Job well done, SpaceX engineers! Keep up the good work!

Japan's murder rate by firearm is quite low. Yet, Japanese citizens are significantly less free in this respect. (Not to mention that they are both a very homogenous and very racist culture.) All things considered, I still choose the greater freedom and accept the somewhat greater risk as the cost.

Firearms (broadly speaking) are designed to kill - sometimes animals and sometimes humans. (Although some are used only for target practice, or shooting clay "pigeons", or for historical collectors and museums, etc.) Speaking of those firearms that were designed to seriously injure or kill humans, sometimes killing another human is a necessary thing (i.e. self-defense against a deadly threat) and sometimes killing another human being is a bad thing (i.e. murder.)
A firearm is a tool. By itself, it is neither "good" nor "bad." "Good" and "bad" (or "necessary" and "bad") are labels assigned when one considers the purpose for which a person uses the tool.
To "reason" that guns are "bad" because they kill people is both juvenile and silly because as pointed out above, not all killings of humans are "bad."

It seems we can depend on HarryJuku to oppose the fundamental civil rights of Americans.

Based on what's in this article, this sounds like a good decision. Yet, the article doesn't really present much of Astoria's "side" of this dispute.

Looking good so far!

While many of us agree that discrimination against gays and lesbians is wrong, the remainder of her remarks (at least as reported here) strike me as propaganda - and poorly done propaganda, at that.

Pakistan is not our ally. It seems that we have been paying them aid in an effort to ensure "good behavior." I see very little "good behavior" and quite a bit of bad behavior, so why are we paying them anything?

This psychopath is just seeking attention. We should not give it to him.

It seems that you and I aren't really all that far apart on this issue but we're approaching it from different sides. I do agree that judges ought to have more discretion in sentencing than they do currently (because we've all heard of cases where people have received very harsh sentences for rather minor crimes) yet I do not want to see a return to the extremely wide discretion that was the norm before the political wave of mandatory minimum sentence legislation passed around the country.
We must find a middle ground - there should be some mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes but those minimums perhaps should be lower giving the sentencing judge a wider array of options. This should prevent much of the horrid leniency that led to the electoral rebellion that ushered in mandatory minimums in the first place.