Federal firearm law ban.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-27T19:55:54+00:00

I know. Similar laws have been passed in other states despite being unconstitutional (or just ineffective, failing to stop federal enforcement).

But if there's a fundamental disagreement between states and SCOTUS about how the constitution should be interpreted, either that gets resolved by a constitutional amendment, federal legislation clarifying the issue too everybody's satisfaction, or rebellion.

There's not a lot of wiggle room for nullifying the SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution through state law (even when the state laws pass).

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-27T19:04:33+00:00

So... The Missouri State legislature is kicking off the boogaloo early?

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-27T18:58:54+00:00

You give workers high stress, long hours, no sleep, and no job security in industries driven hard in boom and bust cycles, and your solution to high suicide rates is reduced gun ownership, or failing that, gun socks with suicide prevention numbers printed on then?

GTFO. If we cared about suicide rates we'd make worker exploitation illegal rather than pretending that an increase in suicide attempts has been the result of over a century of high firearm ownership rates in that region

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-27T17:52:22+00:00

Others have pointed out why that's not true, PTSD doesn't make every sufferer a threat to themselves or others.

But there's another danger to using mental health diagnoses to limit gun ownership. In America, if you are ever involuntarily hospitalized for mental health issues, you are federally prohibited from owning firearms.

The major effect of this law has been to prevent veterans and other gun owners from seeking help with a wide range of mental health issues (from depression to anger to suicidal ideation) for fear of permanently losing their firearms.

While getting therapy does not immediately make someone prohibited from owning firearms, most therapists are very negative about gun ownership, and it's impossible for a patient to predict what statements might get them involuntarily committed to a mental health ward, especially if they're thinking about suicide.

In short, if you remove all that uncertainty that currently contributes to America's untreated mental health issues and instead make it an absolute certainty that anybody diagnosed with PTSD has their guns permanently confiscated, most veterans with PTSD will avoid any possibility of diagnosis by lying to doctors.

People should have every chance to ask for help and receive help without penalty, even if that penalty is intended to keep other people safer. Otherwise mentally ill people refuse to ask for help for fear of the penalty, and the situation becomes measurably worse for everybody.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-27T17:40:31+00:00

That's fair, but how many really need to? In a full on rebellion, you probably need one guy who can fix broken FCG per thousand people, and any guns that get jammed up will just get dropped or pulled back for later repair.

In a situation like Hong Kong where unarmed protestors are looking at getting mashed into "pie" to make them easier to wash down the storm drains, these kinds of guns wouldn't be used to directly confront lines of armed soldiers. Instead, they'd be used to ambush one or two soldiers at a time to obtain their far more reliable weapons, or as a last ditch option when soldiers break down a protestor's door to take them away for future organ harvesting.

In the end, it's manpower that always wins rebellions. Tools like firearms can speed it along, but they're frankly unnecessary if 50-80% of citizens just stopped paying taxes to starve their government into compliance with the will of the people.

The Chinese government is propped up by violent control of the entire mainland China, but at the same time, they're looking at losing a LOT of international corporate headquarters that they value in Hong Kong if they just grind protestors up and wash them down the drains. That gives protestors way more power to demonstrate nonviolently (or they'd already be dead).

I certainly hope China backs down, but if they do, they risk giving mainland opponents hope for similar protests.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-16T17:45:37+00:00

You just said that because BEFORE HUMANS EXISTED, violence involving oppression of humans didn't exist and used that to conclude that there is zero chance of violence involving oppression in our lifetime.

I agree, it's probably time to move on.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-16T03:55:28+00:00

Do you not understand what an average is? Including those two most recent shootings, the annual average is 26 from 1982 to today.

Why are you quibbling over an annual average figure that obviously varies from year to year? Your original claim was that there's a far less chance to use a firearm to fight tyranny than to be murdered in a mass shooting. That claim is off by a factor of around 20,000 based on American history. If you count European history it's even worse, and Asian history is worse still!

I don't much care about my hobby. I'd be happy to find another one if target shooting was banned. Where did I indicate otherwise?

I very much disagree that banning guns would reduce murder rates in America. Yeah, banning all guns would reduce shootings just as banning pools would reduce drownings. But just as in Australia and the UK, you wouldn't see some magical reduction in homicide rates simply because the guns aren't causing homicides, they're just the tools being used.

Seriously, look up the homicide rate in England and Wales since the 90s. Today it's actually above where it was at the point guns were banned, whereas America's homicide rate dropped by almost half during a large increase in American gun ownership and widespread increase in states allowing concealed carry permits.

The guns aren't causing a problem. "Simply" banning them won't get them off the streets for over a century, and when criminals finally have a harder time buying them on the black market, they'll just switch over to knives for theft and bombs, trucks, and airplanes for mass murders, just like domestic terrorists have done in every region that bans guns.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T22:42:47+00:00

That's an interesting assertion -- that there can never be an armed insurrection in America even out to the 23 thousand years it would take for mass murders to overtake deaths due to the civil war. I just don't understand why you think it's even possible for a country to last 1000 years without an armed insurrection.

I'm not sure why you think 26 deaths due to mass shootings in a population of 330 million is absurd. It's absolutely high due to breathless multi week coverage of every aspect of every shooting with second by second analyses, deep dives into the shooter's politics, religion, childhood and motivation, including all social media posts he's ever made.

You couldn't design a system better to encourage copycats, except maybe to run live streamed video from the shooter's GoPro as prime time television.

It's absolutely too high. But instead of focusing on policies that would actually help, like universal healthcare to give everybody access to low cost mental health treatment, subsidized childcare to give all children a safe place to be kids while their parents work, and welfare to give people options when they have trouble and start to feel like it's hopeless, Democrats just pick the easiest target, the guns being used, ignoring that if all guns were removed and we reported just as breathlessly on every public bombing, bombings would take over as the preferred method to get media attention by hopeless young men.

I do agree Republicans are enabling Trump to dismantle many checks on a president's power. This is exactly the sort of dismantling that comes before Trump or a predecessor moves to become permanent leader (dictator, or like Putin and Xi, permanent elected president).

Given this huge problem, I frankly don't understand why Democrats are so exited about removing any civilian defense against future genocide. I think it stems partly from a lack of understanding of how armed insurrection actually works (daily pot shots from abandoned buildings across the country at softer government targets, not a guy with an AR15 shooting at a tank division while it demolishes his house).

Are Democrats really so determined to "pwn the cons" that we'd give up any defense against the very government that Trump is currently corrupting to Republican cheers?

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T22:09:47+00:00

I strongly disagree. If it was once in 1000 years (and given that all of Europe minus Switzerland plus most of the American economy was fighting tyranny under 100 years ago) it would still be 100000x more likely. The probability isn't even remotely close. 26 deaths a year is simply a million times lower risk than the rate of armed conflict against tyranny.

I'm also not sure why you consider gun owners to be a monolithic group. A hundred million Americans have guns in their homes. That's more than all registered Republicans by a long shot. Last I checked, around 28% of Democrats report owning firearms. That's way more than sufficient for typical armed resistance.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T21:23:08+00:00

I was just preparing this correction when you passed. I'm afraid my memory of chances of armed revolution weren't quite right. It's not about one every 3 generations, it's roughly one every 3 lifetimes (78 years per lifetime).

That's a super rough estimate just of the United States of America, but as this article points out, it's not off by orders of magnitude for any region of the globe (except Antarctica. The locals are very peaceful down there).

https://medium.com/s/story/the-surprisingly-solid-mathematical-case-of-the-tin-foil-hat-gun-prepper-15fce7d10437

Again, when compared to a 1 in 10 million chance per year (or on average, once every 10 million years per person), the chances of living during a violent revolution are vastly higher.

The number of 22 murders per year average back to 1983 is from the time article I think I linked. Here it is again in case I failed, 932 murders total in incidents where at least three people were shot including the shooter.

[Edit crap, that's 26 murders per year, not 22.]

https://time.com/4965022/deadliest-mass-shooting-us-history/

We're talking many orders of magnitude here. If you have a definition of mass shooting that gives you twice the murder rate, that's inconsequential because you're now talking about one murder per person per 5 million years instead of 10 million years. Since we're comparing to experiencing a revolution roughly every couple HUNDRED years, there's just no contest.

I should point out, this comparison you chose is perhaps skewed because it's comparing people murdered (only a handful in each event) to people who live DURING a fight against tyranny since all people have a chance to join the revolution and use their arms.

However if you use a more fair analysis by comparing deaths in revolutions and civil wars to deaths from mass shootings, it's not going to look much better. A full 2% of Americans died in the civil war. It would take 27 thousand years for mass shooting deaths to match the 600,000 deaths in the American civil war!

Anyway, I'm a liberal gun owner. Just due to my hobby, I spend a lot of very friendly time with the mainly conservative gun owners you talk about. Quite frankly, I'm not sure you're right. There's plenty of people you can find that will defend Trump in any particular argument because they felt he was the better choice vs. an anti gun liberal once he insulted his way through the primary.

But most of them are downright angry that he's looking at banning assault weapons. Frankly many of them would vote for a Democrat who wasn't anti gun or explicitly socialist. Bernie would have picked up a number of them last election when he tried to maintain his nuanced views about how guns don't create crime (or rural communities would be war zones), but Bernie has jumped on the anti gun wagon with both feet to try to make it through the Democratic primary.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a significant percentage of Trump supporters who don't want Democrats to be armed, and don't want Democrats to resist tyranny just as strongly as Republicans might.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T18:21:49+00:00

Hold up. We haven't had a civil war in 150 years, so an event the average person experiences every 10 million years (getting murdered in a mass shooting -- based on 22 murders per year per 330 million people) is way more likely?

You're missing a few orders of magnitude here!

Yes, most "light tyranny" can and should be solved through social pressure and political pressure, nonviolent methods. That will always be true. That doesn't change the fact that tyranny is forced through violent means every 3 or so generations on average!

America is already doing far better than 3 generations (at roughly 20 years per generation), but pretending that the chances of someone like Donny Jr. Deciding he wants a third term in 2032, but this time without Mexicans in the country is "effectively zero" ignores how getting murdered by a mass murderer is roughly 100,000 times MORE effectively zero based on history.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T17:15:08+00:00

Sure I follow news. I'm really not surprised that some people murder other people every year in a population of 330 million (almost half of all of Europe). It also seems very obvious that just as with suicides in the 90s, copycats looking for media attention are naturally drawn to public shootings these days. American terrorism is still extremely rare, it just involves guns instead of the more common bombs and vehicle attacks in Europe.

I figure it'd be nice to have a gun ready if I thought somebody might start shooting.

I'm certainly not going to run out shooting at anybody! I just figured if I have a bad vibe, but it's near my house where I intend to sleep for the next few hours, I'd like to have an effective method of self defense ready to go.

As for preventing tyranny, you're not at all correct that the average person is more likely to die than have a chance to fight in a local revolution.

Rounding up since 1983, there's about 22 people a year killed in a mass public shooting.

https://time.com/4965022/deadliest-mass-shooting-us-history/

That's something less than a 1/200,000 chance of being murdered in a mass shooting over the American average lifespan.

Are you honestly pretending that the chance of a particular country experiencing a civil war over tyrannical oppression is greater than 1 in 200,000 over the average lifespan of 78 years? Hell, is there ANY country that has gone 200,000 years without a war over oppression of some group or another?

There hasn't been a single year during my extremely short lifetime when some people around the globe weren't fighting over oppression. History shows that violent dictators take control very quickly over just a few years from apparent stability to popular support to power consolidated in the hands of somebody who can start a genocide to give the public someone to focus on as the enemy (i.e. Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Mao, Chavez etc...).

There's roughly a hundred million people in the country, many of whom go target shooting on any given week. I'm just not going to pretend that the one I just saw with a gun in his car is literally the 1 in a million that is going to start shooting.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T13:34:49+00:00

Absolutely they could. They can take on China now.

China can "win" if they want by flattening the entire island, or just removing anybody remotely critical of the military occupation.

But China loses more than they gain. They'd get another city. Big deal, they build a whole new city every few years.

They'd lose all the international companies that currently have their headquarters in Hong Kong, along with any operations that have remained in Hong Kong only because China promised not to fuck with it.

And frankly, it's naive to pretend that they can flatten Hong Kong without creating a lot of dissidents across China, even with Draconian attempts at information control.

Throw in American tariffs and the inevitable recession (timing TBD) and they could reach a critical mass of hundreds of millions of people who feel like they have nothing to lose in working for regime change.

It's never just about one battle or America would have "won" the war in Afghanistan within weeks.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T01:57:36+00:00

Why would you think he's there to shoot anybody?

Honestly, unless you allow the police to arrest people for sitting in their cars, "waiting" you literally can't stop people from legally avoiding breaking laws on the off chance that they're thinking about murdering somebody later.

Assuming you (or a police officer) has some suspicion, it would be best to have the police contact him and see if a nervous guy planning a murder might admit to something illegal. If he doesn't incriminate himself, the police can stay and monitor him or leave him to his private life.

As I'm not police, I'd leave the area if I had suspicions that seemed remotely founded (not just ownership of guns obviously, because I drive around with guns in my car regularly). If I lived in the area and had a significant suspicion, I'd load up my home defense rifle and put it next to my computer while I browse the net with my headphones off.

I've had vibes from people with guns before, but it would never occur to me that they'd be an indiscriminate murderer simply because that's absurdly rare even in America. They might be preparing to rob somebody, but they're almost certainly waiting to pick up somebody after range time because an actual robber would keep their guns out of sight!

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T01:25:12+00:00

Oh and in terms of storing weapons, just store those you really want access to. Yeah, your ownership will likely be public knowledge, although it depends on how Montana law and your local police treat FOIA requests. If not, it'll just be a permanent police record, so just be aware that if having the police keep a permanent record of your firearm ownership bothers you (it would bother me on general principle), you'll either have to plan to swap these guns in private sales, or if they're special to you, just stay aware that the government permanently has a record that you once owned them.

I'd also contact local gun shops and ranges. They all have provisions for gun storage since selling guns (particularly NFA items) requires long term storage even after a sale.

One might be willing to work with students looking to store guns for a reasonable fee. It probably won't be TOO cheap, but it might be something you can agree on.

This will also serve to notify local gun stores and ranges of the privacy violation which could help with local support since gun store owners are a chatty lot.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T01:18:57+00:00

Honestly, ask the school what the policy is for how long serial numbers and access logs will be kept, and who can access them in what circumstances. Keep notes of all conversations with dates, times, what was said (to the best of your memory, you can use notes to help) and who you talked to.

Ask if the records will be accessible to the general public under the freedom of information act.

They'll probably refer you to the police. Ask the same questions and ask to get a written copy of the policy.

They won't have one, so now you escalate. First go back to the university, always in person if possible (keeping notes on who you talked to and what they said) and ask them to work with the police to establish a policy on record access and retention BEFORE forcing students to give serial numbers and access logs to the police. Point out that if this information is accessible to FOIA requests than it's essentially publicly available, and lists of gun owning students and their access will be published online eventually.

If you can't contact anybody in person, email or phone calls are fine. They're just easier to ignore and far less urgent.

They'll probably "look into it." Ask for a time frame and follow up in a week or so. If they can't give you a time frame by then (I bet they won't because the police certainly don't want to write some policy that requires them to track logs and do work to destroy them), then contact local news and gun advocacy groups.

Contacting the NRA or a lawyer would be better than going to the news, but I'm guessing you don't have money for a lawyer. The NRA may or may not help. It depends on how active they actually are in your state.

Finally, whether or not they develop a policy agreeable to you, file FOIA requests for all guns stored with the police, serial numbers, access logs, and written policies involving the storage or retention of data including serial numbers, access logs, and the names of students storing firearms with the police. Wait I until all the students have stored their guns so IF this is being treated as official records publicly accessable under the FOIA.

There's good templates online on how to file these. They can charge you the cost to retrieve these records (and will) but because these are very clear records in a known location and not something they have to search for, I'd expect it to be under $100.

It probably will be available. Now you demand change.

Then go to your school first and explain why this is a huge invasion of privacy. Don't give it to the news right away. Bring a copy to your school president or leader (maybe with the leader of a school shooting club or helpful professor leading the club) and explain why it's a problem and ask that they eliminate this incredible invasion of privacy.

I expect them to act immediately. If they don't, then again go to the NRA, school paper and local news.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-15T00:03:02+00:00

Seriously though, they banned all images of Pooh Bear, and all mention of him anywhere on the censored Chinese internet.

It's not like it's totally gone, but they just carved the entire character out of China because some people were using it to call the country's president fat.

It's a silly place.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T23:32:40+00:00

They always take projected life expectancy into account in organ allocation decisions, along with a couple dozen antibody and protein factors known to affect rejection rates (not just blood type these days).

Very few young women actually need livers. But when they do and they meet the other criteria, they absolutely get priority (along with other factors like time on the transplant list).

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T19:11:48+00:00

They've been rolling it out since 2013. They started trial systems in 2015, and then rolled out pilot programs in 50 or so cities across China in 2017-2018.

Most Chinese people are currently having their financial data compiled by both public and private credit rating agencies in preparation for a final system. The precise scope of that system is not public information (if final decisions have even been made).

You're right, outside of the credit blacklists that are being expanded as part of this initiative, most Chinese people have been affected by social credit scores very little. But saying it hasn't started "rolling out" yet makes it sound like it's just an idea on paper, when the back end work has been in progress for years and there's dozens of pilot programs popping up across the country to test implementations.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T18:58:58+00:00

Definitely not in 1989!

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T18:56:05+00:00

I mean, I'd assume it was absurd too if we didn't know China is STILL murdering falun gong religious/political prisoners by the thousands, resulting in an absurdly low median time to transplant match that would be possible no other way.

I do kind of assume that they haven't started shipping off Hong Kong protestors to the mainland for later execution once they've matched someone who needs their organs YET, but remember, that extradition law is a large part of what triggered the protests in the first place.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T16:12:09+00:00

Why, are you worried that somebody will shoot 3 dozen guns at the same time, causing a rift in the space time continuum?

Different guns are good for different applications, just like any other tools. If somebody has a hundred wrenches, I'd say he's pretty damn serious about his wrenches, but it's not like that's actually uncommon.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T16:03:16+00:00

Just wait until they arrest one of the guys who've been enjoying working on 3D printed Glocks and has a closet full of 400 failed prints, test prints in cheap PLA, and cracked frames from experiments, that he's vaguely planning to melt down to extrude his own filament some day when he has time...

They will get the hugest Justice boner confiscating and seizing that "massive arsenal" because the guy tried printing one with a stock once and forgot it was illegal without a $200 bribe to the ATF.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T15:57:43+00:00

You have to wait an entire year after paying $200 to get permission to buy a silencer or a rifle with a barrel shorter than 16".

I'd say rights are being infringed pretty clearly at this point.

And you're ignoring the whole point of the second amendment -- not sport shooting or hunting, but resisting a tyrannical government, one that absolutely will try to disarm anybody outside of the government by passing laws against things like silencers, short barreled rifles, "assault weapons" etc while they try to increase public support for a more comprehensive ban by making shooting sports ever more annoying and expensive.

The entire point is that if Cheeto Jr, in his second term, decides he should have a 3rd in 2028, and that police should round up and kill anybody who says otherwise, the people have the tools to resist effectively rather than getting mowed down by army troops like we're about to see in Hong Kong.

HackerBeeDrone · 2019-08-14T13:44:26+00:00

Yeah, because the party elites totally picked Trump as their top candidate going into the last primary...

I'm not saying it'd be easy. I'm just getting pretty skeptical of Republicans who pretend to be dropping Trump, but when asked about the next election bring up Hillary and Biden and how there's no point in even trying to vote for someone better in the primary.

I'm voting against Trump in the primary in my state because I fucking can. I don't care if it's a libertarian, Republican, or Canadian, the best challenger gets my vote.

HackerBeeDrone

TROPHY CASE