I like to track things: baseball stats; my weight; the location of my keys; the travelings of my friends and family on Google+ or Facebook; etc. I am a little bit concerned about people tracking me in an unwanted fashion, but not overly so. My conduct at work and home has been tracked by my employer for the last 22 years, so maybe that level of government interference does not bother me.
As I was watching some news this afternoon, the confluence of two separate political issues about to be debated this week struck me as odd.
If we are to believe the lobbying done by the NRA, gun owners do not want a gun registry because they are afraid the government is going to come to their houses and confiscate their weapons. Maybe this happens frequently in other countries, but it really hasn't happened in the USA for the last couple of centuries. I don't have a crystal ball or a time machine, so I suppose it is within the realm of possibility, but I feel that eventuality is highly improbable during the remainder of my life. And I plan to live the greater part of the next half century if possible.
I am also making the assumption that some of those same people who don't feel the government should know the contents of the armories in their homes should INSTEAD be spending its time tracking people illegally in this country with a system called e-Register so that they cannot legally work. Employers would have to use the e-Verify system to confirm that the people they are about to hire are actually here legally.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. They want big brother to crack down on small business people and increase their costs of providing whatever service or good is produced by their enterprise, and potentially spend LOTS of buckaroonies deporting, detaining or tracking people trying to enjoy the American dream, but keep your hands off my AR-15!
My interpretation is that they believe they should be able to sell or give that privately to ANYONE they choose without having to confirm that they have a legal right to own a gun, much less the mental wherewithal to use it for non-nefarious purposes.
As a non-gun owner but member of the military, I however have to sign a scary looking legal form attesting to the fact that I have not been convicted of any misdemeanor domestic abuse offenses which would make me ineligible to possess a gun. The Lautenberg amendment to the Appropriations Act of 1997 made this necessary and retroactive. Even if the offense was reported on your entry documents before you joined the service, that one conviction (if it has not been overturned) will cause you to be discharged from the military because you are not eligible to possess a firearm.
I have been out of the gun-toting business for a few years (they just keep me tethered to an iPhone these days) but I still would have been kicked out of the service for committing such an offense decades earlier. I am certainly not condoning any form of domestic violence, but I find it interesting that some members of the military and law enforcement professions have been fired for committing (and properly reporting) these offenses before they were employed.
As I was watching some news this afternoon, the confluence of two separate political issues about to be debated this week struck me as odd.
If we are to believe the lobbying done by the NRA, gun owners do not want a gun registry because they are afraid the government is going to come to their houses and confiscate their weapons. Maybe this happens frequently in other countries, but it really hasn't happened in the USA for the last couple of centuries. I don't have a crystal ball or a time machine, so I suppose it is within the realm of possibility, but I feel that eventuality is highly improbable during the remainder of my life. And I plan to live the greater part of the next half century if possible.
I am also making the assumption that some of those same people who don't feel the government should know the contents of the armories in their homes should INSTEAD be spending its time tracking people illegally in this country with a system called e-Register so that they cannot legally work. Employers would have to use the e-Verify system to confirm that the people they are about to hire are actually here legally.
This really doesn't make any sense to me. They want big brother to crack down on small business people and increase their costs of providing whatever service or good is produced by their enterprise, and potentially spend LOTS of buckaroonies deporting, detaining or tracking people trying to enjoy the American dream, but keep your hands off my AR-15!
My interpretation is that they believe they should be able to sell or give that privately to ANYONE they choose without having to confirm that they have a legal right to own a gun, much less the mental wherewithal to use it for non-nefarious purposes.
As a non-gun owner but member of the military, I however have to sign a scary looking legal form attesting to the fact that I have not been convicted of any misdemeanor domestic abuse offenses which would make me ineligible to possess a gun. The Lautenberg amendment to the Appropriations Act of 1997 made this necessary and retroactive. Even if the offense was reported on your entry documents before you joined the service, that one conviction (if it has not been overturned) will cause you to be discharged from the military because you are not eligible to possess a firearm.
I have been out of the gun-toting business for a few years (they just keep me tethered to an iPhone these days) but I still would have been kicked out of the service for committing such an offense decades earlier. I am certainly not condoning any form of domestic violence, but I find it interesting that some members of the military and law enforcement professions have been fired for committing (and properly reporting) these offenses before they were employed.
