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[sluissa]

Just to note, assault rifle specifically refers to automatic fire weapons, either fully automatic or burst fire. If a weapon is semi-auto only, it is not an assault rifle, even if it looks like one. Fully automatic, and burst fire weapons are already heavily regulated and completely banned for new sale to civilians. (Only ones registered before May 1986 are allowed to be in circulation, and even they are closely watched and more importantly, extremely expensive to get ahold of.)

This is why gun people roll their eyes at pushes against "assault weapons" or "assault rifles". The last law against "assault weapons" from the Clinton era was almost useless, focused on superficial features and was mostly an annoyance more than anything keeping anything specific out of people's hands. While "assault rifles" are already extremely regulated and effectively banned except as collectors items to the extremely rich or business investments for exclusive use at a gun range. (At least one range around here has an automatic weapon you can rent to use, at their range, with one of their people standing next to you, and using their very expensively priced ammunition for it. You're looking at between $200-300 just to rent it and buy two small boxes of ammo, which, since it's automatic, you could burn through in just a few minutes.)

Now, I don't even argue that 2nd amendment requires unrestricted access to firearms. I'm fine with some reasonable limitations, and I'm even willing to bend quite a bit on "reasonable" if it means the politician pushing it is doing otherwise really good things. But it chafes me to hear ANY politician, talking about regulation on ANY topic, when they're so obviously poorly educated on said topic or simply lying to push a political agenda.

[delphonso]

I honestly think the spirit of the 2nd amendment would be better served by limiting military powers than by arming more citizens. Should you need to fight back against a tyrannical government, you will lose. And unless Americans are allowed to organize militia and arm themselves with bomb-dropping drones and nuclear weapons, the 2nd amendment is really not being represented at all.

Gun rights have little to do with the consititution, in my opinion, and have more to do with hobbyists and corporations. As I see, the 2nd amendment is already broken, because it was written in a time when our military wasn't over half our budget.

- This sounds a lot more whiny than I intended it. I meant to point out that gun ownership for hobby and hunting are not included in the 2nd amendment, though they are included in the argument, since most people ignore half of the 2nd amendment anyway.

[Bumber]

I'm pretty sure you were expected to be allowed to protect your homestead with a gun back in the day. I don't think it's just about military use, even though that's the reason given.

Edit: Although, I guess that would be left to the States to decide.

[Max™]

It was literally intended as a threat against the government overstepping it's bounds via the presence of an armed AND TRAINED militia drawn readily from the populace.

The 1st amendment pisses me off because of goddamn snowflakes raising hell over being silenced for saying their stupid bullshit, be they lefty snowflakes or righty snowflakes, they're almost invariably using it wrong: the 1st protects you from THE GOVERNMENT deciding what you get to say, if I pop you in the jaw until you shut up for being an antivax babykiller you don't have a 1st amendment violation to cry about, your broader right against unwanted violence is an argument you could raise but violence to preserve the safety of the weak and helpless is justified dammit.

Until the government issues a law saying "It is legal to punch Jenny McCarthy in her stupid uppercuntflaps every time she spews babykilling bile" THEN it is a 1st amendment issue.

[Doomblade187]

Minorly related, this article goes into a lot about the origins of the second amendment.

Here ya go.

[SalmonGod]

To clarify on my post about the pro-gun crowd a couple pages back:

I'm personally kind of ambivalent on the gun control debate.  I think the common arguments on both sides are valid to some extent, and there is no clear right answer.  Personally, I just wish guns didn't exist.  Human beings succeeded at dominating nature long before they came to be, including eradication of megafauna.  Anything more advanced than bow & arrow was created primarily for the purpose of killing other human beings, and thus has no business being a thing.  It's a coincidental edge case that they might also prevent someone from getting eaten by a bear on very rare occasion.

But since they do exist, I agree that the best thing that could happen is de-escalation of the power wielded by government forces.  Guns may be an equalizer between physically weak and strong individuals, but they have the opposite effect on societal scale, as larger, wealthier organizations unlock access to powers an individual could never dream of.  If nothing more advanced than a bow & arrow exists, then the only difference between an individual and an organization is the number of people with bows & arrows.  When military aircraft and combat drones and the like exist, then the difference between an individual and a powerful organization is something else entirely.  Or even the difference between a majority of individuals vs an organization that is comparatively small but wealthy.

My comment on the pro-gun culture wasn't to say that every pro-gun advocate is racist.  But it would be wildly dishonest to claim that gun rights have any tendency to be honored equally between whites and non-whites.  There's massive pro-gun hysteria and a spike in sales whenever a white person misbehaves with a gun, but rarely any pro-gun outrage or NRA commentary when police kill a black person for being a responsible gun owner.  Or has state policies designed to disarm minority communities.  When that happens, suddenly it's not framed as a 2nd amendment issue, and the same massive pro-gun crowd that regularly proves themselves to be quite capable of making a lot of influential noise mysteriously loses their powerful unified voice.  This isn't an accusation that it's the intention of every person who is pro-gun ownership, but the net effect of the agenda is a racial power disparity.

[dragdeler]

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[Egan_BW]

Really not sure what you're trying to say.

[dragdeler]

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[Egan_BW]

And... what happened instead and how is that relevant to this discussion?

[dragdeler]

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[Max™]

It is probable that the megafauna outside Africa would have died off whether we showed up or not, but ignoring our role in their disappearance seems to beg for an explanation of why the only surviving megafauna were the ones that evolved alongside us and learned "kill or run far from the walkyapes" and it also ignores that encountering new species which hadn't yet adapted to us could have been a strong motivation for us to more rapidly develop our toolmaking and tactical thinking. We spent a million years making stone handaxes and capitalizing on/using fire in Africa and South Asia before we had much success expanding further and developing more complex toolmaking.

[dragdeler]

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[Enemy post]

Not all megafauna went extinct. We just consider those that didn't to be relatively unremarkable modern animals.

[Max™]

Oh good lord, so the first result on duckduckgo for randall carlson is some shit like "sacredgeometryinternational" and the blurb includes in his description the terms "geometrician" and "geomythologist" which sounds like it's two or three steps from calling yourself an astrologer (or astrologician!) given the url it's on.

Like, that's not a red flag to check your facts and verify with other sources... it's a three hour long fireworks show where all the fireworks produce massive red flags across the sky, coordinated to music no less.

Note: I find the younger dryas impact hypothesis to be quite reasonable given the various impact ejecta in the appropriate layers, I've read various articles and such on it and never heard of this dude before now. Not going to a site about sacred geometry on general principles though.