about reducing accidental deaths, and maybe making a dent in intentional ones, gun safety should be required at all schools. We teach children sex safety, so why not gun safety? For this, you really can't simply tell them not to touch a gun, which is a good start, but you need to instill into them the danger inherent in a gun.

That being said, more kids drown than are accidentally shot. Far more kids are killed in traffic accidents. More kids commit suicide. More kids are actually killed by someone else, sometimes by their own parents. Way more kids die from malaria.

Compared to the above-mentioned around a hundred deaths a year from accidental discharge, you must add the untold human misery that a convenient handgun prevents, the rapes, the murders, the beatings and the kidnappings. A handgun is particularly suitable to preventing a rape, for instance. Conservatively, a gun is used around 180,000 times a year defensively in the US. Realistically, it's at least a million times and probably more because most uses go unreported. When a monomaniac sets about to 'solve' a problem, such a person often ignores the side-effects of his solution, in this case, to reduce the efficacy of a tool of self-defense in order to reduce the instance of a much smaller problem. What I'm trying to say is that if you do this, the body count most assuredly will go up, not down.

Re: @DryBones... Doomed to failure

And dry fire and dry fire and dry fire and dry fire. Pistols are all about how you hold them and you need muscle memory to get proficient with one. I probably dry fire my gun 100 times for every time I shoot a live round. I concentrate on the sight picture and make sure the gun doesn't wobble while I do it to learn trigger management and that makes a huge difference at the range.

Re: Doomed to failure

A. I have a 10mm I carry 'in the woods'. I'm not hunting, I'm only going to use it if something charges me where accuracy is less necessary than sheer energy down range in a hurry. I won't carry a long arm because I am hiking, not hunting and long arms are heavy and cumbersome. I have no idea where you get the idea that anyone in the woods would only carry a long arm when there are plenty of useful pistols and revolvers for self-defense in the woods. Besides, I believe you are more likely to be attacked by a two-legged vermin than a four-legged one these days almost no matter how remote you get.

B. It turns out that England, which has water separating it from other countries, in which guns are basically outlawed, has not managed to stop the inflow of guns. The US, OTOH, shares a massive border with Mexico, and plenty of countries south of Mexico manufacture guns. Basically, New Jersey will outlaw any meaningful self-defense gun, which they already pretty much have done, without stopping the inflow of illegal guns at all. If you think it is possible to stop the inflow of guns, first explain how we should stop cocaine from being imported, and I will listen to you.

Re: Hmm....

Heh. The NRA has been *TRYING* to tell you all about it. Shoot, if you just surf on over to the US federal government's various websites, you can find out this is a lie. The total number of children accidentally killed, as in killed by accidental discharge is fewer than 100 per year, and most of those are hunting accidents. Police accidentally kill some 300 per year for comparison. The vast majority of gun violence is caused by the drug culture, not accidental discharge, and you can bet they won't adopt smart guns.

This statistic, which some of us are tired to death of disputing, was created simply by observing that there is a lot of gun violence between young people, almost all of whom know each other, and then deciding those were all accidental. I do await your numbers, though, rather than bald assertions.

To give you an idea of how rare it actually is, it makes the evening news when it happens.

Re: 'Smart guns' - an inherent failure

Hoo boy. Let's see.

1. I *STILL* don't use a semi-automatic because they *STILL* aren't as reliable as revolvers. Oh, well, guess I don't know what I'm talking about, as my gun doesn't even have a mechanical safety, it being a revolver, and, as the adage goes, 'the whole gun is the safety'. I need my defensive gun to always work whether I maintain it or not, so I have a revolver.

2. Let's talk about the 'rule of threes': 'three seconds, three yards, three rounds'. Nearly all defensive uses of firearms will be over in three seconds, happen at a range of under three yards, and use three or fewer rounds. Given that this thing takes a leisurely second and a half to work, that's fully half of the *AVERAGE* time it takes to end an engagement. Gunfighting is furiously quick and seconds count.

3. If mandated, it will increase the cost of the defensive gun. Some guns will go up by quite a bit. Possibly enough to put the cheapest guns out of the hands of the people who can least afford to be without one, the poor in bad neighborhoods.

4. I guess the state of Idaho has not occurred to you. My relatives who used to live there bought a massive pistol precisely because they needed something to carry during the winter that wasn't a rifle. Most modern combat pistols and nearly all revolvers work fine without gloves because, well, it's often cold outside, and some of us refuse to let our fingers freeze off because you are ill-informed.

5. Sure, 'designed to fail safe' means it is prejudiced against working, which is worse.

6. So you have to make everyone in the house put their finger on the thing and learn how to hold it just right so it might fire if needed? Meh.

7. I do *NOT* have a 'license' to own a gun, living, as I do, in the land of the free. I live in Tejas. I *DO* have a license to carry a concealed firearm, but there is *NO* requirement anywhere in there that I should 'maintain' my gun to any particular standard. It is assumed I'm not an idiot so will see to adequate maintenance, but that's pretty much oiling periodically and cleaning after firing, neither of which are strictly required for the operation of the pistol. Seriously, if a modern firearm won't work after being left in a closet for a few years, it's not a good firearm. The days of guns turning into rust when you leave them alone for a year or two are long gone. I can leave any of my defensive pistols in the closet or in a safe for months on end without firing them and know for certain they will fire when I need them to. This 'device' can't meet that *REQUIREMENT* as a defensive pistol needs to always, always, always go bang when needed. Imagine a fire extinguisher that required a battery to work and you see the problem...

Funny thing that you are partly correct in that the freedom to own a firearm does restrict your other freedoms. There are places I can't go when carrying. I can't drink alcohol when carrying. However, you are completely wrong about your moralistic high road, as I don't have a gun to kill someone else; I have a gun to prevent that from happening, whether upon my person or upon some other person. If you've ever studied actual firearm combat, you'll know that the point isn't to kill someone else but to stop them, unless you're an assassin.

That being said, in my opinion, a government that does not allow its citizens the right to self-defense is a government that has subjects, not citizens.

I will make one more comment, and that is to point out that the major shooting you had in Australia makes grim reading. Nobody made an effort to stop the man because everyone felt that it was up to the authorities.

We had a shooting in Tejas a long time ago, in Austin. Quite a few people were killed, but not as many as would have been if it weren't for armed citizens. First, there were many people in the crowd armed with .357 Magnum revolvers that could shoot high enough to be useful against the man's position in a tower. These people bravely drove him to cover, which allowed many people to get medical attention and reduced his field of fire such that he couldn't shoot as many people. Second, many of the people in the crowd had rifles in their vehicles and brought those out, making it that much harder for him to do his worst. Third, the three people that put an end to his spree consisted of two sheriff's deputies and a guy off the street. Those three charged up the tower and shot him.

I know it seems to be backwards, but Sandy Hook was the reason I finally went and got my concealed handgun license. I could not stand by and watch my children get shot if there was anything I could do about it. While I appreciate that you and those who think like you think it's a moral issue, to me, it's a personal issue: I have to, as a man, defend my family and provide them with the means to defend themselves. And, to quote the article, 'when seconds matter, police are minutes away'.

And I would point out that this is a *VERY* common theme: the anti-gunners have theoretical knowledge of guns while the pro-gun people have actual experience with them.

Would you let cops give your phone a textalyzer scan after a road crash?

Re: Possible abuse?

Umm, no. As I said elsewhere, a traffic accident is not a criminal case unless there is strong reason to believe it is. The constitution of the United States prohibits fishing for information to determine if someone could be charged with a crime; there must be evidence of an actual crime before the fishing can start. This principle is repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court.

Two legal principles apply here, the right to peaceably travel and the fourth amendment right to privacy. In the case of this law, forcing you to surrender one strictly-interpreted right in order to exercise another is very, very likely unconstitutional and I expect this law will be struck down.

I voted no

There is little hard evidence that cell phone usage leads to a higher incidence of accidents or that it leads to a higher incidence of fatalities.

Let me explain, then you can get out the pitchforks and torches. First, cell phone usage (both in cars and out) has been increasing nearly geometrically since the 90s in the United States. In that time, traffic accident rates per mile traveled have gone down slightly. Second, traffic fatalities during the same time have gone down somewhat more per mile traveled, due mostly to vastly improved safety of vehicles on the road but also significantly due to the presence of cell phones and thus much faster emergency response.

Neither fact, by itself, proves the positive proposition 'cell phone usage while driving has not cost lives', but both, together, disprove the positive proposition 'cell phone usage has significantly increased fatalities on the roads' as such an increase would be glaringly obvious in a significant increase of the fatality statistics on US roads. You would expect at least one standard deviation increase from the previous statistics, but you see a gentle downward trend instead, which is simply not compatible with the proposition that cell phone usage causes increased accidents or increased fatalities.

So, if it is obvious that cell phone usage impairs a driver compared to an 'attentive driver', what is happening?

Three theories exist:

1. Driving doesn't require that much attention. This is, mostly, true. Most drivers know when they need to be attentive (heavy traffic, adverse weather, narrow roads, etc.) and when not (open freeway, few cars, so on) and adapt appropriately. I was once on a road between Las Vegas, NV and Denver, CO, that was completely bereft of cars, hadn't seen one in hours, and I whiled away the time practicing magic. This is one reason that teenagers are disproportionately represented in cell phone usage statistics, but they are disproportionately represented in crash statistics anyway, so there is little benefit in banning teenage use of cell phones while driving anyway.

2. There are lots of other distractions. Fooling with the radio has been shown to be distracting enough to cause a wreck. I'm pretty sure one time I, personally, was rear-ended, this is what the other driver was doing. People eat, do makeup, talk with passengers, look at signs, on and on, all things that can lead to wrecks. Most of these will be nearly impossible to ban. Singling out cell phone usage and banning that will not reduce any of the other behaviors.

3. Compared to inattentive driving, there are actually worse issues, such as driving while tired, stressed, or otherwise less than optimally alert, which nearly everyone does. My morning commute is full of people who are not fully awake yet. Also, there is the issue of personality disorders. Most of my near-wrecks that happen on a constant basis (I drive 55 miles each way every day in a major city) are caused by drivers who start pulling over without looking or simply don't care. Road rage occurs at least weekly. Banning cell phones won't address any of this.

Also, please note that not only is it the case that simple statistics show that the idea that a cell phone ban would not reduce fatality rates, the fact is that the studies that do purportedly show that cell phone usage causes an increased rate of accidents are all seriously flawed. For further edification, I have added some links to a very recent time-series study showing that polities that have enacted cell phone usage bans and have seen cell phone usage drop have not seen any reduction in either accident rates or fatalities.

While I don't have it to hand, there was once a study reported in a car magazine I used to read that said, essentially, that people have a 'risk constant', and, if you make one section of a highway safer, the total fatalities do not necessarily go down; they just shift elsewhere on the same highway. If you successfully ban cell phone usage, you make my life worse, but you don't reduce the risk of travelling on the highway at all. By the principle of liberty, we must conclude that banning cell phone usage is not warranted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safety

http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/aaa-study-suggests-phone-usage-while-driving-is-symptomatic-rather-than-being-the-cause-of-distracted-driving/

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/study-finds-that-reduced-phone-use-does-not-cut-crashes/?_r=0

Re: Voted yes for exact same reason

In the United States of America, we have something called the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution that very specifically limits the rights of a policeman to search a vehicle, and, you may be surprised to know, routine traffic incidents are currently, in my district (the Supreme Court of the United States has not addressed the issue but my circuit court has), not 'probable cause' so searching a car would either require obvious evidence of criminal behavior or some other admissable probable cause. If the traffic accident will obviously result in a likely criminal prosecution, then a search may be warranted, but, in that case, they can retain the phone for later inspection. In all other incidents, this would not be legal. Traffic incidents are not criminal because that would violate the sixth amendment guarantee to right to trial by jury for criminal cases. Since having a jury trial for each and every traffic ticket would be prohibitively expensive, the several states all make traffic stops not criminal. This means that there is no right to search.

Anyway, this law is unlikely to succeed in my opinion, and I am not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice, but the United States Supreme Court has long recognized a 'right to travel' as a fundamental right, and this law would needlessly impede that right. The state would be required to show, in court, that a) there would be a compelling public benefit (doubtful; you anti-phone use people have failed to make a substantial case), and b) that there is no other less intrusive way to do it (true; they can just subpoena the phone records from the provider). This is because the right to travel is strictly interpreted.

What it does, however, is provide me with one more reason to never go near the state of New York, not that I really needed another one...

Here's a great idea: Let's make a gun that looks like a mobile phone

Oh, come on

Has any of you anti gun people bothered to look at actual statistics? To me, you look like scared toddlers: 'Mommy, a gun! It's so scary! Hold me!'. Full disclosure, I live in Texas, where, just the other day, in the city where I live, I saw a guy out for a walk with what you would call an 'assault rifle', technically a semi-automatic carbine, strapped to his back and thought nothing of it. It happens all the time down here. Texas is no worse statistically than any other modern Western demographic in aggregate crime and my neighborhood is very safe.

If you focus only on gun statistics, sure, gun homicides are higher. If you focus on homicides in general, the question becomes a lot muddier. If you focus on crimes committed by Concealed Handgun License holders, it becomes very clear: we just don't commit crimes at anywhere near the Texas average.

As for carrying, which I do all the time (no, really, I feel undressed without my .38), civilians carrying have proven to be an effective deterrent and protection against crime. You can, if you want to know the truth, go look for all the stories of defense using a firearm in this country. More importantly, it allows those who cannot physically defend themselves a chance to do so, allowing a weakling to defend him/herself against a bruiser, leading to the fact that CHL laws reduce rapes the most, something that ought to chuff a feminist, given that the pistol is very empowering. God made man, Samuel Colt made them equal. Some 800,000 times a year, according to conservative estimates, someone in the United States uses a gun to lawfully defend himself against a crime.

The US murder rates are mostly a result of drug gang activity, and, if we can't stop drugs from coming into the country, I really don't understand how we can stop guns from coming in from South America, where they are cheaply, plentifully and illegally made. As an aside, note that England, with its gun ban, has not, as of yet, stopped guns from coming into the country either. What they have managed to do is make it so anyone not physically fit can't defend themselves, which, as I understand it, would be a felony anyway, as the once-proud English commoner no longer has the right to self-defense.

It is like you anti-gun people somehow magically think that if you try really hard, guns will just go away, when history shows us they do not. Every society that has outlawed gun possession has found that they cannot actually stop gun possession any more than they can stop drug possession or crime in general. All they have done is made it harder for the most vulnerable in their society to defend themselves. Oh, and made a police culture of shooting first and asking questions later whenever they see anything that even remotely looks like a gun.

Finally, you are probably not aware of the most likely reason the man carrying the carbine mentioned above had it: I live in an area about 15 miles from a major downtown metropolis, where there are coyote about. I have personally seen a coyote about a mile from my house. There are also feral dogs and, well, semi-tame dogs owned by people who think pit bulls are great pets but only if you make them angry. Many of the households in my neighborhood have at least one semi-automatic rifle for this reason, and a lot of us carry pistols when we walk for this reason. It is not unheard-of for a pet to go missing and there is a definite risk to small children as well.

So. Please keep yer snarky uninformed opinions about the childishness of America to yourself when reporting on such things. It does not look well on you to parade such idiocy so broadly.

As for the gun in question, it is interesting, but likely not very useful to me. I can conceal a full-frame auto, being a big guy, if I want to, and nobody would ever see it. Just looking at the grip for the thing, I expect it would both be quite painful to shoot and hard to shoot accurately. And, .380 auto is not a very effective round, in my opinion. Since I can already get a very small .380 derringer that would be impossible to spot in my pocket or in a concealment holster, I don't see the point.

IT manager jailed for 5 years for attempting dark web gun buy

Seriouisly? For a micro 9?

Let me join the chorus and say I have a CHL (Concealed Handgun License) in the great state of Texas, and can purchase any handgun I like and receive it immediately with no background check as my CHL required a far more extensive background check than the national one. So, someone buying a micro 9, as those dinky guns are called, really doesn't seem like a 'crime' requiring five years in jail, to me.

Further, would someone here in the US (or even someone in the UK) please explain to me how, if it is that easy to get a gun in the UK, they expect to ban it in the US? This is still one of the unexplained mysteries of the gun control lobby here, not that they are big on thinking things through, that they can effectively stop the influx of illegal guns because, even though guns are, for the most part, legal here, there are still truckloads of illegal guns shipped in from South America, where they are manufactured without serial numbers or any governmental oversight.

So, yeah, you caught a poor sod who had delusions of grandeur. How many *REAL* criminals have you caught? The ones with decent connections who can get guns cheaply and easily?

Penny wise and pound foolish: Server hoarders are energy wasters

Similar math led to a new G34 Opteron for me

I am a long time AMD user and am too old to figure out the Intel stuff if I can avoid it. I did, however, do some back-of-envelope maths and determine that replacing my VM system (was 16 core 4 socket Shanghai Socket F) with a dual g34 (two sockets, 8 cores, 3.5GHz) would save me enough to pay for the used parts off ebay in around two years. Electricity is a bit more expensive here in Texas, around ten cents a kwh. The old system pulled an average (yes, average) of about 400 watts. The new one is around 200 watts. That works out (using the one watt for server, one watt for ac) to $350 per year in savings. I paid $200 for the motherboard, $100 for the pair of CPUs, $50 or so for the coolers, and around $350 worth of ram. The gravy, of course, is that the new system is actually over twice as fast per thread as the old system, more than making up for losing half the cores.

PETA monkey selfie lawsuit threatens wildlife photography, warns snapper at heart of row

Should be thrown out of court

This case should fail on standing. As I understand it, the animal was wild and therefore not owned. Under US law, only something recognized as a 'person' (human or corporation, basically) can own a copyright, therefore only a 'person' can be damaged by violation of said copyright, therefore only a 'person' can sue over it. Since no 'person' owns the monkey, no 'person' can be given standing to make cause for the monkey and PETA is actually representing a client relationship that is not present and would not be legal even if it were.

I sincerely hope the judge dismisses the case with prejudice and someone sues PETA for wasting everyone's time and causing material damage to a person's career. *THAT* is a lawsuit for which there is standing, material damage, and a clear train of evidence.

Debian ships new 'Jessie' release with systemd AND sysvinit

Re: systemd a copy of Solaris SMF

Aw, heck, I'll bite. I use Solaris every day in my job, and find it to be astonishingly bloated, fantastically slow, and very, very tedious to do simple things in.

A fairly common occurrence in my daily work flow is copying hundreds of megabytes of logs or other data to a linux box to analyze using shell tools because a) Solaris process start time is so bad that most shell tools end up being unacceptably slow and b) Solaris default VI can't load a large file.

Another random fact: Solaris' tar utility can't read its own output if there is a large file and you don't tell it to properly handle large files. I wish, I wish, I wish I were kidding.

I do have much fonder memories of AIX on my RS/6000 F50, but there's no reasonable way I could actually afford a usable RS/6000 and the wife made me get rid of my 'space heater'.

OTOH, with a bit of effort, one can afford to piece together a quad socket opteron for relatively little money, which is what I've done. It's only 16 cores and quite old, but I've got the same stack running on a 48 core machine at a place I've done work for, and working quite well.

With modern Linux, there's very little advantage to using a legacy *NIX unless one is just deeply attached to it or to legacy software that will only run on legacy *NIX.

Health & Safety is the responsibility of Connor's long-suffering girlfriend

Uninitialized pointers

One company that used to be one of our vendors at a previous job solved the problem of uninitialized pointers by doing a code sweep and having each and every pointer in each and every function point to an array allocated on the stack. Not only did this produce stonking stack use, but it led to some very interesting subtle bugs that only occurred in AIX, when the invalid pointer was accessed after return. It became my job to 'fix' this hopeless situation.

OMG! With nothing but machine tools, steel and parts you can make a GUN!!

Defensive uses of a gun

Your estimate is based entirely on justifiable homicides, which are such a tiny percentage of gun uses. The estimates of gun uses for self-defense range from a low of 200,000 per year (John Lott, iirc) to a high of 2.5 million (Gary Kleck, et. al.). Speaking as an avid gun enthusiast, possessor of a concealed carry permit, and an assortment of guns (and proud of it), my guns have never once been fired at anyone, but have twice protected me from crime of which I am aware.

The mere presence of a gun protects you from crime in an unreportable way. For instance, one story I have heard first hand, a woman was accosted in a parking lot, lifted her blouse to show the grip of her gun sticking out of her pants, and was left alone. Given the random behavior of cops when presented with a carrying civilian, even when licensed, and the amount of sheer annoyance involved, these happenstances go completely unreported. For every single time someone shoots a criminal, there are literally hundreds of times when the criminal was deterred by the mere presence of a gun.

I think that the one post who said, essentially, that data, logic and personal experience would never be sufficient to change his mind on gun control pretty much nails the attitude of nearly every gun-grabber out there. Statistics exist. Much research has been done. Gary Kleck and John Lott are the primary ones of which I am aware. Mostly, the other side resorts to making statistics up, resorting to fear, and smearing the image of a gun owner.

Think I'm kidding? At one point, one of the anti-gun groups was counting as 'children' ages up to 21 in a study, leading to almost all gang violence being included in their 'kids killed by guns' statistic. Naturally, gun control would have no effect on gang violence, because, if you can't stop the drugs they sell, you can't stop the guns they use either, as both are freely made in South America. Also, the current chimera that 'you are far more likely to be shot by your own gun than to use it defending your life' fails on two counts, one that you mentioned, that suicides count in this category, and two that they woefully underestimate defensive uses of handguns. Note that they don't say 'you are far more likely to shoot yourself in suicide', as, if you remove suicide, getting shot by your own gun becomes statistically insignificant, and less than actual, reported justifiable homicides. I have, frankly, grown very weary of defending my lifestyle to mendacious people such as these.

As to whether or not citizens can stand up to federal or state officers, I don't know if it is possible at this time. It has been done successfully before. I will say this, that if government breaks down into chaos, we the armed will be able to defend ourselves from others. And, please don't insult me by saying it will never happen, as it has happened, many times, most recently in Ferguson. If the government degenerates into armed thugs, then the armed citizen stands a chance. Besides, the whole thing is, to me, a question of authority. In your country, authority flows from the monarch. In ours, it flows from the people. It makes sense that you would allow to be armed those who are in authority. Also, if armed, I have a chance against tyranny, no matter how small. If unarmed, I stand no chance. I can improve my chances by taking training myself.

To quote Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."