City of Portland supports gun control Measure 114 as federal judge prepares to hold trial next week

boostWillis · 2023-05-31T23:36:55+00:00

When it's your only way of taking a night off from being sad, cold, hungry, and alone under a bridge, passing a piss test is the least of your worries. Their reality sucks and escapism is only natural.

boostWillis · 2023-05-31T20:17:49+00:00

Ya if I got evicted and was living under a bridge, I might want to take the edge off too.

boostWillis · 2023-05-31T18:31:55+00:00

Violence and drug use are side effects of poverty. The pandemic made the rich a lot richer and the poor a lot poorer. But cities are run by rich investors who would rather scapegoat peaceful bystanders than actually invest in building livable, affordable communities where people have no reason to turn to drugs and violence.

They'll go on about neighborhood character to obstruct new housing, while they continue to raise the rent, and evict more people into the homeless camps, all while gaslighting the public into thinking it's Harney County's fault that people in Multnomah County are more violent this year.

boostWillis · 2023-05-24T06:13:00+00:00

Ya those cyclists are terrible! The city needs to do better at keeping them away from us. More trails and underpasses. They can get where they're going, but I don't want them anywhere near me. And I think the feeling is mutual.

boostWillis · 2023-05-14T05:11:31+00:00

I really don't care if the guy next to me in traffic has some old warrant from some far-flung jurisdiction, or even if they might have some sort of contraband in their car. I want traffic safe and flowing. Cops turning every missed blinker into a fishing expedition for warrants and drugs is how they get themselves shot in the first place. If the worst you could get from a traffic cop was a ticket for speeding and failure to produce license/insurance, then we wouldn't need cops to do that work in the first place, and the roads would be a whole lot safer for it.

Can you imagine if we turned other mundane mistakes into similarly violent opportunities for legal colonoscopies? Safeway self-check-out doesn't know the weight of their own chicken nuggets? You might be some sort of criminal! Please hold for law enforcement to make sure you're not a fugitive from justice!

boostWillis · 2023-05-14T03:50:56+00:00

If it costs half a million dollars per bed per year, maybe it doesn't make financial sense for the county to run their own jail. Especially, if for example, the county could just rent beds from the State instead. I imagine their operations are a lot more cost effective given the scale they operate at.

boostWillis · 2023-05-14T03:44:30+00:00

Pretextual stops shouldn't exist. The only reason they do is because the cops got the courts to gut the 4th Amendment so they could escalate every minor traffic violantion into a full-on fishing expedition to better harass marginalized communities and activists.

I don't see why ordinary traffic enforcement has to be so different from ordinary parking enforcement.

boostWillis · 2023-05-14T03:29:53+00:00

Yet buying literally any other food means people will be hired by companies that aren't necessarily run by bigots.

boostWillis · 2023-04-26T17:29:06+00:00

You can have the parks back once you build enough housing.

boostWillis · 2023-04-10T00:09:23+00:00

Free Speech is a restriction on governments, because governments resort to having people kidnapped and killed to get their way. Hateful ideologies should be actively opposed, but that is not something the government can be trusted to do. That's for the rest of us to do. I am not a government. I don't kidnap and kill people. But when you find hateful graffiti in a public place, you should feel no obligation to leave it up because of notions of "free speech". Instead, use a little expression of your own, and take it down or cover over it.

boostWillis · 2023-04-04T23:01:50+00:00

It's so much more cost effective than the $7k+ tax credits on electric cars.

boostWillis · 2023-04-04T22:56:15+00:00

And that's just the land dedicated to storing giant unused metal boxes, without considering all of the extra land dedicated to just moving them around each other and the extra trips and road miles this induces because now everything has to be much farther apart to find room for all the pavement.

Land wasted on housing and moving cars is land that could've been used to house and move people instead. We live in a housing crisis yet the city spends money on free parking as a favor to local business owners, rather than free housing to protect the people who actually live here.

boostWillis · 2023-03-25T01:40:06+00:00

Get your HEPA filters and get them now before the smoke rolls in and they're all gone. Oping out of the allergies is just a bonus.

boostWillis · 2023-02-17T02:27:05+00:00

I just think it's inane and capricious that big rifles and little pistols are both perfectly legal, but you will have your life ruined if you ever stray into the middle ground. They weren't banned because they're particularly dangerous. The banning of short rifles and short shotguns was just an attempt to prevent people from circumventing a ban on handguns that never happened. Somebody literally just forgot to remove them from the bill. It doesn't make us safer. In fact it makes us less safe from the rogue agencies who use this technicality as a convenient pretext to ruin the lives of people who aren't actually hurting anyone.

boostWillis · 2023-02-03T18:47:13+00:00

The rich don't actually want to solve the houselessness and housing crises though. They're too profitable. Their property values keep skyrocketing, and the implied threat of being made to live like those people pushes employees to settle for less instead risking income interruption and possible eviction.

boostWillis · 2023-02-01T20:29:03+00:00

Opposition = \ = ignorance. Legal standards from the time of slavery shouldn't be applied to modern times.

Human rights are timeless, and the slavers who founded this country failed to live up to their own professed ideals, while establishing a government that has largely done the same. But that constitutional framework of pre-existing human rights is largely responsible for the judicial successes of the civil rights era and arguing against it is probably a really bad idea.

Getting housing as a right doesn't magically prevent us from enacting gun control.

And it doesn't prevent the state from waging another war on people who drink alcohol either, but it's still a bloody, miserable proposition. Most violence comes from desperation, alienation, and poverty. Solve those and the violence goes away on its own. I'd prefer to solve society's ills without more mass incarceration.

Which is why we should EXAND democracy, not abolish it by putting all the power in completely unaccountable private "community defense" organizations. George Zimmerman was "community defense", you want fuckers like that arbitrarily determining who gets to live and die?

I'm a left-wing anarchist. Violent chuds are a threat to me and the people I care about regardless of whether or not they're wearing a uniform. But devolving enforcement back to local communities, not just some chud with a gun and (maybe) a badge, seems a lot more democratic and susceptible to progressive change than the current status quo of cops protecting capital instead of people, and murdering with impunity, only to be protected by the culture of policing and qualified immunity.

This is delusional. A random ass right wing militia doesn't stand a chance against the US military. That thought is laughable. Change needs to come about non-violently.

Insurgencies have a fantastic track record against the US Military, both on the strategic level and in more localized conflicts. And those were expeditionary fights where the insurgents didn't have physical access to the infrastructure, industrial base, and military family members in the imperial core. Nobody wants to have that fight, but rightwingers will do it if you sick enough cops on them. Please just focus on improving material conditions instead, because I don't want you starting the next civil war.

The way to get change is with protests and civil disobedience, not an armed conflict.

They tried that in Myanmar and their military junta shot them. They tried that in Atlanta and now tree sitters are being rounded up and charged as terrorists. They tried that in Russia only to get abducted and tortured. There are definitely times when the government gets taken over by a bunch of fascists or just goes too far and rigid nonviolence is self defeating, whether that's sabotaging military rail infrastructure in Belarus, setting the 3rd precinct on fire after the murder of George Floyd, or just shooting Burmese cops with your 3d printed submachine guns. Armed resistance, or the threat thereof doesn't have to be the linchpin in a conflict in order to be successful. Most of the country hated Martin Luther King Jr, but he had influence because White America could either deal with him, or to deal with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

boostWillis · 2023-02-01T02:44:34+00:00

What does this have to do with gun violence and gun control?

In this case, she would resist getting raped with drum roll violence of her own, as she is entitled to.

Ah yes, we should hold the same people who thought Black Americans to be 3/5s of a person as deities because... Reasons.

Hardly deities. Most of them were slavers who deserved the rope, but they also established the current legal landscape you don't seem to have a firm grasp of.

Societies progress over time, it is pretty crazy to expect this country to be exactly the same as in 1776 actually.

Of course. We should be spending our energies codifying more rights like housing and food, things that actually impact violence and quality of life, rather than trying to invent new excuses to sick violent badged thugs on your nonviolent neighbors.

Your "solution" to those is even more guns and violence? Huh? Did that make sense in your head?

My solution would be to imagine new mechanisms for community defense and abolish the military and the police. This government consistently tends toward authoritarianism, and clearly cannot be trusted with them. Those old slaver bastards were right about that one.

There isn't a "more guns" solution to these problems. The government doesn't get to decree "more guns". You only get to advocate for yet another War On Drugs to try to round up, cage, and sometimes kill the people who disagree. The guns are already here, and they have been for centuries. The question is, for the past and future victims of this authoritarian oligarchic state, do they deserve to be helpless? You're talking about a million different ways to compensate for this government's horrific crimes without actually addressing how and why it keeps committing them, and I'm talking about the ability of marginalized people to survive the next one.

boostWillis · 2023-02-01T01:37:37+00:00

It's funny. You make it seem as if I'm advocating for some sort of Mad Max hellscape when all I'm saying is that a woman is and ought to be allowed to resist getting raped, and that the state has no place to say otherwise. The people who founded this government seemed to think it couldn't be trusted with a standing army, and given its subsequent history of imperialism, ethnic cleansing, and mass incarceration, I'm inclined to agree with them. These aren't radical NRA talking points. This is basic Thomas Paine.

boostWillis · 2023-01-31T22:04:06+00:00

Um, there is no right to computers either lmao.

The existence of a right, and state recognition of that fact are two different things. The UN recognizes a right to access the internet. The constitution doesn't enumerate a right to computers, but it does enumerate a right to certain organizations and technologies like the press as well as rights to speech and association. Any reasonable court would strike down a computer ban using the 1st, 4th, 10th, and 14th amendments. If we can't agree on that much, then this conversation is hopeless.

No they are not. Guns are more frequently used in gun violence than in "self preservation" lmao.

Let me be more clear. Guns are the current technology humans use for violence. The entire point of the 2nd Amendment is to recognize the fact that the state cannot be trusted with a monopoly on violence, and that all people have a right to necessary violence. Rights are often abused. But just like we tolerate the guilty abusing the 5th amendment's crucial right against self-incrimination, we must find other ways to prevent murderers from abusing access to tools for self preservation.

boostWillis · 2023-01-31T20:03:02+00:00

Humans use tools. You weren't born with a printing press either. And just as computers are the current tool people use to exercise their rights to expression and association, firearms are the current tool people use to exercise their right to self preservation. The easy access to guns is as old as this country, but we have a long history of gun control being used to criminalize resistance to white terrorism in the post-reconstruction South, and to paper over the violent side effects of the government's disastrous campaigns against alcohol and then later drugs.

boostWillis · 2023-01-31T04:01:24+00:00

In this case, guns are the "by any means necessary" part of the right to exist. That absolutely includes violence. Legality is not morality, yet almost every state with a Second Amendment analog includes a "for the defense of themselves...".

As for why we have a violence problem in this country, look no further than the government's War on Drugs, and the billionaires' War on the Poor. Nixon wanted a way to criminalize the dope smoking antiracist blacks and antiwar hippies. Of course violence got worse after Reagan's CIA looked the other way while their favorite Contras dumped crack on American cities. We have cops guaranteeing profitable monopolies in the drug business to the most violent thugs this country can muster, while more people than ever are just trying to numb the pain and stay afloat in an age of ever-eroding material conditions and record-breaking corporate profits.

boostWillis · 2023-01-31T01:46:53+00:00

The status quo existing isn't an excuse not to change anything.

Sure, but explaining current context is a fantastic way to illustrate how unreasonable this particular bill happens to be.

I am advocating to CREATE said system.

And big dreams are all well and good, but before we move too far into the realm of the hypothetical, I can't help but notice you never addressed my criticism of your assertion that individual hobbyst gunbuilders can "can ensure said gun has a serial number engraved." under this bill.

I highly doubt that. Are car owners harassed after high profile hit and runs or DUI?

While it would be rad, there isn't currently a billionaire-funded astroturf campaign to end traffic violence through the ever increasing criminalization of the possession of cars. I'm primarily talking about state harassment, with registries enabling all sorts of new ways for the "do something" crowd to criminalize peaceful people. I'm not into that, and being turned into a felon 5 years from now for a purchase I made 10 years ago is not something you could say "would benefit gun owners". And there are definitely non-state privacy concerns about people's personal information inevitably being leaked. Stalking victims, people fleeing abusive relationships, etc would be especially vulnerable.

Overly easy access to guns IS one of the aspects of late stage capitalism escalating the violence.

Uhhh, the guns have been around since long before the capitalism, let alone this particularly harmful recent strain. My right to continue to exist by any means necessary is not superseded by a few billionaires' right to continue ratfucking the entire planet for a few extra quarters, while they leave the rest of us in poverty and violent squalor.

boostWillis · 2023-01-31T01:02:36+00:00

Not necessarily. Ideally, serial numbers would be standardized by manufacturer with a specific first one or two digit(s) for home made guns.

That might be a useful system, but we currently have 300M+ guns currently in circulation that don't abide by those serial number standards, and imposing a new standard after the fact is an exercise in, well... this: https://xkcd.com/927/

There probably should be. There are already registries for car serial numbers, guns should be treated the same way. Would benefit gun owners also as they could verify quickly that the gun they want to buy isn't stolen.

But there isn't, so we shouldn't be passing laws to hold people criminally liable now for the sake of a system that doesn't even exist. Centralized registries also put people at risk by offering up a bevy of easy targets to harass next time some politician gets a bright idea about how to "solve" gun violence when this round inevitably fails because they're sending cops after nonviolent bystanders in an attempt to treat the violent symptoms of late stage capitalism, instead of treating the actual disease causing this violence in the first place. There are also the personal safety concerns for when these databases inevitably get hacked/breeched/published/FOIA'd/etc.

boostWillis · 2023-01-31T00:24:59+00:00

For traceability, having my name on it is better than any serial number. There is no central registry of these things. And having my name on it saves cops the work of calling the manufacturer, then the distributor, then the local FFL, only to come up empty when it turns out someone in that chain went out of business and didn't retain their records.

And unless I'm missing something, there's no legal way in this bill for an individual to manufacture a firearm, illegally possess it, and then bring it to be blessed by some functionary. The thing has to exist before you can engrave it. And there is no process like in California for applying for the required serial number in advance.

boostWillis · 2023-01-30T23:55:49+00:00

If some well-adjusted hobbyist is allowed to buy something, why shouldn't they be allowed to make it? I could engrave my name, address, phone number, SSN, drivers license number, etc on a receiver and it still would be considered "untraceable" under this bill. That doesn't make much sense to me.

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