Another shot at the case against gnus

[Gallstones]

Domestic violence victims can now get expedited concealed carry permits Jul 15, 2014

As of Tuesday, domestic violence victims in Kentucky are now able to obtain a concealed carry permit in one business day.

The new law allows people who have received an emergency protective order to get a temporary concealed carry permit. The victim doesn't have to under-go the required training in order to obtain the permit, but the permit will expire if training is not complete within 45 days.
...
although police rush to any domestic situation, sometimes it just isn't fast enough.

[Tero]

They can't help it! Conservatives and libertarians have fear in their genes.

Mother Jones:

Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are...Conservative

Scientists are using eye-tracking devices to detect automatic response differences between liberals and conservatives. University of Nebraska-Lincoln
You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics-upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests; and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. In the process, Hibbing et al. marshall a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it.)

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets-centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns-would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12 thousand years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, where he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what's truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, "22 or 23 accept the general idea" of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of "modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work," and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. [Italics added]

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what's clear is that today, they've more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

"One possibility," note the authors, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed.
Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but non-paradigm shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that "successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task...that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience."

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock...thanks to science.

[laklak]

Libertarians aren't conservatives.

[Tero]

They are in many ways. The world they long for...the Wild West...only exists in the past. Just because they are freedom loving in some ways does not stop them from being right wingers on many issues.

They also resist all changes dictated by a majority. Say we decide to ban gas powered cars. They would resist that.

[Gallstones]

Detroit police chief gives credit to armed citizens for drop in crime July 16, 2014

Detroit has experienced 37 percent fewer robberies in 2014 than during the same period last year, 22 percent fewer break-ins of businesses and homes, and 30 percent fewer carjackings. Craig attributed the drop to better police work and criminals being reluctant to prey on citizens who may be carrying guns.

“Criminals are getting the message that good Detroiters are armed and will use that weapon,” said Craig, who has repeatedly said he believes armed citizens deter crime. “I don’t want to take away from the good work our investigators are doing, but I think part of the drop in crime, and robberies in particular, is because criminals are thinking twice that citizens could be armed.

“I can’t say what specific percentage is caused by this, but there’s no question in my mind it has had an effect,” Craig said.

Craig made national news in January, when he told The Detroit News he believed armed citizens deter crime — an unusual stance for an urban police chief. In May, the chief was featured in an NRA publication, America’s 1st Freedom, in a cover story titled “A Show of Courage in Detroit,” in which Craig reiterated his support for citizens using guns to protect themselves.

[Gallstones]

They can't help it! Conservatives and libertarians have fear in their genes. [Isn't liberals who are the most fear based--afraid of guns, afraid of mean words, afraid of freedom]

Blahblahblahblahblahyaddayaddapftht.

Wrong thread.

[laklak]

They are in many ways. The world they long for...the Wild West...only exists in the past. Just because they are freedom loving in some ways does not stop them from being right wingers on many issues.

They also resist all changes dictated by a majority. Say we decide to ban gas powered cars. They would resist that.

You could just as easily say Libertarians are Radical Left. After all, they are pro-choice, LBGT rights supporters, are against foreign wars and involvement in other nation's internal affairs, want to legalize all drugs including prescriptions, oppose all forms of censorship, want to end all corporate subsidies and tax breaks, want to repeal the Patriot Act, want to close Guantanamo Bay, insist that all accused of crimes (including terrorists) have full constitutional rights, want to restore constitutional rights to felons after their sentence is served, and want to make NSA/CIA/FBI/TSA surveillance of the internet, phones, mail etc. absolutely illegal.

That hardly sounds "conservative" to me.

[piscator]

Libertarians aren't conservatives.

Sheeot.

No true Scotsman in 3..2..

[piscator]

Libertarians aren't conservatives.

...They just happen to think Conservatives are right about most everything.

[Gallstones]

From Shooting Illustrated [Magazine], (Facebook) 07.16.14

After seeing Rolling Stone magazine’s ground-breaking exposé on “The 5 most dangerous guns in America,” (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/pi ... a-20140714) we wanted to fill in this obviously incomplete list. We have identified the missing part of this puzzle, and wish to present it here.

Here’s our exhaustively researched list of “The 5 most dangerous ammunition types in America:”

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

1. Pistol bullets.
2. Revolver bullets.
3. Rifle bullets.
4. Shotgun bullets.
5. Derringer bullets.

[Gallstones]

Alaska man shoots 9-foot brown bear trying to get into house July 16, 2014

An Alaska man shot and killed a 9-foot brown bear that attempted to break into his home several times.

The Peninsula Clarion reported Jim Landess, who lives in Sterling on the Kenai Peninsula, shot the 5-year-old male with a pistol July 7. He was home with his son at the time of the incident.

He told the Clarion in an email that the bear was pounding on the outside walls of his home. He and a son were able to scare the bear off with a couple of shots fired into the air, and they went back to bed. But the bear came back about three hours later.

"My son was sleeping downstairs and stood up to be eye-level with a 9-foot brown bear looking at him through the dining room window," he told the Alaska Dispatch.

Landess said he grabbed his .45 pistol and fired about seven rounds at the bear from an upper deck.
...
"I'm not a hunter; I'm a fisherman," he told the paper. "It wasn't something I wanted to do. I wanted to scare him off."

[Tero]

They are in many ways. The world they long for...the Wild West...only exists in the past. Just because they are freedom loving in some ways does not stop them from being right wingers on many issues.

They also resist all changes dictated by a majority. Say we decide to ban gas powered cars. They would resist that.

You could just as easily say Libertarians are Radical Left. After all, they are pro-choice, LBGT rights supporters, are against foreign wars and involvement in other nation's internal affairs, want to legalize all drugs including prescriptions, oppose all forms of censorship, want to end all corporate subsidies and tax breaks, want to repeal the Patriot Act, want to close Guantanamo Bay, insist that all accused of crimes (including terrorists) have full constitutional rights, want to restore constitutional rights to felons after their sentence is served, and want to make NSA/CIA/FBI/TSA surveillance of the internet, phones, mail etc. absolutely illegal.

That hardly sounds "conservative" to me.

The thing is, with an increasing population, we are likely to have more and more Gubment. We might need to take the guns away at some point, too many people carrying guns on the sidewalk. Bound to be trouble . It does not sound like more freedom. So libertarians always long for the old times, like the conservatives.

[Tero]

Shotgun bullets.

[Seth]

When guns are outlawed people will stab watermelons in a passive-aggressive manner. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.

BANTAM, Conn. – A 49-year-old Connecticut man faces threatening charges after a woman told police he stabbed a watermelon in a passive-aggressive manner.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/07/15/co ... latestnews

Retired NJ cop in my team told me today that if a man calls his wife or girlfriends "bitch", he can be arrested for domestic violence, but if she tries to stab him with a knife and he grabs her wrist, he gets charged with domestic violence, not her.

New Jersey is SO fucked up...

[Tero]

If she had to pick up a knife or a scissors, it's probably his doing.