Aram

As far as I know, there are no laws against owning an automobile, or even driving one, without a license in America, even if you're underage or intoxicated, as long as you only drive it on your own property. It is only when you take the automobile out onto the roads, built, operated, and owned by the government, that there are any sort of restrictions. On the road you have to follow a very complex series of rules and actively participate in a very complicated and dangerous action if you're not to be a danger to yourself and to all others on the road. This would equate more to following the rules of safety while at a shooting range than to ownership alone. As far as simple ownership is concerned, automobiles have far less restrictions than firearms, which makes little sense as they're potentially just as dangerous.

Maybe so, but it's still a step up from being completely defenseless. If a person is armed, it's a fight, even if it's extremely one-sided. All it takes to get compliance from an unarmed person is pain. Yes, well, regardless of whether or not the amendments in the constitution are suposed to be torn out or inked over at anyone's convenience, the 2nd amendment, in mine and in a great deal of Americans' minds, is not wrong. We consider the right to self defense as basic and precious a freedom as the right to free speech or the right to privacy. In our history we've had multiple crimes by our government against all three of these rights, and none are any more of less criminal than another. If someone were to try to take away any of them completely, I think they'd have a fight on their hands

If so, that "I'm thinking of a number, between 450 and 850" guy and J.G. Wentworth would have banned long ago.

I seriously doubt any law enforcement officers are trained or even allowed to fire warning shots. There's too much risk in firing a bullet in a public area to waste one making noise. Everything's different in the military, but I chances are that if you're immediately threatening the life of a soldier, that warning shot is going to hit somebody in the sternum.

If someone meant me harm, I'd rather not trust my life to be protected by some loud scary noises. People aren't bears. If one means to kill or otherwise harm you, bullets work better than any other type of ammunition, and that's all your target should recieve. If they don't mean to kill or otherwise harm you, you shouldn't be shooting at them in any case. Simulating the sound of a gunshot is only going to make the target think you mean to kill him when you don't. A verbal ultimatum would work better than a false start. Most firearms, unlike in the movies, don't fire blanks and bullets interchangabely in any case. Automatics require a blank firing attachment and a weaker action spring if they're going to be operated by gas alone.

If your life is on the line, the answer would be "hell yes." Are you really trying to make an argument against easily visible sights? These arguments get wierder every time one springs up, I swear... Often times, yes. It takes a lot of light to be able to see plain iron sights. If its dark enough that you couldn't read a book, you probably will have limited use of your sights, but you could still have enough vision of your target to identify him in a lineup. And even if you can't see who precisely your target is, if they've broken into your home in the middle of the night, you're going to be pointing a gun at them anyway. A decent sight picture is extremely important no matter what you're shooting at, whether its a can, a deer, or an attacker. If you can't see your front sight, you can't hit your target. It's as simple as that. You need to see where your gun is pointing if your target is five feet away or fire hundred feet away. And when it comes to confronting an attacker, there is only one thing to do. If you feel that your life is in danger, and you quite understandably believe that your life is more important than theirs, you aim at the largest mass of the target or wherever you easily can to stop the target the fastest, you fire, and you keep firing until your life is no longer in danger. There is no shoot to wound, or shoot to kill. There is only the fastest possible suppression of a threat to your life. If you're using a firearm, you should pretty much expect someone's going to die. If you really feel that you attacker's life is more important than yours, feel free to find some other means to defend yourself or don't at all. It's your choice.

"Going Waco" on half the homes in the US? Are you out of your mind? Do you even know what happened at Waco? It's estimated that at least half the households in the US own a firearm. To surround every one of those houses with a division of jackbooted thugs with automatic weapons and armored vehicles and then accidentally burn them down would effectively turn us into a police state in a crisis of civil war. In America we believe in our 2nd amendment right and very many of us would not just give it up because the government one day decided to do away with it on a whim. The idea of forcefully confiscating the firearms of the American populace is incredibly foolish.

As I understand it, Eddo, the new M&P is a fine handgun. I've heard testimony from a few people stating feeding problems with theirs but others who say theirs run flawlessly. The plus side to buying a S&W is that they stand by their products and anything that might be wrong with your pistol, they will be more than happy to fix. Good to see you talked yourself out of the .500. I still hold that a .22 will give you much more inexpensive enjoyment than even a 9mm for a beginning shooter.

Uh...since when? I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a player get a yellow flag for uneccessary skipping.

How old are those? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> They're both fairly new, but it's a real Colt and a real Smith & Wesson. Colt has been making the SAA on and off the same way since the beginning. The Schofield came out of a limited edition the S&W Custom Shop put out in 2000. They even used the original machines. They're both .45s, but while the Colt is in .45 Colt which is still widely made and used, the S&W is chambered for the obsolete .45 Schofield round. The .45 Schofield is shorter than the .45 Colt so while you can't put .45 Colt into the Schofield, you can put the .45 Schofield into both, so the combination still sort of works.

I think the most ominous sound in the world is the sound of a single action revolver cylinder rotating as the hammer is locked. That soft little triple click is as loud as thunder, especially when it is coming from behind you. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> My Colt clicks four times. C-O-L-T. Everything else just feels wrong after cocking a Peacemaker. http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/8425/coltscho26ij.jpg

That's kind of an irrational fear. I don't know what was wrong with the firearm or what your friend was doing wrong, but unless you do something really stupid or are shooting something that really ought not be fired, there's really no danger of that happening.

Do you really think you're going to learn to shoot straight firing hundreds of rounds out of a gun you'll come to hate firing, and will cost you close to a buck a round? Again, get yourself a .22 and have some fun plinking cans all day, without getting a sore wrist, for a sawbuck. It won't make you any less macho.

No, no, and no. It's not a death ray. It's just a big handgun...way too big, in fact, for someone who's never fired a handgun before. Get yourself a .22, work your way up through the mid-range calibers which will actually be fun and useful, and and then decide if you really need to go any bigger. Picking one of those as your first handgun is like choosing a Ducatti 1000 for your first motorcycle. If you came out of them thinking you needed a .500 for your first handgun, for all those armored bodies and charging cars you'll be shooting at, you should ask for your money back.

The small, investigative sidequests were what made this game fun. The impossibly long and boring main quests, like that guy's mansion and the sewer crawl, needed to be cut to make room for more of those if you ask me.

They did that at the end of a lot of shareware games. Doom, for example.

I had these two, or rather I had Commander Keen and the Shareware version of Cosmo's Cosmic Adventures. Not that it mattered as I couldn't beat the boss at the end of level ten. It dropped you in a big pit with the slippery walls so your suction cup hands didn't work as well and the boss was this giant ball with spikes on the bottom that tried to crush you. I could usually get maybe only one or two hits in on him before I got killed. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> You weren't supposed to defeat that boss. Him killing you was their way of saying "if you don't like it give us money." I remember decoding the funky hidden alphabet in Commander Keen. so I could see what all those random messages said. Trust me, it wasn't worth the time.

Oddly enough I'd memorized the four golden rules of gun safety long before I'd learned that you're not supposed to put strange objects in your mouth.

I had Legos (the oversized kind you couldn't swallow), building blocks, and a Marlin .22 rifle

They illegalized that as well as anything remotely interesting. Not to say fox hunting was particularly interesting.

One step closer to Mr. Burns' guard dogs that shoot bees out of their mouths?

I didn't have Leukemia, but the treatment is basically the same. I had aplastic anemia, which basically meant that my marrow stopped working for pretty much no good reason at all. They wipe out your old marrow with a combination of a prewar poison and horse serum, which coincidentally destroys your immune system and makes all your hair fall out. They collect the donor's stem cells with a pheresis machine (they don't actually have to go straight to the source anymore), and give it to you through your IV while you're pretty much dead and living on transfusions of red blood cells, platlets, antibiotics, saline, and electrolites, which is why you need two giant catheters. I got about three separate infections during this process, which made the whole thing far worse than it needed to be. Then I experienced three major flare ups of GVHD, which is apparently not unusual, and thus the need for steroids, which also caused a dozen more infections. It's not a happy process but it seems to be the best we've got.

Nobody ever took a chisel to my nostrils and I thankfully never pissed blood, but I think I've got you all beat by the sheer volume of **** that happened to me in a small amount of time. I'd say I've been stabbed with a needle roughly a thousand times over the last two years, from simply drawing blood and recieving injections. I've recieved more than a hundred semi-permanent IV sites, one very painful pick line in my arm for about a week, and have had four separate Hickman lines installed on my chest--at one time I had two of them at once. A Hickman line, if you don't know, is a massive intravaneous catheter that looks sort of like a length of extension cord sticking out of your chest. It's held in place by stitches and the hole in your chest that it plugs in through constantly itches and weeps. I spent most of the last two years with one swinging around beneath my shirt and the scars they left behind would make you think someone blasted me with a shotgun. The best part is being wide awake while they're installed and then getting them yanked once you're done with them or they get infected. Yanking one out once you've had it a while is about is difficult as pulling a healthy tooth. Apart from those the most painful procedure I've probably had is a bone marrow aspiration, which basically involves laying flat on your chest while a doctor makes an incision over your hip bone and then jams a needle that looks sort of like a drill bit into it so hard that it impacts the mattress underneath you. Then he starts twisting it in order to drill into your hip bone down to the marrow and all of the little nerves in there start going crazy. Most of the pain during one operation seemed to be concentrated in the middle toe of my right foot, strangely enough. I've had two of those, as well as three spinal taps, the last of which didn't seal up properly and leaked for three days, giving me a headache so bad that I was popping opiates like candy for the entire duration. Over the course of the whole deal, I've had about a hundred fevers, some of them so bad I went completely delerious. I was extremely nauseous almost continuously for a year. My bowels stopped doing what they were supposed to one month so I spent most of it ****ting myself with squirts of green or red liquid. Still, easily the single worst part of the whole damn ordeal was being put on high-dose steroids, on and off, on and off, over and over, until my body came to accept the donor marrow. Rather than the fun muscle building kind of steroids, immuno-suppressive steroids pretty much dissolve any strong bones and muscles you have and replace them with a hundred or more pounds of retained water. You blow up like a water balloon, lose the strength to pick yourself up off the toilet, and start looking almost like you've got the innsmouth look. Your stomach burns and your whole body aches for as long as you're on them. They leave you so vulnerable to infection that you're afraid to touch anything or go outside, and they mess with your mind in an amazingly unfun sort of way. The last round of them I got had me hallucinating things attacking me from the ceiling and kept me from sleeping a minute for well over a month. The scariest part was probably when some medication they had me on caused me to have a seizure. I was sitting down on the toilet one night and got up only to realize that all I could see was a strange mass of twinkly multicolored stars. I'd barely gotten back to my bed before a doctor realized what was about to happen and piled on top of me so I wouldn't kill myself thrashing about. The next thing I remember it was a week later and I felt the worst I ever have, ever. I don't consider any one of these individual things particularly horrible or traumatic, but the fact that it has gone on, almost steadily, for about two years, and only just now finally seems to be resolved, makes it a lot more than a nightmare. It was a personal hell, physically and mentally, and looking back all I can think is that there really ought to be a better way.

They wanted to take out my wisdom teeth about five days before I figured out my platlet count had plummeted. If I'd had it done I'd probably have bled to death.

If Saddam was worth a damn he'd have gone out Tony Montana style instead of in a hole and from a rope.