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Comment by thatoneguy | Hacker News Reader

I was a "broadband technician" around then and AT&T Broadband did not give AF if you were stealing cable or not. I only handled cable modem installs and quit after a year to go major in philosophy and because:

- Getting quietly threatened once (with AR-15 up against the customer's front door) on a troubleshooting call that I wasn't able to leave until "the internet started working".

- Having to increasingly go do cable TV disconnects because people were usually in a bad way and I had more than one colleague that had either had a gun pulled on them or straight-up shot and left to die up a pole for most of a day while trying to disconnect cable.

- Having to increasingly go on cable TV installs because people's shitty TVs backfeeding electricity into the cable line meant I was getting zapped at least once a week.

That said, I met a lot of cool people, gave out a lot of free TV/HBO because I didn't care unless the customer was a dick, wrote down a lot of funny stories and ultimately realized that I could go college in spite of dropping out of high school because I happened to install the non-traditional student advisor's cable modem.

My colleagues said they'd see me back at the shop in four years after I graduated with a philosophy degree. Jokes on them, I dropped out after getting a job at Google.

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The amount of incidents involving firearms is astonishing. I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals.

I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people. I'm really a bit surprised to hear this.

I did a similar job early on in my career (involving cheap phone calling devices with customers including consumers and often dodgy 'calling shops'). But the most dangerous situation I faced was a customer with a heavy dose of the flu, lol. And roadside fastfood.

You're right that the US is very proud of their trigger and muzzle discipline. Or at least half of it. The other half points loaded guns with the safeties off directly at their own crotches to own the libs[0].

Going a layer deeper, Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers. To put it extremely charitably, we're used to being fucked by corpos so we pre-emptively fuck them back in the dumbest way possible. Less charitably, our country has a bunch of bullies that want to shout at anything they can bully. I don't think they'd actually pull the trigger, but, y'know, law of large numbers, times small but non-zero probability of homicide by virtue a gun being present on the scene equals probably at least one murdered cable tech.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-ca...

That Vice article and the pluralistic blog spam post don't understand what a Fudd is. A Fudd is a curmudgeonly, old fashioned gun owner who is judgmental about people owning modern firearms. They favor hunting and shotgun games over handguns and semiautomatic rifles. If they own handguns at all, think revolvers and 1911s instead of Glocks. Generally, Fudds tend to be very adamant about safe gun handling, often advocating for range rules that are overly restrictive like prohibiting aimed rapid fire. They're not the kind of people who point loaded handguns at their crotches to get a reaction out of people online.

The people who are pointing loaded guns at their crotches are mocking people who take the four rules of gun handling very seriously, including both Fudds and most "normal" gun owners. They're trolls that exist almost exclusively online. They don't make up anywhere near half of gun owners and they're unwelcome at pretty much any gun club or public range.

> That Vice article and the pluralistic blog spam post don't understand what a Fudd is.

Of course they don't, because they're not journalism, they're activism. They don't report - they incite.

Thank you for taking the time to actually provide useful information.

I agree with almost all of this, but a lot of the people who point loaded guns at their crotches act like normal people at the range or shoot at unsupervised DNR land

> Americans really, really love to abuse the shit out of customer service workers.

That wasn't my experience when I worked in customer service for a few years. Maybe 10% of people were like that and it was always because they were tired of not getting solutions to their problems, and that was always because their account fell into a bad spot in the customer service flow policy (suspicious activity, low LTV, fraud, etc.). It was really hard to take any of that personally.

I'd argue it's more like the corporate powers that be often have unforgiving policies and account review practices sending people to the moon with anger.

> It was really hard to take any of that personally.

Indeed. When companies abuse their customers, customer service is not only the only way by which a problem can even hope to be resolved, but it is the job of customer service to do so. They are representatives of their companies, the interface between the customer and the service their company offers.

Now, I don't sanction abuse, of course, and pulling guns on people is insane, but that's not what you have in mind here, and knowing how tortured and stretched the definition of "abuse" some people have is, I will say you do sometimes need to be somewhat aggressive and push to escalate your problem to get the customer service rep. to transition on their script's finite state machine to a helpful state and outcome. In those cases, don't blame the customer. Blame the corporation.

Corporations often like to drag their feet to maximize profit with all sorts of ridiculous and unsavory tactics. It's like being automatically enrolled in something by default and burdening the customer with unsubscribing; on average you can steal at least a little money from those who don't unsubscribe, or do so only after a couple months have passed. The time and burden of doing so (a form of theft), and the lack of genuine consent (Pacta sunt servanda, buddy!), doesn't seem to be accounted for.

10% of people being like that sounds like a lot to me.

> low LTV

I think I see where the problem is on the corporate side.

Sucks to be in customer support. The job really seems to be a buffer between abusive company policies and the angry customers.

10% customers being abusive seems _extremely_ high.

>Maybe 10% of people were like that

That's 1-2 a day minimum!

> Or at least half of it. The other half points loaded guns with the safeties off directly at their own crotches to own the libs[0]

The source you cited specifically says it is not to own the libs.

> It turns out that the origin of this is not "owning the libs" – it's "owning responsible gun owners." -from your source

Yikes on linking to the wrong article that totally invalidates your argument.

Most of the replies have turned this into a gun debate. Realistically it’s because he was involved in disconnecting service. When you have to do any sort of job that puts you in the position of taking something away from poor people, you’re at high risk, because taking something away from someone who is desperate and likely feels the got the short end from society is not a recipe for a jolly day.

In your average American neighborhood none of this would happen. In the rougher poor neighborhoods, everybody thinks everyone is out to get them (and frankly they might be right), is on edge, and likely has a loose association to the law or social mores.

Without going into an entire sociology diatribe, in America there are many reasons someone may end up poor, but low impulse control, lack of education, and an inability to follow rules tend to top the list, all of which can lead to very troubling outcomes that wouldn’t happen among the gainfully employed average, whom also pay their bills and would not be targeted for disconnection of service.

The majority of Americans own or have access to firearms (although it’s barely a minority of “households”), but incidents involving firearms happen in poorer neighborhoods predominantly. The mix is not great, and we should do something about it as a society but it’s a complex and somewhat intractable issue that’s not fully solved by just throwing money at it (just look at council houses in the UK as an example of similar outcomes despite social support).

>Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals

Europe? Literally lots of people have guns, where I live, from 01 Sept there's plenty of gunshots ringing out scaring one of my dogs. I know two people in the uk that have shotguns (police checked, locked away in the attic). There are many ww2 firearms in circulation (Serbia, I believe just had an amnesty), so 'literally' is incorrect. The difference is: guns aren't common, and certainly aren't often carried, and most definitely not openly (apart from farmers and hunters, but the gun must be unloaded and broken(. My fave is talking to Americans that 'can't wait to get back home so I can carry my gun, for protection, it's my right'. Not a single one of them has been threatened whilst here. Nor have they been threatened in the States....but it's their right to protect themselves from the government. I always ask, if their government started being 'oppressive', how long would either sides' ammunition last? Not a single person I've spoken to has more than a few days ammo available.

I live in New Zealand, and many people have guns. The difference is if you point it at someone at minimum you’ll lose your gun licence and have the weapon confiscated.

I used to work at a multinational, we were quite amused when we saw an update to the US workplace rules that prohibited firearms anywhere on company property. One of my colleagues has his rifle in the office - he was going on a hunting trip and leaving immediately after work. Of course it was locked in a gun case and the bolt was stored separately, but it was amusing.

Threatening someone with a firearm is felony assault and definitely will result in you losing your right to own firearms and having it confiscated.

Unless the governor pardons you it would seem https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/06/missouri-cou...

Yes that is how a gubernatorial pardon works.

Should it though? Prerequisite of a pardon is that you accept guilt. If people are guilty of being reckless with firearms, should they still have access to firearms?

> Europe? Literally lots of people have guns, where I live,

Exactly.

Not only outside-EU countries; I live in EU country that has ratio of registered guns to cops ~4,5:1.

The difference to US is, that a) there's no open carry and b) no legal owner is going to threaten with a gun over something trivial (it is a good way to lose your license).

These two things make people carrying guns invisible, but not non-existing.

Most of Serbia's firearms came from the breakup of Yugoslavia.

That being said, I never saw a gun or even heard of someone having it (in my city of Novi Sad, at least - things may be different elsewhere).

Homicide rates for 2021 (according to macrotrends.net):

Serbia: 1.06 US: 6.81

> Not a single person I've spoken to has more than a few days ammo available.

Anecdotes aren't the strongest, but no worries, many of the small group of people I hang with have the combined capacity of a batallion, along with manufacturing capabilities in the case it's needed. All really great people too. We'd welcome a Euro like yourself in a heartbeat despite any differences we may have. Good luck out there.

The government has the best ammo available: organization

>I always ask, if their government started being 'oppressive', how long would either sides' ammunition last? Not a single person I've spoken to has more than a few days ammo available.

It's especially absurd when you realize that these people scream that they need guns to protect them from an oppressive government. Meanwhile in the US, we have millions and millions of dollars a year in Civil Asset Forfeiture, which even when justified is a direct impingement on your Fourth amendment rights, and just an assault on justice in general. These same people are also loudly applauding laws in states like Florida and Texas that explicitly oppress people of certain types. They also support laws that prevent women from getting absolutely NECESSARY health care.

The ONLY "right" they care about is the right to own guns, yet how many of them took up arms and came after the government after ruby ridge? Only one really did, and they used a bomb to kill a hundred innocent people in a completely unrelated part of the government.

EVERYTHING about "gun culture" in america is about "feeling" powerful, about being "strong", about fear of nebulous bullshit that doesn't exist. These people will seek out a video of some drugged up criminal taking twenty bullets before finally collapsing, and use that to justify buying the biggest handgun they can afford because of "stopping power" as if they need to defend their home from the damn hulk, and definitely don't care about over penetration accidentally killing their kids in the next room over.

These people simply want a world where might makes right, but are terrified because they aren't "might", so they get guns. They OBSESS over hero fantasies, gathering on message boards or facebook to talk about how they "totally would have stopped that shooter". They joke about shooting children that date their daughter, they make jokes about how "someone" should shoot people for being wrong. They just generally don't think other people deserve safety or life, and that the penalty for any action should be swift death from a cops gun. They then are stunningly silent when a cop shoots a legal firearm owner because the cop got jumpy about a black guy saying he had a gun. They often ARE the cops actually. Meanwhile an actual active shooter shows up in their local school and they take their sweet ass time doing nothing while hearing kids dying. Remember, the gun heavy community of Uvalde had many of their children murdered while heavily armed cops sat outside and prevented parents from trying to save their kids on their own. Did the local community rise up against this government force and overthrow a useless and dangerous government? No, they voted for them again in the next election. Because gun nuts would never shoot a cop, because they are friends.

Which is funny, because what do they think "the government" they would have to overthrow is? The ATF, and worse, liberals. That's as far as it goes. When they say "The second amendment is to protect us from an oppressive government", that means liberals sending the ATF to confiscate their guns and THAT'S IT.

What's funny is that the main historical example of a large scale uprising against the american state, the civil war, was fought like any other military conflict: with state owned firearms, including United States owned firearms stolen from american armories. They also seem convinced the the army would be on their side, instead of most of the military staying loyal to their commanders as is the norm in that situation. They point to Afghanistan as "look the US can't fight a resident population with guns", utterly oblivious to the fact that Afghanistan is what the US military looks like when its trying to play good cop. If you want to know what the US does to an armed and rebelling community, simply look how the US treated labor unions in the early 1900s. Here's a hint: They flatten an entire city block to kill them and it doesn't even make it into a history book.

And to top off this stupid shit pie? The NRA, the main advocate organization for gun ownership in the US, was run by Oliver North, of Iran-Contra infamy, until 2019, and their main funding comes through Russian hands nowadays.

> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing or murdering people.

I take it you have not actually visited the United States.

In fairness, everyone I know in the US who owns firearms - which is basically everyone I know here - takes safety and knowledge of the laws around storing/carrying/brandishing/firing them very seriously. But the sheer scale of the US population and the absolute number of guns is just difficult to conceive of from a European perspective. We have something like 60 privately owned guns in this country for every person in the Czech Republic. So even if only 1% of our gun-owning population were irresponsible or criminal with them, it would still add up to a lot of deaths every day.

Oh another “The US is big” post.

The EU has 30% more people

There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.

There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.

There is a cultural problem in the US with firearms.

Nobody really lives in Montana so that's not a big surprise.

I think it's playing a similar argument as the GP with US-guns-per-Czech-person. OK, Czechia is a bigger part of Europe than Montana is of US, but it looks as if Montana was picked to show how the original argument is invalid.

just some dental floss tycoons

> There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.

> There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.

gonna need a fact-check on these claims, please, because initial googling reveals these are, at the very least, false or misleading

I live in the Northeast US and very few people have guns here.

Incidentally, even if it is difficult to purchase a gun, it's trivial to order a crossbow or airbow, which has just as much 1-shot stopping power (although, of course, after that 1 shot, reload can be a problem, less so with the airbow)

What did you find in your search? At least, the gun count seems pretty close, as far as I could tell.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/05/which-european-country-b...

> Around 46% of all 857 million guns in civilian hands around the world belonged to people living in the United States in 2017, a survey has found.

> The European Union's 513 million inhabitants owned a collective 79.8 million firearms in 2017.

And the “20 times as many murders” is not right, but seems to be pretty close if they were just taking about firearms homicides.

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-....

> Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole.

I also live in the Northeast, but that’s a point against when talking about this stuff; when you live in the only reasonably run part of the US, it is easy to misunderstand how ridiculous things are in much of the country.

Gun ownership is not evenly distributed. Their are as many guns as citizens in the US, but out of ten people, 8 have no guns, 1 has a single handgun, and 1 has 10 guns.

That isn’t really a fact-checking issue, though, it is an alternative interpretation of the data. I think your post is a fine way to begin a reasonable argument.

I actually don’t care to argue back. I object to the argument-less fact check request and insinuation that the figures are misleading, on principle. It is annoying to give your conversation partners homework for no reason.

Depends where in the Northeast you are! Half the people in Vermont own a gun, New Hampshire and Maine aren’t much different. NY/RI/MA/CT/NJ have relatively low gun ownership rates, for sure.

Does that include places like Switzerland, where every male is issued with a gun as part of their national service/canton militia?

I think the cultural problem is everyone wants to be like Stallone or Arnie, which would suggest the US population has an inferiority complex towards the old world.

No. Switzerland isn’t in the EU. Include non EU countries and the population and number of guns is even larger, but gun homicides don’t change much.

Even gun suicides are far higher in the US per capita and per gun than in the EU.

The US has a gun fetish. People sleep with them for crying out loud!

hey now, if i don't sleep with the thing, how am i gonna grab it when i'm asleep?

I took “sleep with” as a sexual thing but you’re right, it’s probably referring to nightstand guns or the famous bedshotty.

Worth noting, it is impossible to both have a gun for home defense, and be a "responsible" gun owner. Being a responsible gun owner implies the guns are properly locked up, away from ammunition, because kids regularly play with daddy's guns and kill each other and themselves, but if your gun is locked up in a safe separately from it's ammo like it is often legally required to be, there's no way you can actually use it for home defense.

But everyone still claims they are "A responsible gun owner" because all that actually means to the gun culture in the US is that you are white or rural or conservative.

Same, but I suspect there's a bit of selection bias going on there in both our cases. I just don't think I'd be able to sustain a friendship with the kind of person who owns guns and handles them irresponsibly, and I expect the same might be true of you.

You’re spot on - everyone who I know who “does gun” has an extremely hostile reaction to people who handle them irresponsibly.

And those people are often irresponsible in many other ways, too.

Except everyone who "has a hostile reaction to people who handle guns irresponsibly" has a story of a range or person they know who does exactly that, and their response is simply to stay away, instead of narcing on them and making the community safer at the expense of being a tattle tale.

So there are plenty of people who call themselves "responsible gun owners" but turn a complete blind eye to bad behavior.

Or they will keep a loaded gun in their bedroom for home defense, something that is outright NOT responsible gun owner behavior, yet is the primary cited reason people own guns in the US.

I guess that seems reasonable, but now it makes me wonder about the graph - it can't be that the people who take gun ownership and security safety only know people who do likewise - how many people who take these matters seriously still have friends they hang out with who take it less seriously.

Why? Well bad apples and stuff, it's hard to believe perfect discipline is maintained when some of those around you have less than perfect discipline.

It seems like a question that one could probably get pretty close to answering (although not perfect).

Just from personal experience among my friends and acquaintances - and anyone I meet who I chance to talk about guns with - there is a very strong self-reinforcing culture of safe handling and responsibility. People will come down incredibly hard on anyone who seems inept or who they even hear speaking about some kind of irresponsible behavior. Now, I'd say about half of these are ex-military people, but they set a standard and keep other people in line. Of course, perfect discipline isn't maintained in this country. But it's actually one of the few areas where pretty much everyone knows they must act like a responsible adult. People are well aware that it's their life or their freedom are stake if they mess up. I know guys who get drunk as skunks and get in bar fights, but who would never carry their gun when they go out drinking, or anywhere besides the woods.

> Just from personal experience among my friends and acquaintances

This is significantly biasing your perspective, and I don’t think you quite realize by how much.

There are many, many gun owners who are incompetent and irresponsible. There is an entire spectrum, and it’s not a purely bimodal distribution with 95% safety-conscious owners and 5% hoodlums.

>Of course, perfect discipline isn't maintained in this country.

well ok, I don't know but there are stats on how many adults have guns, and there are stats on misuses of guns. I suppose a clever statistician would be able to get to some potential overview of how many people who own guns have decent discipline?

Not saying that's you but someone on this site. It is difficult to find anything with a query on Google nowadays, but the things I do find - like https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ implies to me that the amount of the population that maintains your level of discipline is very low.

> But it's actually one of the few areas where pretty much everyone knows they must act like a responsible adult.

"Everyone"?

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

The reality is that nearly every "responsible gun owner" knows gun owners who are not responsible, and usually just ignore that unfortunate reality. None of my family members, including the ones who "take safety seriously" and lock up their stuff from their kids, would EVER narc on the family member who thinks shooting up their back yard while drunk or high is okay. They rationalize this through all sorts of "but they aren't hurting anyone" wishful thinking, ignoring that being irresponsible with a gun in one way usually means they are being dangerous with firearms in other ways.

So many people provide direct evidence that they do not respect the danger or power of firearms, and most gun owners just look the other way.

>takes safety and knowledge of the laws around storing/carrying/brandishing/firing them very seriously.

What matters is what happens when their friend does something dangerous with a gun, and they don't seem to care. My entire family is "responsible gun owner" including my brother who definitely seems to care about safety, but all that goes out the window when another family member brings out the guns at a family BBQ while absolutely drunk. You can bet your ass nobody said anything. If you aren't willing to narc on irresponsible gun behavior, you ARE NOT a responsible gun owner.

Also, Kyle Rittenhouse took a gun across several state lines, possibly stirred up shit, got shot at, and killed the person doing so. While the actual event of shooting was ruled "self defense", how is it "responsible" to take your firearm to a protest with the intent of being a counter protester. If "Anti fa" did such a thing, these people would riot, but Rittenhouse was invited to talk at fucking CPAC.

That's the kind of person these people lionize. They are envious that he was able to kill someone with a gun and get away with it. They want to be him.

> In fairness, everyone I know in the US who owns firearms - which is basically everyone I know here

You are not representative, as only one-third of individuals, and 42% of US households, own a firearm:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...

* https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...

Gun owners are in the minority of the population.

Drill down to state levels, or further to local areas, and those numbers change tremendously. In many parts of the country gun ownership is almost universal.

And you might not even know; not everyone tells everyone that they own a gun.

Assume those numbers are wrong. Many gun owners lie on various polls and surveys when asked about firearms ownership. The reason generally being a certain level of paranoia about firearms and firearms owners being cataloged in a way that could support a hypothetical future confiscation effort.

Firearms owners may well still be in the minority, but there's probably a fair bit of error there.

Does that include children in the population?

Yeah, my father keeps everything locked in a safe, but the other day, some cops knocked on my door asking if I knew anything about a gun that was stolen from the passenger seat of an unlocked truck parked across the street.

I'm sure everyone says they take these things seriously, and I'm sure you're a fine upstanding citizen who mostly interacts with other fine, upstanding citizens. However, we do know, due to the number of offenses made public thanks to Florida's Sunshine law and other public sources, that we simply can't make the generalization that people take these gun safety measures seriously.

It seems like you’re the one that hasn’t been here.

That’s a shocking number of gun related incidents in the GP. Seems like accessing TV/internet must be an issue like road rage that brings out the absolute worst in people. People don’t go around popping shots at technicians or waving their weapons around in the US.

> People don’t go around popping shots at technicians or waving their weapons around in the US.

I think that's highly dependent on where in the US, and what kind of neighborhoods and people these technicians are working in.

The idea that such places exist in the US does not surprise me in the least. But at the same time, there are certainly places in the US where the majority of gun owners do handle their firearms responsibly.

Nearly every cable technician has these stories. A lot of what cable technicians do is go to a house to disconnect for non-payment. These people are rarely well off, and are often a subset of the worst of the worst people in the country. Cable technicians can tell you stories of honest to goodness nazis, terrifyingly mentally broken people, lunatics who think they should be able to shoot anyone stepping foot on their property, etc. Basically if there is a person who is shitty in any way, they probably won't pay their cable and the technician is going to get to meet them.

My brother is an avid gun "advocate" (nut), but he still wasn't happy being threatened with guns from yokels who don't like paying bills.

I'd be interested to know what state they were working in.

If you work as a cable technician, 6 customers a day, that's around 2000 in a year. If 1 in 100 is mentally ill, in a bad mood (TV broken!) and with a gun ...

Maybe there's some selection bias: You'll tend to meet angry people, who are more dumb (couldn't fix the problem themselves?)?

Maybe in any weapon loving place, a job where you visit lots of people at their homes and help fixing something that's broken, is mildly dangerous?

Especially if you’re disconnecting service - I dare say the repo tow truck drivers encounter MANY more gun incidents than the average AAA tow truck driver.

However I suspect the repo company allows its employees (or they’re self-employed) to carry in retaliation - I strongly suspect that the cable companies don’t allow their repairmen to pack heat.

It’s like the thin bread line - pizza delivery is more dangerous than being a cop.

>However I suspect the repo company allows its employees (or they’re self-employed) to carry in retaliation

I doubt it. That'd be a huge liability.

Dig into it further; it's been one of the "qualifying reasons" for some of the states with the hardest-to-get CCW permits.

Remember that repo companies are often incredibly small single-person "companies" contracted out.

There are over 300 million fire arms in the US. Yet other than criminals shooting rivals, and people commiting suicide, almost no one uses their gun.

Even if you include full time criminals and suicides, that still means basically 0.001% of fire arms are used to kill someone every day year.

Most gun owners are decent people that want to protect themselves, not use it to cause hard to the innocent.

If anything, that statistic (roughly one per person) doesn't inspire confidence. The correct takeaway isn't "wow, so few of the guns in America are used to kill people." It's "wow, there are so many guns that anybody can have one, regardless of whether they are fit to."

> The correct takeaway

This is objectively false. You're attempting to portray a personal opinion as fact. Bad form, and definitely not appropriate for HN. Please don't do that here.

We don't tell people if they have the right to reproduce, and we shouldn't tell people if they have the right to protect themselves.

Your insistence on a right to a gun for self-protection comes at the cost of others using their right to a gun for crime.

If nobody had guns, you wouldn't need to a gun to protect yourself from someone else with a gun.

The problem of course is that the genie is already out of the bottle. We can't take the guns away, they're all over the place in the USA already. Even if the Second Amendment was repealed, all that would happen is that only criminals would have guns.

We're fucked and there's no solution.

Yes, you still need a gun even if the criminal only has a knife or a baseball bat. You will not win with someone with those tools. And no woman will win even if she has the same knife or bat. So yes, women need guns.

This made me laugh pretty good, but it's been my opinion for a long time.

> I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals

I live in the EU and that's not true, I know multiple people who own guns and go to the shooting range every other weekend

People vastly underestimate the number of privately held firearms in Europe, and how “easy” it is to obtain one.

It’s not an insurmountable obstacle, and depending on the country can range from “California difficulty” to “basically an NFA stamp” but they’re out there.

Often they are not “the scary black rifle” type, but they’re still firearms.

Then again, in the USA you can buy a Gatling gun and you rarely hear issues around that - https://youtu.be/9U8850jgTwk?si=5UTz7HsgaLxgbFuS

This is very country-dependent; in some they're actually quite common, in some they're extremely heavily restricted. In Ireland, say, you will require a legitimate reason to have one (essentially the only legitimate reasons are sports shooting, hunting, and certain farming activities), training, secure storage inspected and signed off on by the police, and permission from the police. In practice, it's so onerous that most people doing sports shooting would use a gun owned by the club. Automatic rifles are completely illegal to own, as are nearly all pistols (except for use by the military and by specialist police; ordinary police don't have firearms). Tasers etc are also effectively illegal to own (there being no legitimate sports/hunting/farming applications).

Oddly, crossbows are also restricted, though may be licensed as above; as I understand it this is due to a legislative error which no-one has gotten around to fixing.

Exactly - gun laws are way more complicated than people assume - some countries on paper will be identical to Ireland but basically anyone can say "hunting" and the police don't do much more than just sign off on it.

And in other countries, they make no distinction between a black-powder blunderbuss and fully automatic military weapons - they're both equally hard to obtain, so the people who do get a gun end up with a select-fire rifle.

Pistols are often more heavily regulated than rifles, because they're concealable.

In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want. Artillery not so much if it is autoloading. The "own a musket for home defense" copy pasta comes to mind.

> In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want

Is this... common? Can't imagine why anyone would want one.

I've known a few people into black powder guns and cannons. It is a fun hobby for them. One of them got into it by way of model rocketry, the rest were folks who were generally into "mountain man" era skills, technology and reenactment (for history and fun, not prepper illusions).

There was also a tradition at our high school to shoot off a cannon each time our football team scored a point at home games (just the powder no projectile).

It's not common and they're expensive, but it's possible and apparently fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtswMYlBd0

(It's probably $5k to $10k to get a working cannon, and most owners are probably reenactors and movie-proppers.)

I'm now curious if one could license one here. It doesn't _obviously_ fall into any of the categories that would make it prohibited (as opposed to merely restricted), and it's not like it'd be very useful for criminal purposes, but it might be hard to sell the gardai on the idea that it was essential for farming. (Surely at some point there's been a sport that involves cannon, tho...)

One thing I would note is that, unlike other utilities, Cable and Internet are not deemed 'necessary' in the us. This means that they exist in nearly unregulated space when it comes to their business operations. These Cable companies are remarkably careless and are liable to take rather abusive actions such as delivering non-functioning service and then billing tech charges to 'fix' the service with many customers ending up in a loop of paid techs coming to fix things they cannot fix because the issue is elsewhere. It is a brutally helpless feeling and when the only thing that can make you feel in control is a gun...

All of that is to say that the companies really do put the techs in harms way in their operations.

Americans take pride in having them, but being properly trained in safely handling or effectively using them is optional. Try and force it and you’ll get the tyranny talk.

Sadly I’ve heard many stories of cable/dish techs dealing with this nonsense.

The opposition to mandatory training is because the actual goal is usually to harass and discourage or raise revenue rather than improve safety. There's plenty that's been tried and none of it seems to have improved safety outcomes. The people who are irresponsible with guns pretty much always know better and decided to be stupid, anyway.

Well that's kind of the key point of making some rules (and training) about handling firearms, to have a legally valid reason to prohibit the irresponsible people from handling firearms if they have demonstrated that they won't, and can't use "I didn't know" as an excuse after they have decided to be stupid.

The first step, of course, is coming to an agreement whether that subpopulation of 'irreversibly irresponsible' people should have the right to bear arms or not; in USA there doesn't seem to be a consensus about that.

At least they're free from the tyranny of the cable service personnel...

The secret is that bullying people with excessive force is exactly what millions of americans with firearms actively want to be able to do.

You should see some of the nextdoor and facebook communities. So many people are super eager to shoot someone over pretty much any petty crime.

Yes, this is a huge problem with U.S. gun culture. The "make my day" crowd is hoping that they will get to end someone's life legally.

Case in point:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/08/texas-vigila...

The guy had a choice:

* Replace a wallet

* Shoot a guy dead

Obviously, we don't usually hear about the people that pick the first option, but there are plenty of takers for the 2nd.

That's a very shallow reading of that particular situation. The robber was pointing a gun at people. At the point when someone threatens life like that, regardless of whether the motives are personal or material, it is reasonable and legally justified for someone to use deadly force to end that threat. The only real criticism that can be leveled against that particular shooter is that in hindsight he continued shooting after the robber was arguably no longer a threat.

> That's a very shallow reading of that particular situation.

Yes, with a bit more depth to the reading, you'd know that the robber had already collected the money and was leaving when he was shot in the back.

And what happens when another do-gooder walks into this taqueria, sees this guy shoot someone, and then grab money off the body? Wouldn't that person be in the clear to shoot the first guy?

What if the 2nd guy is a police officer?

It's not clear that the robber was leaving at the time he was shot. The robber was still threatening people with the gun when he was shot. Shooting the robber in the back was a way to get the jump on him—drawing on someone who has already drawn on you is generally suicide.

As for the risk that someone else might mistake the shooter for the robber, anyone who has taken a concealed carry class has learned that there are risks to defending yourself. It's a choice you make because you don't think there are better ones.

But fundamentally, I'm objecting to your characterization that this guy was looking to legally kill someone or that it was motivated out of a desire to keep his wallet. The robber was threatening people's lives. The danger was not over. Shooting the robber was a reasonable choice given what the shooter knew at the time.

Or look at it another way. What if the guy being robbed missed, then robber shoots him and all around him. Which would not have happened if the wallets were just given. It's always better to de-escalate.

In some European countries there's a recent trend to attack people perceived as "the state", such as firefighters and paramedics in certain situations. Afaik, this is usually done by low income, uneducated people that good stone grudge and then lash out. You can indeed be happy that they don't have access to firearms.

This is not done by “low income, uneducated people". This is done by 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants from the middle east and africa. Please be specific, otherwise these problems will never be resolved. I come from a low income neighborhood but native parents, this was unheard of up until the 2000s.

To be specific - Poland. We don't have enough immigrants from middle east and africa for this to be noticeable problem. It's mostly uneducated drunk idiots who target ER teams. Firefighters - I didn't heard about them being targeted yet.

Edit: I don't say that MENA immigrants targeting public services is not an issue. I say that this issue exists globally too, it's a result of having a lot of uneducated demoralised people, whatever their background or origin.

>It's mostly uneducated drunk idiots who target ER teams.

It's the aftershocks of all the coronavirus/antivaxx conspiracy theories. The people who got brainwashed hard attack doctors/ER teams because they see them as murderers.

This was happening already before covid. But conspiracy theories probably made the problem worse.

Maybe in Poland this is the issue, in the rest of Europe it is not.

You theory doesn't check out given the counter example.

There are very few MENA immigrants in Poland so it makes sense to me they would have few riots by MENA immigrants.

At the same time it is possible Polish sports fans are more rabid in their “support”.

First five UK-based examples I found via Google were three white men and two white women attacking paramedics. One used a meat cleaver. (All found with the search "attack on paramedic sentenced <random city>")

(Edit: full disclosure - one more search and the sixth had a common Turkish surname (no mugshot)).

First, the UK is a special case. I’m working right now in Liverpool and it is the most dysfunctional city I’ve been to in Europe. I’ve worked in most of Europe.

Second, the nationality of the perpetrators is often masked in case it is a foreigner.

Third, a random Google search isn’t exactly representative.

Obviously native Europeans have attacked police, medics etc. But organized mobs attacking firefighters, paramedics etc is a new phenomenon.

So that's Poland and the UK that are special cases so far.

> Second, the nationality of the perpetrators is often masked in case it is a foreigner.

Ah, well, if we're going by nationality, I'm 6 for 6 - that last bloke with a Turkish surname was an ex-policeman, so I reckon he was probably a British national.

I think the random Google search is one up on a random internet denizen's unsourced opinion, to be honest. I kicked the tyres of your opinion with the most basic, cursory test and it came up short.

you essentially saying "trust me bro" is even less representative

To be honest I’m surprised this is still up for debate. I was hoping by now, we would be discussing solutions and not what’s going on.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39047455

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/sweden-faile...

I agree with the principle that we need to stop flinching away from stating this kind of thing, but am unsure if it's actually true that it's ME and Africa for this specific type of antisocial behavior.

Checking out the "offences by outcome" uk gov spreadsheet[1] is a bit of a wash. Africans aren't any more overrepresented than they are for violent crime in general (less, in fact) and Middle Easterners seem to be lurking in the giant bag of "Not Stated" ethnicity. Though at least for assault of emergency workers in general (as opposed to predictable group attacks on entering an area) "White British" are still (barely) the majority.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Every time that medical staff is assaulted in Portugal, specially when the code word "family" is used, we already know it was done by a Gypsy group or family who couldn't be bothered to wait in queue to be looked at.

The other "low income, uneducated people" never do such things, always the same group.

Oh wow you just went right for the boring anti-roma racism, cool.

>The other "low income, uneducated people"

You are horribly misinformed if you actually believe this.

> I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals that only really use them to shoot their rivals.

Come on, this is totally untrue. I grew up in rural Ireland and it's very common for farmers to own guns. Hunters too.

Check here [•] - Finland, for example, is only a couple of percentage points behind the US in number of households that own a gun (42% vs 37%).

The difference is in the culture, not gun ownership. In Finland, Ireland, and every single developed country in the world (and most developing countries too) except for the US, privately owned guns are for hunting or for killing pests, not for threatening humans. That's the difference.

•https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent_of_households_with_g...

At least Finland's stats are a bit misleading. They are using number of guns per capita, not number of households with guns (and might also be using number of permits instead of number of guns, same gun might have more than 1 permit). There's about 650 000 permit holders in Finland, i.e. about 12%. Of course there are some people who have access to illegal guns but I don't think that's very high number. Estimates I see for number of illegal guns (which include deactivated guns which can be reactivated) are from 35 000 to 200 000.

Literally quite a lot of people have guns in Europe though, many many millions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

Nevertheless never heard of such a thing happening.

I think it's mostly a numbers thing. Willing to bet that most people take owning a gun seriously, but there's a loooooooooot of guns in the US. There's enough in US circulation alone to give a gun to every citizen of the US, Canada, and the UK. That much floating around and there's bound to be some dumb fuck in the news waving around their new bang stick.

Like others have said, you've got a lot of other things in the US to worry about than guns. However, since we're sharing gun incidents, mine is that I had a sheriff's deputy LARPing as a SWAT officer bust in to the bathroom at work and point a rifle at me while I was trying to use the urinal. Lots of yelling until they realized that I was not a part of the drill and had my pants unzipped. Not happy that they didn't inform us that the cops were going to use the building we're in for school shooting training. Dangers of working in a repurposed school I guess?

In Europe, it is not literally true that "...nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals..."; but it is true that owning pistols and AR-15s is relatively rare in Europe. My understanding is that the only country with a well-established concealed carry community is Czechia.

In germany, you can own a gun for sport or hunting. However, you are not legally allowed to carry it with you, except when going to and from that activity. It's also not a "walk into a store and buy one" situation, but if you want a gun, you can certainly still get one.

The Swiss also have lots of guns at home, but due to completely different reasons, so almost no one carries them in public.

What are you talking about? What country in EU ? Because for example here in CZ, there's a lot of firearms. But guess what, you must pay for a gun license and have a doctor examination with possibility of psych. evaluation, then a gun license exam is really hard also practice test of gun handling and shooting is pretty hard and not cheap.

So you will think twice to get it and you really don't want to loose it. Basically turning gun owners into the most law abiding citizens there is.

If you're talking about countries like UK or similar, where you can't legally defend against attackers and biggest cities are controlled by gangs with kitchen knives and acid bottles. Even police don't have guns and can't arrest them, cuz racism or something. GG EZ.

> where you can't legally defend against attackers and biggest cities are controlled by gangs

Good grief, where do you get your information?

* In the UK, it's perfectly legal to defend yourself ("reasonable force").

* Beat policemen don't carry guns; firearms officers do. Any policeman can arrest anyone they suspect of an offence.

* Drug dealers rob one another; it's a direct result of prohibition. If you rob a drug dealer, he isn't going to report it to the police. That's nothing special to the UK (or to big cities).

When I lived in rural Ireland most of the farmers had a shotgun or rifle.

Worth noting that these are virtually the only people in Ireland who _do_ have firearms; the licensing for other use cases is pretty onerous.

Yeah but did they have faulty broadband?

Actually, they had brand new broadband! My area was in a "rural fibre zone" and while I was there the local houses (including mine) went from satellite-only or tethering (which could be OK, sometimes, barely) or 1 Mbit DSL to 1Gbps fibre. It was pretty awesome.

Man, I do wonder how they decide which rural areas get fiber, do they throw darts at a map?

So the theory is that they'll roll it out to 569,000 premises which are considered unlikely to be connected to fibre via the commercial providers; it's fairly extensive. In principle, it should go virtually everywhere that the commercial providers don't. We'll see how it works out in practice, of course. They're at about 150k premises 'passed' (ie they can be connected on demand); of these 45k are actually connected.

EDIT: Actually, from context they may be talking about a prior rollout. But the idea's the same.

Rob!!! It's been a while. Hope you're doing well. I was referring to this (from 2018) for the 300k number - https://www.openeir.ie/open-eir-passes-170k-rural-homes-busi...

Oh, small world!

Yeah, this was OpenEir (which is now just Eir’s standard commercial offering, though I think the rural buildout was subsidised). I was thinking of NBI, a separate network which is supposed to fill in what OpenEir didn’t.

Meanwhile I’m on coax; that’s the price you pay to live in the city center. (For whatever reason, Dublin city center tends to be behind on this stuff; my old apartment, beside Trinity, didn’t even get _VDSL_ until 2016 or so).

Based on my experience... yes!

In the end, the Irish government decided to bankroll the rollout of fiber to "commercially unviable" areas (under the guide of a National Broadband Scheme). That prompted one of the unsuccessful telcos to suddenly find ~ 300k of those homes commercially viable!

Trying to understand why some properties have been hooked up and others not is a fruitless exercise. During the COVID lockdown, I discovered that most churches (which had a strong interest in broadcasting masses to their congregations) has either been deemed commercially unviable or not indexed at all. Many hoops were jumped through.

There were strategic rural routes along roads between towns, etc. It got 300k homes hooked up. Ironically people in turns got fttc, rural people ftth.

There's really no other kind in rural ireland.

The best internet I've ever had was in rural Ireland.

> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism

Well, in US so many times heavily armed police act like chump in face of serious criminals so not sure that general populace are proud of professionalism.

The trick here is that US police are absurdly unprofessional in nearly any way. With guns it's even worse, as a mythical "good cop" with a gun gets only a single magazine a year through work to maintain proficiency, and depending on the state requirements, might not even have regular testing of their shooting abilities. Police in the US regularly shoot things that weren't even close to their target, and their standard training is to just keep shooting until they need to reload, whether or not it really makes sense. They are also taught that everything and everyone wants to murder them, and they should shoot first, and that their life is more important than justice, and other things that make them so paranoid they think it's normal to always face the door at a restaurant like my anxiety crippled girlfriend.

Meanwhile plenty of them are in right wing militias.

I'm glad to live in Europe where people have lots of guns but basically never threaten others with them because they are generally decent folk.

There's plenty of non-decent folk in Europe as well. I think the main difference is that it's much less common to fetishize guns, make them part of your everyday life, and belive that you need them to defend your life. Because that belief is the first step towards shooting a guy who disconnects your cable TV because you didn't pay your bills.

It's a lot easier to not shoot someone or get into violent crime in general when you have the option of just taking government assistance and trying to better yourself.

In the US, because of obscene paperwork and often actively hostile to poverty policies, it might be easier to just join a gang to survive.

Good point. I like to tell the US about how we decent Europeans had to come to the US and stop two world wars that they fought in the Americas.

America has been at war for around 225 years. Most of which has been fought outside of America. We just like shooting freedom bullets on other people's land, and when we run out of problems we shoot freedom bullets at each other.

If your thesis is that America should not have entered the world wars because of reasons other than it would've saved American lives to avoid them, I'd love to hear it.

No, the thesis is that coming to Europe in defense of soverign nations does not in any way excuse american domestic policy choices that result in people being worse off.

Just like sending aid to Ukraine does not in any way excuse the US of invading a sovereign country in the middle east for fake reasons and then attempting colonialism for 20 years under the guise of "bringing democracy"

But you already knew that.

It doesn't matter if I knew or not; it's just not relevent to the topic of whether Europeans are all the decent ones and Americans not.

This comment is incredibly manipulative and dishonest.

> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people.

Nothing about the parent comment implies otherwise. You're intentionally making up points that nobody made in order to push your agenda.

> I'm really a bit surprised to hear this.

...and you're not really surprised - this is just another use of emotionally manipulative language.

I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing, threatening or murdering people.

Why did you think this?

The rule of thumb is you are still way more likely to be killed by other things before being killed with a firearm. It’s not really that bad. Once you graduate from school your risk of being shot dead dramatically lowers and other normal causes of death take the top spot.

Firearms are the second-leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the US. 15%. [0]

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr1804754

Yep . . . just as I thought. Your source uses ages 0-19 as "children and adolescents." Guess what happens when you lump in those extra two years of 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds, who are legal adults?

You also lump in a disproportionate amount of street gang-related shootings, which have different causes and different solutions, and make it look like suburban teens are uniquely at risk from firearms . . . when they're not. The vast majority of firearm homicides in this country are suicides, and the next-most involve street gangs and the drug trade, and involve young men with criminal records killing other young men with criminal records using illegally-obtained pistols.

Do street gangs wait until you're 18? I don't quite understand how including the two extra years would skew the data.

It's not just two extra years, it's the year that makes the biggest step change in a person's life, and the year after.

That doesn't mean the death rate of children due to firearms is high, it could just mean there isn't really anything else that kills children i.e. they mostly have parents looking out for them, don't have to work dangerous jobs, and haven't lived long enough for lifestyle factors to take effect yet.

It does mean theres three kids shot dead for every one that drowns.

I'm a gun owner and I believe in the rights of citizens to be armed, but I'm still not sure this is a good argument. On principle, anything that causes unnecessary deaths should be curtailed unless the benefits somehow outweigh the damage. We still have people driving cars who kill each other every day by accident, but there's a general feeling that it would be better to do away with that if we could find a way to eliminate private transportation without destroying our economy in the process. To make a strong argument for firearms ownership requires not just downplaying the harm but actually explaining why the public good of an armed populace outweighs the many and obvious evils it inflicts on innocent people. That's a much tougher case to make to someone who's lost a family member to gun violence, but nonetheless it's a case that needs to be made (in my opinion) if we're going to remain an unruly bunch who won't be led down the road to either a right-wing or left-wing police state.

[edit: Just to clarify, I think there's an equally strong argument to be made about freedom of movement as a societal benefit, and an individual right, that outweighs the harms caused by humans driving their own cars.]

I think the whole concept of "carrying guns to prevent a police state from taking over our country" is a bit outdated.

These days this is not done with bullets but with carefully planned public manipulation through media and social networks.

And if it really comes down to bullets, the government owns a lot bigger guns than you do.

I think you’re missing the nuance here. If I can protect myself using a weapon, I don’t need to vote for mass surveillance to protect me. The ability to engage in shootouts with the police isn’t what prevents the formation of a police state. The problem with a police state is that state violence becomes a way to exercise political power.

Precisely. Policing in any country is always a mix of public service and protection racket. A police monopoly on protecting people from other people, or society from itself, leaves no safety for anyone.

It's ironic that some of the most vociferously anti-gun people in the US are also the ones with the clearest view of the police as an armed gang. But absent armed police and without the right to protect themselves, what do they think will fill the vacuum?

People don't agree on whether there is a positive or negative correlation between security and safety; whether increased security makes the society more or less safe. Some people also think that everyone interested in security (including the police, the military, and people buying guns for self defense) is inherently suspicious.

Trust makes the society safe. When there is a lack of trust, careful security measures can be used to compensate. But security can also lead to an arms race that makes everyone less safe, as measures that improve someone's safety may have a negative effect on others.

> But security can also lead to an arms race that makes everyone less safe, as measures that improve someone's safety may have a negative effect on others.

The stoic natural rights theory on which the US is founded definitely tips the balance towards self-defense over the collective. It’s the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

The hard part is stopping the self-defense at armed individuals. And not escalating from armed individuals to armed gangs. From armed gangs to criminal organizations capable of challenging the state. From criminal organizations to regional warlords replacing the state. And from regional warlords to conquerors establishing a new state.

> The problem with a police state is that state violence becomes a way to exercise political power.

The historical evidence shows that countering a police state / authoritative government with violence/force is less effect than with non-violence:

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44096650

Since 1900, if a movement used violence in their methods for change they had a success rate of 25%; movements with non-violence had success 40% of the time. Further, most movements who did use violence to have a 'change of government' were much more likely to end up with authoritative government.

Other than the obvious confounding factors, I feel this has to have some cherry picking or selective interpretation of what is a non-violent movement. Almost always there's some non-violent action preceding a violent movement, the question is at which stage they get quashed, fail to become much bigger, and then people have to resort to violence.

All the incidents used in the count are in Appendix A, and are part of a publicly available database used by researchers in the field.

You wrote a lot but said nothing.

How does owning a firearm protect you from state violence without an implied threat to shoot police?

The recent surge in violence as DAs have stopped fully prosecuting criminals -- including those who commit violent gun crimes -- has blurred the line between criminal violence and state violence. That renews the argument for self defense.

In other words, as the state declines to protect you, you have a better claim on the natural right to protect yourself.

> DAs have stopped fully prosecuting criminals -- including those who commit violent gun crimes

Just wondering if you have any evidence to back up this assertion.

False dichotomy, corporations are another (somewhat powerful entity).

They don't tend to use direct force either, but there are private militias...defending yourself from a gang or haywire corp is also an important thing.

People like to take the big argument, defense from govt, and tear it down from a broad level, and then ignore the many other lethal threats posed. There have been a couple shootings in recent memory, where citizens quickly resolved the matter far faster than law enforcement could have hoped.

Situations too, where men armed with axes etc. went on killing sprees in other countries and mostly people were unable to respond.

I don't think everyone should bear arms, or even that it should be common, but I do think the right to defend yourself is a pretty inalieable right. If gun ownership can help with that, then by all means...

Guess what these axe wielders would have done if they had access to guns.

The Ukrainians carried guns to prevent Russians from taking over their country.

As someone who moved to the US and finds the gun culture absolutely bonkers, I get the gun culture and why they had it in the constitution.

I don’t get the obsession behind open carry though. What good is people walking around in shopping malls with large semi automatic rifles on their back?

Almost no one actually does this, and most sane gun owners think those people are attention whores at the very best, dangerous nuts at worst.

This is a phenomenon I've head described as "nutpicking." Take the absolute worst of a demographic and then go "why are you all like THAT?"

Claiming US gun culture is all about going to the mall open-carrying a semiauto rifle is on the same level as claiming gay men all prance around in assless chaps and leather. No, they don't, and it shouldn't be any mystery why claiming that is so offends people.

I'm going to plus one psunavy03's comment here. I own firearms, but they're locked in a gun safe. I pull them out every now and again, drive them to a gun range, fire them, clean them and then put them back in the safe.

And I believe this is the experience of the overwhelming majority of gun owners in the US.

It occurs to me I haven't seen any estimates for how many people open carry on a daily basis. (You would think SOMEONE would collect that data SOMEWHERE.)

The states are sort of (in)famous for how many people own firearms, but I assert the number of people who open carry on a daily (or weekly) basis is much smaller than the number of people who own firearms.

I'm going to stop short of accusing nojvek of nutpicking, but encourage them to look around. The stats I've seen are that one in three Americans owns a firearm. If you were walking around and one out of three people were open carrying... well... I think that would be a little unusual unless you were in a gun show or at a shooting range.

Gun-culture in America can be weird, but it's often portrayed as being weirder than it actually is.

[Edit: also. how did we go from cable modems to guns so quickly?]

I only mention because when I was in Texas for the first time in my life, when I entered Target for shopping in Houston area, I saw 4 men walking in with big guns strapped to their back.

I was kind of freaked out but everyone else operated as if it was normal.

I found that pretty jarring. Was only there for a few days but almost everyday I saw someone with a gun on them on the streets.

Yes my sample size is low, but it’s still a strong memory in my mind.

Ha ha this story was never about modems. It is about corporations, government and justice system.

>> Almost no one actually does this

More to the point, none of the few nutjobs who insist on doing this has ever actually carried out a mass shooting. At least not to my knowledge. Generally, if you find yourself around someone who's carrying openly, you can be sure you're less likely to be shot than you would be just walking around a random mall by yourself.

I always thought it had more to do with a sense of personal agency than reasoned expectation of using a firearm to protect myself (or someone around me) from harm.

Firearms can, in many situations, allow you to enforce your will over that of other people who may be intent on harming you or others.

The thing I never quite understood is why so many of us believe they'll encounter those situations walking to train station in the urban core.

So in one sense, I think I can understand the thinking behind it but at the same time think people are mistaken for how often you'll need to shoot someone while walking home in the city or in the burbs.

That being said... I worked part time as an agent for a bail bondsman to pay for college and frequently carried large sums of cash with me through bad neighborhoods. I open carried with the approval of the sheriff's office and municipal police departments largely as a reminder that I could shoot back. But I never had to. The last person a potential criminal wants to shoot at is their bail bondsman... I never drew, aimed or fired my firearm in two years of working that job. In many ways I think it was like part of a "costume" that communicated I had the weight of social convention on my side.

@nojvek -- also... are you seeing people in shopping malls open carrying or are you seeing news articles on TV or online talking about people in shopping malls open carrying? Also, my personal experience is you're MUCH more likely to see someone open carrying at the feed store in the rural parts of the country than at a proper shopping mall in the urban core. (I don't have enough experience with the burbs to render an opinion.) Though there are places in the exurbs and rural America where you probably want to have a firearm to defend yourself against animals or people with foul intent.

I saw in person. It wasn’t in the city city though, was in one of the suburban malls.

Are you seriously saying that gun-culture is "not really that bad", because the people at greatest risk of being shot are schoolkids?

Yes I know. But being exposed to threatening situations with firearms so often would not leave me unaffected.

I just watched someone do a sale of a fully loaded glock for a zip during a smoke sesh. Loaded straight into fairly skinny jeans without checking the safety. Bear in mind that handguns are by far the largest contributors to domestic gun-related homicide (intentional and unintentional) and that most gun control safety targets "assault rifles" and other scary shapes. I don't think this is a nightmare we can exit any time in the near future even in the most ideal scenario.

About ten years ago, i was buying weed from a cop (i got the hookup through his highschool friend). He bragged that every one of the ten or so AR15s on the wall in his bedroom over his gravity bong and below the bullet holes was registered to a different person. Why he thought that might have interested or impressed me is something I still try to puzzle out on late nights.

Interestingly, same city for both events.

"Registered to a different person" -- for the most part, guns are not registered in the USA. Was this in a state or city with a registry for AR-15s?

"Loaded straight into fairly skinny jeans without checking the safety." -- Glocks do not have safeties.

The idea with most newer striker-fired pistols, like the Glock, is that the gun goes in a hard-sided (molded nylon or kydex) holster. If it's not in the holster, it's ready to fire. If that is not safe in the situation you are in, put it back in the holster.

Rifles, shotguns, &c, are never holstered; so if it is time to fire the weapon, you deactivate the safety; otherwise, it is left on safe. Because pistols have the extra step of being holstered, it turns out be work well in practice not to have the intermediate unholstered-but-safe step.

> "Registered to a different person" -- for the most part, guns are not registered in the USA. Was this in a state or city with a registry for AR-15s?

Handguns are registered to a tiny degree. The NICS checks records may be kept only on paper, and are kept by the gun dealer until they close business. Then the BATFE or a related govt. office gets them. By order of congress, this office is not allowed to computerize.

In some states and in some cities, handguns are registered; but in most states, they are not registered to any degree.

A registry connects a particular gun -- a particular serial number -- to a particular person. A NICS check doesn't do that -- it's a criminal background check. Just because you have a NICS check, it doesn't mean you bought any particular gun. You could pass the background check and then decide you don't want the gun after all.

You may be referring to a Form 4473 -- the DRoS (Dealer Record of Sale) -- which does record which person received which gun (with serial number) -- and all licensed dealers maintain these records, for all guns they sell (not just handguns). These records form a sort of a search tree, since the manufacturer records which wholesaler the serial number went to the, the wholesaler records the retailer and the retailer records the end user. These records are useful in regulating the traffic in arms; but the decentralized nature of them means that the government can not go on fishing expeditions -- can not just go out and query the database and see what looks interesting today.

Here's how the DRoS are used in regulating the arms trade. Say police come across a big box of guns from Colt. They can go to Colt with a suitable warrant and say, hey, where did these go to? And then go to the wholesaler, on down the tree. It turns out this information is often sufficient to localize shady gun dealers who are trying to sell to the mob, the cartels, &c.

Cash person to person transfers are either still currently legal, or were currently legal until very recently.

Gifts and other private transfers, including occasional cash transfers, are still legal in most states and will be legal for the foreseeable future.

However, some states have banned private transfers of handguns or of all guns. This means, in practice, that people must perform the transfer through licensed dealers.

It is illegal in the United States to be in the firearms business without a license. It is legal for private people to transfer firearms to one another without filling out a 4473. So on the one hand, we have the business of selling guns and filling out 4473s and maintaining records according to the ATF's rules, and the majority of transfers of guns take place according to these rules; and on the other, we have people who give a gun to their son or daughter as a birthday present, or sell a few guns they no longer use. In the middle, we have a grey area -- people who sell a few guns every year, &c. Occasionally, people in the grey area get caught; and it's not a good place to be in; so people who occasionally sell guns but have no interest in being in the firearms business will actually transfer through a licensed dealer (the seller transfers to the dealer, who then transfers to the buyer, charging a nominal fee). For example, when people sell guns on GunBroker.com, they almost always intermediate the transaction through a licensed dealer.

This is what people are talking about when they say "universal background checks" and "the gun show loophole". Now, "the gun show loophole" seems like a completely ridiculous idea. I do not see how progressives can believe it exists; and I do not see how this could possibly occur with any frequency. The ATF knows where the gun shows are. Maybe progressives think the ATF is not going to the gun shows looking for people selling guns without a license? I don't think anyone who knows anything about selling guns believes for one moment that the best place to sell guns illegally is a place, like a gun show, that is literally crawling with cops from agencies at all levels of government (not only to keep an eye on things but also as customers).

I'm less concerned about any tracking (Being paper records, the 4473 is effectively meaningless as a tracking facility) from the 4473 and more concerned about a background check - I'd be perfectly fine for eliminating person to person transfers between individuals without a state license (CPL/CCW, FOID, etc).

Though one of the gripes with NICS is as far as I know it does not fail safe, if a local LE or reporting agency ignores the request or does not process it in a timely manner, the person may get a false pass.

I'm not sure what people hope to accomplish, by "...eliminating person to person transfers between individuals without a state license (CPL/CCW, FOID, etc)." and similar policies. It would cut down on the number of person-to-person transfers, but so what? Person-to-person transfers are not a problem in this country -- they don't contribute to anything bad. Many mass shooters actually buy their guns from licensed dealers; many of them commit their attack as their first and last crime, so they have no background to check. Stolen guns are a significant problem, particularly handguns; but stolen guns obviously have no record of their transfer to the criminal.

Regarding NICS, it is supposed to instant -- National Instant Check System -- and it is generally quite fast. The issue is not with an agency ignoring the request but rather with agencies not forwarding the data they are supposed to forward. If it's not in the database when the check is run, the check comes back clean -- most NICS checks complete in a few minutes.

If for some reason a NICS check does not complete in two or three days or something like that, yes, it defaults to open and the person gets their gun. That is how it should be. There must never be a possibility for the government to prevent the trade in arms, either for particular people or for the whole country, simply by delaying things without explanation. Process delays are one of many tools governments abuse. If the data is not in the database, another 2 days is probably not going to get it there. Something has to be done about the agencies that don't forward their data, yes; but opening up an avenue for sideways stuff on the part of the government is not the solution.

In the United States, it is illegal to transfer a firearm to a felon (and probably to all other categories of person who would be denied by NICS) -- this is another reason, one I didn't mention, that most sales brokered by GunBroker go through a licensed dealer. A licensed dealer has access to NICS. A regular person doesn't. If they do a private party transfer and, lo and behold, the person they transfer to is a felon, they are in big trouble. They would rather not be in trouble so they delegate to the dealer to handle the transfer.

Dealers maintain none-paper records, too -- as do manufacturers. They have DRoS systems which are electronic. This makes it easy for them to provide data to the ATF when a suitable warrant is presented. What prevents the data from being a resource for government fishing expeditions? It's two things:

* The ATF is formally forbidden from centralizing the data in a big data warehouse -- it is technically against the law to maintain a federal gun registry.

* It is legal to transfer guns, albeit only in special circumstances, outside the system.

These two things together prevent the available information being used for a fishing expedition. Firstly, the government is not allowed to assemble the data; and secondly, the available data is imperfect -- it is not proof that a particular person owns a particular gun or even any guns.

The way this data works, it's not a big problem for combatting the illegal traffic in arms. A large part of that is identifying where, exactly, the arms exited the formal arms business and entered the black market. The data is perfectly suitable for that.

The data can't be used to show that this or that person definitely has this or that gun; and it can't be used to show which people have which guns, or how many people have more than ten, or anything like that. That is a good thing. Those are guns held by private citizens; they are private people, it's their private business.

Gun registries are not of much use for solving crimes related to guns. Criminals don't use leave behind guns that can be traced to them; and if a criminal is apprehended with a gun that may have been used in a crime, the gun has to be tied to the crime through physical evidence -- powder residue and stuff like that. It's not like there's some serial number at the scene of the crime that can be used to find the gun somehow!

Do you care more about mass shootings or average day to day gun crime?

They have different sources (one, poor access to mental healthcare, the other, poverty) and probably need different solutions too. I personally dont care as much about mass shootings, because in the grand scheme of gun crimes, lots less die. Nevermind Suicide, which is just access to mental healthcare.

I'm really interested in making poor communities safer, and reducing the transactions in illegal guns - but tbh, thats like trying to bail out a rowboat with a thimble - and without dealing with the underlying causes of gun crime folks debating in this space are effectively arguing about what color a building ought to be, while its also actively on fire.

In the end, I think everyone who buys a gun should have to go thru the same process, and should undergo a background check, and that a fail dangerous system is bad - now how we go about fixing that issue? thats another question entirely.

I'm not sure how you think the remedy you're proposing -- "I think everyone who buys a gun should have to go thru the same process, and should undergo a background check, and that a fail dangerous system is bad" -- is actually connected to the problem you're trying to solve. Most of the supply of guns used in crime is stolen guns -- it's not guns purchased legally from private people.

Private people, although they have the right to do so, don't generally transfer guns directly to strangers, because of the possibility of criminal prosecution for transfer to a prohibited person.

There are some improvements we can make to NICS -- but they all have to do with making sure the data is actually there.

https://www.stlpr.org/government-politics-issues/2022-04-29/...

Keep in mind that, in the absence of data indicating a conviction, a person is just going to get cleared in a few minutes. NICS checks basically never take even an hour, let alone a day; the time limit of three days is there to prevent the relevant agencies from engaging in malicious delays.

You have to have time limits like that for most government procedures; and we can't presume, in the absence of evidence, that someone should be denied. You are suggesting we give up something fundamental and general -- the presumption of innocence -- when you argue that NICS should default to closed.

> "Registered to a different person" -- for the most part, guns are not registered in the USA. Was this in a state or city with a registry for AR-15s?

I interpreted this as the cop having simply stolen the guns from their registered owners through some sort of search or seizure process.

There would be no "registered owners" in most jurisdictions.

My nightly bedside weapon is a Beretta 92 with the safety decocker. I know a lot of people think it's silly to have a safety on that gun, but I want to be awake enough to think about it twice if I wake up in the middle of the night.

There are some good things about safeties -- service pistols had them for decades. There didn't used to be nylon holsters, after all.

Another thing that people do is set up a holster behind the headboard or somewhere else where they know to get at it.

I have a friend who has a gun safe under his nightstand—not intended for quick use, but still easy to access.

I get night terrors and sleep walk, so I'd likely end up dead of I had a weapon by my bedside.

You can get a paintball gun or air soft and experiment!

Maybe it would help with the sleep terrors, maybe it would result in a rainbow colored cat.

I'm not sure about AR15s, but the serial number on the slide of a handgun is associated at (legal, storefront) purchase with a name and (I think) address. I presumed that was what was implied as registration. I assumed this was true for some part of the AR15 (maybe the receiver?) but I don't actually know for sure.

There are loopholes, but there are reasons to prefer a gun that was last purchased under someone else's name, ideally someone you don't know at all.

Regardless, the thing I found interesting was the COP's perception of the value of the guns.

This is the form 4473 -- the dealer has a record of all sales that they've made. However, you could certainly sell the gun to someone else, through a different dealer. That doesn't make the old 4473 invalid -- it records a sale that actually occurred -- but it does mean the 4473s are not functionally a registry.

There is no safety to check on a glock.

Good to know, thank you. Is this true for all Glock models?

The glock safety is on the back of the grip?

There are some pistols that have these "grip safeties" -- like 1911s -- but Glocks do not have them.

The person holding the Glock?

Because a Glock doesn't have a safety lever. It's built into the trigger mechanism.

> It's built into the trigger mechanism.

What, so pressing the trigger automatically disengages the safety? As a non-gun-person that seems like an insane design decision.

It is probably better to say that Glocks have no safety. This is actually quite safe in practice because pistols are holstered in common use -- this makes them very different from rifles, shotguns, &c. With a pistol safety, there is an intermediate, "unholstered-but-on-safe" state that doesn't exist with rifles. This turns out to be dangerous in practice because people can think the pistol is on safe when it isn't; or think it is ready to fire when they need it to and, lo and behold, it's not. It turns out to be safer in practice to just assume the gun is shootable when it's out of the holster -- and if that's not safe enough for the situation you're in, put it back in the holster!

Glocks have a system that is systems called "safe action" where there is a system of internal locks that prevents the weapon from firing in situations where the gun is dropped, hit by a car, struck from the side, &c -- this is not really what most people are thinking of when they think of a safety. It turns out to be very important in practice, though. If a police car gets hit by another car and the guns go off that's going to be a bad day for everyone.

>This turns out to be dangerous in practice because people can think the pistol is on safe when it isn't

One of the golden rules of gun safety is to not point a gun at something you do not intend to kill (the rule usually uses "destroy" because gun culture loves playing down the danger of guns) so if this is actually an issue then responsible gun owners are not as common as they should be.

What do you think "actually an issue" means in this context?

For the most part, the development of striker fired pistols and duty holsters was driven by police and military use; these are contexts where a person draws a pistol several times a day (on some days) and hundreds or thousands of times a year. General process safety concerns -- like reducing the number of "safe" states that people have to think about -- do matter in that context.

There were some cases of officers shooting through the floor of their cruiser because the seatbelt tang somehow could get inside one brand of holster and pull the trigger.

It does seem like the right balance hasn't been found yet.

Which brand? What is the "tang" of a seatbelt? It us hard for me to imagine a seatbelt buckle actually getting into a holster, but I would like to learn more about this.

When I read about it, I couldn't understand it either. They didn't explain precisely, but IIRC, it was a pistol with a tactical light, which explains why there might be more space that usual. I couldn't find the particular incident, however.

This sort of thing is unfortunately somewhat common:

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/sig-sauer-p320-upgrade-safe...

https://safariland.com/pages/service-bulletins

The sig p320 thing isn't about safeties at all but a mechanical design flaw that the company has remedied with a recall. And that safariland link just seems like safariland is a terrible manufacturer of holsters.

If this is the one I’m thinking of it was pretty clear that there was a police department that was incompetent and blaming negligent discharges on the firearm instead of on true officers.

Maybe, but all those police departments were there before...and the Glocks didn't ND.

>What, so [pulling] the trigger automatically disengages the safety?

Correct. There's a few other internal safeties to help ensure it doesn't go off unless someone is pulling the trigger and (hopefully) intending to fire.

It's still drop safe and not going to go off by itself, but if you fire it (and there's a round in the chamber), it's going off.

>As a non-gun-person that seems like an insane design decision

There's certainly tradeoffs. It's simpler and you're not going to accidentally forget to disengage a safety at the worst possible time (when you actually need to be using a gun), but it does increase the risk when improperly handling the firearm which is a risk not everyone is cool with for obvious reasons (and even experienced operators (incl. Law Enforcement being generous, which largely carry Glocks) are human and can make mistakes).

The glock mechanism of safeties is (statistically) rather safe though being simple enough:

https://crimefictionbook.com/2016/02/04/do-glocks-have-safet...

But (as I learned only recently) there are guns around with actually no "proper" safety and one model at least is particularly prone to fire accidentally:

https://www.thetrace.org/2023/04/sig-sauer-p320-upgrade-safe...

Yeah that one has been rather concerning. In theory you follow all the firearm safety rules (especially watching where you're pointing) and if something goes haywire things turn out relatively fine, but I certainly wouldn't be comfortable using one personally.

A lot of the issues in general seem to come about around holstering which is one of the situations where you're most likely to be "breaking" the rules pointing towards yourself, certainly not ideal.

Reholstering is one of the stronger objective arguments for a safety, but that still assumes the safeties themselves are properly designed.

> you're not going to accidentally forget to disengage a safety at the worst possible time

That's much better than the opposite problem: forgetting to engage the safety and accidentally discharging.

> it does increase the risk when improperly handling the firearm

I just feel like having to toggle a switch before killing a man is the least you can do to avoid accidents.

>That's much better than the opposite problem: forgetting to engage the safety and accidentally discharging.

If you're following the firearm safety rules you're not pointed at anything/anybody you don't wish to destroy so it's a moot point. (yourself included, though at least in that case nobody else was harmed needlessly)

A safety lockout (or lacktherof) shouldn't be a factor in your pointing of a gun at someone and pulling the trigger.

>I just feel like having to toggle a switch before killing a man is the least you can do to avoid accidents.

It's extremely rare for someone who isn't being extremely negligent to be in a position where they could "accidently" kill someone.

Could a safety prevent such an occurrence? It's very well possible and that might be a reason to prefer a firearm with sufficient safeties that increases your comfort.

On the other hand some people decided that they're cautious enough and by in large most people avoid accidents and practice good safety practices to avoid harm should one happen.

There's trade offs either way, but ultimately it's preference.

>On the other hand some people decided that they're cautious enough and by in large most people avoid accidents and practice good safety practices to avoid harm should one happen.

ok, so the group "most people using firearms" and the group "most people using websites" do not significantly overlap is what I'm hearing?

I'm aware of firearm safety rules and all that. That's not my problem with this. My problem is that the safety on a firearm is part of a defense-in-depth type situation. Removing the safety switch removes a layer of that defense. I hope I don't need to explain why that's a bad thing on this forum.

There’s also the “if you ever pull the trigger in a situation where the safety keeps it from firing, you are doing something horribly wrong”. People often treat the safety as a “gun off” switch when it should never be considered that. I understand the Glock philosophy - no gun is “safe” until you’ve personally verified that there is no ammunition in it at all, and even then it should be treated as if it is loaded.

Relying on a safety to keep it “safe” is usually the first step in ventilation of the floor or ceiling.

I invite you to re-read my previous comment and meditate some on what "defense in depth" means. Of course you're not supposed to rely on the safety, but that doesn't mean it should be removed. The entire point of defense in depth is to construct things in such a manner where a single mistake is not enough to cause trouble.

It depends on what the purpose of the firearm is for.

Play-guns for the shooting range? Sure, add fifty safeties if you want.

But guns are used for other purposes, and there is a failure mode where the person holding the weapon intended to fire and end someone's life and the gun fails to do so because the safety was still engaged.

Many things are purposely designed "fail-safe" but some things are designed to "fail deadly" for very good reasons.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the negligent discharges that can be categorized as "I thought the safety was on and was pulling the trigger like a moron" is much higher than "I knew the gun only had a grip/trigger safety and was pulling the trigger like a moron".

It isn't that simple. Most handguns actually have lots of "safeties" meant to ensure that it only goes off when held/pointed and the trigger is pulled. Triggers are also not like controller buttons. They generally require significant force to actually pull. No modern handgun should fire if shaken or dropped. Even guns from 100+ year ago (Colt 1911) have redundant safety features to protect against mishandling.

The 1911A1 is a marvel of engineering and anyone remotely interested in technology at all should study the design and its implications.

With a modern holster there is no need for an additional safety. Keep gun in holster, holster protects trigger. If you really need a gun and be ready to fire and only then: get gun out of holster.

He can do 10 separate shootings and the gun and bullets would not be immediately traceable back to him?

When I worked at an ISP in the 90s the amount of threats and verbal abuse from customers was wild.

One guy who ran a event ticket operation (selling tickets to events) we installed a T1 for the phone company wouldn't go out unless they could bring a security guard. The same guy once came to our office and waited outside in the parking lot and followed one of my coworkers home demanding that she fix his internet. Her father came out and confronted him and he took off.

Another time someone was mad that his address didn't qualify for DSL because "the man was keeping him down from getting fast internet".

Later in life I worked at the phone company and linemen told me stories about being high on a pole in rough neighborhoods and being accosted by folks on the ground brandishing pistols demanding to know whose phone line they were tapping (they tried to explain that stuff is done remotely but they didn't understand).

> "the man was keeping him down from getting fast internet".

as a non-american... who is supposed do be "the man" ?

Any person in authority. In the abstract, the government or big business.

I guess it really did depend on the mood and demeanor of whatever technician got sent out on a given day.

Back in those same years, it was a painful, nonstop pendulum swing every month-or-two, between a) cripplingly unusable internet, and b) working Internet but with absolutely every channel unlocked for free.

Everytime something happened that required a technician to come out while it was in state "b", it always triggered a stern talking to to teenage-me from a tech and them putting the filter back on and ruining the Internet again until finally the next time another tech presumably couldn't fix it without again removing the filter. I frequently had successive visits that left me stranded in state "a".

Comcast, man.

The invisible hand of the free market has clearly worked to perfection.

Whatever else you think on these topics, government-enforced utility monopolies aren't the free market.

The phrase "free market" comes from Adam Smith who used it to describe "markets free from rent-seeking behaviour." So careful there, free markets may not be what you think either.

> Whatever else you think on these topics, government-enforced utility monopolies aren't the free market.

They tried non-monopoly power and wireline phone markets in their early history and they didn't work.

A lot of times a company would go bankrupt, but their wires would be on the poles and would degrade to the point of falling apart and dangling, which would then make contact with a live wire and folks would get electrocuted when they touched it.

In fairness, this would be in the times before common usage. Also, this totally happens in the current state too as major companies buy the little guys up and then do little to actually care for the lines.

It generally was never their TVs.

It was the neutral to their house failing and using the cable line shield and it's associated grounds as a neutral.

Most of this story is horrific and ...funny. You should write a screenplay.

We had free HBO in my house in the early 90s because the cable guy apparently just decided to let us have it. I never understood how that worked.

A small in-line filter

Or really the lack of a small in-line filter. Nobody at the head end knows if a house is getting more channels than they paid for until an audit years later turns up a discrepancy. At that point you don't really know if it was the homeowner doing it or a mistake by a technician so all you can do is install the filter and watch that house for convenient mistakes from that point on.

I met an at&t installer who was intercepted by law reinforcement who wan'ted him to go into a house wearing a wire.

A very long time ago I had internet (but not cable tv service) with Comcast. It was generally mediocre reliability, but it's the only option we had. At some point, the service just up and went out entirely.

For approximately two months, we had absolutely zero internet service, while Comcast continued to collect our monthly fees. We kept calling, and they kept sending out tech after tech. I don't recall what the final tech fixed, but they complained that all of the previous techs should have spotted the issue. We never got reimbursed for those two months of non-service, but we did magically start getting cable tv after the final tech visit. We figured it was their gesture of kindness for the Comcast hell we'd been through.

In 2006 we lived at the end of a wooded street and the lineman told me squirrels would run along the elevated cables and after a couple years they would nick the insulation sufficiently for water to seep in and then suddenly the whole neighborhood would lose IP dialtone for several months while they replaced the cables.

Sometime around 2015, Comcast seemed to get better. I was able to get dual-stack v4/v6 to the house and bandwidth exceeded advertised rates. When I returned their cable modem after buying my own, returning it was zero-drama / no paperwork problems. Also... in 2015, if you got dual-stack, your support calls were handled by a group with better hold times and generally knew more about what was really going on (rather than reading off a script.)

My last experience with Lumen was pretty horrific. Worse than any problems I ever had with Comcast (including the time we didn't have internet service for 3 months.)

It's very strange to hear myself say this, but I now have a generally positive opinion of Comcast.

Only about 1 out of 5 techs actually have any idea what they are doing at these cable internet providers. It's great because the company doesn't actually care whether the techs do their job or not because they will bill regardless, and as long as you are waiting for a tech to come fix your service, you aren't taking them to court to get it actually fixed.

What the fuck are you going to do about it? Spectrum's ancestor agreed to not offer service in this county so go ahead and switch back to dialup you worthless maggot.

Sounds like a bigger problem with your society than the job.

Now now. Be nice.

I feel you about getting zapped. I visited Catalonia for a month in 2008, and I was trying to help improve OTA reception on my fiancée's TV. She had a roof antenna installed.

Little did I know that the antenna in Europe is actually energized by design (I think I found out later?) and I received several non-damaging but definitely "means business" shocks whilst trying to manipulate the cables.

> Little did I know that the antenna in Europe is actually energized by design (I think I found out later?)

A normal rooftop antenna is not energized. However, if that's in a house, there likely is a power amplifier placed in the line (or, for more fancy setups, a powered splitter box) to make sure every antenna socket can have a TV plugged in without compromising signal integrity.

> the antenna in Europe is actually energized by design

wtf. Wanna drop some links?

I'm not questioning the veracity of your comment, but given the number of comments here (from e.g. non-Americans) expressing surprise or disgust at the seeming frequent and cavalier use of firearms, I think it should be pointed out that it is missing some details that are highly relevant.

1. Pointing a firearm, AR-15 or otherwise, at the cable guy (or anyone else) in a threatening way is a felony in all 50 states, just like in Europe and elsewhere. Using threat of force to prevent a person from leaving is an additional felony (kidnapping) in all 50 states, just like in Europe. I assume you called the police as soon as you got out of there and the perpetrator went to prison for many years? You left that part out, and it's important to stress because non-Americans seem to be getting an erroneous or exaggerated perception of everyday life in the USA.

2. A nitpick, but the firearm in question likely wasn't an AR-15 as "around then" was midway through the valid time frame of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban [1] and while a limited number of pre-ban AR-15s were grandfathered in, they were rare and very expensive. The floodgates opened after its sunset in 2004, after which they became very popular, unlike before the ban.

3. "Pulling a gun on" the cable guy, or shooting the cable guy and "leaving to die up a pole," like all murders, is a felony in all 50 states. You made the right decision to leave such a dangerous job, I feel awful for all your colleagues, and I do hope that the perpetrators did a long time behind bars.

4. Fortunately, that spate of violence seems to have been localized in both space and time: to the best of my knowledge, while such incidents do occur, they're rare. I don't work in the industry, I know several people who do (for many years), and they've told me that they've never had anything like that happen, the main problem they encounter is peoples' hostile dogs in the yard/house. A web search turns up a few incidents, but not many considering how many cable installations take place in America each year. Also, keep in mind that it goes both ways: sometimes the cable guy attacks the customer (and there's no need for a gun, e.g. [2]).

5. "People's shitty TVs backfeeding electricity into the cable line" My guess is, it's not shitty TVs, but rather faulty wiring in the user's house (ground loop, etc.). Anyone who's performed with enough PA systems has had the experience of grabbing the mic and getting a 110 VAC shock.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban

[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2022/0...

>I'm not questioning the veracity of your comment, but...

Given your explanation, maybe you should question the veracity of his comment.

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