I dont know anything about buying body armor, but if you have the money, could you get it legally? or do you have to jump through some hoops like with guns?

It's really, really expensive

At one point, I was thinking about buying a vest, not because I need it or expect to use it, but because I thought it might be fun to own. The type I wanted was a Platinum AA301, which is a popular vest worn by cops (it's also the type worn by Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillipe's characters in "Way of the Gun", during the final shootout).

I found out that I could buy the vest itself (minus the Spectra Shield A350 plates) online with no problem, the plates if I had no criminal background. Problem is, it would have cost $600, and that was for a used vest. I didn't have that kind of money (this was a few months after I bought my AR-15), and even if I did, I decided that there were better things to spend it on.

Also, I should point out that there are plenty of airsoft retailers that sell vests, but not with real plates. I used to own a Pantac vest with fake (plastic) plates that I got from Red Wolf years ago, which I wore underneath my web gear in skirmishes.

A place around here sells body armour, but you may have to be a LEO to buy one from them

Re: the Closer episode,

Maybe the original script laid out how the boys got their equipment, but got cut down due to time or flow. Maybe a lengthy scene explaining the various loops and taxes involved just got edited down to "we bought them at the mall."

Or maybe the writer is a dumbass who doesn't know the first thing about guns and body armor

Also a possibility.

"Possibility"? I'd say it's dead-on.

I'm just saying, A) there are many steps from coming up with plot and getting it in front a camera, and B) it's a 44 minute show, explaining the intricacies of federal gun law may mess up the pacing a bit.

And even if it was mere ignorance, it's ignorance, and not some conspiracy against the 2nd Amendment. Besides, I'm shocked, *shocked,* that the mainstream media would spread misinformation about gun ownership.

Agreed, ignorance is ignorance. I never said it was a conspiracy. I'm not that type of person.

I saw an episode of cold case where they trace back the owners of a mac 10 to a crime, it starts out making sense. The gun was confinscated, an illegal gun. stolen off a truck of coninscated weapons by a corrupt driver. But then it had stupid stuff like it being sold at a gunshow booth to somebody, and they take it home for a little cash. This made no sense seeing its a machine gun. They were trying to make it look like american gunshows are some type of arms bazaar.

If only we lived in a perfect world...

A Canadian television mini-series called "Guns". Aired in 2008. Looks to be anti-gun and anti-gun owner.

Boston Legal was a pretty good show regarding gun ownership.
I remember Denny Crane (William Shatner) saving the day at least twice just because he always carried firearms.(6-8 pistols on his person and a survival rifle in his office) I think that show was pretty well balanced and not so biased.

Denny Crane shot a handcuffed pedophile in the thigh, claimed it was self defense, and then went on Larry King Live to brag about it. Balls. Of. Steel. :cool:

Yes. Great episode. He should have shot him between the legs.

In the Guns TV miniseries made in Canada, American gunshows are made out to be "no questions asked" gun bazaars too--if you have plenty of cash and a fleet of straw buyers at your command. There is a fairly detailed segment where a gangster's girlfriend tries to get back into his good graces by organizing a straw-buying operation at an American gun show before smuggling the weaponry back into Canada.

The gunrunners situated in Canada in that miniseries also have a fairly sophisticated operation as well, with equipment capable of converting semi-auto firearms to fully automatic, along with tools to melt down any guns that are being actively traced by the Canadian law enforcement, IIRC. They even had plans to get some heavy firepower off of a corrupt American military base commander to send it off to some tin-pot dictator in Africa. So yeah, the American gun industry doesn't get off lightly in this production.

On the other hand, a motion picture like the original Red Dawn is one of the biggest pro-civilian-gun-ownership and training movies around, right?

Honestly, its sad, but I dont consider this anti gun crap thrown into a movie, I consider it realism. I bet youd see this crap in a california police station.

LAPD North Hollywood station has a picture of Larry Eugene Phillips Jr. hanging on the wall.

Have to call bullshit on that one. Many street level cops are not Anti gun. All the cops I KNOW personally would pitch a fit if that crap were in the police department officially and also the department's attorney would not allow it, being that it is damning evidence of bias if they EVER had a case regarding someone's guns (other than a violent crime).

It IS ANTI GUN CRAP. It WAS the doing of ULTRA LIBERAL IDIOT Richard Donner and his wife (who are some of the most left wing uber liberals in Hollywood) and people were making fun of it when the film was actually being made. At the time this was filming, I heard propmasters, art directors and fellow armorers snorting with contempt at the heavy handed politicking that the director (Donner) was forcing into the Lethal Weapon movies.

Richard Donner was one of those guys who SWORE he would leave the United States if George W. Bush got re-elected in 2004. And yet, none of those bozos who made that promise ever made GOOD on it. More proof that uber-Libs are liars :mad:

If that is the case, and I cannot verify that it is, that would be because a lot of the rookies don't know the details about the North Hollywood Shootout. Probably more about bravado than anything else. though.

I like the picture in our police office, shows a prisoner in a jump suit, crossing arms, and he is ripped. Muscles on his muscles. It says "Work out, everyday you don't he does."

Its true, why do they let violent criminals lift weights and get more scary and jacked? Have them play b ball or something that doesnt add 20 pounds of muscle while there in the joint.

We should try to make them weaker.

Yeah I figured it was some sort of trophy more than anything else.

I've took college Penology; and one of the few things that I remember from that is that weight lifting is largely important to them somehow.
It keeps them occupied and they feel importance in it. That and making sure the food doesn't suck. If you don't have then your just creating a breeding ground for trouble.

I studied prison system in college as well and there's a problem with just "keeping prisoners occupied" and giving them luxuries they should not have because they are in there for punishment not retirement. There's a prison in IL where they have a game room with an XBOX 360 and they get to play GTAIV. Computers for learning and the ability to get high school and college degrees. Sure I agree on the theory that if an inmate learns more, he can possibly become a better person, but more or not, you give them a shop class, they learn how to weld, becomes smarter criminals. And more than not, what they've learned will always aid them in further crimes. Sure some become better people, but the ratio to those against the unchanging villain scum of society is low.

I don't know much about prisons, but I'm pretty sure that inmates with behavior/disciplinary problems are usually denied weight-lifting privileges. The same applies to recreation privileges in general: The prison staff can take their stuff away if they act up. The whole purpose of allowing prisoners to have "luxuries" (whether it's weights, TV, computers, whatever) is to give them an incentive to behave, so that they won't attack the guards. Take that stuff away from them permanently, and what incentives do they have not to riot? On the contrary, I'd think that the boredom would just make them angry enough that they'd be more likely to become violent.

As far as weight-training making prisoners more "dangerous": It may be true to some extent, but I don't see how the inmates will ever be a match for guards who have access to high-tech weaponry, both lethal and non-lethal, regardless of their advantage in muscle mass.

Also, I might be talking completely out of my ass, but how common are prison riots and prison breaks in the U.S. compared to Third World prisons where the inmates get no luxuries, barely any food, and get tortured by the guards for misbehaving? Probably not as common, right? Don't you think there's a reason for that?

Comparing prison to retirement is ludicrous. The "punishment" doesn't come from deprivation of recreation; it comes from the fact that they're separated from the rest of society, don't enjoy 99% of the same liberties as us non-convicts, and are in an environment where their well-being is often at risk (rape, beating, or even death) at the hands of other inmates.

Those aside it obviously doesn't deter crime or even change criminals. All prisons do is provide a place that breeds worse criminals. Attempts to stop all the bad things that happen to convicts don't seem to work either.

My cousin was, until recently, a prison guard. All he had was mace and a rifle that was on a rack far away from wherever he could possibly be attacked

Weight training may be dangerous to prisoners who fight each other, most know to leave guards alone. But remember, america isnt known for harsh sentences, they may get paroled and you have a jacked scary guy whos pissed off and has no money rolling around town.

Huge beefy criminals can't run very fast.
Don't encourage them to do cardio, or next time the cops won't be able to catch up.

They can do serious damage in a fight though, Id rather restrain a 100 pound meth head than a 250 pound body builder.

You do not want to mess with a 100 pound meth head...or havent you seen Rock N Rolla?

On topic:
Babel. Yes, the one with Brad Pitt.

Off topic:
There should be two kinds of prisons:
1- Labor camp
2- Hard labor camp.

Make them work. Make them produce. Free labor. Don't do the crime if you don't wanna work for free.

Old school chain gangs.

Not necessarily...I wasn't talking about just building roads.

There are over 1.5 million inmates in the United States alone.

Imagine things The United States could achieve with a "free" workforce of 1.5 million.

Yeah, cause unemployments not high enough already. Get them to clean up roads or do jobs that dont get done.

You're not helping anything buy spending tax dollars on labor. Yeah you could hire 1.5 million people to fix the roads and that would create 1.5 million new jobs, but where is that money coming from?

100 pound meth head, easy to beat in a fight. 250 pound body builder... easy to shoot?
Yeah it's not ideal.

Regarding the issue of prisons: I'm really a little bit disturbed that some of y'all think that America should become more like a Third World authoritarian state. I realize that sometimes, it seems like scumbags in this country get better treatment than they deserve for breaking the law, but trying to deprive them of ANY luxuries doesn't seem to me like it's good for either society or the guards who work at prisons.

Anyway, back OT: A while ago, I watched an episode of "M.A.N.T.I.S." (a superhero TV show from the mid-1990s that starred Carl Lumbly) called "Tango Blue", which was apparently made as propaganda to support the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (being signed into law at the time). It promotes a whole bunch of myths about "assault weapons" (namely, that they're fully-automatic) and involves the hero sponsoring a gun buy-back program.