re: It is a great day for the Republic

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If you only had 75 minutes, how many of these rifles could you realistically purchase

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I may need 12 steps in my life....

I guess you're a gun enthusiast?

One of my adult students tried to convince me to get a gun last week. "Ms. Cubbies, these n---a outchea are crazy. You need to be packing."

I just laughed. I'm not important enough for anyone to want to murder.

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The Left has crossed several “red lines” for conservatives over the last several decades

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Can you list some of them, please? I want to see what you think is comparable to rounding up all the privately owned guns in the country.

The left has never sent government thugs to your house to take your guns away before, or anything like that.

If they do that—and again, nothing on paper regarding the 2nd Amendment matters unless they're willing to do so—I'm convinced that people will react.

And if you're right and they don't, then just like right now, we get the government we deserve.

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I'm not important enough for anyone to want to murder.

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Do you have a car and/or a credit card?

Then you are important enough.

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I just laughed. I'm not important enough for anyone to want to murder.

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This is an incredibly stupid and naive comment, even coming from you.

I didn’t say gun confiscation but making it nearly impossible to purchase a firearm and gun buy backs would put a major dent in the gun population. And yes several conservative red lines have already been crossed like prayer in schools, balanced budgets, abortion, gambling, pornography, etc. Guns, packing the SC, amnesty will be the next ones and conservatives will do nothing per usual and moderates will waffle. This is what the Republican Party has always done, acting like it is some mystery is amusing

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I didn’t say gun confiscation but making it nearly impossible to purchase a firearm and gun buy backs would put a major dent in the gun population.

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I said gun confiscation.

According to Ammo.com, there are between 400 and 500 million guns already in circulation in the United States. Which is up from a 360 million gun estimate from just ten years ago.

Even if they made it difficult to purchase a gun, in the context of what we're discussing, so what? There's already enough guns in circulation for every man, woman, and child in America to have 1.5 of them. They'd still have to get their hands on hundreds of millions of guns to stop the intended purpose of the amendment.

And gun buy-backs? Well, if they are voluntary, the only people selling their guns back will be people doing so voluntarily, which is citizens giving their freedom away, not the government taking it.

If they are involuntary, now we're back to confiscation, which I believe Americans would resist.

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prayer in school

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O.k., now the reaching starts.

The (at least practical) foundational pillar of conservatism IMO is the belief that government is at best a necessary evil that should be minimized and kept small lest it tyrannize citizens. Feel free to disagree with that opinion on the most fundamental pillar of conservatism, but if you do I would like to know what you think the fundamental pillar is if it's not that. (It's definitely not "conserving things." That's broad such as to be worthless unless you want to argue that we violated conservatism by ceasing to enslave people, abolishing child labor abuses, etc.)

Going forward, that premise has logical entailments. The Bill of Rights is one such logical entailment, because the entire purpose of it is to limit government with respect to citizens and provide recourse for citizens against government overreach.

The First Amendment...the government limit they thought was so important that it got listed first...limits the government from endorsing a specific religious viewpoint. The specific language notwithstanding, we know from history and other writings that the purpose was to keep the government from establishing a national church, just like we know from history and other writings that the purpose of the 2nd amendment was to hedge against government tyranny.

You can have all the prayer in schools you want. As long as they aren't government schools. Or, you can have all the prayer in government schools you want, as long as every viewpoint has equal opportunity to be expressed. Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Satanism, Atheist, etc.

But trying to say that government schools have to facilitate a certain kind of prayer is clearly violating the fundamental pillar of conservatism.

In other words, that's not even a "conservative" issue. Even though lots of (low-IQ IMO) "conservatives" have argued for it. It's certainly not comparable in any way as a "red line" that has been crossed to gun confiscation. For one thing, the higher IQ (actual) conservatives understand the concepts behind it and don't argue for it, so at best it's a divided issue.

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balanced budgets

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Except for a 3 year period that bridged over a Democrat and Republican POTUS (and which the Republican POTUS ended with a tax cut), we haven't had a balanced budget since 1969. Before I was born.

And here's the thing...people think that we used to always have balanced budgets (except for the FDR years), but it's not true. We ran deficits twice under Truman and FIVE times under Eisenhower, all three of Kennedy's years, all five of Johnson's years, Nixon's first year (1969) we ran a surplus, and then it was all deficits until 1998.

And if you go back well into the 1800s we had several deficit years sprinkled into years with surpluses.

So it's not like the country's conservatives had this brick wall "red line" that they tried to hold and the left came through and steamrolled it down.

Next...

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abortion

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This is the most puzzling thing you posted to me. Are you not aware that in recent years Republican state legislatures successfully forced a case to the SCOTUS that resulted in overturning Roe v Wade, returning the question of abortion to the states (where it was before Roe v Wade), which is something that most people would have considered impossible?

In other words, you listed a "red line" that has been crossed (i.e., a defeat) that is in reality one of the most significant victories for conservatives in over 50 years with respect to abortion.

?

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gambling, pornography

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What? You're telling me that at the forefront of this onslaught of the lefist crushing of the most important conservative issues possible is gambling and pornography? That it's comparable to gun confiscation?

Stop with the populism induced doomsday victimhood nonsense, please. It's rotting your brain.

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acting like it is some mystery is amusing

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Listing "abortion" as a crushing defeat by the left is a very big mystery.

Other than that, I haven't denied that the Republican Party campaigns on upholding conservative values and then doesn't do what they say they will do.

You've forgotten what this conversation was even about.

BTW, the Democrat politicians campaign on doing stuff that they never do (and gun control is at the top of that list) just like Republicans do, and their base complains about it just like the Republican base does.