Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't have anything cogent to add, just my sympathy.  It's been great to see you around again, despite the circumstances.

Yeah, echo that. Hopefully you'll get some kind of chance to degauss (... like old monitors, not data) at some point in the near future, vec.

Basically, yeah. They're largely the folks that end up supporting genocide or somethin' because it's carried out by an enemy of the west or someone claiming to be communist or whatev'. For a recent example, they're fairly likely to buy in or parrot the horseshit about russia's invasion of ukraine being a response to nato aggression or crap along those lines.

"No one likes them" is a pretty accurate take, they're (or at least their political et al positions) generally pretty reviled by... well, most reasonable people, even ones that are otherwise fairly politically extreme. Sometimes their heart's kinda' in the right place but holy shit do ideological blinders come into play real, real hard.

I don't think I've ever had a dream where I was someone else.

Just this morning I was bouncing between a sheriff and a lady gunfighter in a weird west setting going after a cthulhu-entity powered gentleman might-as-well-have-been-a supervillain. The gunfighter had a raygun in one hand and the other hand had a gun with an underslung circular saw (if that sounds orky as hell to you it was because it was orky as hell, shit was some propa dakka). After a minor confrontation where the gunfighter barely managed to break the skin of the underworld cultist mogul (and in doing so, impress them!), the sheriff managed to talk him out of a fight and to leave town.

It was pretty great.

Sorry if I got a bit heated. It's just that something about this just doesn't sit right with me. You understand?

The only people it does sit right with are the fucking ghouls that run for office on a republican ticket, the rightwing media apparatus, and the literally goddamned firearm industry. Of course it doesn't sit right with you, there's basically no one worth even a little shit that it does.

It's worth noting with the teacher thing, there's actually places in the US where it's legal for one to carry on campus at this point. Teachers that actually do so are incredibly rare, for a pile of reasons, among which is -- as I noted upthread -- that the sacks of shit that pushed that insanity through the state legislatures gave exactly fuck and all support for it. No assistance (not fiscal, not practical, not in terms of scheduling for work, nothing) with training, no assistance with acquisition or maintenance, fucking nothing. Their (displayed, anyway, they probably neither expected nor wanted it to nor cared if it would work out) idea of doing it right was to make the possibility legal and then expect everything else to magically work itself out and the already underpaid and overworked school staff to take on extra duties, for free, on their own dime and time, that would easily take up a chunk of a bloody cop's weekly schedule. Unsurprisingly, shit didn't happen.

It's one of several reasons I've been saying that not a single sodden goddamned thing is going to happen to improve things on the issue of gun violence until something breaks the back of the US right wing. Even the shit they say they want, they will not support, especially beyond shitstirring legislation that's more intended to piss off people that aren't fucking scumshit than do anything useful.

This is why fiscal costs isn't actually Enemy Number One to the improved healthcare that wouldn't likely do much on the issue -- Enemy Number One to anything that's claimed by any side of the US political spectrum to help is not anything logistical, it's the GOP and those aligned with and around it. Even their own shit they sabotage.

But we can't have that. If you ban guns in America, there will be an insurrection that will kill more people than the bill would save.

That's not even a remotely a given, actually. A gun regulation schema that actually brought US gun deaths down to the level of other relevant countries would save multiple tens of thousands of lives, per year. An insurrection would have to kill a whole hell of a lot of people (which itself is questionable, given the nature and amount of folks actually willing to start murdering people if someone tried to disarm them) for an actual effective gun ban to not pay for itself in blood pretty rapidly.

Like... seriously. Over the last few decades firearms have racked up like a 7 digit body count in the US -- around 1.5 million since the late 60s. It's been like two or three civil wars worth of bodies over that period. Multiple combined world wars in terms of american causalities. More than every single military conflict the US has been involved with since 1776. More than a covid (for now, anyway, probably). 2020 alone was about 15 9/11s stacked on top of each other. An insurrection would have to be one hell of a thing to kill more than a gun ban that actually worked would save. The mountain of corpses the US firearm industry has helped build and continue to grow is pretty goddamned large.

So, a large amount of US case law protects the right to Americans having guns. Those cases cite the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
The text of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So, MaxTheFox is correct.

I mean, bright side, the current SCOTUS seems intent on proving that case law means fuckall, so by the time there's enough people willing to do something about the issue the US right wing can't sabotage the process, we probably won't have to care about it much. The 2nd has a lot of room for interpretation if you have the means to jam that interpretation down everyone's throat, heh. The current horseshit one is pretty recent, legally.

It wouldn't surprise me if, once the Gen X/boomer crowd stops being politically relevant, there actually does come about a fair amount of firearm regulation, and enforcement. Tolerance of the state of things in regards to that is dropping pretty damn hard among the younger generations that are the primary ones eating the bullets over all this shit.

Can is pretty different from "can do well" or effectively and whatnot. From what I understand most efforts to curtail deer populations via hunting just don't work very well, both relative to other means (especially relative to other means like predator reintroduction) and compared to dedicated, organized efforts (i.e. not rando mchunterson given a licence and a missing or enlarged quota). So, like. It's a sorta' yes, but shittily.

... pointedly, though, a great deal of the reason it's even necessary is because firearms enabled folks to trivially murder the normal checks on deer population, so. Feel free to make the argument they don't get credit for halfass cleaning up a mess they made :V

Why do you people even stay in your weird country?

It's hard as hell to leave, for all sorts of reasons. Give me a reasonable means to move somewhere less bugfuck and not have to worry about my family in the process and I'd be out yesterday.

Unfortunately, I don't have the sort of money that can manage something like that.

Because if we leave we still have to pay our taxes to the US?

Only if you retain citizenship in the US. Revoke that and you're fine.

Well I am not a Hindu so I don't believe in them. I honestly couldn't care less about what other religions have to say.

Like, believe or not it's still a classic work of human literature, one of the oldest surviving texts made and propagated by human hands.

Been a while since I read any of it, but from what I remember there's plenty of remarkably beautiful work in the Vedas -- Hindu or not, they're worth a read just for what they are outside a religious context, same as quite a few other holy texts of note.