I think the point is that the American gun issue is unique in that other countries where guns are readily available don't have the same problems. There is a mentality issue that doesn't exists elsewhere. It's hard to avoid that.

If someone is getting all this from the video posted in this thread though, I do agree with you that it's a leap and not entirely related. There are plenty of idiots in every country and homeless people are unfortunately treated very badly around the world for a variety of reasons.

Well at least there on our side !!

Pro USA & Israel

really, what if I was gay, or a lesbian, or even worse I belived in darwinism over all that "the earth is only 4 thousand years old" bollicks.

I seem to recall that outsiders with "heathen views" are not tolerated anymore than a shariah law spouting dick head would be at the new Den.

Edited by dannyh (21 Oct 2015 2.55pm)

"It's not the bullet that's got my name on it that concerns me; it's all them other ones flyin' around marked 'To Whom It May Concern.'"

Yes America is STRUGGLING as never before!. By the time our current President leaves office America will be morally and financially bankrupt. Never in my life have I seen anything or anybody deteriorate as badly and as quickly as America has. I have been here 37 years and I am now a proud American but my adopted country is not the same as the one I chose!!!!!!!.

nothings ever broken, in many years they may even be able to fix the whole gun problem

The gun problem is fixable. The wealth gap problem is fixable. All problems are fixable, it just takes the will to do it.

The problem right now is that the political system is completely broken. One subset of one branch of government – the House of Representatives – has been hijacked by a radical fringe that has no belief in government or intention to govern. They work only to preserve their own job, and to do that they have to become ever more extreme.

Here’s how that happened:

In 2010, as often happens in mid-term elections (i.e. those that occur in the middle of a President’s 4-year term), the opposition party had big gains. What made this somewhat unusual was that it was also a census year, which means that the congressional districts get redrawn based on the new population survey. Republicans had control of this process in the majority of the States and, true to form for the party in power when this happens, gerrymandered the f*** out of their congressional districts. This created safe-as-houses seats for fellow Republicans; safe, that is, from a Democratic challenger….

When the Republicans had ginned up as much racial and religious bigotry at Obama as possible, they created a monster. That monster wasn’t going to go back in its box, and it was made up of people who vote in party primaries. Thus, incumbent representatives now faced a challenge from their right and so had to be ever more radical just to keep their job. If there was even a hint of wavering in their right wing purity they would be “primaried” by someone even more extreme, and that whack-job would likely win.

So now we have a sizable chunk of the party in power in Congress, who are opposed not only to the President’s agenda, but also to the agenda of their own party. They have run the Speaker out of the job – he just said “f*** it” in the middle of his term – and now they cannot even figure out who to elect as Speaker, the 2nd most powerful position in government and 3rd in line to the Presidency. With this being the status quo, it’s impossible for government to do anything.

In American political history, the low bar had always been the “Do Nothing” Congress of 1947-1949; it passed 906 bills. By modern standards, that’s actually a lot. For example, when George W. Bush faced a strong Democratic-controlled Congress in his final years in office, they still managed to pass 483 bills in 2005/6 and 460 in 2007/8. The Obama administration got 385 bills through Congress in 2009/10, despite a scorched earth opposition from the minority of Republicans in the Senate. Then the Republicans got the House back in 2011/12 and the output dropped to 284 and in 2013/14 it was 296. Nearly half way through the 2015/16 Congress, the count of bills passed is 71.

This is a failure of government that is off the charts bad. They have run into bear traps of their own making (sequestration); they have shut down the government – twice – and are threatening to do it again; they have caused the first ever downgrade of the credit rating of US government…and they’re threatening to do that again. They fail to pass routine bills like the highways bill or the farm bill. They struggle to pass funding for the department of defense – and you’d think that would be a slamdunk with the right wingers!

The bottom line is that there are many problems, all of them solvable, but we are saddled with a flawed system that has given us leadership that couldn’t fix a light bulb if all of them combined their intellectual capacity, and multiplied it by 10.

Edited by Ray in Houston (21 Oct 2015 9.01pm)

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.