Did I ever say I was agreeing with you? Not at all, I never claimed to agree with you, so please stop putting words I never stated at all.
I'm not putting words in your mouth, I simply asked you a question.
You never asked me to be precise? Weren't you the one saying I was not giving the right figures about "thousand" and "hundred thousand"? If this is not asking to be precise what is it? Frankly there is no need to argue about it, you are giving yourself a headache out of nothing.
You said "Thousands", which implies a figure between 2 thousand and 19 thousand, which is obviously an incorrect statement to make. It's not about precision, you simply made an incorrect statement.
As for your "practical uses" for guns:
- hunting, is basically killing other living beings, and many abuses sadly exist about hunting protected species.
- self defense, basically when you have to use your gun against someone for "self-defense" there is a high chance you may kill that person.
- training yourself to ultimately know how to shoot someone sure, what a good point...
Hunting is very good for killing food to eat, or more commonly to kill some animal and use it's body parts for something, such as making a trophy. It is an entertaining activity, and there is nothing immoral about it due to the fact that animal life is not worth nearly as much as human life.
You don't have to kill someone for self defense, even someone seeing that you're carrying a gun can offer protection in the fact that they are much less likely to mess with you.
Hand-eye coordination is useful for practically everything, not just for killing people.
"very poorly constructed sentence", when you barely say "abortion is killing babies" or abortion have no "practical uses" (as you still did not explained at all what did you mean by "practical"): this statement was very hypocritical.
No, I mean that the sentence literally is not valid english and conveys no meaning to me when I read it.
Also, I never said "Abortion is killing babies". Jeez man, stop "putting words in my mouth".
And normally it is a good idea to build a strong argument supported by sources and anything worth it helping others to get what you want to say, sadly here it wasn't the case since you did not added any important informations such as where were these figures from? (source), and which region were you talking about?
The figures come from the CDC mostly.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htmhttp://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss6410a1.htm?s_cid=ss6410a1_w
http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-statesAbortion is a choice, people against abortion can actually avoid to abort if they want, it is a personal choice, so you see I do not get that much the need to debate about it and why you folks try to force some liberticide policies. Many people like you here are contradicting very much from what I read elsewhere, since some of you define themselves as "libertarians" with very contradictory and misguided views.
I am actually not in favor of making abortion illegal, and I've never called myself a libertarian.
And about your stats: people believing in God, I suppose it is another Americancentrist view right? (again you did not provide a source supporting your stats nor explained what population was targeted)
Various sources say in between 2 and 13 percent.
http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec/http://www.wingia.com/web/files/news/290/file/290.pdf
Take China as an example, most of the people are atheist there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_China), and frankly with 1,4 billion people, I would not be surprised a much higher number of atheists worldwide.
63% of all the worlds atheists live in china.
And even about America, according to a 2008 ARIS survey (source here: http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/), belief in God varies considerably by region. The lowest rate is in the West with 59% reporting a belief in God, and the highest rate is in the South at 86%,
ARIS is biased as hell, here's a more recent (and less biased) study by pew from 2014:
http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/3% of americans are atheists, with 87% believing in God and 13% being not sure/not believing.
Belief in God ranges from 84% in the west to 91% in the south.
and what you don't say at all is that some people actually "do not know at all" or do not either say if they believe there "is a God or not", atheists could be 9%¨(people openly saying there is no God) but you have also around 20% of people that are irreligious and do not know at all if there is or not a God (which is my case), and can hardly be considered part of the ones that "openly" say a God exists.
I did not count these people, I specifically named the figure "80-90%". With 10-16% being unaaffiliated in some way this is a reasonable number.
As for the question: I am biased or not? explain me what being pro-abortion has to do with being leftist? In Europe there is indeed a consensus about abortion, socialists, liberals, conservatives and even nationalists are in favor of abortion, there is just a small minority of them being anti-abortion, but this minority can be found not only among conservatives or nationalists but also leftists.
Everyone in europe is leftist compared to in america, even the so called "conservatives" and "nationalists".
I do not understand the need of anti-abortion people to force their will on others, you said yourself " there will always be minorities with dissenting opinions" and "Claiming that these ideological minorities are inherently wrong on principle due to them being small is simply a foolish thing to do."
So please stop contradicting yourself everytime, defending anti-abortion is quite useless, as people that are against abortion have the right to not abort, as a personal choice, as for the ones for abortion let them keep this right, even if they become a minority in the future, it is not a reason to start being against people's freedom just on religious/cultural grounds.
I am not in favor of legally banning abortion, but rather reforming society to the point that abortion is unfathomable. I am a very big proponent of small government, and if the government does not have to step in on an issue, it shouldn't.
Perhaps when there are 100 abortions in a year it can be banned, but such an engrained part of society cannot be driven out by force by smashing it with the ban hammer; In case you hadn't noticed with drugs, banning something only creates a black market for it. When you have 700,000 people participating in something annually, you can't end it simply by banning it.
And this is reachable. If you actually look at the numbers (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_United_States), abortion really is being driven out; Abortions went from 1.4 million in 1990 to only around 700 thousand in 2012.
Edited 5/27/2016 01:30:26
