Lightroom 4 IMHO is better for converting color to B&W than Photoshop Elements.

Flower in BW LR4

You are right, but my budget was at the limit with the D7000, the Nikkor 10-24, the SB600, left me enough for the Tamron 18-270. Maybe someday I can add another good Nikon lenses.
It is like my Miata, a Porsche would be nice, but the Miata puts a smile on my face every time I drive it.

Nikon D7000 with Tamron 18-270
I also use the Nikon 10-24.
Those two cover almost everything I do.

Flower with Tamron Telephoto


Flower with Nikon 10.24

To borrow what someone else said on another post. We are on a rock floating in space.

I am 67 years old and sometimes I realize in a conversation I said up when I meant down, left when I meant right, uncle when I meant aunt. The only person that holds me accountable when I misspeak is my wife. She has the ability to remember exactly what I said 20 years ago.

You can take any person on this planet and work yourself into a frenzy over something they said, if it is taken out of context or they misspoke.

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :mrgreen:

AND the seatbelt laws were forced on us by the insurance companies...not saying seat belts and airbags aren't a good idea (they have saved many lives),but it should be up to me if I wear one or not.

Yea or nay on choice, but I suspect that having seat belts and airbags forced on us has not only saved lives, but reduced the cost of insurance.

No one forces me to wear a bicycle helmet but I always do. The helmet I was wearing last year saved my life. I was hit by a car going at least 45 mph. The helmet is now in 6 pieces. I still had a cracked skull and was in a coma for 10 days. Without the helmet my skull would have been in six pieces. I wear a seat belt not because of any law, just because I do not want my first accident to be my last.

Of course Auto Insurance is socialized insurance. We all share the costs.

Sorry "Colonel" Still a Marine and still neighbor.

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
Obama has done a lot for the VA. I am there every week.

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

[quote=Lancer W/A Canon]


Home • Ask FactCheck • Gun Control in Australia
Gun Control in Australia
Posted on May 10, 2009 , Updated on May 11, 2009
Bookmark and Share

Q: Did gun control in Australia lead to more murders there last year?

A: This ‘Gun History Lesson’ is recycled bunk from a decade ago. Murders in Australia actually are down to record lows.

FULL QUESTION

Is this true??

A little Gun History Lesson

⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏

FULL ANSWER

The e-mail says that "[i]t has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms." Actually, it’s been 13 years since Australian gun law was originally changed. In 1996, the government banned some types of guns, instituted a buyback program and imposed stricter licensing and registration requirements. Gun ownership rates in Australia declined from 7 percent to 5 percent. Another law in 2002 tightened restrictions a bit more, restricting caliber, barrel length and capacity for sport shooting handguns.

Have murders increased since the gun law change, as claimed? Actually, Australian crime statistics show a marked decrease in homicides since the gun law change. According to the Australian Institute of Criminology, a government agency, the number of homicides in Australia did increase slightly in 1997 and peaked in 1999, but has since declined to the lowest number on record in 2007, the most recent year for which official figures are availab[/quote]

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

Not my words, but makes sense:
Not sure if I can agree with that. By all accounts Japan never tried to win a head to head war vs the US. They wanted to keep a steady rythm of victories over them, while establishing a double layer of ring defences on the pacific (phillipines-marianas-marcus island was the inner, NG-solomons-Marshalls-wake-eastern aleutians was the outter) to convince the US that a counterattack was unfeasible. They never intended to invade the US mainland as such, as far as I can tell.

Midway was never in the initial plans of Japan when the war started. It was out of the twin concentric defence rings they planned to set up in the pacific, and too far from the mainland (and too close to Hawaii) to set an easy invasion. The reasons to attack Midway rested mostly in the aftermath of the doolittle raid over tokyo. Pearl Harbor had crippled the US battleline but their carriers were still unharmed, and Yamamoto wanted those carriers to be sunk at all costs. The attack on Tokyo was an insult to the Japanese armed forces (and the IJN in particular), and had been launched from carriers. And the US Carrier striking force was the only offensive weapon left in US inventory by then, so it only made sense to force a major battle to trap and sink them. Midway was intended to be that battle, the island was of secondary or even tertiary importance, what Yamamoto wanted was the US carriers...things turned out to be pretty different tho.

Had Midway been a Japanese victory what would've happened?...probably not much. Hawaii was out of the scope of probable (or even possible) japanese targets because it was almost unfeasible to successfully invade it-it would've overstretched the japanese navy to the point of rupture.

US mainland was completely out of question-the distances involved were extreme.Remember aswell that both to invade hawaii and/or the Eastern US a lot of troops would've been needed. The Navy did not have enough manpower to pull something like that (the Japanese Marine force was mostly based on regimental combat teams for amphib operations of limited scope), and the Army was:

1-Absolutely not going to cooperate with the navy, at least not easily (japanese Army-Navy rivalry was extreme, they fought each other constantly). That would mean that one of the key points of any long range invasion like Hawaii or US would be poisoned from the start -no interbranch cooperation meant the operation would be a disaster from the start.

2-already heavily commited both in China, Burma/India, and New Guinea. There was a hefty manpower reserve in Manchukuo but neither the Imperial staff nor the Army staff wanted to weaken that force too much because they wanted it to act as a deterrent against possible Soviet agression. The Japanese Army without taking large units out of Manchukuo-which was politically impossible to pull off, would've had no resources to mount a successful large scale invasion in the US Mainland.

3-Lack of proper amphibious resources. The japanese landings at the start of the war were doing against unprepared enemies, and using barely adequate ships as amphibious transports. To land in USA would be very very different than landing on, say, Legaspi. The scope of the operation would be much different, the ammount of troops to be landed ,too, the distances from the Japanese supply sources (the mainland) would be all the way across the pacific meaning enormous travel times for the supply convoys, and Japan had not enough ships to keep such a invasion supplied.

Those 3 points were well known for all the IMperial staff and of course by the IJA. They would've never agreed to such an operation. There's also the important part of intel and recce. It was nigh impossible for Japan to conduct a proper recconaisance over the US mainland, and it would've been very difficult to the point of almost impossible to conduct a proper research on the possible landing locations.

We all know the ammount of preparation work the landings on Normandy needed, and the immense logistical problems faced by the allied force in france afterwards after one of the mulberries was put out of order, cherbourg port destroyed by the germans, and Antwerp not captured until late in 1944. The japanese had quite a stretch of water to cross (quite bigger than the Channel), no Mulberries at all (they were an allied improvisation), and would've needed a similar or bigger ammount of troops to succesfully invade US mainland.

Nope-it was impossible. Japan never planned nor intended to invade the US mainland. It was well out of reach for them, and they always knew it.

If we look around us we see that other countries have some control of their guns. In 2004, handguns murdered:

5 people in New Zealand

37 people in Sweden

56 people in Australia

184 people in Canada

19 people in Japan

73 people in the UK

11,344 people in the United States

Even adjusting for population, these numbers are horrifying. Japan has almost half as many people as the United States. So how can these numbers be so dreadfully lopsided? Last I heard, Japan was considered civilized, modern and “open” compared to, say, Cuba. So why are those numbers so wildly out of proportion? Gun control. Pretty simple.

Among 26 of the industrialized nations, 86% of gun deaths among children under age 15 occurred in the United States. As of 2008 the city of Philadelphia alone had in storage 65,000 (yes, thousand) confiscated semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons. Every year one-half million violent crimes are committed with firearms in the USA. On average, each hour of every day, one person is murdered with a gun. There are an estimated 250 million guns in the USA. One in four Americans owns a gun. In 2004, semi-automatic assault weapons were again legal after a 10-year ban. Over 20 states have “Castle Laws” wherein you can shoot to kill any armed or unarmed person who poses a threat to your property, not just your life.

How? What is this based on? Facts?
Not what my neighbor who is a Full Colonel in the US Marines would say. Compare Obama to Bush?

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:
I am a Vietnam Vet 100% disabled. Since Obama I have seen a dramatic improvement in the Long Beach VA. I also spent 3 weeks in the Indy VA and was very impressed.

:thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown: