T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fuck Are You, EFF?'

Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by wl on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:44AM (#10866162)

We see the same kind of thing with the National Rifle Association. It seems like many people opposed to them are convinced that it's just a proxy for the small arms industry (that would be the National Shooting Sports Foundation) and it can't possibly have the grassroots support it does.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by aidenn0 on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:34PM (#10866588)

To me the NRA just seems to have gone off the deep-end in the last decade or so. Perhaps it's just a symptom of the increasing political polarization in the US in general, but recently it seems like their point of view has shifted to "no gun regulation is good gun regulation" which is almost a parody of what they used to stand for.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by wl on Friday January 08, 2016 @01:04PM (#10866814)

The NRA has historically cared more about hunting than guns. If a restriction on guns didn't burden hunting, they didn't care. In the firearms community, people like this are pejoratively referred to as Fudds. Famously, the NRA supported the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 (which banned new automatic weapons from going into civilian hands). There was a shift in the organization away from the Fudds in the early 1980s and again in the early 1990s. In recent years, the Fudds have lost much of their influence.

Respectfully, I think you should look carefully at the kinds gun regulations that are being proposed today. People are confused as to why the NRA would oppose background checks on all firearms transfers without understanding that all proposals put forth to date would create firearms registries, which have been abused in the past. If you came up to a solution to that (and didn't add a new tax on firearms transfers), you might actually get the NRA's support. Additionally, some state "universal background check" measures have done ridiculous things like make it illegal to lend a firearm to someone at a shooting range.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by aidenn0 on Saturday January 09, 2016 @06:13PM (#10873255)

I actually do have such a proposal.

1) You apply for a background check; there will be a fee to cover costs.

2) Assuming you pass the background check, you are issued an ID

3) Any gun sale would require you to present the ID. This includes in-state private-party transfers. The seller keeps (but does not register centrally) a record of this (e.g. a photocopy)

Note an unexpired id from #2 is not required for possessing a firearm, merely for acquiring one, and having been issued an ID at some point in the past is not proof that you have any firearms (as you may have never purchased one at all, or you may have sold all the ones you purchased).

While not perfect, it is a better system than the current system, and lets you audit people suspected of selling firearms inappropriately. Individual firearms are not registered, nor is it possible for the government to generate a list of definite gun owners (though eventually it would be possible for the government to generate a list of definite non-gun owners once everyone who owned a gun before the law was in effect is dead).

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by wl on Saturday January 09, 2016 @08:56PM (#10873778)

• By charging a fee for an ID necessary to acquire a firearm, you tax the exercise of a constitutional right.

• An ID card does not guarantee that the bearer has not subsequently been deemed mentally incompetent nor convicted of a crime that disqualifies them from firearms ownership.

• Your proposal would require anyone who has ever sold a gun to maintain records of the transfer indefinitely. In order to have teeth, you'd have to create a new crime for failure to do so. Even federally licensed firearms dealers don't have to maintain records indefinitely.

All this aside, there is the larger issue that the kinds of events that prompt such proposals (Sandy Hook, Santa Barbara, San Bernardino, Charleston) have perpetuators who either passed NCIC or would have if they went through a dealer. And while mass shootings are what get all the news coverage, they are hardly representative of the average shooting, where the guns tend to have been acquired illegally already.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by aidenn0 on Saturday January 09, 2016 @10:55PM (#10874070)

It's not a tax if it's merely covering the costs of the transaction. That is that if we agree that it is a good thing to require background checks at all, then it will be part of the cost of transferring it.

If you don't agree that background checks are a good idea at all, then just say so.

This proposal is likely a lighter financial burden than either requiring everyone to get a background check for every transfer, or to require everyone go through a federally licensed dealer.

It wouldn't necessarily need to be indefinitely; how long one wants to require this is a policy choice. Long enough to catch repeat offenders is all one really needs; stopping a single person from just once committing any crime is pretty hard.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by someguydave on Sunday January 10, 2016 @10:33PM (#10878620)

What incentive does the pro-gun side have to tolerate any new restriction, no matter how insignificant?

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by DrScump on Friday January 08, 2016 @08:20PM (#10869582)

But, what are you basing that on? Have you actually researched legislative content, votes, positions, etc., or are you basing your perception on what media tell you?

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by artimaeis on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:47PM (#10866670)

It seems to me that the NRA positions itself to the government as a representative of all gun owners. Around 31% of households in America claim to own guns [1] - so maybe this group shouldn't have so much political sway as it does? I recognize that groups with moderate views are few and far between but the collective "we" that the NRA stands for keeps pushing me further away from it.

[1]: http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun...

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by pdeuchler on Friday January 08, 2016 @01:01PM (#10866786)

31% of Americans is an enormous political faction, you'd be hard pressed to find another group of citizens with a singular lobbying purpose that reaches that size (AARP and Agriculture lobbies come immediately to mind).

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by DrScump on Friday January 08, 2016 @08:25PM (#10869602)

  It seems to me that the NRA positions itself to the
  government as a representative of all gun owners.

Rather, the media position the NRA as the representative of all gun usage.

Blaming existing law and the NRA after a highly-reported shooting is common, even when the gun was obtained illegally and the shooter not legally eligible to own one. An analog would be blaming Planned Parenthood when a newborn is abandoned to die.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by zepto on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:58AM (#10866289)

Is the NRA transparent about its finances? I personally have no idea who supports it.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by wl on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:10PM (#10866392)

There have been accusations that they inflate their membership numbers, but conservatively, the NRA has over three million dues-paying members and they claim nearly five million.

I was looking for EFF membership numbers as a point of comparison, but I couldn't find them. Does anyone know where to find them?

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by zepto on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:14PM (#10866427)

Those numbers seem easily plausible, but that's not really what I asked - do we have any actual transparency into it, and where else does the money come from? There could be 3m members but that still represent a minority of their support.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by DrScump on Friday January 08, 2016 @08:13PM (#10869551)

How much they (NRA-ILA) spend on lobbying is transparent, duly reported like any other interest group.

ILA is just one facet of what the NRA does; the rest is generally ignored by major media.

(ILA = Institute for Legislative Action, the lobbying arm)

BTW, I'm not saying that the rest of NRA isn't also financially transparent, I just haven't researched that in years.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by CaptSpify on Friday January 08, 2016 @10:33AM (#10865530)

To be fair, I can see why it looks and feels like AstroTurf to people who don't know any better. That kind of cynicism is probably pretty healthy for good reasons in companies like theirs.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by ocdtrekkie on Friday January 08, 2016 @10:38AM (#10865579)

I mean, that's true, and Google has spent plenty of money on the EFF. But the reason I trust the EFF, unlike most companies/organizations/government officials Google 'donates' money to, is that the EFF has taken Google to task, recently even: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/02/google-eff...

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by digi_owl on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:44AM (#10866166)

Except that anyone poking at the EFF history should quickly discover that they have been around for some time, and got started because of government overreach regarding computers and electronic networks.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by krisdol on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:44PM (#10866655)

Yes but so has congress and a good number of its members are fronts various industries' special-interests.

(to be clear, I don't think the EFF catering to T-Mobile's competitors, just that it's a healthy skepticism to have of organizations like it)

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by CaptSpify on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:41PM (#10866636)

Oh, I agree. A basic google-search should have been enough to tip them off. And it seems they didn't even do that, so shame on them. I'm just saying their pre-search reaction is probably justified.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by krisdol on Friday January 08, 2016 @12:43PM (#10866650)

Yes but so has congress and a good number of its members are fronts various industries' special-interests.

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by CaptSpify on Friday January 08, 2016 @02:55PM (#10867711)

pssst: I think you double-posted

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by netneutralish on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:36AM (#10866084)

People really care about this stuff.

Hopefully enough people care about this to influence the FCC before T-Mobile meets them on January 15th to discuss their Binge On program as per: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/t-mobiles-video-thro...

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Re:T-Mobile's John Legere Goes Off the Deep End: 'Who the Fu... by souterrain on Friday January 08, 2016 @11:51AM (#10866224)

Really reminds me of this guy https://youtu.be/bajOUNg9_ms?t=280

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