<Sigh> There is this subject called "reading." I commend it to you.
Use of force to perform legitimate functions of government is one thing. Use of force to take my money and give it to someone else for anything other then as payment for services rendered toward those legitimate functions is a whole other ballgame.
Or are you saying that if use of force is ever justified it is always justified?
The Branch Davidians were already gun dealers. They had already passed background checks just as thorough as that required for NFA arms. As for the rest, well, it's pretty clear that you've bought into the post Waco propaganda campaign.
The problem is that the NFA does nothing to stop convicted felons from getting them if they want them.
Yes, all law is essentially force. That's why you should be extremely careful about what you do using force of law. When you make something a law (and government programs are, by definition, law) you are using force to impose your will on others.
The bar for justifying that use of force should be a lot harder than it actually is.
Then so much the worse for your experience.
Um, no. The people with the victim mentality I am talking about are "leaders" such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and politicians like Pelosi who say, in essence, that folk cannot succeed on their own and need the government handout to get by.
Do you really think it's just coincidence that the underclass (and before you start screaming that's a "term of art" in sociology--look it up) has grown dramatically since the passage of things like Johnson's "Great society" programs.
Tell people they need a handout to survive. Tell them your party is the one keeping them alive and that the other party wants them to starve. Who do you think those people who bought into and became dependent on that handout are going to vote for? Then grow the number of people who are in that dependent class. You honestly cannot see the inherent cynicism in that system?
You really have drunk the
. None of those claims are supported by actual facts. Just a few points: Our post secondary education system is as good as it is despite, rather than because of, our primary and secondary education systems. I've been on Medicaid and if you think multi month waits to get in to see a doctor are a good thing, have I got a deal for you--cash only, please in small bills. And the propaganda about how it was in the past completely ignores private organizations like Goodwill and the Salvation Army which provided much of the aid--from freely donated gifts--that is now provided more poorly by the government.You are simply too young to remember what things were like before the "Great Society". Most of what you have been told about that are lies. People, by and large, are more than willing to give to help out the poor. At least the deserving poor. (Check out the play "Carousel" sometime. It has an interesting take on attitudes of a bygone day.)
The Great Society had nothing to do with helping the poor. I'm one of those who is old enough (albeit barely) to remember what things were like before this so-called "Great Society" and how things have actually gotten worse in just about every metric since then.
The Great Society, despite all the propaganda presented in its support, was not and is not about helping the poor. It is nothing more than a power grab by folk who believe in government control in more and more (eventually all) aspects of our lives.
If by "good program" you mean "taking more control of people's lives, creating a permanent underclass, and otherwise making things worse than they were before" then I suppose.
There's a line I heard many years ago that has stuck with me: a liberal counts "compassion" by how many people get government assistance; a conservative, by how many people no longer need it.
Despite what the propagandists would have you believe, people were not starving in the streets before the Great Society. Even during the Great Depression people may have had to go to "soup kitchens" to eat, but the soup kitchens (privately run, not government run) were there.
Now, some folk claim that going to soup kitchens to eat was demeaning, but, seriously, getting ones food from donations freely offered or from "donations" extracted by threat of force, which is really more demeaning?
Um, no. First off, the term "general welfare" appears in two places in the Constitution. First place is in the Preamble and grants no powers. Second place is in Article one under the powers granted to Congress, but note that it's in the specific part about raising taxes for the common defense and general welfare. But, as we read on farther we see that the specific powers congress is granted include raising and supporting armies, and calling out and arming the militia. Guess what, they've just defined their powers with respect to that "common defense" part of the tax raising power. So, clearly, the other powers listed in Article 1 are what is meant by "general welfare". That first part, granting the power to levy taxes for the common defense and general welfare only grants them the power to raise funds for those other enumerated powers. It does not grant power to change the English language, co-opt the word "welfare" to mean handouts to indigents, and then use the force of law to make a class permanently dependent on those handouts. Simply deciding to call something "welfare" does not make it Constitutional.
The being prepared you are defending here is the the functional equivalent of preparing by making sure you have plenty of guns to rob your neighbors so you don't go hungry. You're just having the government do it for you.
You continue to drink the
. Republican tax cuts affect everybody. I am far from rich and yet, strangely enough, I've also benefited from these tax cuts. Republicans cut taxes on everybody but since "the rich" are part of "everybody" it gets spun as "tax cuts on the rich". Democrats raise taxes on everybody (well, everybody who has an income) and that gets spun as "tax the rich."As for the Warren Buffet thing, I suspect somebody is pointing to gross, not net, income. Among the things that are the difference between those two factors is that secretary's salary.
So much the worse for the Federal Courts then. A precedent was set with FDR's blackmail of the Supreme Court of his day to get Social Security past muster. The rest follows from that. That's one of the problems with precedent in legal cases is that bad decisions made by bad means are just as much precedent as good decisions.
Another canard. That the democratic party keeps making that claim doesn't make it so.
If you don't want to be thought a liberal, then maybe you should stop making liberal points, repeating liberal propaganda as holy writ, and otherwise acting as a liberal.
It's really amazing how many people out there play the "I'm not a liberal but..." while having really nothing but liberal positions (or maybe a token "conservative" position here or there). It's not amazing that they do it. It's amazing that they expect anybody to fall for it.
about me getting some of mine? You did not provide any subsidy to my children, so the amount of MY money returned to me after my involuntary loan the the .gov should be of no consequence to you.
I can't wait to see the response to this mindless.... whatever it is. 
