Mr. Cook:
Although I usually disagree completely with you, in this instance
I am on your side. TASERs are dangerous and quite often lethal
instruments of torture that have no business being used on anyone
let alone on children. I quote from the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment.
Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 39/46 of 10 December 1984, entry into force 26 June 1987, in accordance with article 27
PART I, Article 1
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity....
By any rational definition, a TASER is an instrument of torture.
I have had this diabolical device used on me. It was extremely painful, and I still suffer ill effects from it 5 years after the fact. Those who would quibble about the reason it was used on me and say that I should not have resisted authority miss the point completely, and their opinions are not worth arguing about. The POINT is I was tortured. I had unbelievable pain inflicted upon me to force me to comply with a demand I considered totally unreasonable. I had injuries inflicted upon me that have yet to heal, nerve damage in particular, that were unjustifiable.
We have turned our schools into institutions of torture, not of learning. We now TASER children as punishment and force to them to comply with our demands and obey our rules. This makes us no better than the authoritarian governments against whom we fought in the Second World War, and against whom we still fight for reasons that are now exposed as completely hypocritical. We are among the signatories of the UN resolution against the use of torture to force compliance and punish people, yet look what we are doing to our own children. Is it any wonder the so-called 3rd world countries that we bully point this out to the rest of the world on a regular basis and hate us instead of respecting us despite all the monetary aid we send them?
How many people like you must be banned from the public roads before you realize that the roads are just that? Public. They don't belong exclusively to you, you drooling Neanderthal.
Of all the rants they have here, the one it is most important that the citizens of Chattanooga read they won't publish. I will try to get it in here. According to a Police spokesperson it is NOT a crime for an employee of the city of Chattanooga to lie to a citizen of Chattanooga. This is such an outrage I don't what to say about it yet no one seems to care.
Ms. Rochat, there are a couple of things that you need to understand about gun owners that you apparently don't. We are not the bloodthirsty rednecks you seem to think we are. The vast majority of us are simply ordinary people who are tired of the interference in our right to self defense on the part of the anti-gun lobby and the government of this country. We do not advocate for more guns, but rather that more law-abiding people be able to carry them where they will actually do us some good in areas where, heretofore, they have not been allowed to. These "gun-free zones" as they have unfortunately come to be called, are a major temptation to individuals with mental problems to do what the Sandy Hook shooter did because they know that no one will be present who is able to stop them. And no matter what anti-gun lobbyists tell you, the only sure defense against someone with a gun is someone else with a gun. Any other weapon is utterly useless, and as much as collectivists don't wish to believe it, it is perfectly logical and perfectly true. And strengthening doors and windows will not stop an individual with a gun unless those doors and windows are made of extremely expensive bullet-resistant materials. Furthermore, your use of ridiculous hyperbole will not strengthen your argument in the least. Your statement: "Do they really think an armed teacher could have stopped a killer in full body armor with an AR-15 that put 11 bullets in a 6-year-old in a mere second?" is wrong on many levels, but for the sake of brevity I will mention only two. First, Adam Lanza was NOT wearing "full body armor" but only a military style vest, and the news reports did not say whether it was a ballistic vest or not. Secondly, Mr. Lanza did NOT "put 11 bullets in a 6 year old in a mere second"
as this would have meant a rate of fire of 660 rounds per minute and the AR-15 he used is a semi-automatic weapon and is NOT CAPABLE of doing that. And it is physically impossible for any human being to pull a trigger that rapidly. If you are going to argue for banning these weapons, then at least have the courtesy to use factual information in your arguments and avoid wild, ungrounded statements such as the ones in your letter.
Ikeithlu: Well that explains quite a bit. I wondered about some of the rather bizarre ideation that I thought I detected, and I suspected there might have been some traumatic event in his formative years. I have a niece who was molested at about 6 years of age, and she exhibits some of the same traits although in her case it did not drive her to religious fundamentalism. Some fundamentalists I've seen are mean as you say, and they give us Christians a bad name. Too much openly expressed piety amounts to conceit, and it's not pretty in Christians OR atheists who worship their "logic" and scorn those who are true, non-hypocritical believers. In my 61 years on this planet, I have come to believe that extremism in EITHER direction is just a bad idea. It's why I prefer discussion to argument.
lkeithlu:
Greetings to you sir. It was my hope that I could effect some improvement by offering advice and/or criticism to Mr. Orr, but from what I’m hearing it seems I might actually
have just been wasting my time. I’m not quite sure what to think of him. I’ve only been reading the comments for a few days, but Mr. Orr seems to be everywhere. He’s quite
prolific and holds forth on many subjects that he seems to either lack or have incorrect
information on. He certainly has a unique belief system I’ll give him that. I was trained as a teacher at the University of Tennessee and his ideas on punctuation are….well…uhm,
“interesting” comes to mind. Tell me, is he like that all the time or does he have lucid
moments?
To: Easy123
As to what freedom I may lose in all this, I suspect we may all lose our freedom to decide
how we wish to defend ourselves. We don’t need any more options to be denied to us especially not the option of having a weapon capable of actually doing a decent job in self defense. As I said before, it’s extremely difficult to defend oneself against an AR-15
with nothing more than a revolver, and it has been proven that gun bans don’t work because the Clinton “assault weapons” ban had no appreciable effect on gun violence during its very dubious tenure. And I don’t recall ever saying that anyone had proposed removing all guns, but the fact is they are proposing to remove the very ones that are the most effective for self defense against the criminals. And, yes, we do pay politicians to govern us, but not at the expense of ignoring the will of the people and ruling by executive fiat as Biden and Obama propose to do to force their solution to the gun violence problem on us. And for someone who never met his father, Obama has certainly been influenced entirely too much by his Marxist ideals.
Not that it really matters considering the outcome, but Mr. Lanza did indeed use the rifle. The point, however, is not the weapon he used, but the act he committed and the reasons for it. Those reasons are what needs to be addressed.
I really need to say a thing or two to our friendly substitute for Dan Martino(for those readers too young to remember him, Dan Martino was a street preacher who wandered around downtown Chattanooga in the 70's and 80's carrying a wooden cross and haranguing people on the sidewalks during lunch breaks and such).
Mr. Orr, why must you publish these longwinded and ill-punctuated religious diatribes in areas where they are completely off topic and inappropriate? You may think that you are called upon to bring the light of Jesus into the world and no one denies that you have that right. The trouble with this is that you are doing it in an entirely inappropriate and, frankly, irritating manner. Not only are you alienating people who might otherwise agree with your religious views, but you are doubly irritating those who do not. Your disregard for the logical and proper rules of grammar and punctuation make your missives painful for those of us with a proper education to read. Your knowledge of scripture is impressive, but your lack of knowledge of, or disregard for, the Harbrace manual is monumentally silly. If your wish is to be taken seriously, then believe me when I tell you that this is NOT the way. If you wish to be considered a thoughtful and serious individual instead of "another one of those Christian fundamentalist whackos" then you must not only cease publishing these religious monlogues in contexts where they are obviously not relevant to the subject, but you must also obey the proper rules of English grammar and punctuation no matter how much you disagree with them. To do otherwise will not get you noticed in the way you wish to be, but only tagged as an inarticulate religious "nutjob". It is my hope that you will accept this as constructive criticism and not as an attack upon you or your beliefs.
Cook: A Taser a day ...
Mr. Cook: Although I usually disagree completely with you, in this instance I am on your side. TASERs are dangerous and quite often lethal instruments of torture that have no business being used on anyone let alone on children. I quote from the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 39/46 of 10 December 1984, entry into force 26 June 1987, in accordance with article 27
PART I, Article 1 1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity....
By any rational definition, a TASER is an instrument of torture. I have had this diabolical device used on me. It was extremely painful, and I still suffer ill effects from it 5 years after the fact. Those who would quibble about the reason it was used on me and say that I should not have resisted authority miss the point completely, and their opinions are not worth arguing about. The POINT is I was tortured. I had unbelievable pain inflicted upon me to force me to comply with a demand I considered totally unreasonable. I had injuries inflicted upon me that have yet to heal, nerve damage in particular, that were unjustifiable. We have turned our schools into institutions of torture, not of learning. We now TASER children as punishment and force to them to comply with our demands and obey our rules. This makes us no better than the authoritarian governments against whom we fought in the Second World War, and against whom we still fight for reasons that are now exposed as completely hypocritical. We are among the signatories of the UN resolution against the use of torture to force compliance and punish people, yet look what we are doing to our own children. Is it any wonder the so-called 3rd world countries that we bully point this out to the rest of the world on a regular basis and hate us instead of respecting us despite all the monetary aid we send them?
Rants
How many people like you must be banned from the public roads before you realize that the roads are just that? Public. They don't belong exclusively to you, you drooling Neanderthal.
Rants
Of all the rants they have here, the one it is most important that the citizens of Chattanooga read they won't publish. I will try to get it in here. According to a Police spokesperson it is NOT a crime for an employee of the city of Chattanooga to lie to a citizen of Chattanooga. This is such an outrage I don't what to say about it yet no one seems to care.
City Court
Well we finally got a cartoon from Bennet that was worthy of the name. Maybe we should buy him a set of felt tip pens instead of the crayons.
We have more selfishness now and other letters to the editors
Ms. Rochat, there are a couple of things that you need to understand about gun owners that you apparently don't. We are not the bloodthirsty rednecks you seem to think we are. The vast majority of us are simply ordinary people who are tired of the interference in our right to self defense on the part of the anti-gun lobby and the government of this country. We do not advocate for more guns, but rather that more law-abiding people be able to carry them where they will actually do us some good in areas where, heretofore, they have not been allowed to. These "gun-free zones" as they have unfortunately come to be called, are a major temptation to individuals with mental problems to do what the Sandy Hook shooter did because they know that no one will be present who is able to stop them. And no matter what anti-gun lobbyists tell you, the only sure defense against someone with a gun is someone else with a gun. Any other weapon is utterly useless, and as much as collectivists don't wish to believe it, it is perfectly logical and perfectly true. And strengthening doors and windows will not stop an individual with a gun unless those doors and windows are made of extremely expensive bullet-resistant materials. Furthermore, your use of ridiculous hyperbole will not strengthen your argument in the least. Your statement: "Do they really think an armed teacher could have stopped a killer in full body armor with an AR-15 that put 11 bullets in a 6-year-old in a mere second?" is wrong on many levels, but for the sake of brevity I will mention only two. First, Adam Lanza was NOT wearing "full body armor" but only a military style vest, and the news reports did not say whether it was a ballistic vest or not. Secondly, Mr. Lanza did NOT "put 11 bullets in a 6 year old in a mere second" as this would have meant a rate of fire of 660 rounds per minute and the AR-15 he used is a semi-automatic weapon and is NOT CAPABLE of doing that. And it is physically impossible for any human being to pull a trigger that rapidly. If you are going to argue for banning these weapons, then at least have the courtesy to use factual information in your arguments and avoid wild, ungrounded statements such as the ones in your letter.
'Let us all have equal weapons' and more letters to the editors
Ikeithlu: Well that explains quite a bit. I wondered about some of the rather bizarre ideation that I thought I detected, and I suspected there might have been some traumatic event in his formative years. I have a niece who was molested at about 6 years of age, and she exhibits some of the same traits although in her case it did not drive her to religious fundamentalism. Some fundamentalists I've seen are mean as you say, and they give us Christians a bad name. Too much openly expressed piety amounts to conceit, and it's not pretty in Christians OR atheists who worship their "logic" and scorn those who are true, non-hypocritical believers. In my 61 years on this planet, I have come to believe that extremism in EITHER direction is just a bad idea. It's why I prefer discussion to argument.
'Let us all have equal weapons' and more letters to the editors
lkeithlu: Greetings to you sir. It was my hope that I could effect some improvement by offering advice and/or criticism to Mr. Orr, but from what I’m hearing it seems I might actually have just been wasting my time. I’m not quite sure what to think of him. I’ve only been reading the comments for a few days, but Mr. Orr seems to be everywhere. He’s quite prolific and holds forth on many subjects that he seems to either lack or have incorrect information on. He certainly has a unique belief system I’ll give him that. I was trained as a teacher at the University of Tennessee and his ideas on punctuation are….well…uhm, “interesting” comes to mind. Tell me, is he like that all the time or does he have lucid moments?
'Let us all have equal weapons' and more letters to the editors
To: Easy123 As to what freedom I may lose in all this, I suspect we may all lose our freedom to decide how we wish to defend ourselves. We don’t need any more options to be denied to us especially not the option of having a weapon capable of actually doing a decent job in self defense. As I said before, it’s extremely difficult to defend oneself against an AR-15 with nothing more than a revolver, and it has been proven that gun bans don’t work because the Clinton “assault weapons” ban had no appreciable effect on gun violence during its very dubious tenure. And I don’t recall ever saying that anyone had proposed removing all guns, but the fact is they are proposing to remove the very ones that are the most effective for self defense against the criminals. And, yes, we do pay politicians to govern us, but not at the expense of ignoring the will of the people and ruling by executive fiat as Biden and Obama propose to do to force their solution to the gun violence problem on us. And for someone who never met his father, Obama has certainly been influenced entirely too much by his Marxist ideals.
Rants
Not that it really matters considering the outcome, but Mr. Lanza did indeed use the rifle. The point, however, is not the weapon he used, but the act he committed and the reasons for it. Those reasons are what needs to be addressed.
'Let us all have equal weapons' and more letters to the editors
I really need to say a thing or two to our friendly substitute for Dan Martino(for those readers too young to remember him, Dan Martino was a street preacher who wandered around downtown Chattanooga in the 70's and 80's carrying a wooden cross and haranguing people on the sidewalks during lunch breaks and such). Mr. Orr, why must you publish these longwinded and ill-punctuated religious diatribes in areas where they are completely off topic and inappropriate? You may think that you are called upon to bring the light of Jesus into the world and no one denies that you have that right. The trouble with this is that you are doing it in an entirely inappropriate and, frankly, irritating manner. Not only are you alienating people who might otherwise agree with your religious views, but you are doubly irritating those who do not. Your disregard for the logical and proper rules of grammar and punctuation make your missives painful for those of us with a proper education to read. Your knowledge of scripture is impressive, but your lack of knowledge of, or disregard for, the Harbrace manual is monumentally silly. If your wish is to be taken seriously, then believe me when I tell you that this is NOT the way. If you wish to be considered a thoughtful and serious individual instead of "another one of those Christian fundamentalist whackos" then you must not only cease publishing these religious monlogues in contexts where they are obviously not relevant to the subject, but you must also obey the proper rules of English grammar and punctuation no matter how much you disagree with them. To do otherwise will not get you noticed in the way you wish to be, but only tagged as an inarticulate religious "nutjob". It is my hope that you will accept this as constructive criticism and not as an attack upon you or your beliefs.