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posted by on Thursday May 04 2017, @10:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the QfvLcozLwtE dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Guns are not a part of the culture of my homeland, except perhaps for the occasional Bollywood movie in which the bad guy meets his demise staring down the wrong end of a barrel.

My childhood in India was steeped in ahimsa, the tenet of nonviolence toward all living things.

The Indians may have succeeded in ousting the British, but we won with Gandhian-style civil disobedience, not a revolutionary war.

I grew up not knowing a single gun owner, and even today India has one of the strictest gun laws on the planet. Few Indians buy and keep firearms at home, and gun violence is nowhere near the problem it is in the United States. An American is 12 times more likely than an Indian to be killed by a firearm, according to a recent study.

It's no wonder then that every time I visit India, my friends and family want to know more about America's "love affair" with guns.

I get the same questions when I visit my brother in Canada or on my business travels to other countries, where many people remain perplexed, maybe even downright mystified, by Americans' defense of gun rights.

I admit I do not fully understand it myself, despite having become an American citizen nearly a decade ago. So when I learn the National Rifle Association is holding its annual convention here in Atlanta, right next to the CNN Center, I decide to go and find out more.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/28/world/indian-immigrant-nra-convention/index.html


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:11AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @12:11AM (#504604)

    Translation: I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! <stamps foot>

    Come to think of it, that covers about 75% of your posts.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 05 2017, @01:40AM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 05 2017, @01:40AM (#504634) Journal
    You know, you could have just not posted. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

    An automatic firearm continuously fires rounds as long as the trigger is pressed or held and there is ammunition in the magazine/chamber. In contrast, a semi-automatic firearm fires one round with each individual trigger-pull.[1]

    Although both "semi automatic" and "fully automatic" firearms are "automatic" in the technical sense that the firearm automatically cycles between rounds with each trigger pull, the terms "automatic weapon" and "automatic firearm" are conventionally reserved by firearm enthusiasts to describe fully automatic firearms. Use of this convention can avoid confusion.[1] Firearms are further defined by the type of firearm action used.

    So here, Buzz was merely correcting someone, who let us note was being a dick here. What I find particularly amusing about the exchange is that they're both technically right. But I have to side with the "ammosexuals" here. They're the ones who actually talk about firearms on a regular basis and actually have a clue what they're speaking about. The following complaint is particularly stupid:

    ...and they substitute "semi-automatic" for "automatic", presumably in order to use "automatic" for "full-automatic" in order to belittle non-ammosexuals for their correct usage.

    And then it's followed by:

    But just think about it, "semi-automatic" is an oxymoron. It is like being "partially whole" or "slightly pregnant".

    The definition of semi-automatic is that one has to pull the trigger each time to fire one bullet. You don't get the spew of bullets that you'd get with an automatic weapon (remember he calls that "fully automatic" which should be a redundant phrase from his point of view, no?). So unlike a semi-pregnancy, partially automatic actions really happen.

    What gets me are the repliers who think this is deep thought. The poster gave the definition himself and still fucked it up with an explicit excluded middle fallacy. That's YouTube quality commentary right there. And the ammosexuals are corrupting our language to mock us, isweartogod.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @05:26AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 05 2017, @05:26AM (#504696)

      Its funny how your own quote from wikipedia literally backs up tarkus and yet you cut-n-pasted it anyway.
      Since you are blind to your own words, its the "enthusiasts" part.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 05 2017, @06:32AM (1 child)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 05 2017, @06:32AM (#504711) Journal

        Its funny how your own quote from wikipedia literally backs up tarkus and yet you cut-n-pasted it anyway.

        Sounds like you should read my post again. I made an observation on that very point.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday May 05 2017, @09:11AM

          by aristarchus (2645) on Friday May 05 2017, @09:11AM (#504741) Journal

          khallow! Do NOT make yourself look so stupid! You are embarrassing me! Do I have to spell it out? OK, "enthusiast" = "ammosexual linguistic subgroup". Wikipedia is on my side, and I am not sure how I feel about that, but stop trying to pretend that gun nuts are not subverting language to mock normals.