Ginger_Warrior

Happiness is only a reflection of how you feel at that particular moment in time. It's not an indication that in the future, you will continue to be happy, or that with hindsight, you've done things "right" now.

You weren't here in TIF's Golden Years, I see. In those days every other thread was a debate or discussion in some form, 'flame wars' everywhere. 8-) I think only the Today thread surpassed the "Does God exist" thread in number of pages. Relationship thread, if you count its first iteration with its current form, surely.

One of my recently-turned-vegan friends went to a house party where there loads of sausage rolls spare. She bagged them and brought them in for us to nibble on. She made the mistake of taking one herself before realising she'd just crammed her mouth full of pork, grabbing a tissue and spitting it out. I made the point that the pig has already died, that the food was spare anyway, and that her eating the sausage roll would not prevent another pig from being slaughtered to replace the pig that was now lying, cooked, chewed and ultimately not eaten, in the bottom of the bin. She meekly replied, "I don't care, I won't eat meat. Have you seen how they're killed?" ... There are a number of valid reasons why someone would choose not to eat meat. This was not one of them.

It's basically saying this: "I know you're looking for sex as part of a long-term relationship. Well, I'm not going to give it to you. However, I'll still stop you from getting it from someone else because you're still giving me all the things I want and that suits me just fine. I'm not telling you to guilt-trip her into sex, I'm just saying that it is an issue if you're wanting it and she isn't, and it will cause resentment because of the consequent imbalance the relationship now has. Either you're giving up your desire to have sex to stay in the relationship, or she's giving up her desire not to have sex to stay in the relationship. Good luck squaring that circle.

I could never tell whether Sara's profile pic is a micrograph of a eukaryotic cell with all of its organelles missing, or something he drew while on E's.

There are schemes where people are charged a subscription in return for meals and support in dieting. People paying more money to eat less. Now that really [bleep]s with your mind.

Sounds more like a first date scenario than a casual gaming session. :^_^:

No, you haven't. You haven't controlled for other factors and you can't prove the decrease in gun crime wouldn't have been steeper hadn't it been for this law. Neither did Berenice. Why are you applying this to one side of the argument only, and not the other? If we go by what you say, then we should just skip the last two pages and stop the thread now because technically, none of it has been absolutely and categorically proven to true. We could also assume good faith for argument's sake. Glad to see we've finally found an "in-between" point. I wasn't implying that the ban made the country more violent, I was implying that the response to the ban basically didn't stop the violent crime from rising in the upcoming years, however, as opposed to countries like Mexico, UK did have other factors (unrelated to gun control) that affected such stadistics, which is why I didn't bother to show a graphic past 2000 where such factors took place. Again, the idiocyncrasy of such country plays a role, look at countries like switzerland (where basically everyone knows how to use a gun) where more people commit suicide via their own guns than actual crimes compared to countries like Mexico (a country with a nation-wide gun ban) where people simply don't care about gun laws + they have a drung war on top of that.... Agreed. Another factor is that the UK doesn't have a land border which makes the control of misappropriated firearms into the country a lot easier. But looking back at the point I made, from where this all started from; my main point wasn't that firearms are banned in the UK, the UK violent crime rate dropped, therefore banning firearms reduces the rate of violent crime... it was that a gun isn't generally regarded in my country as a necessary means of self-defence. Even where killing sprees do occur here, such as the shootings by Derrick Bird in 2010, there isn't any significant desire for the ban on firearms to be reversed, or any sentiments of "If I'd have had a gun, I'd have popped him before he killed anyone else". It is true that people's perceptions towards crime has changed in the past few years, and this has been due to an increase in violent crime over the last three or four years, so most people feel as though their neighbourhoods are now less safe than they used to be, but the factors behind this rise aren't anything to do with gun control and possessing a gun would do very little to make people feel safer. Let's look at the reasons people turn to violent crime in the first place.

Although, the lack of a sex life also destroys its fair share of relationships as well. I don't emphasise its importance as much as other people in this thread, because I think it's often exaggerated, but when one person's ready for it and the other person isn't, that's an issue both of those people need to resolve. It's not that abstaining from sex is bad... it isn't bad. Two people having split views on it, however, is.

Agreed. I mentioned before that the issue was far too complex to reduce it to "country Y vs country X" (the same also applies for "state X vs state Y" comparisons). Public gun ownership in the UK was never that high to begin with, as your source shows. That is clearly not the case in the US, and there would be massive logistical and legal complications with an outright ban. Frankly, I'm left-wing, I'm vehemently pro-gun control, and yet I don't expect to see a ban in the US, certainly not in my lifetime, if not ever. However, it's an intellectual scandal to imply that banning firearms in the UK lead to a dramatic rise in violent crime. It did not. I'm not saying that banning firearms reduced violent crime either, but it simply did not cause an increase in violent crime, as I've demonstrated quite forcefully on this page.

I'm translating your post as "I feel ready, but she doesn't." Otherwise, you'd have said "She wants to, but I don't feel ready yet." First thing to say is that how you live your life is your business, not mine, so I'm not going to lecture you either way. Honestly speaking though... is that really the situation between the two of you?

Stop accusing me of deliberately refusing to agree with you. When you post 'facts' here, expect people to view them critically. You said this was your profession before, but you appear to have missed a very important caveat from the very source you used (Home Office, 2000). Bolded the important parts for clarity. I put it to you that there was no increase in violent crime or firearms offences from 1997 and the years immediately after the Firearms Act, only that the Firearms Act expanded the definition of violent crime at the same time as effectively banning public ownership of firearms, leading to the perception of increased rates. Meanwhile, the BCS shows a non-significant difference in violent crime rates at a year-by-year basis, but nevertheless a consistent and gradual decline in violent crime rates from the late 90s onwards.

Too bad the definition of violent crime changes drastically between sources :roll: I guess I better leave my profession out of the question and enjoy the incoming wave of semantics :roll: Could changing definitions of crime not also have applied to you when you posted a massive gif with the words "MYTH" and "FACT" written on it? (Some of the facts which I've subsequently proven to be wrong, or at the very least, outdated)

Violent crime in England and Wales as recorded by the British Crime Survey has dropped by 39% from 1997 (the year that the Firearms Act was introduced) to 2010/11.[1] There were 3,593,000 cases of violent crime in 1997, and 2,203,000 cases in 2010/11.[2] Firearms offences in the ten years between 2000/01 to 2010/11 have fallen from 17,698 offences to 11,227, a drop of 36.5%.[3] Your attempt to link a supposed increase in violent crime and firearms offences to the banning of gun ownership is false.

I've told you why it's wrong. If the police being armed was deterring people from committing an act severe violence using a firearm, you personally would have no need to own one to defend yourself from the bad guy who's being deterred. Whatever. This thread is going the same way all the other fifteen billion gun threads in TIF's history have gone. It's a shame that this issue and the (thankfully, long-dead) religion threads show the worst in this community. You proved it with the "serious issues" comment. I'm out.

It's hardly semantics from where I'm standing. It's a fundamental flaw in one of your arguments, probably Omar's. But hey, I live in a country where public ownership of guns is essentially banned, and in a country where the homocide rate by guns is drastically lower. It's obviously a coincidence. So I guess I'm basically the last person you want to tell you that gun ownership isn't needed to stop a gunman from killing you in some deranged off-the-cuff massacre.

My point is they're clearly not acting as a deterrent if shootings still happen in full knowledge that being shot in return is a given possibility. You can't argue that they are acting as a deterrent, and persist to argue that because they've failed to deter a gunman, you need them to defend yourself. One of you is wrong.

Well done, you spotted the contradiction. Anyone would think I thought they'd stop and turn round upon seeing that sign! Strange though, that you use school massacres as a case for needing guns when it was the Dunblane Massacre which catalysed the ban of public ownership of firearms in my own country.

Surely, Omar's point would follow that if armed police are acting as a deterrent, it shouldn't matter that schools are armed. No one would go there armed because they know the police would (eventually) shoot them in a demonstration of extreme force. Which way do you want this cake? You have to be contradicting somebody.

Except in countries where the police aren't armed. So... it doesn't make them the police at all, really. I thought that Omar's point wasn't really directed at rioting, it was more aimed at the local policemen/women on foot patrol, generally making themselves a presence in the community. In other words, localised petty crime and single isolated cases which have no wider social or political background to them, or scenarios where demonstrations of extreme force are not needed.

It is surely vastly debatable whether changes in people's crime behaviour are down to guns or not. Given pretty much every developed country on Earth has been able to drop its crime rates consistently for the past couple of decades, and some of those countries have armed police while others do not, and some of those countries have a right bear arms while others do not. This line of argument is tantamount to suggesting that in countries where police aren't armed, looting is commonplace and rife. This is clearly not the case. Another problem with this debate, as well as the hypothetical scenarios and the way everyone presents themselves as an expert in self-defence versus an armed criminal, is the simplification of problems which have deep and complicated socioeconomic and geopolitical factors.

It is true that the idealism which surrounds relationships when you're in your teens starts to wear off after a few failed attempts, and that people learn lessons from those failures. Perhaps the middle ground we can agree on is that while relationships are generally a source of optimism and happiness for the two individuals involved and their friends/family, and should therefore be encouraged, people are more likely to enter relationships which will fail if they haven't fully realised why they're entering the relationship in the first place. Is it really because their new partner is that great, or is it that they're just too needy at that point in time, and "any port in a storm" will do.

I have a belief that some people only enter relationships out of a compulsive need to do so. In fact, I'm convinced this is more than a belief; I'm pretty much quoting some of my friends here: "I'm the kind of person who always needs to be in a relationship", "but you just feel so secure in a relationship", "When you're in a relationship it's about having someone who's always there for you no matter what." All of these sentiments come from a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity, which is immature. Maturity is recognising not to put so much of your emotional stability on the shoulders of other people. I guarantee if my friends did that, their perception of a healthy relationship would change quite drastically.

I know that feel bro.

Welcome back. :) Time flies, doesn't it? Lady Gaga's 'Just Dance' was released almost five years to the date. It really doesn't seem that long.