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Old February 4, 2013, 10:11 PM   #9
Evan Thomas
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Join Date: July 7, 2008
Location: Upper midwest
Posts: 5,631
2ndsojourn, I agree with you; where did I say we should accept new laws? My point was that there are already laws on the books, and that they're not enforced for various reasons, some of which are not so good...

But if we want the existing laws to be enforced, we'd better be willing to fund that, and to expand the agencies that will do the enforcement; to enforce federal laws, the FBI and the ATF will need a bigger piece of the pie. Realistically, this requires a serious "national conversation" (if you'll forgive my borrowing that expression) about what our priorities are: do we want, for example, to have less punitive drug laws, and to redirect funding from the "war on drugs" to enforcing firearms laws? Perhaps we need to recognize that mental illness is a more serious public health problem than erectile dysfunction, for example, and require health insurers to pay for better treatment for the former, rather than paying to treat the latter. I could go on, but you get the idea, I hope: we don't, as a society, have unlimited resources, and we need to decide how best to use what we have.
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Last edited by Evan Thomas; February 5, 2013 at 12:37 AM. Reason: too many words.
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