Posts by VoxDei@qoto.org
(DIR) Post #AZowxbqBfn3iYTlzxg by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-16T09:42:30Z
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@freemo Firstly, this is from last year, it's not new. Secondly, it's based on some bizarre legal theory, creating a legal principle that did not previously exist and does not make sense: specifically, that the state can pass gun control laws only if there is are "historical roots" for the law in question. So it's (again) the court making up the law it wants, rather than the law it's got.Thirdly though, and most importantly, why is this a good thing? You're a gun nut, I get it, and that's fine - you're a responsible gun owner and all that.* But why does the fact that responsible owners are responsible mean that it's a good thing for everyone to be given a gun for the asking, even if there is no reason to believe they know what they're doing or will be responsible? We don't give cars to people who haven't demonstrated they can drive safely, for the good and sufficient reason that in incompetent hands they're lethal, and cars aren't even designed to be lethal weapons.*Personally, I don't get why you would have a need to carry a gun in public, and open carry in particular is physically intimidating to others in the same way that walking around with a large and aggressive dog is. So I must say I think it's particularly anti-social. But that's not a safety issue, merely a courtesy one.
(DIR) Post #AZqoHnSneuaH7gIydk by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-17T07:14:45Z
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@freemo A license requiring you know what you're doing and know how to be responsible in no way infringes on the right to bear arms.
(DIR) Post #AZqp9EzI3W6FppzCk4 by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-17T07:24:24Z
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@freemo @sdgathman You two as gun lovers think open carry is reassuring. I as a person who doesn't interact with them much find someone carrying a gun intimidating. If I ask you why you are carrying one, you will say "For protection", or similar, but that reassurance from someone I don't know means nothing. Are you drunk? Are you a drug dealer? Are you psychotic? If I disagree with you? If I cut you off in the car? If I spill your beer or trip over your foot or turn out to think Trump is the antichrist? Safer simply not to interact with you, so I won't unless I have to.
(DIR) Post #Aa23mlF1QV1YV7pIiO by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-22T17:30:14Z
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@freemo Interacted with you briefly recently but wasn't offended in any way. Apologies in turn if I came across as lecturing, I just... don't get the gun thing.Sorry to hear you've had a rough time recently. Genuine best wishes, I hope you can get through without too much scarring.
(DIR) Post #AaCHH2OvQuz7ORpEIK by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-27T13:50:34Z
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@ihavenopeopleskills @freemo I would take issue with the idea that anyone (certainly any significant number of people, there may be edge cases) genuinely needs a gun immediately for legitimate purposes. Even more so if you exclude reasons that aren't caused by the wide availability of firearms in the first place - I'm much less likely to feel I need one to protect myself if the likely threat doesn't have one. Moreover the 2a protects the right to bear arms, not to be able to obtain one instantly.
(DIR) Post #AaDoL5eMmp2eH2Y1Oy by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-28T09:33:42Z
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@freemo @ihavenopeopleskillsYeah, but the argument made was that a license prevents someone who needs a gun immediately from getting one. My point is why would you need a gun immediately? There might be one or two edge cases, but I suspect they’ll be very small numbers of occurrences. I would say preventing people from getting guns immediately is a net good thing - it’ll prevent a lot of suicides, for a start, way more than lives it’ll ever save because someone could obtain a gun on an hour’s notice.Guns are not trivial to obtain out of thin air. 3D-printed guns are not common. I live in the UK, we have strong gun laws, you don’t find that people have a secret 3D-printed gun hidden in a cupboard just in case they need to shoot someone. Yes, fine, hardened criminals might have one, but that’s the case now - if you’re determined to get an illegal weapon, you can, it doesn’t make them widespread and it doesn’t mean that Joe Average needs a gun and needs one right now (but with a long enough delay to nip down to the shops and come back with a gun).I’m not denying you your “right” to bear arms (scare quotes because I don’t understand why anywhere bestows that right in the first place, and the 2a explicitly says that it’s related to the requirement for a “well-regulated militia”, which is never considered in the legal arguments). But none of the constitutional rights is absolute. The first amendment, for instance, does not allow you to say anything to anyone at any time. If I go around saying “person X is a rapist” for example, if I can’t prove it I get sued for slander, I can’t say “Oh but the first amendment, I can say what I want whether it’s true or not”. Imposing a requirement on gun ownership to prove that you have some basic competence via a licensing scheme does not infringe your rights. Moreover, the 2fa bestows a “right to keep and bear arms”, not to walk around with assault weapons - it would be within the meaning of the 2fa if the government said “You can have this one type of gun” - you would have a right to keep arms and to bear them. I realise that American jurisprudence, especially from the point of view of the current Supreme Court that barely pays lip service to the actual law, disagrees with that, but that doesn’t change what I think the law actually says.
(DIR) Post #AaEPeHLlCucmMmrFoG by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-09-28T16:31:44Z
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@freemo @ihavenopeopleskillsThis debate is getting longer than I wanted it to, in the sense that we’re both writing a lot, and I don’t want to offend anyway. I think perhaps I was unclear about some of what I meant, and I don’t want to argue about technicalities - we end up with enormous posts that don’t really get us anywhere. So I’m going to stop, I wish we could have this discussion over a beer some time, it feels like it’d be much more productive in person! I appreciate that you say you know I’m arguing in good faith, because I definitely am, so thank you. :-)
(DIR) Post #Aab5rr8EJQ5Z1NvZdw by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-09T15:08:27Z
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@freemo If you've got any time for sci-fi, try reading Blindsight by Peter Watts. Some very interesting exploration of the questions of consciousness, though I think he's more or less come to the opposite conclusion to you!
(DIR) Post #Ab0kc7YDQthjtuofy4 by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-22T00:12:47Z
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@freemo @olives I don't claim to know a lot about the distinction, so it's entirely possible I'm wrong, but my belief was always that armed police in the UK had carbines. I'm reasonably sure they do not fire on full auto regardless. It's possible specialist counter-terrorism police have different armaments.Police in the UK are not routinely armed with more than tasers, mind. It's only specialist armed response officers who have guns. Where I live in Devon I seem to remember hearing that there are only three armed response units to cover the entire county overnight, which is about 70 miles N-S, about 55 E-W, largely rural but with at least three population centres in excess of 50,000 people. Though again I may be misinformed.
(DIR) Post #Ab4qAUB3xBsdNin8BU by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-22T18:45:07Z
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@guardeddon @freemo @olives Is that the same weapon as you see the armed police at airports with?
(DIR) Post #Ab4qYGsz1Upz6mg1Hk by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-23T23:38:10Z
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@freemo @guardeddon @olives Well, depends a bit how you look at it. For your regular beat cop, not so much - ours don't carry firearms. Comparing like with like would probably mean only specialist firearms officers (I guess the closest US equivalent is SWAT?). I don't know what they'd tend to carry in the US, but I suspect it's heavier than that?
(DIR) Post #Ab4r3gchNlHLuO2WLw by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-23T23:43:52Z
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@freemo @guardeddon @olives Yeah, the ARUs are like that - you don't get them just hanging around the place, they turn up when they're needed.All this said, on Googling, @guardeddon is correct about the model of weapon, but it's a single-fire variant in use. See https://www.eliteukforces.info/police/uk-armed-police/ under "Police Weapons". So similar in idea to the US, I guess.
(DIR) Post #Ab4rRGeha5ZmJyDlS4 by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-23T23:48:07Z
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@freemo @guardeddon @olives Way beyond my personal knowledge, I was just going off that website (which says the most common is the MP5SF, which may be the same thing as you're talking about, and the G36C)
(DIR) Post #Ab8Ura1gfAWDc8ODR2 by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-10-25T17:54:00Z
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@freemo I suspect it's just coincidence. We're genetically programmed to find at least human babies cute (um, once they've stopped looking like gremlins, I guess), and I wouldn't be surprised if as an evolutionary hold-over from when we were all the things before humans that evolution finds it much easier to specify "find anything that looks young cute" over being species-specific for humanity.
(DIR) Post #AcdsYUU06IdIyMOWUS by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-12-09T19:07:38Z
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@freemo Do you happen to know what the number was for say, 1975?
(DIR) Post #AcdslYqLCTn6GD4nlg by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-12-09T19:09:07Z
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@freemo (Just because my understanding was that in the US and UK at least, the deregulation of Reagan and Thatcher has led to that gain going backwards since then)
(DIR) Post #AcdtqsIeO8xY0RPpke by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-12-09T19:22:10Z
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@freemo That would be my hypothesis. Though I am frequently wrong. ;-)My understanding is that the gains you speak of were largely won by organised labour. Deregulation of markets and weakening of trade unions since the 80s has demonstrably led to wider inequalities between workers and executives, which would suggest the gains in worker buying power should at the very least have slowed since then and possibly gone backwards.
(DIR) Post #Acj9MPab8g8nKc6dxg by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-12-12T08:09:30Z
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@freemo @kilroy_was_here I don't know, but I strongly suspect that increase in death risk is rather uneven. Teachers, probably about the same, coal miners, not so much. So most jobs you'd probably be fine. ;-)
(DIR) Post #AcjobwQzOtBvfA8T6O by VoxDei@qoto.org
2023-12-12T15:51:41Z
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@freemo @kilroy_was_here I don't think it's correct to say that living standards in 1975 were achieved by compromising workplace safety (and by extension that any loss since then is because more is being spent on safety). Safety standards at the time were what was believed to be acceptable, it's not that people were cutting corners to save money, and even if they had been workplace safety isn't generally as expensive as all that.Any erosion of median living standards since the 70s is likely to be a result of massively widening inequality between the top and the bottom. For instance in the UK in 1979 the top 10% took home 21% of the total net income, in 2009/10 it was 31%. This rise was largely at the expense of the bottom 30%. (figures from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/editorial/more-unequal-country). The top 10% have a 50% pay rise over that period, the bottom 10% have a 75% cut. Similarly, from https://www.poverty.ac.uk/pse-research/going-backwards-1983-2012, the percentage of people lacking three or more "necessities" in the UK has more than doubled between 1983 and 2012.Similarly in the US the share of aggregate income from 1970 to 2018 being taken home by the "upper tier" income group rose from 29 to 48%. The "middle tier" income group fell from 62 to 43%. Share of aggregate family wealth for the upper tier rose to a whopping 79% from 1983-2016, to just 4% for the lower tier (both stats https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/).The rules got changed, a lot of regulations that served a very good purpose got done away with, and the richest in society got the benefit. It's nothing to do with spending money to make workplaces safer.
(DIR) Post #Aj5hazjHCv0wz2hKng by VoxDei@qoto.org
2024-06-19T12:58:06Z
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@cstross Well, maybe. But most people don't want to vote for Nazis, so alternatively maybe if the Tories make themselves unelectable and stay there, then if Labour *also* makes themselves unelectable does it open space (even in our FPTP monstrosity) for a third party? Greens or Lib Dems or even a splinter party from Labour or the Tories.