@Zetruth Oh, that Kennedy. Why didn’t you say so initially? A few thoughts on him. He isn’t a public figure. No one heard of him before the pandemic where he made a name for himself fear-mongering and trying to convince people of…. something. It’s not that he was called anti-vax or a conspiracy theorist, he’s literally both of those things. He is against vaccinations and theorizes (without evidence) a massive conspiracy to do….. something.

@keith Let’s agree on one baseline then move out from there: There are well over a billion guns in this country. That is a problem. You said yourself, ” They are all over. You cannot go back in time and change the past. You can only decide based on reality. ” Presumably, what you mean is that we do need to severely decrease the number of guns in this country because so many guns is way too dangerous and requires more people to buy guns to protect themselves, leading to an infinite feedback loop that can only end when every joe owns a nuke.

Once we have that down, we can continue.

@Zetruth There was never a psak by the Crown Heights Beis Din forbidding the COVID vaccine, and they never had an 8 hour phone conference discussing it.

I’m sorry to break this to you, but whoever is telling you these things is lying and you should stop believing them.

@Always_Ask_Questions I think the point @jackk was trying to make was that there is abundant evidence that the Earth is round and anyone who cared could easily find out. Yet, people still choose to ignore what’s literally in front of their faces and claim it’s flat. So there’s no arguing with them since no evidence will convince them!

There was a recent documentary about Flat Earthers and there were two scenes that stood out. In both of them, people procured expensive equipment and worked really hard to set up an experiment that, if it succeeded, would prove the Earth was flat. Naturally, both experiments failed and the data showed exactly the curvature expected. In both cases the people just kind of went “Huh, I guess we need to try a different experiment”.

@Bath_Tavath The COVID vaccines have been extensively tested, possibly more so than any other medicine on the planet. And the risks are minuscule. For a healthy person, it’s literally riskier to drive down the block. It’s at least 10,000 times more likely an individual will contact COVID and face serious injury, then be injured by the vaccine in any significant way.

@yeshivaguy45 @nomesorah @Zetruth Wow, so the 8 hour conference call was the total opposite of what it was claimed to be. It was not with the Crown Heights Beis Din. It was with a bunch of random people from Crown Heights. The Crown Heights Beis Din actually put forward a statement condemning the call and urging people to get vaccinated.

@Meno We at least agree on one thing, that American culture is messed up that pushes everyone to own guns which allows too much gun crime to happen. Seems to me our only disagreement is whether more legislation would help or it’s a lost cause and we should just accept gang wars, school shootings, and armed muggings as a fact that will never go away.

@mentsch1 I was just responding to the other poster who was worried about actions that would “threatening the pro-gun population” with a comparison to a different part of anti-Torah American culture. Baruch Hashem, at least there’s a huge growing movement to fight the pro-gun culture of the US. We should support it and not stand in its way.

@CS Almost all of the Chachamim learned things from secular people. The Tana’im talk about Aristotle. Tosfos quotes Socrates. The Gra hired tutors for almost every subject studied at the time.

I question your interpretation of “secular studies are metamei the brain”. Perhaps when the previous previous Lubavitcher Rebbe ZT”L said that, he meant studying useless goyish things, like Indian mythology or comparative literature, and not the type of studies that can help a person understand the world (which are absolutely not “secular” no matter what your Cheder called them).

@Meno I don’t think it’s impossible, just very difficult and it would take a long time. One thing that needs to happen is restrictions on the sale and manufacture of firearms. If there are less guns available in stores, people will own less guns and there will be less guns in circulation and there will be less gun crimes. Right now the approach (which has been heavily based on scripts written by the NRA) for most gun-nuts is “Well, US culture is so messed up, we can’t ban guns because then we won’t be able to defend ourselves from the guns that criminals have because we didn’t ban guns”. Which is all types of messed up.

I mean, the frum velt has been fighting tooth and nail against the inevitable encroachment of toeva stuff into every day life. Should we just give up on it because it’s impossible to change at this point?

@Meno That’s what I keep getting back to. We can’t change the whole culture of a country (really it isn’t the whole country, it’s certain rural areas in Red States) overnight. But we have to start somewhere. Regarding “gun-free-zones”, we have seen time and time again, that armed civilians do little to stop mass shootings. And the more guns there are available, the more likely a mass shooting will occur. But let’s ride with that for a second: You need a gun because American culture is so messed up that there are armed criminals around every corner. OK, I can see the logic. However, what you do not need is high-caliber high-capacity firearms. You need a small revolver. So why don’t we start by banning anything that isn’t small?

@DaasYochid I knew a Dutch guy in Yeshiva in Israel once who would always correct everyone’s pronunciation of New York names, from Catskill to Harlem.

@AviraDeArah Yeah, that’s a huge stretch. It’s not a slippery slope to mandating limits on consumer ownership. It’s laws limiting dangerous objects which already exist. You’re just restating the “What if the government goes bad?” argument that gun owners love to push.

@AviraDeArah The government already regulates how much of anything you can have in many instances. Generally when the thing is something potentially very dangerous, you need special licenses and approval for each one you want to buy. That is something I would like to see applied to gun ownership. Just like you can’t build a slaughterhouse on private property without a host of licenses and regulations for each slaughterhouse you build. So too with guns.

@ujm I am welcome to hearing corrections from people who are involved in kids-at-risk, but in my experience boys have always been going OTD far more often than girls.

@interjection I am suggesting that there is a dangerous trend to minimize the importance of studies that aren’t Gemara to the point where it’s damaging to the children, both when they are young and when they get older.

I am questioning whether girls are going OTD at the same rate as boys. As far as I know that was never the case. Girls (at least in the non-Chassidish non-Modern settings I am familiar with) usually stay frum at a much higher rate.

@AviraDeArah, so then you would be OK with new laws restricting guns to, let’s say, one gun per household and a maximum of five rounds? Because all this talk and you still haven’t explained why anyone would need more if we’re talking home defense.

@AviraDeArah So because it would take decades to work, we should just throw in the towel? To be honest, the whole idea of needing a gun for self-defense is like 95% NRA propaganda. (a quick perusing of the magazine rack in Rite-Aid would convince me that I am going to die within the year if I don’t have a four foot long gun that can shoot massive bullets at an outlandish rate) There are very very few cases where someone’s life was saved because they were carrying a gun (excluding security guards and police). And many many more cases of negligent gun owners leaving loaded handguns where their kids can find them and accidentally kill someone. Or where a robbery leaves the homeowner dead, because the crook started shooting when he saw a weapon. Or where a gun is stolen and used in a crime. At the end of the day, the prevalance and availability of guns in the USA kills far more people than it saves.

And at the end of the day, let’s face it. Even if you would buy into all of this no one needs more than one gun for home self defense. And there’s no need to have more than five bullets in it.

Take away the guns currently out there.

Limit their sale.

Limit their manufacture.

Limit who can own them and how many they can own.

@AvirahDeArah .22 .9mm shmumty shmoo, who cares? Yes, people who are anti-gun generally have less knowledge of guns. Just like frum people have less knowledge of what bands are playing at Coachella. Guns are extremely dangerous. The 2nd Amendment has allowed gun nuts and gun companies to ride roughshod over the USA and put literally over a billion guns readily accessible to any meshuggenah some legally some illegally.

My point is that no one average person needs so many guns and so many bullets. You want self protection? Even with a .22QFB (or whatever it’s called) will cause an intruder to back off. If the intruder is armed, you carrying a gun won’t make any difference, except cause the bad guy to be more likely to open fire.

@Kuvult The fact that you (presumably a mentally stable and non-violent person) can get a hold of four guns without problem means that someone less mentally stable and more violent can also get a hold of four guns. Therein lies the problem. Should we take dangerous weapons away from innocent people just because others will use them to commit crimes? YES YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES I DON’T EVEN UNDERSTAND WHY THAT’S EVEN A QUESTION OF COURSE WE SHOULD!

@mentsch1 If someone thinks you have too many guns, you have way too many guns. “Gun culture” is like any other hobby, collecting, talking about, using, trading, buying, selling, etc. and in general being very “into” a particular thing. The only problem is over here is that this “thing” encourages the mass production and sale of deadly weapons that allow criminals to commit murders on a much higher rate than they would otherwise do.

Am I nervous that the nice well-adjusted guy down the block from me owns more guns than fingers? No. But I am nervous that because of that guy (and many others like him) people who are less than well-adjusted can just as easily acquire these weapons.

The idea that owning multiple dangerous weapons (when at most one or two would suffice) is somehow a human right has to die. Period.

The question is why weren’t they more anti-Trump years ago? Trump has been in the news a lot lately and for some really disgusting things. So should YWN just ignore front page news because they sort-of kind-of lemme-speak-with-the-shadchan like the guy?

@mentsch1 So you agree that we need to get rid of guns in the USA, you are merely pointing out that it would be a long and difficult process, yes? Great. Now lets get that process started by out loud declaring how gun culture is stupid and dangerous and we have to work on eliminating it.

Yes, taking away guns would be very difficult, potentially leading to a civil war, if we do it all at once. Which is why it needs to start slowly and immediately. We need strong efforts to get rid of “gun culture” in Red states and neutering the NRA. Soon, with more than a bit of effort, we can move towards the complete abolishment of the 2nd amendment.

1. A gun store that sells a weapon that is later used in a crime is subject to a mandatory closure and full investigation
2. Ban all guns that hold more than five shots.
3. Ban all calibers greater than .22
4. Each individual gun a person buys requires that they show a reason why they need this gun and it must be approved by an impartial anonymous political committee. Turning in an old gun for an upgrade is taken into account.
5. Limit the production and sale of guns based on the size of the local population. Gun stores in a zip code cannot carry more than X weapons where X is the population size in that zip multiplied by a factor of no more than 2

In some areas of Japan, people leave plastic bottles filled with water outside their house. When asked, most people will just shrug and say “This is what you’re supposed to do”. When pressed, some people will talk about how water bottles scare off cats (but won’t be able to explain why they want to scare off cats, if it actually works to scare off cats, or if there are even any cats in the area to scare off). But everyone does it, so it’s ingrained in the culture so everyone else does it.

That’s what guns are to some states in the USA. Everyone has guns. Few people can give a good, coherent reason why they need so many guns. Self protection? Hunting? Sport shooting? It’s fun? But since it’s such a massive part of the culture, logic has ceased to be a factor in this question a very long time ago. Everyone needs guns because everyone has guns. It’s as simple as that. And as long as these people are fighting tooth and nail to ensure that an archaic outdated law remains on the books, criminals and mentally disturbed people have easy access to weapons (legal and illegal) that allow them to commit harm on a much larger scale.