basically, the US is a one party system, but it has two parties

some of us make good pets, some of us make good masters, the main problem I’m having right now is that it lacks the kind of erotic kind of framing that I tend to prefer

Use illogical, bad faith arguments to trick them into believing that the sky is blue, of course. People fall for horrible stupid dumb propaganda, it’s the nature of humanity. Only like 5% of people are really gonna bother to go actually read studies and shit, I don’t even really do that, I just look at the abstracts and then hope that the scientists didn’t fuck up and run the study wrong or engage in p-hacking or something. I couldn’t afford to go to college and take a statistics course, and my only form of education beyond that is watching 3brown1blue videos at 2x speed interspersed with useless escapist brainrot.

Everyone wants to believe that humans are some highly logical computer creatures that can just be convinced if we get hit with enough rigorous logical argumentation. We’re really not. You can make something much more convincing to someone if you validate their ego, or if you incentivize someone into believing a certain kind of truth as a result of their survival in a certain context, right. Even if we were purely logical beings, that wouldn’t even really solve the problem, because we’re all exposed to vastly different information landscapes, i.e. every MAGA guy you run into has probably be tweaking out to AM radio for 8 contiguous hours at their job, or socializing with a bunch of insularly sexist, homophobic, or racist good old boys in an echo chamber for most hours of the day, or whatever else, right. So, what hope can you have to change their minds over the course of a 1 or 2 hour conversation? If even that. And double this for everyone out there that spends their time listening to NPR, or has milder takes about things, or even just spends their time passively absorbing whatever propaganda floats at them through pop culture and escapist media consumption.

Well that’s why the point of arguing with other people isn’t really to convince them, but just to make yourself smarter and more informed by reading 200,000 pages of government legislation for fun, like it’s just another tuesday. Light work for a person like you

This is false actually. Any claim can be dismissed and evidence doesn’t matter because nobody cares. The best way to convince people of things is with cheap psychological parlor tricks

I just mean that I don’t think they were a good faith interlocutor. Probably if I were to put a specific explanation on it, I’d say that they are probably tired of having the same argument over and over again and being corrected repetitively, to the point where they’re not genuinely engaging anymore, I’ve seen that a lot. Especially with how quickly they backed out but also still left a comment. I dunno if that level of bad faith would be considered trolling in the strictest sense, but I would probably still classify it as such.

I mean arguably we could’ve done all of that with nasa if nasa had received a similar level of funding to SpaceX, but that’s kind of getting into alt-history.

Depends on the writer. You get a superman DC writer, homelander probably gets treated like every other fascist superman beats up. If it’s a “the boys” writer, homelander probably uses kryptonite to rip superman in half in a graphic full-page spread or some shit. You’re also gonna be dealing with, are we dropping superman into the relatively hopeless universe of the boys, are we dropping homelander into the DC universe, where he’ll probably be right st home with like 30 different characters almost exactly like him, will we come up with some portal stuff, what’s going on there

So I dunno, depends on the writer. Ke personally I’d prefer if superman won, cause it’s more hopeful and less garth ennis-y.

I believe they are what is known as a “low effort troll”

I mean we do have a pretty good indication of a quite large impending factor which may cause a lot of them to collapse in the coming years, and which could collectively be attributed to them pretty well, especially within the last 50 years.

Also, why can’t you just take your friend, friend’s guns, in your car, to the range, store them there? is there any real problem with that, or any real reason why you specifically need to have the guns rather than the range, which might be a better long term storage solution? I’m not opposed to your solution, I think it’s workable, I think it has potential to, maybe not get passed federally since the gun lobby is insanely powerful, but maybe work on a state-by-state basis, right, and build up from there. But if you do have an actual counterargument for what the guy’s saying, then you should give it instead of just kind of deflecting, because right now he does seem to have basically refuted all of the hypotheticals you were able to give about why requiring some kind of record every time a gun is transferred is a bad idea, and why universal background checks and the state as an active third party rather than a retroactive third party might be a good idea.

The only counterargument I can really see against it is maybe that it would result in state overreach or people being prevented from having access to guns if we start to see disproportionate enforcement of crimes and certain crimes being reclassified as felonies or something, but that’s also a problem with the current system that wouldn’t really get solved by your proposal at all, so yeah, I dunno.

Ayaaa, we had a conversation a while ago about this same topic. I do think you are still correct in your proposal to make NICS public, but I do also think that the other guy is perhaps partially right. I think such a law would probably be well-accompanied by requirements to own a gun safe (which might be seen as increasing the cost of ownership and thus discriminating and yadda yadda yadda shit I don’t care about), and to keep guns in said gun safe when perhaps they’re not being kept immediately on your person barring extraneous circumstances. I can’t quite recall, but I do believe we also talked about that last time, that there was a kind of need for common sense pertaining to the handling of guns, more than there is, considering how many guns are overwhelmingly passed into illegal uses through relatively simple theft.

I’m also not sure I agree that a violation of the background check, being a fine, is going to have much of an effect. If the fine is cheap enough, that might well enough be just free license to pass guns into an illegal domain and then pay the fine and go about your day. It may increase the costs of illegal firearms well enough which might have knock-on effects in decreasing illegal access to and usage of guns, and what have you, but I think it would probably require a more severe punishment than a fine a la a traffic ticket.

But then, maybe if that’s the metaphor we’re using, then along the lines of traffic tickets, maybe we should just be, uhh, designing the roads differently, whatever that equivalent might look like for guns, but I think that might be stretching the metaphor a little too much.

I mean I think I’d say it was more the result of poor preparation than anything. I think most places are saying he had like, 3 shots or somewhere around there, and apparently his rifle had no optic on it at all, which is kind of an insane idea at that distance. Which I think also maybe lends credence to the idea that this was just some impulse decision rather than a prepared kind of thing. I don’t think it’s that hard of a shot to make in general, even given the single opportunity that you’re going to be working with, I’ve hit soda cans with .22s at similar ranges. You barely have to take into account windage or holdover and I haven’t seen any evidence of heavy wind on the day of, really.

So, I dunno, I think it’s probably just an idiot kid killing himself in like, some elaborate suicide by cop or something. or just a dumb groyper, jury’s still out.

I think it’s probably that your anecdote and experience is kind of out of left field considering this guy was only dealing with a couple coyotes, and honestly you probably don’t even need a gun in that circumstance, and I don’t think you’d much need anything larger than pistol-caliber.

Hmm, I don’t understand the downvotes but okay lmao I’m sorry that the AR platform is actually fine in close quarters?

As far as I understand it, the main problem people have with it, which they also have with pretty much every gun larger than a foot or so, so most guns, is that you can’t really cross a threshold horizontally. About the only thing that could qualify against that maybe is like, a pistol or one of those shotguns with a bird’s head grip, or like, some smaller pdw or something. I also dunno how much of a problem that is, of, oh it’s gonna snag on something, or whatever, right, I guess it’s just the idea it’s going to present a higher snag risk or something when turning around, or, when getting up to a ready position? I dunno I’m not a gun nut.

I think it probably also isn’t helped by the increasing consumerist trend to load up their guns with more and more extraneous shit and go for longer and longer rifles on their AR platforms to try and increase accuracy on the range, which means they tend to conceptualize of them as being unsuitable for close quarters despite that kind of being the idea of an intermediate cartridge and all that. It also doesn’t really help to cite our military engagements with it considering over the last like 3 decades of the rifle’s service we’ve mostly only fought like, random middle eastern terrorist organizations that don’t have a great reputation for good training or good equipment or anything like that. You could maybe look at uses of the rifle by other organizations like the IRA or whatever, but I don’t think they had any close quarters engagements.