DuskStar

What if pulling the lever has a 50 percent chance of reducing deaths, but always eliminates societal cohesion and trust?

> They used the work of others to get to the result.

Should everyone go back to assembly on bare metal, then?

$20 device is illegal to import or possess for 99% of Americans, but a lot of criminals have them anyways. (And essentially no otherwise law abiding Americans do) You should support more gun laws to make other things besides this illegal too!

I'm sorry, but a budget deficit of 9.6% of GDP isn't exactly a healthy level either.

Sometimes, specific terms matter. Federal law is one of those times. Especially gun law, because getting it wrong means the ATF shoots your dog and you go to club fed.

The second one is an "Assault Weapon", not Rifle. This is why it was called the Assault Weapons Ban.

See [0], "a United States federal law which included a prohibition on the manufacture for civilian use of certain semi-automatic firearms that were defined as assault weapons".

"The Act prohibited the manufacture, transfer, or possession of "semiautomatic assault weapons," as defined by the Act."

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban

And such lists have very often led to further restrictions / confiscation in other countries, so it's not exactly a baseless fear.

You do not in fact need a driver's license to purchase/own/operate a motor vehicle in the USA - only to use public roads. (And that's just talking about "by law" - "in practice" people drive with no license or with a suspended license far too often here)

Because trusting the government to have the power to determine who gets to defend themselves means that African Americans in the post-civil-war south, and Jews in 1930s Germany, don't get to defend themselves.

People keep saying that the US is on the verge of being a fascist white supremacist state - why do you want to give that state the right to choose who gets guns?

Edit: and in more immediately practical consequences, because gun-hostile governments have a history of publicly leaking the list of people who own guns.

But you just completely ignored what I wrote, which was that a policy's name may be viewed differently than that policy's implementation. And then you said there's no objections to red flag laws! Did you even read my comment?

But calling an AR-15 a "military assault rifle" is probably enough evidence that you don't know what you're talking about, anyways. ('Assault Rifle' is a term of art and the vast vast majority of AR-15s do not qualify - the legal ones that do qualify have literally never been used in violent crimes in the US, because they are worth tens of thousands of dollars and machine guns (a superset of assault rifles) have had universal background checks since the 1920s)

My point was that one of their key examples of "the elites are wrong on what public opinion is" was a subject where "public opinion" is extremely dependent on wording, and that they themselves do not seem to realize this, and it's plausible that the elites might have a better view of the public than these polls do.

Some polls are built to gather information, others are built to advance a cause.

A lot of gun restrictions can be very different as presented versus how they are in practice. Especially when it comes to the sort of "edge cases" that don't actually end up being edge cases.

Universal background checks sound like common sense to a lot of people, until it's pointed out that they mean that they suicidal person can't give their guns to a friend for safekeeping - or let a buddy borrow a hunting rifle for the weekend. (It also means implementing a national gun registry to actually enforce anything, and registries have led to confiscation too many times for comfort)

Ditto with red flag laws - everyone wants to let the police take the guns away from the next school shooter, but a lot of people are justifiably wary that the police will just take guns from "every black man", "everyone that criticizes the local police department" or even just "absolutely everyone". (Or that potential home invaders will do this to their victim before invading) All Cops Are Bastards, but we can trust them to not abuse new powers over guns?

So when the actual wording of the policy that gets shorthanded as "red flag laws" or "universal background checks" makes it to a referendum, you can see some of that come into play.

> Think also about gun control, which we know is much more popular with the public than elites often think it is. One of the things that we’re seeing recently in American politics is an effort by activist groups to correct misperceptions about what the public does think to change the nature of the conversation in Washington.

This bit right here made me trust the article a LOT less. Poll responses on Gun Control are very highly dependent on wording and how much information is provided.

For instance, people might support "universal background checks", but oppose "you cannot legally loan a rifle to your brother for a hunting trip". Or they'll support "red flag laws", but balk at "laws that let police take anyone's guns on the basis of an anonymous complaint". Same policy, different presentation.

Another example in a different field is "how much should the rich pay in income taxes?", where people will answer "more than they are now" (instead of "less" or "the same") but if asked to pick a percentage they'll choose one lower than current rates.

Your definition of "civilized" seems to be "places gun control worked", and excludes most of Central and South America.

Like the cops at our most recent school shooting in Texas, you mean?

Seems like they already hesitate to act.

Indeed, but we should almost certainly care more about total homicide than gun violence (which is 2/3rds suicide, 1/3rd gun homicide).

For a while, the biggest mastodon instances were japanese, (and potentially still are), and had a different approach to lolicon.

https://medium.com/@EthanZ/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reas...

If you use your free speech to say to a project veritas "operative" that there's no way they're a project veritas operative, you probably deserve to get fired for sheer stupidity at the very least.

The Navy is currently deploying 100kW-class solid state lasers. It's taken a while, but the dream of laser AA is coming!

> It’s impossible to rate high on all those issues and not be “stable” in any meaningful sense.

However, a dictatorship can ALSO be stable - just look at North Korea. Democracy is not the only way to achieve stability.

I think broadwell was a process shift, not a microarchitecture shift.

Maybe many people are working multiple jobs?

So your jobs each pay X, but your income is 2X.

Mass shootings in areas with strict gun control, don't forget that part!

Lithium is light. This means that it generally floats to the top of things. This means that it is not a good candidate for asteroid mining, because while it has floated to the surface of the Earth over the course of many many many years, it has not floated to the surface of asteroids.

This is also why things like gold or platinum are good to mine from asteroids, because they have not had the opportunity to sink to the core of those asteroids like they did on Earth. (And getting to the core of an asteroid is a significantly more reasonable proposition than getting to the core of the earth)

This depends. Do you want someone to be able to take care of you after you retire? Medical care, that sort of thing?

If so, that means that you need people. People younger than you. People with some sort of societal attachment to you that results in them not just tossing your entire generation into a metaphorical woodchipper, because taking care of old people is a ton of work.

The traditional way to ensure that such a population of younger people exists has been to have children. Importing immigrants might solve the "people younger than you" side of things, but it is yet to be determined if it adequately solves the "societal attachment" side of things.

I think it's ironic that you complain about robber barons preventing the modern equivalent to libraries when Andrew Carnegie built 2000 public libraries in the US alone.

I bet the Vatican is one.

Should we apply the same standards to things like BLM or Moms Demand Action?

Those standards being "billionaires donated, therefore illegitimate" as far as I can tell.

Why does everyone always get this backwards? Section 230 is what allows moderation without assuming liability for the content. Completely unmoderated forums do not require section 230. Moderated forums do.

Unfortunately, people tend to build nuke magnets in places that they are fine with nukes landing. Kansas, South Dakota, Idaho...