The Pitters' Place

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:The difference is cops are meant to pull you over only if you're driving in an illegal manner.

How are cops to "pull you over" simply for carrying without infringing on all your rights? That's like them stopping you just to see if you have a license to drive because you're driving in public.

Maybe if you show signs of inebriation; or if you behave in a matter that makes cops believe you're up to some nefarious deed.
Of course, knowing US-American cops, this could mean: Walking with a non-pale skin.

The problem is so non-guns it's almost funny.

If I wanted to, I could illegally acquire a gun today before the sun went down. If guns were outlawed outright immediately, millions of guns would still exist on the black market, easily accessible to anyone who tried hard enough. Murderous people with violent disassociative tendencies tend to want guns to go and kill people. Legal or not. No one can seriously say that changing gun law is going to stop someone from doing what they plan to do. The thing is to prevent them from wanting to do it in the first place with improvements in education and mental healthcare. Or just paying attention. Good parenting. Generally supportive communities. Shit like that.

All the energy and thought and money expended by politicians on the topic of gun availability or ownership needs to be redirected from what's in these people's hands to what's in their skulls.

Granted, not all mentally ill people show signs obvious enough to take note, but when they do say something alarming or weird alluding to wanting to do harm or hating everyone, shit man, fuckin grab them by the ears and slap some sense into them!

The existence of guns in the case of people having a strong urge to harm others is irrelevant.

phe_de wrote:

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:The difference is cops are meant to pull you over only if you're driving in an illegal manner.

How are cops to "pull you over" simply for carrying without infringing on all your rights? That's like them stopping you just to see if you have a license to drive because you're driving in public.

Maybe if you show signs of inebriation; or if you behave in a matter that makes cops believe you're up to some nefarious deed.
Of course, knowing US-American cops, this could mean: Walking with a non-pale skin.

If you're inebriated, cops aren't exactlu giving you the benefit of the doubt to begin with, so a license seems unnecessary for this reason. If you're acting suspicious, what good is a license? It just gives cause to let police go on their merry way to do what was causing that suspicion.

And yes there is that other issue, which we all know would affect more of a certain race. They'd be stopped for CWB (carrying while black].

phe_de wrote:

Gendo wrote:I think I see the issue here... nobody is disagreeing on the difference between "buying" and "owning". I think the problem is how you interpret "the law protects your right to own it". You see it as meaning nothing more than the law can't take away something you already own. But that's NOT what the law actually protects in this case. It says that if you want to own one, you can. Not that if you happened to be one of the lucky people who bought a gun before more laws were passed, that you get to keep it. But that if you don't own one now, you can own one in the future. That's what the right to own one means in this case.

Maybe a solution could be: Instead of making a distinction between buying and owning, make a distinction between owning and using.

Sort of like with cars. Anybody who can afford it can buy a car; but if you want to drive it in public, you need a driver's license.
Maybe some sort of gun license could work. Anybody can buy a gun, or two, or 109; but if you carry them in public, any cop should be allowed to ask you for your gun license. Just like cops can pull you over on the freeway.
And as long as you use the guns only on your property (and don't commit crimes), then it shouldn't be anybody's business.

The problem I see is that it will be difficult to agree on the possible requirements for obtaining a gun license.

This just gives more authority to the group of people already most likely to abuse their authority. In most cases a license is already required anyway. The most notable exceptions also happen to be places with the lowest crime rates. Meanwhile the city of Chicago continues to defy the U.S. Supreme Court, while pretending otherwise, and more people die in Chicago on an average weekend then in all the mass shootings during a month. This doesn't register with gun-control advocates because:

1) Ten people dying in ten different shootings aren't "attractive" to the media the way ten people dying in one event attracts them.

2) It disproves the lies told by the gun-control crowd.

3) Most of the people being killed in Chicago are young black men/teenagers and the only way black people dying is worthy of media attention is when a lot of them die in one shooting. One black teen/young adult being shot and killed in Chicago isn't worthy of media attention/government propaganda because it will just happen again in a couple of hours.

But the real problem with what phe de proposes is it just simply does not address the actual problem. The people carrying guns openly in public are 99.99935% of the time the people who don't commit crimes, won't commit crimes and are the most likely to prevent crimes instead. Citizens carrying guns are far less likely to be criminals and much more likely to be this guy:



Or this one:



Of course these stories rarely make headlines beyond their local area because stories where the good guy wins just aren't media worthy. Yet these events happen more often than scenarios where innocent people are killed. Also, these two stories won't make national headlines for reasons that should be obvious.

sikax wrote:The thing is to prevent them from wanting to do it in the first place with improvements in education and mental healthcare. Or just paying attention. Good parenting. Generally supportive communities. Shit like that.

All the energy and thought and money expended by politicians on the topic of gun availability or ownership needs to be redirected from what's in these people's hands to what's in their skulls.

I agree; but I don't think it should be an either-or choice. Why not do both?
After all, if you are sick and experiencing pain, you can take medication that will (hopefully) cure the cause of the pain but takes a while to be effective; and you can take painkillers that don't fight the cause but help you go through the day.
Laws that regulate gun usage and ownershop would be the painkiller; measures that work for a better society would be the cure.

And maybe a gun license is not practicable. I just suggested it here as an analogy to driver's licences.
Maybe because, in Germany, cars kill more people than guns.

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:They'd be killed for CWB (carrying while black].

Fixed.

@CashRules:

Like I said in my reply to sikax: The idea about a gun license was only a suggestion. If it's a bad idea, then it's a bad idea.
And I'm not familiar with the situation in Chicago.

phe_de wrote:

sikax wrote:The thing is to prevent them from wanting to do it in the first place with improvements in education and mental healthcare. Or just paying attention. Good parenting. Generally supportive communities. Shit like that.

All the energy and thought and money expended by politicians on the topic of gun availability or ownership needs to be redirected from what's in these people's hands to what's in their skulls.

I agree; but I don't think it should be an either-or choice. Why not do both?
After all, if you are sick and experiencing pain, you can take medication that will (hopefully) cure the cause of the pain but takes a while to be effective; and you can take painkillers that don't fight the cause but help you go through the day.
Laws that regulate gun usage and ownershop would be the painkiller; measures that work for a better society would be the cure.

And maybe a gun license is not practicable. I just suggested it here as an analogy to driver's licences.
Maybe because, in Germany, cars kill more people than guns.

In most cases a license of some type is already required. Places where you can carry a gun with no license whatsoever include Vermont, the least violent state in the country. Sometimes I think non-Americans aren't familiar (through no fault of their own, they just don't live here) with what our gun laws actually say and think a person can just walk into a gun store and walk out three minutes later with a gun and carry it anywhere they want. That's almost always a no.

1) The background check itself is a time-consuming process and is required for every individual purpose. If I go to a sporting goods store and buy a gun I have to complete the background check. If I then go to the same store and buy another gun only thirty minutes later, say I changed my mind and decided to buy a gun I had originally decided against buying, that background check I just completed half an hour ago is no longer valid and I have to complete the entire process again.

2) If I actually use a gun for hunting that requires a license and depending on what I'm hunting and where it could require several different licenses/permits.

3) Open carry without a license has never been shown to be correlated with an increase in crime. But this is rare. In my state no license is required for carrying a gun in my vehicle and then, if I need it to stop a crime from occurring then I am allowed to remove it from my vehicle in public. However both open carry and concealed carry require licensing.

4) It still doesn't make sense for guns to even be the focus of the argument when talking about mass shootings. Guns are not the problem and never have been and there is not one shred of credible evidence that demonstrates otherwise.

Sometimes I think non-Americans aren't familiar (through no fault of their own, they just don't live here) with what our gun laws actually say and think a person can just walk into a gun store and walk out three minutes later with a gun and carry it anywhere they want. That's almost always a no.

That's because pro gun law propaganda makes it look that way. Like the Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine one and one of the Batman shooter I saw recently. So I did think, a very long time ago, I could just walk in and get any gun I wanted without any sort of process and that Americans were crazy for having it that way, later I found out that Americans are indeed crazy, but not in the way I thought. Because America is made of propaganda is so hard to find the truth or an objective telling of the world in anything.

Yeah, our motto is pretty much: "It's not what you know, it's what you can prove." And you can't prove anything, so we're all fucked.

sikax wrote: Institutionalized oppression and inequality couldn't have had much to do with the motivations of the dude in Santa Barbara whose manifesto explained his frustration with women and that they didn't want to sleep with him. That's some self-esteem shit the roots of which are unknowable. It's about coping skills and critical thinking, things that are severely lacking in all spree shooters and most Internet commenters.

Wait, what? Wasn't that dude like the poster child for misogynistic, white male entitlement? Didn't he make a video carrying on about how women only went for the alpha males when they should be throwing themselves at him? How is that not a product of our institutionalized oppression and inequality?

CashRules wrote:I don't mind people stating their opinions and I don't insult people for that. What I do mind and find personally insulting myself is when people think that opposition to vast, over-reaching gun-control is only due to selfishness. It's not. It's due in large part to the fact that no evidence exists to support the view that fewer guns, or more restrictions on guns, has any effect on the crime rate. I'm also not interested in any faulty comparisons between different countries because such comparisons always involve the person making the comparison be selecting which two countries they want to compare and basing solely on one factor, guns, while ignoring an almost limitless number of other demographic factors. I can easily select countries to compare that would show that more guns equals a drastically lower crime rate but those comparisons would be just as faulty as the comparisons I just complained about. So the truth remains that no valid evidence exists either way and the truth, as far as it can be known, is that the number of guns and the extent of gun laws has no statistically significant effect on crime. If you want to make a valid comparison then you do so either by comparing trends or by comparing the same jurisdiction both before and after a new law goes into effect or expires.

The guns that are most often mentioned as the ones that should be banned were in fact banned in the U.S. for a decade and the result does not make the case that gun-control supporters wish it made. the result in the decade since it expired also does not make their case. There is an especially stupid poster by the name of Goz on the RFS board who has argued many times that Australia's gun massive gun buyback program resulted in a significant reduction in crime. She steadfastly refuses to accept the demonstrable fact that the trend that she boasts about for Australia actually began two decades before that law was enacted and every western industrialized nation on earth experienced the same trend during the same time period regardless of whether they enacted gun-control laws, or laws more favorable to gun owners or no gun laws at all. These are the kind of people who irritate me. It is like arguing with creationists about evolution because these people insist on arguing about a topic they simply do not comprehend.

There are essentially two issues that are trying to be addressed, both of which are separate and both of which require different solutions.

The first is the high level of gun crime along the lines of inner city gang shootings, robberies, that sort of thing. Very often these will be committed with illegal sourced weapons.

The second are the mass shooting events like the recent one in Oregan where someone is "mentally disturbed" or "racist" or otherwise "not normal" and takes what was generally a legally obtained weapon and goes on a killing spree.

I don't have the stats to hand and I can't be bothered to try to find them, but the first category almost certainly accounts for the overwhelming majority of gun-related causalities in America. But the solution to is far from simple - it's extremely expensive and ineffective. What's more, in a large number of those cases it's either criminals killing other criminals or it's criminals killing poor socially disenfranchised people (ie non-white, non-voters) so the government doesn't care.

But the second category at least is something that can be addressed. And whilst the numbers may only be in the hundreds rather than the thousands a year it's still far more than any other developed country on the planet. So shouldn't there be an attempt to do something about it?

Now unlike all those other developed countries America is fairly unique in that it does not have Universal Healthcare and it does not (in any serious fashion) restrict people's access to guns. Perhaps the latter part of it is not the problem. Perhaps the significant differentiating problem is the lack of Universal Healthcare.

Actually, there's one other factor thinking about - "Free speech" - everywhere else has legislation restricting Hate groups and things like the promotion of racial violence, but that's another thing that America is happy to tolerate, so racist hate groups can openly convene and then go and buy guns and then...

And although UHC and the preaching of hatred should possibly be addressed, asking responsible gun owners to just take a few minutes to prove that they're responsible to help weed out the irresponsible gun owners seems like a fairly inoffensive, non-invasive way of helping to ensure that mentally unstable/ex-felons find it a bit harder to get hold of guns.

But I suspect that this will be deemed an infringement on their rights, so they'll fight tooth and nail to not do it.

Gendo wrote:

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:They'd be killed for CWB (carrying while black].

Fixed.

Touche.

BruceSmith78 wrote:

sikax wrote: Institutionalized oppression and inequality couldn't have had much to do with the motivations of the dude in Santa Barbara whose manifesto explained his frustration with women and that they didn't want to sleep with him. That's some self-esteem shit the roots of which are unknowable. It's about coping skills and critical thinking, things that are severely lacking in all spree shooters and most Internet commenters.

Wait, what? Wasn't that dude like the poster child for misogynistic, white male entitlement? Didn't he make a video carrying on about how women only went for the alpha males when they should be throwing themselves at him? How is that not a product of our institutionalized oppression and inequality?

I meant the root for him specifically, like in his life. There must have been some sort of trigger.

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:

phe_de wrote:

Gendo wrote:I think I see the issue here... nobody is disagreeing on the difference between "buying" and "owning". I think the problem is how you interpret "the law protects your right to own it". You see it as meaning nothing more than the law can't take away something you already own. But that's NOT what the law actually protects in this case. It says that if you want to own one, you can. Not that if you happened to be one of the lucky people who bought a gun before more laws were passed, that you get to keep it. But that if you don't own one now, you can own one in the future. That's what the right to own one means in this case.

Maybe a solution could be: Instead of making a distinction between buying and owning, make a distinction between owning and using.

Sort of like with cars. Anybody who can afford it can buy a car; but if you want to drive it in public, you need a driver's license.
Maybe some sort of gun license could work. Anybody can buy a gun, or two, or 109; but if you carry them in public, any cop should be allowed to ask you for your gun license. Just like cops can pull you over on the freeway.
And as long as you use the guns only on your property (and don't commit crimes), then it shouldn't be anybody's business.

The problem I see is that it will be difficult to agree on the possible requirements for obtaining a gun license.

The difference is cops are meant to pull you over only if you're driving in an illegal manner.

How are cops to "pull you over" simply for carrying without infringing on all your rights? That's like them stopping you just to see if you have a license to drive because you're driving in public.

To this, and not meant to be an actual part of this debate, but, here at least, cops can and do this all the time - I figured it was the same in the States?

A cop can pull you over for any reason at all - whether that be to check your licence or to breath test you randomly for either drugs or alcohol.. you don't have to be doing a single thing incorrectly.

We have "booze Busses" that will pull over every single car in a road/hwy/frwy and check each driver for alcohol, a current licence and drugs..

thesalmonofdoubt wrote:

Unvoiced_Apollo wrote:

phe_de wrote:

Gendo wrote:I think I see the issue here... nobody is disagreeing on the difference between "buying" and "owning". I think the problem is how you interpret "the law protects your right to own it". You see it as meaning nothing more than the law can't take away something you already own. But that's NOT what the law actually protects in this case. It says that if you want to own one, you can. Not that if you happened to be one of the lucky people who bought a gun before more laws were passed, that you get to keep it. But that if you don't own one now, you can own one in the future. That's what the right to own one means in this case.

Maybe a solution could be: Instead of making a distinction between buying and owning, make a distinction between owning and using.

Sort of like with cars. Anybody who can afford it can buy a car; but if you want to drive it in public, you need a driver's license.
Maybe some sort of gun license could work. Anybody can buy a gun, or two, or 109; but if you carry them in public, any cop should be allowed to ask you for your gun license. Just like cops can pull you over on the freeway.
And as long as you use the guns only on your property (and don't commit crimes), then it shouldn't be anybody's business.

The problem I see is that it will be difficult to agree on the possible requirements for obtaining a gun license.

The difference is cops are meant to pull you over only if you're driving in an illegal manner.

How are cops to "pull you over" simply for carrying without infringing on all your rights? That's like them stopping you just to see if you have a license to drive because you're driving in public.

To this, and not meant to be an actual part of this debate, but, here at least, cops can and do this all the time - I figured it was the same in the States?

A cop can pull you over for any reason at all - whether that be to check your licence or to breath test you randomly for either drugs or alcohol.. you don't have to be doing a single thing incorrectly.

We have "booze Busses" that will pull over every single car in a road/hwy/frwy and check each driver for alcohol, a current licence and drugs..

Hmm, the only thing I've heard them doing that was similar is police check points for drunk driving, and only in areas/dates where alcohol consumption was a potential problem. I don't think I've heard of anyone being pulled over for just wanting to check their license. They'd have to be doing something that caught the officer's attention. Not to mention, we don't have a right to drink here, unlike the right to bear arms.

TBH - I'm not sure how the actual law is framed. Booze busses are everywhere all the time - chances are, if you are out on a Friday/Saturday or Sunday night - you will be pulled over for a breath test, its almost a guarantee, the test for drugs is more expensive so, they still check random people but less frequently than for alcohol.
As to the "right to bear arms" .. yup, I'm not really commenting on that because its a huge difference between the States and Us - we don't have anything like a right to bear arms in our constitution.

I meant the root for him specifically, like in his life. There must have been some sort of trigger.

He was autistic; which in itself obviously doesn't lead people to go on shooting sprees, but it almost always leads to feeling justifiably outcast and misunderstood, plus practically guarantees that one might never have a romantic or sexual relationship while not lessening one's desire for such at all. My friend's autistic brother is definitely turned on by girls, but they have to tell him no, you can't just go around groping female strangers because that's wrong, and even though he really really wants sex as much as any other teenage boy, realistically it's not something that's ever going to happen for him and he needs to deal with that, which is something that most mature neurotypical adults would struggle enough with, what more an autistic teenage boy. Meanwhile, society continues to proliferate the message that if you're not having sex then you're a loser / ugly / less of a man / less of a person and that this is bad; and then if the guy is intelligent enough to discover and absorb MRA ideology and entitlement and feel the burning rage of injustices against him both imagined and real, it's an outright recipe for disaster.

In fact I think sex is a big part of it, particulary in how people and the US in particular talk about it. It's always couched in the language of rights. And that includes the liberal side of things. Gay rights - the right for gay people to fall in love and sex each other. There's all the feminist talk of a woman's right to enjoy her sexuality. Slutwalk is about a woman's right to have as much sex as a man without judgement. etc.

Most people meanwhile take it for granted that everybody is having sex and enjoying romantic relationships. Those who don't are seen as an anomaly, often negatively. There are movies titled things like 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' like it's some shocking big deal. Friends cheerfully take turns sharing their 'first times' assuming that everyone has one. Lifestyle media make sweeping statements assuming that everyone has had a relationship or is in the midst of one, or talk about how in your 20s it's time to start getting into serious relationships instead of the casual flings of 'our' youth, even though at 26 I've never had a single fling, casual or otherwise, and likely never will. People who don't or can't have sex are viewed as immature or otherwise inferior, or obviously unattractive, or a jerk (because why else wouldn't someone want to sleep with you?). People joke that someone who's angry obviously just needs to get laid. People joke that if someone is an asshole it's no wonder he doesn't have a girlfriend, because obviously nice people (not Nice Guys, actual nice people) will always be able to find someone, and if you can't it means you're lacking or failing as a person. People joke that if an unattractive woman is angry about sexism, it's obviously because no guy wants to date her. People joke that feminists are feminists because they're too ugly for any guy to sleep with. And so on.

The media is saturated with sexualised imagery. Love songs on the radio (precious few songs aren't about love or sex). Romance on TV and on the bookshelves. Sex is on the bottom tier of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Society constantly reiterates that love and sex are a basic part of human life and a fundamental part of just being human; and in the midst of all that, some people are also drilled with the message - be it through institionalised oppression that declares them less beautiful than white people or because they're gruesomely ugly or because they think God hates their sexual orientation or because of constant rejection: "Sex is awesome! Sex is a human right! Sex is for everyone! But not for you." The same with romantic love.

In some of those cases, there are inherent self-checking mechanisms that keep the resulting anger at bay. Someone with the rigid moral conscientiousness to stay celibate for God isn't going to mass murder. Someone subject to racial oppression that's stripped them of their self-worth isn't going to feel entitled to sex, because they don't feel entitled to anything that the media says is for everyone, knowing that 'everyone' usually means 'white people'. But for straight white cis guys? Nope. They're certain it's not their fault (and sometimes it honestly isn't). So they figure that it's obviously other people's fault, probably women, and hence they get out the guns.

We need to change the way people talk about sex. I hate how I'm practically quoting an anti-gay bigot verbatim here, but sex is not a right, nor is love, and people need to be taught that. It's a luxury that most people will get to enjoy. Most, not all. And that's okay too, and you're no less of a person for it.

sikax wrote:

BruceSmith78 wrote:

sikax wrote: Institutionalized oppression and inequality couldn't have had much to do with the motivations of the dude in Santa Barbara whose manifesto explained his frustration with women and that they didn't want to sleep with him. That's some self-esteem shit the roots of which are unknowable. It's about coping skills and critical thinking, things that are severely lacking in all spree shooters and most Internet commenters.

Wait, what? Wasn't that dude like the poster child for misogynistic, white male entitlement? Didn't he make a video carrying on about how women only went for the alpha males when they should be throwing themselves at him? How is that not a product of our institutionalized oppression and inequality?

I meant the root for him specifically, like in his life. There must have been some sort of trigger.

Being born in a country that expands white male neoliberal supremacy's culture of violence as a way to gain power? No?

"Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society's understanding."

-Ra's al Ghul 2005

"Know your enemy."

- Sun Tzu, ~6th century BC

thesalmonofdoubt wrote:TBH - I'm not sure how the actual law is framed. Booze busses are everywhere all the time - chances are, if you are out on a Friday/Saturday or Sunday night - you will be pulled over for a breath test, its almost a guarantee, the test for drugs is more expensive so, they still check random people but less frequently than for alcohol.
As to the "right to bear arms" .. yup, I'm not really commenting on that because its a huge difference between the States and Us - we don't have anything like a right to bear arms in our constitution.

You might not be directly commenting on the right, but the U.S. constitution does have that right and your idea has has interesting implications and many could argue it not only affects the 2nd amendment but also the 4th.

Anakin McFly wrote:"Know your enemy."

- Sun Tzu, ~6th century BC

"Well, by that I didn't mean one should make sympathetic rationalizations and excuses for criminals with narcissistic bloodlust, fueled by a culture that has narcissistic bloodlust as one of it's major pillars."

-Sun Tzu, Just now

Those weren't sympathetic rationalizations or excuses; that implies saying "well that's all right then, I understand why they did it, therefore we shouldn't punish them and should let them continue," whereas what I'm trying to do is find ways to understand and thus be better at preventing such things in future. Which is the point of most such discussions - asking why this happened, in order that we might be able to stop it.

If narcissistic bloodlust is the root, then we address that. If it's guns, then we address that. And so on. We can't do anything if we don't know why. We'd just be addressing the symptoms rather than the cause. And my point earlier was that the way we frame sex (and happiness, etc) as a right - and thus entitlement - is naturally going to result in people who feel entitled to those things, even if it's something they can't get, and believing it unjust if they don't. So how do we change that to make people grow up less entitled? That's not rationalizing criminal behaviour, it's trying to figure out how to change society to make better people who don't go on shooting sprees. It's evidently a social rather than just individual problem, or else we would be seeing this all over the world. I'd also argue that the US preference for retributive rather than restorative justice is itself a symptom of that cultural bloodlust.

Food for thought:

Dr_Liszt wrote:Food for thought:

Good thing I'm not close to my mother.

Quite right. A lot can go wrong in a country whose national pastimes include racism, violence, and wanton sexual depravity.

Yeah

Victims of structural violence, majority of them minorities, get demonized. White perpetrators get romanticized. It's the furthest extreme of white privilege.

It seems as though the answer is to round up all the white, quiet loner momma's boys.

Yeah, I hate what the media does with this. That's sympathising with criminals, coupled with a healthy dose of racism. It''s twisted. I don't want to sympathise, I want to deconstruct and understand the process, and I apologise if I came across otherwise. I always try to understand people and why they do what they do. Understanding doesn't mean agreeing or thinking they were right. I just find it a much more preferable option to going "I don't understand why anyone would do something like that" or simplifying matters to "they're just crazy" or "they're just bad people."

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/idaho-t ... ing-nudes/
Obviously this is just the behaviour of a mentally disturbed lone wolf and in no way connected to disturbing social narratives PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Wtf D:

Yeah, it's evidently not a lone wolf thing if it keeps happening, and in much the same way with similar motivations.

(also, if those girls were 15 like him, he was technically requesting child porn.)

@Anakin...so I've been meaning to get back to you, but I'm not even sure whether I should or where to begin. So, I might never.

Yeah, that's okay. I know I've got a lot of personal issues that get in the way of me being emotionally objective about this topic, so it might be best to leave it. I've been really busy at work and should probably take a break from this board, anyway. Thanks.

Aight.