[Aptorian]

Well, by the anti-freedom group I assume you mean the Republicans, who take money from gun manufacturers, as payment for allowing Americans to shoot each other so long as there's a profit.

The Republicans, who say they represent freedom and democracy but block any gun legislation, though the majority wants.

Meanwhile being Staunchly pro-life to the point that they'd prefer a mother died in child birth rather than have an abortion.

Oh and should we start talking about freedom and those concentration camps at you border?

I guess my point is that Republicans represent absolutely nothing.

[Andorion]

Another mass shooting in Texas

Its being reported as 5 dead, 21 injured.

[Tsundoku]

Andorion, on 01 September 2019 - 07:25 AM, said:

Another mass shooting freedom demonstration in Texas

Its being reported as 5 dead liberated, 21 injured onlookers.

Republican-edited that for you.

Also, those "thoughts and prayers" coming from masses of Republicans will surely have some sort of positive effect, right?
No need to do anything else, thoughts and prayers solve everything!

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 01 September 2019 - 10:00 AM

[Primateus]

Nicodimas, on 01 September 2019 - 04:39 AM, said:

Remember the bad guy will always have the most viable arm. There goal is to inflict as much harm as possible..

The anti-freedom crowd aim in always to strip you of as many choices as possible.

Who represents who?

I think I will stick with saying you are not for freedom, Nico, you're for anarchy.

[Maark Abbott]

Primateus, on 01 September 2019 - 10:23 AM, said:

Nicodimas, on 01 September 2019 - 04:39 AM, said:

Remember the bad guy will always have the most viable arm. There goal is to inflict as much harm as possible..

The anti-freedom crowd aim in always to strip you of as many choices as possible.

Who represents who?

I think I will stick with saying you are not for freedom, Nico, you're for anarchy.

But freedom to shoot up a supermarket is still freedom.

[Tsundoku]

The "Good guy with a gun" fantasy is making the rounds (hah!) again. Idiots. It's by far the exception rather than the rule.
But with modern weapons, even if only semi-auto or reworked to full-auto, a LOT of damage can be done in an appallingly short space of time. And like I've said before, add in a panicked crowd, confined spaces etc and it just gets worse.

https://www.vox.com/...with-a-gun-myth

https://qz.com/16383...erican-fantasy/

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This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 02 September 2019 - 11:01 AM

[worry]

Nicodimas, on 01 September 2019 - 04:39 AM, said:

Remember the bad guy will always have the most viable arm.

Funny talk. The pretense is that this is what gun advocates are worried about, rather than what they are fighting for. It's very explicit in the legislation they advocate for and the legislation they rail against: the more guns the better, no matter whose hands they're in. They oppose restricting guns from domestic abusers, they oppose 'smart' technology requirements, they oppose closing loopholes for background checks, they oppose magazine size limits, they support guns in bars and schools and churches and in every car on the street. They will put you and your loved ones in harm's way, human buffers between the law and their Dirty Harry meets Rambo fantasies. And all the while they'll tell you it's to make you safer. Apt ain't wrong, cuz it actually isn't that far from anti-abortion cultists calling themselves 'pro life' and doing nothing for anyone post-birth, and in fact being staunchly opposed to any collective improvement on quality of life. When was the last time you saw the gun cultists genuinely advocating for anything aside from guns to make life safer? (I say 'genuinely' because we all know the mental health thing is sleight of hand, and the right wing MO has in all reality been to turn prisons into one-stop shops for all of the country's undesirables).

Anyway, what this says:

[Maark Abbott]

Lemme tell ya worry, we are gonna do some guns. The best guns, great guns. Tremendous. Big guns, you'll see, we'll do them, all of them. Hillary wouldn't have done the guns, she has an email, Obama has an email, Obama has a Hillary, lemme tell ya, terrible, the worst.

[worry]

Quote

A long time ago, my dad was an FBI agent. On the few occasions he found himself in an environment that felt dangerous, he was struck, he told me, by the tremendous psychological benefit of carrying a gun. It wasn’t just the superficial awareness that he could use lethal force if required. It was a kind of gauzier feeling of invulnerability, as if he were the only person in each room he entered that had real agency. But he was also smart enough to know, he said, that the feeling was a mirage, and that it was even a dangerous one, a kind of drunkenness. If the confidence it gave him led him into a bad situation, one in which the revolver wasn’t useful, the gun had hurt him, not helped.

The .38 Special he carried looks like a child’s toy compared to the weapons used in most recent mass shootings, including the AR-15 in Odessa. But we seem to be suffering, collectively, from a version of that haze. Fewer than a third of Americans own guns. Many in that group have a more traditional, utilitarian, healthy relationship with firearms, but some portion of them feel that sense of agency very strongly. The free availability of firearms is key to their sense of being a person with power in the world.

That sense of power is impervious to the empirical studies that have demonstrated, over and over again, that when you have a gun in your home, you’re much more likely to have it used against you, use it to kill yourself, or shoot an innocent person intentionally or by accident than to successfully use it in self-defense. You’re also much more likely to have a home invader shoot you. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that living in a home where guns are kept increased an individual’s risk of death by homicide between 40 and 170 percent, and one published in the American Journal of Public Health found that individuals who owned guns were about 4.5 times more likely to be shot than those who didn’t. But you’ll never convince a single person for whom gun ownership is important with figures like that, because the feeling of gun ownership is so powerful.

[Nicodimas]

Well we all know they can’t remove the availability of guns... so quite a moot argument ...

Gun buybacks ! Every single day 61,000 more guns are being sold today outpacing cars by 1:1.2 ratio. There is roughly 150% more guns than total cars based off general stats..there’s a ton of cars.. next time your driving around consider that on a highway, just how armed we are as citizens...

Freedom sure is grand!

Just for conceptual argument, could you remove every car in America? Do you see the enormous logistical problem..

Wild.

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[worry]

Absolute nonsense. For one thing, there is no movement to buy back all guns. Nobody, even the people citing this hypothetical, takes it seriously -- which is kind of a sign of how much (or how little) respect you show people when you use it. For another, the government doesn't need to collect people's guns to have guns. The military industrial complex does more than enough in terms of providing firepower. In fact, there is no scenario where you defeat a tyrannical U.S. government in armed combat. Which is one reason rah-rah-ing fascists even in the context of accelerationism is so disgusting.

Anyway, gun buyback programs work in tandem with other regulations, as part of comprehensive reform, particularly the outlawing of manufacturing assault weapons (roll your eyes), large capacity magazines, etc. Demilitarizing police departments is necessarily another facet of the same movement. It's also, collectively, a multi-generational effort. There are going to be people 100 years from now who will be glad we started now. And like everywhere else in the world, we must fundamentally, infrastructurally transform in preparation for mass migration, and we're witnesses in real time of just how overlapping the gun cult and bigot/nationalist movements are.


Looking at who has the guns: https://www.npr.org/...guns-in-the-u-s

Quote

YABLON: Right now, about 22% of Americans own guns. That's according to a survey that was conducted by public health scholars at Harvard and Northeastern Universities in 2015.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: As I mentioned, getting definitive numbers on gun ownership in the U.S. is difficult. How does The Trace arrive at its data?

YABLON: So we rely on this survey that was conducted by Harvard and Northeastern because the government can't produce any of its own. The ATF, which is sort of charged with overseeing the sale of guns, and the FBI, which conducts background checks, are very strictly limited in what kind of data they can even collect, never mind publicize. They don't even actually have a registry of guns linked to gun owners. They have records that someone went through a background check, but they don't necessarily know how many guns they bought or what guns they bought. And then lots of people will sell guns in totally unregulated private transactions that no one has any record of.

...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I've read that a vast majority of guns are owned by a small percentage of people. Is that right? I mean, how does it break down?

YABLON: Yeah. According to that Harvard-Northeastern survey, about half of America's guns are owned by about 3% of the population.

So ~19% of people own guns for statistically wildly illusory protection (and/or sport), and another ~3% are hoarders daydreaming about the day they get to open fire on all comers during the fall of civilization. And all of us have to suffer, to the tune of tens of thousands dead per year, so America's foremost cowards and predators can have their security blankets and power fantasies.

As for cars, I can very easily see regulations working to build the kind of world we want to see. Like, can you imagine if nearly all cars in the U.S. were forced to include seat belts? Uh, yah. I can see mileage regulations determining which cars get manufactured and which don't, thus which kind of cars people can own. Very very easily. I can see collective action eliminating smallpox and polio too. I can see vaccines largely eliminating a whole host of preventable deaths. I can also see a small percentage of selfish and ignorant people resisting, causing outbreaks of harm, insisting on their misguided view of individual liberty at the expense of everyone else.

[Primateus]

I'd argue that if you believe that freedom only comes by the barrel of a gun, then you're really only in favor of the freedom found by the barrel of the gun, which is essentially a "one for me and none for thee" kind of freedom. You have the guns, you get to be free. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.

[Primateus]

This is, yes, a movie trailer so technically it belongs in the movies thread and sub forum. But it is, I think, kind of relevant to the discussion at hand, so I put it here.

[worry]

Doomsday prep is self-fulfilling by its very nature. And gun-fetish survivalism in particular -- whether rooted in cynicism, paranoia, or something else -- rises to outright monstrosity as there is clearly no minimum to the suffering they would have humanity endure to raise the probability of their individual survival. The language of inevitability of doom scenarios is just a psychological buffer, absolving them from the horrors they refuse to try to prevent as they peace out on civilization and/or the 'hero' fantasies they have of someday getting to...i mean having to...shoot their fellow man to survive.

Of course, all of that is true only if we give them a Mt. Everest-sized benefit of the doubt. In all likelihood, that's just a fraction of a fraction of people, and the vast majority of that 3% are just hobbyists who don't want to give it up. All the death, trauma, and suffering is to protect that.

[Grief]

Nicodimas, on 04 September 2019 - 06:53 PM, said:

Just for conceptual argument, could you remove every car in America? Do you see the enormous logistical problem..

Could you remove every horsedrawn carriage in America?

We phase objects out of our everyday life fairly frequently. Objects (and aspects of culture) can disappear rapidly - even if people in the past might have struggled to envisage it. When was the last time you used an inkwell?

[Tiste Simeon]

Nico spouting his utter nonsense once again I see. If you only get "freedom" because of guns then it's no freedom at all.

I pity you and your inability to understand this Nico.

[Macros]

Cars were designed to move people
Guns were designed to destroy them

Try for another comparison please Nico.
For example how hard it is to remove Zyklon B from circulation

[Andorion]

Actually a gradual reduction in number of cars, combined with a more developed public transit system would be a step in the right direction. And before everyone tries to tell me how big the country is, I get that. I just think that in the future, it would be more realistic to have more spread out settlements, connected by maglev or light rail, with farming being largely automated and intensive. This would free up more land for aforestation or just to let it run wild.

Also the fact that cars and guns are compared in discussion is a very telling point on how guns are viewed - not as a tool of last resort but as a daily utility. Which raises very troubling questions about gun advocates views of socio-political relations.

[Nicodimas]

Andorion, on 06 September 2019 - 02:51 AM, said:

Actually a gradual reduction in number of cars, combined with a more developed public transit system would be a step in the right direction. And before everyone tries to tell me how big the country is, I get that. I just think that in the future, it would be more realistic to have more spread out settlements, connected by maglev or light rail, with farming being largely automated and intensive. This would free up more land for aforestation or just to let it run wild.

Also the fact that cars and guns are compared in discussion is a very telling point on how guns are viewed - not as a tool of last resort but as a daily utility. Which raises very troubling questions about gun advocates views of socio-political relations.

@ Ando I started a thread about how are cities are all built on the wrong system, they were built based off cars. Someday as a society we will become essentialists and reduce our needed square foot footprint. I see small quarters being built (that are soundproof — I mean I like to read books in the quiet or nature). That have Co-Hab kitchens , gyms, study , play etc etc. this would feature very little in the way of streets and would be maglev based. Densely populated. I guess the big risk of this scenario is still illness/germs for sure. However how much would homeless suffer of each person had there own place... I guess I get accused of always building the best world.. but what can I say I look forward to our future world as we work together to build it...

@ ando the whole car argument was to get people to think, you have tens of millions of gun owners who don’t and won’t want to turn them in. The left says the problem is availability. Barring forced removal they aren’t going anywhere ....there’s a ton of availability. I have always thought the easiest way the anti-freedom crowd can fix it.. is just make everyone feel safe first.


Derailing my own thread:

Look at this religious and weapon freedom all at once.

https://www.cbsnews....yyLe_YXz3cLipgw

This post has been edited by Nicodimas: 08 September 2019 - 03:17 AM

[Nicodimas]

An interesting application of technology

https://apnews.com/e...edaaf301d0a3a3d

I think we all realized cameras are the norm, targeted tracking AI that sells this data to marketing is the future for sure. As you shop that data will be sold and they already know what you buy, but in the near future they will have AI track your behaviors as you actually shop (I know this cause this is what one of my buds is working on in IT) don’t doubt the true power of advertising power!

Sidebar: Can’t wait for part of the future when we have droids following us around asking us survey questions too!

Anyhow off subject again..

Yes that is 1984ish , but its here to stay.

I could see this articles point about tracking a potential shooter IDing the menance and giving warning for law enforcement and higher target areas, especially with more advanced cameras.

This post has been edited by Nicodimas: 08 September 2019 - 03:33 AM