War is sometimes needed; it’s a necessary response to aggression. The genocides in Bosnia? Without a war, they would have murdered all the Croats. One of my teachers in school was a survivor of the Bosnian war, and her family absolutely would have been killed had they not gotten out. Without the Allied forces waging war against the Axis, Jews in Europe would have been completely eliminated.

The option to war is to curl up and hope that you can survive the bear mauling you.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-examiner/

Bad source.

I live in an an area with a lot of empty houses. A lot of those houses are not fit for human habitation. Someone dies, the house gets tied up in probate, the kids don’t want to live in the area–nor do most other people–and so the house that was already in disrepair degrades more. And, TBH, moving homeless people to rural areas that have a lot of abandoned homes would make it harder for them to access social services.

Yeah, we have the houses. Just not where the homeless people are.

People generally want that suburban ideal, of a four bedroom house, two car garage, a front and backyard… Zoning would be needed to require housing to be denser, rather than allowing sprawl.

Can you elaborate on that? Structurally they’re quite a bit sturdier than typical residential construction. You need doors and windows, but that’s a matter of cutting holes with a plasma torch. You can use 2x2 and foam board on the inside, and partially bury them in earth for the bulk of insulation, while running ducting, etc. under a raised floor. You certainly have limited space layouts–a CalKing bed ain’t fitting–but that’s not necessarily a deal breaker.

Personally, I lean more towards Quonset huts for inexpensive and durable construction.

Well you see since I’m not pro-gun, I don’t think in terms of “all of these murders are acceptable”.

So, what you’re saying is that the murder rate is not important to you, because you oppose the individual ownership of firearms, regardless of whether or not they’re used to harm other people. Is that correct? So when you cite the murder rate as being your reason for banning firearms, that’s not your real reason at all. On the other hand, if it is your real reason, then you must have a number that you consider to be acceptable. Is it 1? 100? Or does any single person using an item or right in a way that is either illegal or harmful to other people sufficient cause to ban that <> or eliminate that right?

Hmmm. Hans Bellmer is probably my favorite overall, but he’s better known as a surrealist photographer and illustrator. (His illustrations are almost affordable; I don’t know if he’s just not that well known, or if his surrealist eroticism isn’t to everyone’s taste, or what. But his ‘puppet’ photos are really fantastic and disturbing.)

Second is Egon Schiele, who died far, far too young during the Spanish Influenza epidemic. He was a protege of Gustav Klimt, and, IMO, would have eclipsed him had he lived.

Third is Lucien Freud, who has such expressive brushwork, and was a master of color and composition.

Geddy Lee (Rush), Les Claypool (Primus, others), Dominick “Forest” LePointe (First Fragment, others), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Chris Squire (Yes), Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead), Sting (The Police), John Deacon (Queen), Maurice Gibb (Bee Gees)…

Again, since you refused to answer the question:

What is a murder rate that you would consider to be acceptable such that you wouldn’t attempt to restrict the ownership of firearms of any kind by individuals?

It’s also useful to point out that NZ enacted sharp restrictions after the Christchurch murders, and then realized that they were functionally useless, and have since relaxed and are on the cusp of abolishing those same laws, Because the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Weird. I loved the taste. Even a decade after I quit for good, I still love the smell. I don’t get the cravings at all though.

So do the gun laws in America mandate that a gun is kept in serviceable condition and it’s owner is trained in how to use it? Or have we shrugged off “intent” before the second paragraph?

I would fully support laws that required people to train in the arms that they choose to own, and provided the ammunition and expertise as part of income taxes that everyone is supposed to pay. I think that would be great. Heck, let’s bring back marksmanship to schools; there used to be rifle teams in high schools, and I think that we should bring that back along with archery. We are a country that’s heavily armed, but often sorely lacking in the skill to use those arms, and we should fix that to bring the people more in-line with the intent of the 2A.

Yes, ownership is a right, but that right also carries responsibilities. Guns aren’t magic talismans that protect you simply by having one.

The fact that you slipped so effortlessly into that straw man

This isn’t a straw man; I’m steel manning your argument. Your best claim is that you would give that right back once all violence had been eliminated. But that’s an impossibility; even countries that have exceptionally low murder rates, with or without firearms, continually attempt to exert greater control over ownership of the tools of violence whatever those tools are. I’m acquainted with people that live in Finland, a country that has a murder rate that would be the envy of any politician in the US, but each murder committed with a firearm–legally owned or not–sees calls for more and more restrictions on the ownership of arms. What is a murder rate that you would consider to be acceptable such that you wouldn’t attempt to restrict the ownership of firearms of any kind by individuals?

For communism to work as intended past a tribal or perhaps city-state level, yeah, I’d say that we would need to be a different species. Communism works fantastically well when everyone is pretty closely connected; the larger a society gets, the less well it ends up working, without having draconian measures in place that largely eliminate all personal liberty.

I’m not saying that capitalism works well, unless you have a perverse definition of “well”. Capitalism does tend to give individuals some kind of incentive to work for what is nominally the greater good by creating the appearance that their own personal effort is tied to the results that they get. Conversely, communism, in large societies, has your input largely decoupled from what you get back. On a large scale, I think that democratic socialism will give the best overall results, but you have to ensure that no one has the ability to entirely fuck off and leech off the labor of everyone else without risking that infecting everyone, and resulting in nothing at all getting done.

and the long history of pro-gun candidates stripping rights from people,

So, what you’re saying here is that people are having to make choices about which rights they want. That’s not a very strong argument, IMO. I don’t like Republicans trying to strip rights from LGBTQ+ people, or trying to cram religion down my throat. I don’t like Dems trying to take my guns. Civil rights are civil rights, end of story.

Bomb attacks just aren’t happening

Patently false. Theodore Kaczinski is perhaps the most famous one, but there was also the Weathermen, the Boston Marathon, at least one attempt on the World Trade Center, the McVeigh/Nichols bombing in Oklahoma City, the Columbine murderers had improvised bombs that failed to explode, women’s health centers, historically black churches… The list goes on, and on, and on. Bombs have been used in many, many cases, and in some of the worst mass casualty events in US history. (The Oklahoma City Bombing killed 168 people; the 2017 Las Vegas shooting killed less than half of that.)

Cool, now lets do speech, religion, unreasonable search and seizure, right to remain silent, drinking, and voting. Until every single person out of 350M people in the US can use those rights in a way that is deemed socially acceptable, they should be completely eliminated.

The pro-gun community opposes this because the intent of 2A was always to protect the ownership of militarily-useful arms.

The gov’t already has the right to raise and provide arms for an army, as part of article 1 of the constitution; claiming that 2A protects the gov’t’s right to arm itself, when it was already granted that right earlier in the constitution, is laughable. Militias were groups of armed citizens, separate from the army, and they were often expected–and legally obligated in some cases–to provide their own arms in serviceable condition, and to train themselves in their use.

The way to effectively curtail violence without curtailing rights is to change the circumstances that lead to violence. Yes, you can cut out lung cancer, and even possibly do a lung transplant, but it’s far, far easier to prevent lung cancer by not smoking than it is to cure it after you’ve been smoking for 50 years. Same with violence; look at the factors that lead people to pick up and use a gun illegally, then work to prevent those, and you’ll have a greater net effect.

Liberals are Dems in the US. But keep insisting that they aren’t, and see how far that gets you. Progressive and DemSoc candidates sure aren’t getting any traction, because it turns out that the people that tend to support that simply don’t vote in significant enough numbers to make a difference.

The mistake here is thinking that his supporters will care, if they even hear about it.

They won’t.

As long as he is hurting the right people, they will excuse anything.

Significantly less, since commerce and the ability to trade things for a different value forms the basis for civilization. It’s easy to grow and hunt your own food, because that’s immediate and concrete. The farther away you get from that, the more abstract that thing becomes. It’s going to be harder for people to feel any sense of connection and purpose with making the rubber that goes into a seal on the International Space Station when they don’t see any direct benefit from the research done there, and they likely can’t even see the indirect benefit of that fundamental research.

For good or ill, commerce is how civilizations universally work, and you’d have to imagine a completely different species that evolved under vastly different circumstances to have anything else.

If a penitent is unwilling to accept the consequences of their actions, then are they truly penitent? AA tells people that part of their journey to sobriety requires making amends for what they did; why is a child rapist being let off more easily than a drunk?

If I were clergy, I would tell a penitent that there was no forgiveness in this life or the next until they had confessed to police and pleaded guilty without a plea agreement. In my reading of the bible, this is not a conflict; James 2:18 says, “But someone will say, ‘You have faith, and I have works.’ Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”. Real faith, and real repentance, requires an outward manifestation, although the manifestation is not proof by itself of faith. So a penitent that is actually penitent–and thus ready to accept the forgiveness of their god–must be willing to accept the secular consequences of their actions.

The Mini-14 is not a good rifle. Accuracy and reliability are both very poor compared to a bone-stock AR-15; typically you’re looking at about 4-5MOA on a Mini-15. Many of the parts are MIM, are are more likely to fail or be out of tolerance than forged and milled parts.

As far as saying that American citizens have access to better arms than the US military… No. Yes, a civilians AR-15 can be better than what the military buys, and civilians usually take better care of their firearms, and don’t beat them to shit. But TBH, the AR-15 is one of the best all-purpose mid-sized cartridge rifles out there. Other rifles may be better in some ways, but an AR-15 has very, very good balance between cost, reliability, durability, accuracy, power, range, and weight. Sure, my AR-10 in 6.5 Creedmoor has more power, much better range, and is sub-MOA, buuuuuut ammunition weighs 2x as much and costs 4x as much, my rifle is 1.5x heavier, is 12" longer than a standard M4, and barrel life is about 1500-2000 rounds before it’s worn out. (Also, typical infantry firefight ranges are <300y, and often much close than that in urban environments; a long range rifle isn’t helpful there.) As far as hunting goes, 5.56x45mm in heavier weight bullets is quite adequate for varmint and mid-sized game at typical hunting ranges.

As far as armaments beyond rifles, American civilians don’t have legal access to most of the things that win conventional wars. I can’t buy modern artillery shells, or guided missiles. Small arms alone aren’t going to win a conventional full-scale battle. OTOH, small arms and IEDs can make occupation impossibly expensive for an invader.

That said - yeah, Lucas Botkin is a far-right christian nationalist homo/transphobic shitbag. T-Rex Arms make great holsters, which sucks, since I’m not ever going to send any money to them for any reason. You have to take a lot of his shooting advice with a handful of salt, because he’s not personally that good of a shooter. If you want good advice about how to shoot well, look specifically at people that compete; if a person is telling you how to shoot, but isn’t willing to test their own skills on the clock and against other people, odds are that they’re full of shit.

And yea - all of the violence is a social issue, and we should be trying to fix those, not banning shit. And by social issue, I don’t mean some kind of personal responsibility nonsense, or this garbage idea that we need more harsh deterrents and prisons, more cops, etc.; I mean that we need to stop treating people like they’re trash.