#For context if anyone needs it: my uncle's wife put a restraining order on him which calls for him to stay 100 yards away from her

[saintofpride201]

What are the legalities behind getting a restraining order calling for the offending party to stay a certain amount of feet away, but intentionally violating it as the one who called for the order?

I'd ask Google but I'm horrible at wording these things in search engines.

[trand-politics]

Trump, 2a, and other small rants

Full disclosure, guys: I’m a gun owner. I currently own 4 long guns, with two more in the process of being acquired from the wife of a deceased relative.

I like being able to shoot. I do so as a hobby. Most days it’s just in the woods. A friend and I fill some gallon jugs with water and food coloring, and grab a couple empty cans of house paint, and go out on my great-uncle’s 40 acres. He has a straight ~90 yard path that we can do some mild distance shooting as well. Those jugs make a nice poof when you hit them. It’s like an explosive target without the explosives.

I tell you this because I want to provide some context when I talk about not wanting more gun control in the US. It is a fun hobby and an excellent vent for safe owners.

Safe, legal gun ownership is hard. It involves massive safes, trigger locks, combination locks, a multitude of keys, and hard cases. It involves solvents capable of dissolving lead and brushes strong enough to clean brittle steel yet delicate enough to not damage its engravings. It’s time consuming and money intensive.

So when I’m putting in all that work to be safe- for every 5 hours of shooting it’s about 2-3 hours of cleaning and manipulation of safe for storage- and someone tells me, at the end of all that, that he wants to take away my ability to pursue this hobby? 

How about fuck that.

It’s tradition for me to say “both sides are wrong” and I see no reason to break from tradition here. Let’s talk about each side.

The left wants to either restrict guns, restrict features, or price ammo and firearms out of reach of the typical person. 

The first is just unrealistic on a cultural level. Cars kill more people than guns every year. The ability to own one of those things is in the Constitution. 

On the second point, it’s weird to gun owners that there are “assault features” that our friends consider scary. My 10-22 is a simple semi-automatic .22 rifle. I got mine with a wood stock and traditional rifle silhouette. Many states do not restrict these at all, though I know that in New Jersey I’d need to leave my 25 round magazine back in MI (more on that later). But take the 10/22 and put on a black polymer stock with a pistol grip and suddenly it’s an “assault weapon” per Massachusetts and some politicians. And those 25 round mags? A practiced shooter can reload in under a second. You figure 2-3 shoots per second for a lot of shooters, and having to reload saved ~2.5 seconds for 25 rounds. It’s not significant.

Pricing ammo out of reach defeats the purpose of the 2a, which is to allow individuals to defend against tyranny. As the wealthy have more disposable income with which to buy firearms, this pricing scheme simply means that only the wealthiest people will have guns. That seems entirely unfair.

Mrs. Clinton ran on a campaign of holding firearm manufacturers liable for gun violence, a position which even Sen. Sanders said was off. An auto manufacturer is only held liable for a vehicle fatality when it’s proven that there was some flaw in the design that the manufacturer knew of or could reasonably have known of. Mrs. Clinton’s position implies that guns are inherently faulty simply by nature of their existence.

Now let’s talk about Republicans’ plans to put a gun in every person’s hands, often without restriction. That seems pretty silly to me, as well. There are people legitimately unfit to own firearms. I’m a user of the r/guns subreddit and every day I’ll look at a post and think “you probably should not own a gun.” Further, the insistence that more guns = less crime is objectively false, as proven by comparison to nations with more restrictions.

So what’s the solution to that mess? I think it’s stronger enforcement plus a rearrangement of the law to allow for more efficient enforcement. Suppressors are covered by the National Firearms Act, and require a $200 fee, plus a lengthy application process, to purchase. The current wait on an application’s processing is eight months. That tells me that the department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) does not have the resources it needs to comply with existing law. Give them those resources. Further, reduce restrictions on suppressors. Contrary to a rather crass claim by Mrs. Clinton, a suppressor (she used the term silencer) does not completely muffle the sound of a gunshot. It lowers the report by a few decibels. A jet engine is as loud as a gunshot. Picture the difference between standing five feet from a jet and standing thirty feet away. That’s roughly the difference between a suppressed firearm and a standard one. Those shots still echo; they can still be heard from a great distance. Eliminate restrictions on them, and allow the ATF to use its freed-up resources to investigate cases of fraud and illegal firearm sales.

The list of things that can disqualify you from buying a gun is pretty extensive, and includes: any involuntary mental health hold in your life; felony conviction of any type; any domestic abuse conviction whatsoever; being deemed mentally unfit by a mental care professional; using illegal drugs (marijuana is still illegal at the federal level and the background checks are done at the federal level); a restraining order being filed against you if the judge determines that it is in the best interests of the victim for you to be barred from owning a firearm; and attempting to buy a firearm for anyone prohibited for any of these reasons (a straw purchase). That list is inclusive of everyone that I would prefer not own a firearm. 

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I don’t get the NRA. Every time a major shooting happens, they have to get into the mix and make an ad that shines a highly negative light on gun owners and gun ownership. They don’t even support gun owners’ interests, but rather, the interests of gun manufacturers. Most recently, they offered to trade banning of bump-fire stocks for more protections for manufacturers. This organization is ridiculous, and I consistently refuse to buy any product which will give a portion of that money to the NRA.

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Is the GOP’s current platform simply “Take whatever a reasonable person would do, then do the opposite?!” They’re cutting taxes while increasing spending. They’re eliminating access to healthcare. They’re still increasing the size of the goddamn military even while one of the wars we started is about to end. They keep trying to break net neutrality. The EPA’s authority is getting weakened, and federal land is being sold off. They’re trying to pull us out of the UN, isolating us from the world in an age of globalism and friendship among nations. With Nikki Haley’s most recent comments to the UN, it seems this administration is trying to start a war with Russia, the nation that put them in power! And the president wants to strengthen libel laws to squelch any speech that dares criticize him.

Then there’s NAFTA. That agreement has been disastrous for Mexico. It allowed us to dump our subsidized corn on them, while our auto manufacturers filled the country with low-paying, no-skill jobs that Americans would never do for any wage. It’s ridiculous how much we benefit from it. Yet our current president keeps talking about how harmful it is and how much it needs to be renegotiated.

I’m so sick of the GOP talking about health care. They had seven years to come up with a new plan and they didn’t even have a plan that worked for their own membership. I get it. Healthcare is hard. That’s why it took so much negotiation to get the Affordable Care Act passed. And now that repeal has failed, the president has banked on an interesting strategy: Break ACA, then blame Democrats for it being broken. I don’t think he realizes that the executive orders he signs are public. You can’t snap your driveshaft in half then claim it’s your friend’s fault your car doesn’t work any more than you can strip out the means by which a bill works then blame someone else when it doesn’t. 

Health care is so hard, guys. Both parties have an end goal and neither seems to recognize that it will take a lot of incremental steps to make progress toward those goals either way. Democrats’ goal of universal care probably goes through small steps like expanding MediCare, increasing what it covers, adding more incentives for states to buy into it, raising the maximum wage one can make to qualify for it, increasing the minimum coverage requirements of health care plans, then making medicare universal. Republicans will want to do the opposite- lowering the maximum wage to qualify for MediCare, adding additional requirements like drug testing and community service, expanding Health Savings Accounts and providing incentives for their use, and reducing the requirements of what must be covered. As far as this goes, I stand with the left. I consider good health to not only be a right, but a national security issue. There’s no point in protecting citizens from outside threats if they get killed by a bacteria that could easily be cured if one didn’t need to pay $100 to see a doctor and $100 for the medication. I’m sick of friends being bankrupted over a hospital stay.

I’m

sick

of

it.