Guns, control and culture.

JPK, on 17 December 2025 - 07:06 PM, said:

It's just like Macros was saying above you, one bloody step. You're jumping away ahead to a forced disarming, when we haven't got common sense gun laws on the books. How about we start by looking at repealing the Dickey and Tiahrt amendments so that we can actually gather research on guns. I understand that both of these were put into place under the guise of privacy, but those two amendments have hampered actual useful data for decades.

Finally, even if we do move into your disarming robot utopia, who controls the machines? I don't see it going over well if it's State run, but what corporation do you trust with this? Cause last I looked, almost all of the likely contenders are arm in arm with the current administration. Which isn't exactly promising in regards to moving towards a theoretical utopia.

Unfortunately the only "baby steps" we'll likely get on this in the red areas for the foreseeable future are crying, sleeping, temper tantrums, and making terrible grotesque bodily messes while keeping the adults over in the blue states up at night...

Macros, on 17 December 2025 - 07:21 PM, said:

Dystopia JPK, he clearly meant Dystopia

It's the MAGA version that I'd consider truly dystopian. Not what I'd call the progressive version of it. But I understand why most people would view it as "dystopian" and invasive.

In general I do honestly think that many of the dystopian scenarios science fiction has taught us to reflexively abhor can be adjusted to make them more likely to be on the utopian side. Thought experiments about what could go horribly wrong are good, but they should be tempered by considering how to avert the issues being raised (perhaps each such dystopian story could present multiple possible futures, in which civilizations try various ways to avert or largely ameliorate the risks---if well-researched and based on empirical evidence, that would be much better and more useful) and also by philosophical consideration about whether our current, modern knee-jerk reactions may be wrong (in part because it was through such questioning of older knee-jerk reactionary impulses that modern civilizations arrived at many of our current reflexive ethical assumptions and emotional reactions).

And I'd be reluctant to use the term "utopia", though we can certainly make progress.

On robots in particular: police are already using robots to help deal with explosives and mass shooters, and as better robots are developed, in those cases where a court order has been obtained to legally confiscate fire-arms, I do think that bullet-proof robots equipped with nonlethal weapons may be a better option---once they can be designed to be practical, which might take a long time I acknowledge. One additional reason I forgot to mention, though it's a very important one: police in the US will insist on going in armed with live ammunition, and will end up shooting people. Robots also carry risks that might be difficult to avert or mitigate---falling over onto people, malfunctioning---but they seem significantly less likely to kill people than modern American police are.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: Today, 07:50 PM

Malazan Empire: Guns, control and culture. - Malazan Empire