JMHawkins

The one where you take Luke's laser away, and replace it with leadership skills and ethical choices?

Kudu, you mean like the famous line from the movie, "Use the paradigm shift, Luke."?

Or was it "mission statement"?

Do you consider the right to own a fire arm as important as the right to vote or the right to free speech?

The right to own a firearm is the right to defend yourself. Some people think it's to defend yourself against a tyranical government. Some think it's to defend yourself against criminals. Some don't think there's a difference. But ultimately it's a right to possess the means to defend your life if you choose to do so. There are many arguments about whether it's necessary, or effective, or sane, or if and how much it should be regulated, but the point of the individual right is that my decision to defend myself is not subject to their opinions on whether I should or not.

couldn't you just change the constitution?

Others have mentioned the details, but yes the Constituion can be ammended, and it has been 27 times. We've clarified rights, changed the voting age, outlawed slavery, created an income tax, allowed woment to vote, outlawed alcohol, changed our mind (about the alcohol, not the income tax or women voting), and made changes to various election proceedures, qualifications, and what not.

The best way to think of the Constitution is the baseline agreement we all made with each other - a partnership agreement if you will. It's the fundamental rules for the partnership we have with each other as members of the same polity. Changes to it need widespread approval and supermajority support because it literally is the basis for the legitimacy of our government. Without it there is no legitimacy and the government would fall. All our public officials and military swear oaths to defend the Constitution. A "constitutional crisis" in the US is the equivalent of the War of the Roses over there - disagreement over who's in charge and what they're allowed to do. The last time we had a full-on one of those, we slaughtered each other from Bull Run to Appomatox Courthouse.

It can be changed, but not rashly.

Does anyone in the USA actually fear that the federal government would ever become tyranical? Really? You honestly think one day you mght become an Orwellian nightmare?

It is a bit of a stretch isn't it to think that the Government might become so tyranical as to do things like tell you what sort of toliet or lightbulbs you could have in your own home, or to create so many laws that several legal scholars would estimate the average citizen violates three or more per day purely by accident. Or to have the highest incarceration rate in the world (beating #2 Russia by nearly 50% and being about 5 times that of our Canadian neighbors). No reason to worry at all...

Um, Cambridge, is it too late to call off the whole Revolution things? You might have fewer laws over there these days.

At da same time, the right to vote doesn't kill or injure 100,000 Americans a year.

Are you sure about that?

Da right to vote and da right to speak are also regulated. All rights are subject to two kinds of limits...

Perhaps, perhaps, but using the "what if it was voting rights" test helps avoid suggesting problematic things like saying nobody with any mental illness in their family should be allowed to vote, or that you need to convince the local authorities you have a valid reason for exercising your right to vote. In fact, you can flip the test around and it's still useful. If you're worried that a voter ID law might result in voter suppression, ask the folks supporting it if they'd be okay if the same requirement they're proposing were also applied to buying a gun.

It boils down to asking yourself if you'd be okay with someone else putting the same limits on rights you value that you're interested in putting on rights that they value. If you're not, then you either need to go back to the drawing board, or else start building a case whey their rights shouldn't exist in the first place.

What pchadbo said is correct. Replace "gun ownership" with "voting rights" or "right to speak" and you should be able to see the Constitutional problems.

Anyone is of course free (well, as long as the Constitution is in effect anyway) to argue that the 2nd Ammendment is a bad idea and should be repealed, but until then, trying to regulate it away is no more legitimate than regulating away the right to vote or speak.

Unless the hammer and knife lobby is influencing legislators...

Isn't Stanley Tools from New England? Isn't Beavah from New England? Hmmm.....

Rite-in-the-Rain

"Tactical" paper! Unfortunately doesn't sound like it works well with an inkjet printer (well, yeah, it's waterproof after all). I've had some success before with using sprayed shellack or varnish to waterproof paper (after printing it). It's a little tricky, you have to spray a fine, even mist, but if you're careful it will work.

Rocks in ziplock bags are simpler. Some professionally produced weather resistant stuff would be even better. Maybe if National moved from Texas to Seattle, waterproof might be higher on their priority list.

Sorry, the "da" in the title threw me, figured it was Beavah proposing this law...

You're the lawyer Beavah, you ought to know that every one of (doh, Basements proposal, sorry), with the possible exception of 5 would fail Constitutional muster. Especially #3.

Easy way to evaluate. Replace "firearm ownwership" with "voting rights" in each of your proposals and tell me if a court would tolerate them? If the court spent more than 5 minutes on the diliberation, it would only be to debate just how harshly to berate the legislative body that passed the law.(This message has been edited by JMHawkins)

Fine Beavah, but why the fixation on guns? People engage in all sorts of violence with whatever tools are at hand. Shooting themselves is the most common way for men to commit suicide, but women prefer poison. Alaska (a state I imagine has quite a few firearms) has the highest suicide rate in the US, but Texas (another state with lots of guns) has one of the lowest. Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death among people 10-19 years of age (an important age group for us, eh?). Between 1992 and 2001 the number shooting themselves declined significantly, but the number suffocating or hanging themselves increased by almost the same amount. Where did I find that? A CDC study...

A study looking at whether modern mental health care methods work? Great. Why would guns be the focus? Of course the answer is because there's an agenda behind it to produce propaganda for a particular political viewpoint. If there is no such agenda, then the study focuses on the care given and the effectiveness of it, not on the presence or absence of a gun. Injecting the object of a contentious political debate into the research distorts the issue, undermines the credibility of the research.

That's what I mean when I say publically funded research on policy issues is wrong. Guns are a policy issue, not a medical disease. You can indeed imagine may potentially useful questions to ask, but when the answers are inevitably going to be used in a highly charged political debate, the odds are against you getting answers that are useful for anything else.

Da story of da BSA's gradual membership decline is not the story of culture wars over gays or atheists...Da story of da BSA's gradual membership decline is largely the story of weakness of leadership and vision at the top, reinforced by in-grown and bloated executive ranks. We haven't had a visionary program person committed to kids since Green Bar Bill, eh? Instead we've had large committees of diffuse responsibility who sorta tinker and slowly erode da program, coupled with a cadre of executives who mostly waste their time maintainin' an out-of-date system while fearfully protectin' their jobs.

+1, as the kids like to say. Beavah is absolutely right about this. It's the program, not the politics, that drives membership.

I will say though, that the culture war issues do perhaps have a negative effect in that they give the weak and visionless leaders an opportunity to focus on something else, andything else. To appear like they're doing something important while they are actually failing in their real responsibilities.

In a hypothetical case where unbiased data could be collected and made available in a raw and comprehensible form, there would be some value in that. Whether there would be enough value to justify the expense is another question, depending on a) the subject, and b) quality of the data.

For a), I see little value in collecting health care data on gun ownership. The entire premise of such a study would likely be flawed - gun ownership is not the cause of gun injuries, gun use or misuse is, but we have no scientific means of evaluating the connection between the two. All we can do is tally up numbers and make guesses about correlation and causation. Further, I doubt the most significant variables in whatever the actual function V = f(GO) (violence = function of Gun Ownership) is would be included in the study. Culture, for example, which is generally a politically sensitive topic. Yet there are countries around the world with gun ownership that is a fraction of that in the US while gun deaths are several hundred percent higher (and these aren't all in places with civil wars raging). That is a highly politically charged question to even ask, let alone answer. And while from a scientific standpoint perhaps that's unfortunate, from a societal one, maybe it is good to avoid asking some questions that can smear innocent people with the answers. Just how many rocks are we willing to turn over here?

For b) the quality of the data will vary based on the competence of the researcher, and the limitations imposed by the parameters of the study. The more politically charged the subject, the more intrusive the limitations and pre-selection biases will be.

So the answer to your question is, in theory, yes, but in practice, it depends. For some subjects, absolutely - dengue fever perhaps, though unless it's a lot more widespread in the US than I had thought, perhaps it should take a back seat to funding things like West Nile virus. For other subject - gun ownership - no, in practice the data will be useless. Worse than useless - misused.

So, the answer to the first question for both of you seems to be 'no'. Am I correct?

I'm sorry, I've missed a turn somewhere. What was the first question?

OK, here's a suggestion: NRA pays for CDC to do the research. NOW where's the bias?

But of course the NRA would never pay the (current) CDC to do that, because the CDC has shown a prediliction to be anti-gun. That's my whole point - the agency funding the study picks a researcher already on board with the answer they want to get.

Packsaddle, you've got $1.5 million for a climate change study. Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Tim Ball have submitted grant applications. Who gets the money?

If guns or for that matter obesity, are major factors contributing to "ill-health" screw the controversy and study or gather the facts. I'd rather have the debate done with facts as opposed to ignorance.

Again, you're making the assumption you'll get facts. I'm saying you're at least as likely to get propaganda, or at the very least, cherry-picked stats.

...the scientists themselves, the ones I know, are very careful to exclude bias in their studies. OTOH, the ones I know study things like malaria and dengue. I have no direct knowledge of studies of obesity and dietary 'rules'.

But this gets back to my original point about CDC research. I'm fine with, approve of, happily support, research on non-policy issues, like malaria and dengue. There are limited opportunities for pork, or power grabs, over these subjects. Nobody is calling for a national dialog on dengue fever.

The same isn't true for guns, climate, or for that matter obesity. Those are all rife with public policy debate.

If the CDC wants to study the best treatment for gunshot wounds, great. If they want to study gun ownership, red flag.

I can also tell you from direct experience that if such influence is attempted in government research, a scientist has far greater means to resist or refuse such influence.

I tried to illustrate this with my example about the ecologists report - nobody has to try and influence the researchers, they just have to carefully choose who to fund and the pre-existing biases of the reserachers who got funded will produce the desired results. And if for some reason the results aren't what you wanted, well, just don't make much noise about them.

Have there been any recent NIH or CDC studies that concluded the Federal Government should play a smaller role in any aspect of health care? Have they, for instance, ever published a study that observed a connection between decades of government published dietary guidelines and a massive increase in obesity? Have any concluded by saying "hey, you guys who paid for this study, you really don't have a clue what you're doing and for the good of everybody you ought to give up your power and budget and just go home."? Or do they all pretty much blame Big Macs, Big Gulps, and transfats?

I don't have access to a pdf version of the BSA handbook with reprint permission, but I suppose I could gin up a blue card replica.

Appropriate adult leadership must be present for all overnight Scouting activities...

So if there is no appropriate adult leadership present, then it isn't a Scouting activity, ergo it's not subject to BSA rules.

Which is just a fancy way of saying a group of friends can get together and do whatever their parents allow them to do. The only two things the G2SS does are a) give BSA a fig leaf to avoid liability if something goes wrong, and b) make it harder for the SM to guide the Scouts in planning and conducting a safe overnight activity, thereby increasing the odds of something going wrong.

It is a perfect exercise in bureaucracy - increasing the chance of trouble while decreasing the accountability for it.

Would you be willing to illuminate the thread about the U.S. Radium Corporation and the clock dial painters? Can you see any similarity between claims made by these industries and claims being made by NRA?

Packsaddle, you seem to be missing the key contention - that government funded research is no less prone to distortion than privately funded research.

I'll suggest they etch things on stone and keep the stones in a zip-lock bag just in case.

Though I had been thinking maybe we could try waterproof paper instead.

...yeh get the taxpayers out of insuring anything...

this would be a huge step forward. FannieMae, FreddieMac and the FDIC were the gasoline on the fire of the banking crisis. And TARP was tossing a keg of gunpowder onto the mess.

...other than commercial banking...

Why allow socialized insurance of commercial banking? There still moral hazard there too.

The discussion about Blue Cards touched on record keeping. I think the Blue Cards are a fine way of tracking indoor progress, though maybe not as good as they used to be. Kids used to collect baseball cards, so they had some ability to keep track of rectangular pieces of cardboard... Not sure they come into Scouting with that skillset as often these days.

Anyway, the big problem I've seen with Blue Cards is weather-related. Our troop likes to do as much outdoor learning as possible, but while Blue Cards fit nicely in the cargo pockets of scout pants, they don't survive a good downpour very well. After one MB Weekend, we had a lot of scouts with piles of blue pulp in their pockets. As a MBC, the only reason my copies of the cards were okay is that I put them with the teaching materials I put in my truck after the last session (before the rain came).

Scout handbooks have a similar problem. When scouts bring the on campouts, they get pretty badly beatup. We're established enough now that scouts are getting most of their advancement signed off by their PLs and SPLs, but I still get the occasional request, and often the advancement record in the back is a collection of pages held together by a strand and a half of glue, with signatures and dates of blotted ink that has run and become illegible. Nearly every time I see the handbook of a scout who's been with us more than a couple of months, I find myself suggesting he take a picture of the advancement pages every time he gets something signed off.

Bottom line, I like the idea of scouts learning to be responsible for their own record keeping, but can we give them some more durable tools to do it?

Mt. Baker is the council next door to mine. They seem to be having trouble and making poor decisions, not just about camps either. Don't know what the underlying cause is, perhaps financial pressure is getting to them.

On the subject of flags:

Our community used to have a boy scout troop that folded about 10 years ago from what I can gather. The town has changed a lot in those 10 years and is really growing.

That was true for us. The last SM of the former troop (I think we got his name from the DE) still had the flags from the old unit (a US flag and the Troop flag, along with stands). Since we decided to revive the same unit number, he was happy to give us the old flags to use again. Doesn't hurt to check...