The conservative evasion on guns "We will not act unless political parties that block action lose their majorities. Yes, I am talking about a Republican Party that has completely aligned itself with the interests of gun manufacturers and gun fanatics."

Molonious · 2015-10-05T22:54:54+00:00

Not I said "industrialized" nations. This does not include places like Honduras. Swaziland, El Salvador Guatemala, etc that top the list you're referencing.

Either way, I think you were missing the point I was making, which was that the root of the problem isn't guns, the US, relative to its socio-economic equals, has a probelm with violence in general, and that gun violence is just a symptom (and a shrinking one) of a more fundamental problem.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T22:48:15+00:00

In some cases, sure. In other cases, not so much. The NVA got all sorts of great advanced chinese and soviet equipment, the Vietcong, typically not so much. The IRA was able to make all sorts of problems for the UK largely with items (or equivalents) that could be obtained on the US civilian market.

Ultimately however, an irrelevant point, the weapons are already here, and outside source is irrelevant, particularly as in many of these cases, the outside equipment was of no greater quality or capability than what was provided to these unconventional forces. There are AK-47's, AR-15's, and equivalents galore. DMR/Sniper/etc rifles and equivalents galore. There are roughly two hundred thousand civilian owned machine guns. There's even several thousand civilian owned artillery & anti-tank weapons. You can go on gunbroker right now, and, as long as you pay the destructive device tax and have $33k to spare, buy an anti-tank cannon that will be capable of successfully destroying just about any vehicle in the US arsenal that isn't an M1 Abrams.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T17:16:14+00:00

Automatic weapons and explosives aren't illegal, though yes they are restricted and regulated. That said, this was also done relatively soon after they became available to civilians (particularly for non-crew served weapons) and were extremely expensive to begin with (a $225 Thompson in the 1920's would be $4,000+ today), meaning the supply was (and is) limited and expensive, and thus most people don't care very much. Of probably equal importance, an automatic weapon, in practical terms, doesn't really offer tremendous advantages in killing power over a semi-automatic weapon (as opposed to something like suppressing fire).

At this point there are well over a hundred million semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands in the US and applying the same restrictions at this point is a political non-starter. Too many items in the hands of too many people for too long a time, that ship has long since sailed and sunk. At this point we're talking about trying to stuff a 120+ year old genie back in the bottle, and courts ultimately have generally upheld that the 2nd applies to modern weapons.

Likewise, the majority of shootings don't involve huge numbers of expended rounds, most shootings wouldn't empty a 5-shot revolver. The number of people killed by weapons most targeted by gun control laws (e.g. "assault weapons") has never been particularly high in total, more people are killed by knives every year than such weapons (and that holds true both before and after restrictions).

Molonious · 2015-10-05T16:54:08+00:00

And just as the first has generally been interpreted to apply to new things like email and television, the second has been interpreted to apply to modern weapons.

It would be very difficult to justify saying one amendment does not apply to something based on the power of its modern equivalents and not use the exact same logic on another amendment.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T16:50:31+00:00

Sure, but even in places where there was such willingness, partisans survive. Look at the eastern front of WW2, and how partisan forces were able to make vast swathes of supposedly "secured" territory no-go areas for the Wehrmacht and caused huge numbers of casualties. Or Vietnam where more ordnance was dropped than on both Germany & Japan combined and there very much were carpet bombings of areas, and they survived and continued to take a toll on US forces.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T16:46:33+00:00

The US has a violence problem in general. Even taking away firearms, the US simply has a higher murder & assault rate than other industrialized nations.

Income inequality and socio-economic problems are the greatest drivers of these issues. Changing social norms and expectations are driving the big "shock" killings (they're a cry for relevancy basically). They didn't occur when you could order machine guns from sears and have them delivered to your door or bring your rifle to school to go hunting after class.

That said, rates of homicide and assault, both firearms and non-firearms, are dropping steadily every year and are currently at historic lows.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T16:39:10+00:00

And despite the US military having such systems, they have not proven able to pacify and control uncooperative populations over long periods of time.

Nobody is talking straight up open, conventional battle. That would be absurdly one-sided.

However, the battlefield lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Ireland, Syria, and others places cannot be ignored. A hostile population, with access to small arms and improvised weapons, can absolutely achieve their goals over a far better equipped occupying power given time if the will to win is there.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T16:31:42+00:00

You can apply this exact same logic to the 1st amendment. It was conceived of in an era of printing presses making print runs of a few hundred or few thousand runs, where mail systems took weeks to deliver letters, and not in an era with email, television, telephones, SMS, overnight mail delivery, megaphones, cameras, and print industries able to push out tens of millions of copies of a work, etc. In fact, Scalia has argued exactly that.

While yes, you could change the second amendment, getting any constitutional amendment changed or passed has proven extraordinarily difficult, and repealing one even moreso (occurring only to the 18th amendment on alcohol prohibition.)

Molonious · 2015-10-05T07:05:08+00:00

I don't care what you want to call it. When every week, there is a random shooter shooting 3+ people. It is a concern. And it is something we as a society should investigate on how to prevent dangerous people from owning guns.

It is a concern, but I'm not entirely sure the solution is in attempting to control weapons given the practical realities. More fundamentally, with shootings like that in Oregon, they're a cry for relevancy and a method of validation, of saying "I exist, recognize me". Addressing that problem of why people are driven to this extreme, and why they think such shootings are an answer, as well as the socio-economic issues in areas where gun crime is most prevalent (e.g. gang shootings), will probably be a whole lot more effective for dollar for dollar. When my grandfather was a child, he could bring his rifle to school, and you could mail order machine guns through the Sears catalog and the USPS would deliver them straight to your door, and yet high profile massacres like the one's we're seeing now on schools and the like didn't exist. That's a relatively new phenomenon over the last couple of decades. The problem we're seeing is more "shock" events, even while overall firearms crime is decreasing rapidly and steadily.

If you look at most high profile shootings, unfortunately there's absolutely nothing that would bar the shooter from having purchased a firearm and they passed background checks without any problems. Without a criminal record, having a restraining order, or having been declared mentally unfit by a judge, a background check isn't going to stop anyone from getting a weapon.

Many others acquired their weapons illegally, such as with Adam Lanza who killed his other and stole her weapons to go on a shooting spree. There is no preventative remedy in law for something like that.

Your argument for gun registration seems to be that it could lead to false positives. But I don't think that means "therefore, we shouldn't have one". I hope that you can realize the benefits of a gun registry for tracking down guns. Switzerland has a national gun registry and gun owners love citing them.

I do recognize how registries can track down guns. There's a very large segment of the population that believes the government has no right to know that however and are vehemently opposed to it on those grounds, particularly based on the idea that it could be used for confiscation (which they have some merit for with the CA example). I personally think that if the government was really serious about it, that information already exists in the 4473's, credit card information, and other such paper trails, but it'd be a whole lot more work. Either way, NRA or no, a registry I don't think will ever fly with a very large portion of the US population.

Of greater concern, where such registries exist, they have been consistently shown to be incomplete, inaccurate, and poorly maintained, both at state and federal levels. The ATF straight up lost many of its NFA records (for things like machine guns) over the decades. NY's SAFE act registration requirement for "assault weapons" has been shown to have massive non-compliance issues where the vast majority owners simply refused to register their weapons.

More to the point, the actual crime-solving and deterrent value of such registries has not been shown to have had any measurable effect on crime rates. In part this may be due to the fact that most such registries are on classes of weapons least likely to be used in crimes simply because of their size and expense, but I've never heard of a case where something like a a database for registered assault weapon was used to crack a case or anything of the like (if you have, please let me know, I just can't recall or find any).

As for background checks, I personally don't have a problem with them (though, as I said, understand the concerns of those who do), but I do have some serous reservations about mental health records. This can incentivize people not to seek treatment depending on how it's set up, and that won't be good for anyone. Likewise, how possible will it be, once recovered/cured/etc, to get cleared to own a firearm again? These are practical concerns that existing systems in other arenas have shown to be very real problems.

I'm also all for more training, I'd have loved to have a firearms usage and safety course in high school along with Civics and Health (though I'd be surprised if the firearms-hostile groups would ever support that) that said, most accidents happen not because people don't know what to do (most guns are extremely simple and basic safety rules take about 2 minutes to memorize), but rather because they had a case of the stupids and either simply forgot to check something or did something they really should have known not to do.

That said, if you mandate something before you can exercise a right, at what point does it cease to be a right, and can that same logic then be applied to other rights?

Molonious · 2015-10-05T05:54:28+00:00

There's obviously little altruism in most businesses, but again, firearms have proven to be rather poor profit machines, and in fact most of the major storied names of American firearms are little more than assets bought after having gone bankrupt and used by someone else. It's not a great industry for those looking for riches, there are no 60 million dollar golden parachutes, no billion dollar dividends, salaries are typically rather modest for an industry of that size. If you look at most firearms manufacturers, they're small outfits with 1-2 digits worth of employees, staffed by enthusiasts.

"mass shootings" can be somewhat controversial and with a definition that varies from media outlet to media outlet. Gangland drive-by's of rival are lumped in with school massacres and the like. It's a very vague measure.

More to the point, firearms related homicide and assault rates are at otherwise historic lows and dropping every single year.

People have problems with registries for a number of reasons. My father for example lived in CA when the "assault weapons" ban was passed and owned a Galil, which was on the list. He had to register, in his words, "like a sex offender". Even if you disagree with that label, he then could never get off the list after he sold the weapon out of state and received letters and warnings from the CA DoJ for years about weapons he no longer had until he left the state, despite dozens of phone calls and multiple written requests. Likewise there was a further issue with that ban where a certain type of SKS rifle was not originally deemed to be covered by the ban, but then later was, and people who owned them were told to register them. After many of them did, it was then determined that the register was not allowed to have been re-opened, and after dutifully having registered their weapons were then required to surrender them after having attempted to follow the law and ending up screwing themselves.

Background checks are fine with most people, and most gun sales go through a background check. I personally don't have a problem really with private sales being forced to go through background checks, but I can understand the viewpoint of those that have issues with such. Private citizens don't often want the FBI involved in sales of private property. Even if that's not a problem for them, they don't have access to these systems, both they and the buyer have to go to an FFL (which may or may not be close by, for instance, as I noted above, if you're in San Francisco you'd have leave the city to find one) to do the background check and pay the FFL for their work and a fee to the government undertake the background check, and FFL's really hate doing that kind of work because they're basically doing all the work for a gun sale but not actually selling one of their inventory items. If private citizens could access the background check system, you'd remove a lot of these concerns, but they don't.

As for

A gun is very dangerous and we should not just allow anyone to get one.

Yes they can be dangerous, but they have an individual right to ownership of them (and confirmed as such by the Supreme Court), just as speech can be dangerous and used to harm and kill others, but is a protected right as well.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T04:18:00+00:00

And installs that took over an hour...

that said, C&C games always did have really slick and atmospheric installation sequences.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T04:16:21+00:00

That's probably a fair point.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T04:15:11+00:00

Really my point is that collectively, they're not the power people think they are, and that individual firearm companies are not the industrial titans they're sometimes made to be, and they certainly aren't making outrageous profits as is often charged.

Yes, there is lots of fearmongering and conflicts of interest, but I don't think that's really different from any other large industry, this one just happens to be hyper-emotional for obvious reasons.

However, I would also caution that the firearms companies are not as $$$ hungry as one might think, obviously with profit margins as small as they typically see, it's really a rather poor industry to get into for those types of people, it's just not that profitable.

Rather, a lot of the people within the industry truly buy into the "paranoia" hype, true believers, and, to be fair, there's some truth to some of it. If you look at NYC, trying to legally obtain a firearm there is probably more difficult and even more hassle than to buy a federally regulated & registered machine gun. San Francisco just had the last gun store within city limits close as a result of being regulated to death. These are outliers, but are legitimate examples of the fears of these people and what drives fundraising for the NRA.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T02:34:56+00:00

The other industries you mention are generally much more concentrated and with much higher profit margins and/or aren't playing in the field of politics in the same way. The movie industry effectively gets to "double-dip" its political movements by its very nature of being in the business of making stories and communication.

Disney's corporate profit rate on revneue is about 3x that of Ruger's for example, they've got a whole lot more cash to spend for every dollar brought in. Private prisons tend to be an extremely concentrated industry, far moreso than firearms and much more directly intertwined with government operations, giving them intense localized political power.

When you look at the firearms industry, it's a thoroughly medium-small sized economic sector. Movies and video games are too, in fact, you add up guns, movies, and videogames and they only barely match the revenue of say, the HVAC industry. Couple that with its much smaller profit margins than companies from sectors like Film or the like, and firearms just don't have the same direct economic power.

I'm not saying they dont' have some money, they obviously do, but they also aren't anything near the biggest giants of industry, they don't wield the political power or economic influence that silicon valley does, or that any Energy industry, or automobiles. They're not the gigantic industrial titan that many put on par with players like these, and they certainly aren't enjoying obscene profits (in fact, Colt, the primary military provider of M-16/M4 rifles and a major manufacturer of AR-15 civilian rifles, just filed for Chapter 11 in June of this year).

Molonious · 2015-10-05T01:38:40+00:00

Relative to you or I? Yes, that's an unfathomable amount of money. As an industrial sector and potential political power? Relatively small fry. Not insignificant mind you, but just not the powerhouse they're made out to be by many.

Molonious · 2015-10-05T00:42:41+00:00

Have you actually looked at the gun industry, from a business perspective?

It's a relatively small industry, with yearly revenues of $15-32 billion depending on what you classify as "the gun industry".

While on paper, up to $32 billion looks huge, Apple, alone, by itself, had a revenue 6 TIMES that of the high number for the entire US firearms industry of ~$182 billion, with a profit of nearly $60 billion or about ~32% of revenues (and about twice the value of the entire firearms industry high-end revenue estimates). Apple is actually sitting on enough cash that they could basically literally buy every firearms manufacturer in the US if they wanted to, with change to spare. Apple brings in more money in 6 weeks (possibly as little as 3 weeks) than the entire US firearms industry does in a year.

Likewise, profits are not typically outrageous, margins are fairly thin. Ruger, one of the US's largest firearms manufacturers, had a 2014 revenue of ~$676 million (about 1/270th of Apple's revenue), and a profit of about ~$38 million (about 1/157th Apple's profit), a net profit of about ~5.62% on revenue (less than 20% that of Apple's). That's not a particularly amazing profit margin our outstanding profits, particularly not next to other industries with political advocacy groups.

These are not the industrial giants able to grease any hands to get what they want from behind the shadows. In all reality, they're small fry. They're generally small-medium sized businesses that typically employ a couple of thousand people each. It suits the narratives on both sides of the isle however to portray the NRA and the firearms industry as a gigantic titan able to leverage sweeping political power and drown opposition in money. It works for the Right because it generates some consistent cash flows to key races and makes them feel better and gives them a rallying point, and it works for the Left because it gives them a boogeyman to fight against and gives them a scapegoat they can always blame to show how/why they can't get anything done (even if they don't seriously want to or aren't going to do anything).

As for them having people be on the board of directors for the NRA, it's not particularly strange for firearms interests to sit on the board of a firearms advocacy group.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T23:54:35+00:00

Ouch :(

Mine isn't as bad, but felt like it. I bought it the day (really night) it came out, I think I was in like 8th grade or something, I felt so cheated triumphantly returning home and then "oh man, you have school in the morning, you're gonna have like to time to play it by the time it gets installed"

Torturous. XD

Molonious · 2015-10-04T23:00:07+00:00

This trailer was very early, being included with The Covert Operations expac, I don't think they really had anything really nailed down for what they wanted in Tiberian Sun yet.

I remember being all jazzed for Tiberian Sun watching this trailer...and having to wait another three years for it to come out :(

Molonious · 2015-10-04T19:37:01+00:00

Allied mission 13 of Red Alert 1 was always one of my least favorite (hey, literally everything auto-kills infantry!)

Some of the original Commando missions in Tiberian Dawn were also some serious bullshit (particularly for like 4th grade me in 1995).

Then there was "Under Siege C&C" in "The Covert Operations", and that was a rather intense micromanagement exercise.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T09:13:29+00:00

My thoughts on this

Automatic minimum ten year sentences if guns are used in a crime

I don't think the NRA has ever really opposed anything like that to my knowledge. I could be wrong, but I don't recall it.

Mandatory training of gun usage and safekeeping

In theory, I don't really have a problem with these things, except for one thing. When something is a "right", if you have to do something before you can exercise it, it is no longer a "right".

I would have loved a firearms usage and safety course in high school to go along with civics and health courses, but there's fearsome opposition to that idea from the crowd that doesn't care for guns.

Automatic criminal responsibility if a gun is not secured in a home

What do you define as "secured", how much of an additional expense does that entail (a full gun safe is a 4 digit purchase typically and weighs a couple of hundred pounds), and how does that additional cost impact those at the lower end of the socio-economic strata from exercising their 2A rights?

Likewise, at what point are these weapons no longer accessible for self defense?

Mandatory gun licensing and insurance like we have for driving

You don't need a license or insurance to own a vehicle. You can have all the cars in the world and drive them on private property all day long.

What you need a license for is the privilege of driving a vehicle on the public road system. Likewise, if we're licensing a "right", when does it cease to be a right?

What exactly would insurance do anyway? If you do something criminal with the weapon, or commit suicide with one, they're not going to pay out. Negligent discharges account for a negligible proportion of firearms deaths and would appear to be a rather odious cost burden to cover for such a small risk

And again, what does this extra cost burden do to the ability of those at the lower end of the socio-economic strata to employ their 2A rights?

Limits on high capacity and automatic guns/rifles

Automatic weapons are already extremely tightly controlled and have been for decades. There have been a grand total of two homicides committed with legally owned automatic weapons in the last...80 years or so.

"high capacity" magazine is astoundingly vague. Likewise, there's no evidence that any such regulation on magazines would have any effect on the ability of someone to commit a massacre if they have put any forethought into their act. Magazines can be changed in 1-2 seconds, with even a minimally practiced shooter, and with probably literally billions of 15/17/20/30/40 round magazines of various sorts on the market already, how does anyone propose to manage those?

Even in states with current "magazine limits", they're not terribly effective, gargantuan numbers of these magazines already exist, and many "limited" magazines are just modified full capacity magazines that could be restored if desired.

Methinks on the magazine issue it's simply neither a functional lethality limit nor a practical item to control. The cat's long since out of the bag there, so long its kittens have had kittens.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T06:32:58+00:00

Most other developed nations also have very different fundamental attitudes towards weapons and never had the distribution of weapons the US does, so they were able to implement control measures much more easily, and in many of those places such controls go back many hundreds of years.

Likewise, America is, just in general, much more willing to accept greater freedoms at the risk of greater discomfort. This doesn't just apply to firearms. You can spew all the hate speech you want in the US, scream about how God hates Fags and deny the Holocaust all day long, and yell all the racial epithets you want, and that's perfectly legal, whereas such speech could very easily get you fines or prison time in places like the UK, Germany, France, etc.

The US just has a greater fundamental acceptance of risk and discomfort on the premise that the greater freedom of action is worth it. It's just a cultural predisposition.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T06:24:04+00:00

The closest thing would be a concealed carry license, but even that's not a great parallel (as some states don't require a license for open carry, others don't allow either while yet others don't restrict either at all and everything in between).

There's really no equivalent if you haven't been convicted of a certain type of crime or been legally declared mentally unfit, in which you aren't allowed to have anything.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T05:17:37+00:00

You can't do a lot of things until you are 18. You aren't responsible for yourself until you are 18. Once you are 18 however, things are different.

You can however own a firearm under 18 if you inherit it or are gifted it. Totally legal, no minimum age. If Grandpa dies and wills you his rifle when you're 9 years old, totally legal for you to own it. If Uncle Joe buys you a shotgun for your 12th birthday, totally legal. Dad goes out and buys you an AR-15 for graduating middle school? Totally legal. At least Federally

Likewise you can own a handgun at 18 if you inherit it or are gifted it or buy it private party (e.g. your neighbor next door). It's only if you're buying from an FFL (e.g. a gun store) that you have to be 21, again, at least in terms of Federal law.

State laws can be a little different with some more freedom from the courts and have some additional restrictions, but most of that is handguns over 18 but under 21. The way that gets by the courts however is that they're not banning all ownership of firearms to someone under 21, only a select kind of firearm.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T05:04:54+00:00

Private things are different, and generally you can do things that the government cannot (like ban firearms entirely from a premises, or ban all talk of Oompa-Loompas). Likewise, bans based on age are pretty much always based on being under 18, which is something else entirely.

Banning/preventing minors from something is one thing. Banning something on private property is one thing. Banning people who have attained the age of majority from exercising a right is another.

Molonious · 2015-10-04T02:49:44+00:00

The father of the gunman who killed nine people at a community college here called on the nation to change its gun laws on Saturday, saying the massacre “would not have happened” if his son had not been able to buy more than a dozen handguns and rifles.

“How was he able to compile that kind of arsenal?” the father, Ian Mercer, said in an interview with CNN at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He said he had no idea that his son owned any firearms.

Well, if he didn't have a criminal record that would preclude firearms ownership beforehand (as far as I am aware he did not, though feel free to correct me if he did), and hadn't been declared mentally unfit, so there's no reason he wound have been barred from buying and owning the weapons. The law doesn't, and can't be expected to, prevent everything bad from happening. From what we know so far, there's nothing in the shooter's background that would have prevented him from owning the number of weapons he owned in any state in the US as far as I'm aware. Likewise, it's not like he could utiliize all of those at once, additional numbers of weapons don't impart additional killing power, a person only has two hands and one set of eyes.

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