Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Lord Shonus on July 16, 2021, 07:00:05 pm

If either party gains true dominance for any length of time, it will shatter. Both parties are a conflicting mass of interests that are held together as much by the threat of the other party as anything else.

So if one party shatters, the other will room which would give third parties a much better chance than currently, right?

More that a new party or set of parties would amalgamate from the mass. Might still be called Democrats and Republicans, but they'd be significantly different in structure and platform from what they are now. It has happened before - we're currently on the Sixth Party System, and the Republicans were introduced at the start of the Third.

Quote from: Lord Shonus on July 16, 2021, 03:03:00 pm

classified British Army documents

Aren't the devs behind War Thunder from Russia?

The best way to fix game balance is to threaten national security, sounds reasonable

I believe they are. This is one of the reasons the Ministry of Defense is not pleased.

The point of a metastudy is to average out a number of studies, in order to counteract any bias, methodological errors, or other factors that might skew the results. The metastudy being linked did so, and concluded that the evidence for the Austrailian law preventing homicides was weak.

You replied to that with

And later in that same section, it states that McPhedran(2018) found a significant change.

Implicitly claiming that this single study, already factored into the results, completely overrides the study's conclusion and proves that the law did what you say. Doing so requires throwing out the entire metastudy. Either use the RAND study to support the conclusions of the RAND study, or come up with an argument that the RAND study is invalid. If you are trying to present the RAND study as evidence for the complete opposite of what the RAND study concluded, that is intellectually dishonest.

The study concluded:

1. There is some evidence that the laws may have prevented mass shootings, but those are so rare that it is difficult to call it conclusive
2. Firearm suicide rates dropped, but so did non-firearms suicides, making the connection dubious
3. There's little evidence to credit the laws with reducing firearm homicide rate, as that was already dropping when the laws were passed

How does the RAND corporation sound?


https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/1996-national-firearms-agreement.html

None of the studies reviewed in McPhedran (2016) found statistically significant evidence that trends in firearm-related homicide changed after the NFA. Since then, two additional studies failed to find an effect (Baker and McPhedran, 2015; Gilmour, Wattanakamolkul, and Sugai, 2018), but three other studies have produced mixed results. Chapman, Alpers, and Jones (2016) found evidence that the decline in total and nonfirearm homicides after the NFA was steeper than prior to the NFA, but the authors found no evidence of either a step change or a change in slopes for firearm homicides. The greater declines in nonfirearm homicides led the authors to doubt whether any changes can be attributed to the NFA.

There is a reason that school shootings are an epidemic in America.

They're not. When CNN (which is generally anti-gun, to the point where a lot of gun control myths originated there) decided to do an in-depth analysis of the commonly cited school shooting figures, they had to throw out almost 90% of them. Either the incident never happened, didn't actually happen at a school (empty lots that used to have schools and are still zoned that way are a common cause of this), or it didn't actually involve a shooting (early media reports are often wrong). After that huge cull, a huge percentage had zero fatalities or injuries, many were on-the-job suicides, and the majority of the ones that did involve a student being shot were targeted hits. Actual "go into a school and blast anything that moves" shootings are an incredibly small proportion, not much more common (when population adjusted) than any other major nation.

And this right here just convinces me you aren't listening anymore. No one said "ban guns". The republican fear mongering is leaking out of your brain.

Except for the people you started this by defending. The law you consider "special treatment" that should be repealed was enacted specifically in response to a "create a total ban on guns by piling anybody who dares to sell them into oblivion with bad-faith lawsuits" initiative.

I don't foresee abortion clinics receiving the same kind of protection from civil litigation that firearms manufacturers enjoy.

The "protection from civil litigation" is largely myth. Everything you can sue any other company for, you can sue a gun manufacturer for. The special protective legislation simply states "so long as the manufacturer followed all applicable laws, you can not sue them for the actions of their customers". Or, in other words, you can't sue Beretta because your brother got shot with a M92, unless Beretta somehow gave them that gun in violation of some law. No other industry has such a specific protection because nobody would even consider trying it - if you tried to sue Ford because some dipshit ran your brother over with a F150, there isn't a lawyer in the country that would not laugh you out of their office.

The law exists because of exactly that sort of case - gun control groups were openly adopting a "we know we don't have a case, but fighting us will be expensive! So we use our nigh-unlimited funding to sue until we get a de facto ban because nobody will dare do business again!" strategy.

Pneumatic systems can also spray oil.

I had to buy a new car last month, because my PT cruiser wouldn't stop burning. It was ludicrously difficult to find a used car in my price range that didn't have something very wrong with it. I don't think the dealerships appreciated me bringing a code-reader with me, but it saved me a lot of hassle.


One of the cars had a most unusual addition, the purpose of which is lost on me. You could push the stick over, and treat your automatic transmission like a manual. Almost caused an accident on the test drive because I didn't know that was a thing.