Bay 12 Games Forum

When did we talk about gun bans?

... the constant reference to the removal of in-home civilian gun ownership? Regulating firearms to the gunrange is by and large banning them for personal use. That will not happen in the US any time in the next few dozen years, at minimum.

Again, it's not about making it impossible, it's about making it hard enough to most criminals don't bother.

Except, in America's case, it's not about that, either. It's about making sure that the people who legally acquire guns are knowledgeable and capable enough for responsible gun use. Current practices are so loose (at least in a notable amount of states) that they're only nominally there if you don't already have a criminal record.

You're not going to get a law banning or heavily regulating gun usage through the states any time in the next several dozen years, period. Stronger regulations on licensing and selling/buying is at least possible, and would help cut down on accidental shootings.

... because there's places in the world that are basically unlivable due to pollution, right now, and there's areas where pollution from previous generations still have heavy impact. Pollution being bad isn't exactly something that's really debatable by anyone even remotely sane. We have a lot of examples of how it screws things up.

E: The refusal to recognize global warming is at least understandable -- it takes a long-term (20+ years) and heavily statistical (global warming is global; local environments don't necessarily warm up across the globe) view, which many people refuse to engender. Especially politicians who tend to be heavily focused in a very short-term period (election and re-election).

The refusal is g'damn stupid, yes, but it's understandable. Wrong, foolish, and deadly shortsighted, but understandable.

Probably referring to folks with a criminal record. Alternately, most in-home violence, unsurprisingly, comes from folks living there, not folks breaking in.

There's also accidental shootings, of course. One of the reasons that some people in the states are for stricter controls (so there's a stronger assurance people owning guns actually know what the blazes they're doing.).

Ah, so he is trying to use the spotlight fallacy. Take a single example and try and say it represents a larger trend. Very sneaky tactic.

More like calling Deadmeat on his use of "won't" instead of "much less likely to."

How can people follow the constitution written hundreds of years ago more closely than the bible written thousands of years ago.

I... what? How can one not follow something merely a couple centuries out of date more closely than something a couple millennium out of date? That seems like, yanno', sense.

Yet people still believe it word for word, when they pick and choose what they believe in the bible.

That...  yes, people pick and choose from the constitution. You can see it in places like the 4th amendment violations that are written into law along borders, among dozens and dozens of other things. The constitution gets interpreted and selectively applied just as much as biblical text does. Most of the fundamentalist constitutionalist are as batshit insane as the fundamentalist christians.

It serves no purpose in a modern society other than to increase gun crime. Here in britain we have gun crime, but very very little. Our regulation of weapons is arguably the best in the world, and it works.

Most of the american population disagrees with that first bit. The second is definite and repeatedly proven, but the american majority believes, currently, that gun ownership is worth that cost.

As for the american constitution itself, its got good bits, its got bad bits. Same as every other political document in existence. It's got a lot of pretty solid stuff to it, which definitely doesn't mean that it's "Nonsense."

Id imagine thats due to vigilante justice superceding the proper and fair rule of law, thats nothing at all to be proud of.

Imagining doesn't cut it. They do actually have studies and so forth about that sort of thing. Vigilante justice isn't very common (by which I mean g'damn rare) in the US.

E response to your E: Yes, guns do prevent some crime. Deterrent and self defense is a thing that actually happens. The argument is not irrelevant -- possibly insufficient, but definitely relevant.

You... you live somewhere people actually drive under the speed limit willingly? When they're not like 90? And in large enough numbers it actually clogs the roads?

And... and it snows. Where are you, again? I need to mark it on my list of places to eyeball for moving.

I like how gearhead does most of its scaling. The more you succeed, the harder the fight gets. The more you fail, the easier the fights get. It basically self-adjusts to your capability without direct level scaling -- you can very easily game it to weaken things, if you want, so you can either play it very carefully, retreating occasionally to bring down the general difficulty or go balls to the wall and let it adjust itself when you get your crotch rocket mecha blown out from under you. S'one of the more bearable scaling systems I've seen.

Then it's got some set difficulty encounters that will wreck the shit out of you if you try getting into them early. Full death (usually you just get your ride blown up) is rare in GH1 and fairly mitigatible in GH2, so some degree of surprise!death isn't massively annoying.

ToME4 is a limited scaling effect; individual zones have an upper and lower limit for monster levels (and thus what monsters can be generated), so you've got some give in dungeon order without (theoretically, anyway) completely trivializing similar difficulty dungeons after you take down the first one. Then there's an optional area that scales indefinitely (and will eventually kill you, if you keep screwing with it.).

I could see a game where it has both linear (plot) scaling, OoD shit (wreck-your-face areas, no scaling), and opt-in difficulty boosters (investing something into a particular area to boost difficulty). Something for everyone ♪