All weaponry invented over the past hundred years.
But talk designed specifically to persuade is not honest, it is by it’s very nature pure bias. It’s a classic problem of assuming that one’s own bias should be more valid because one feels strongly about it.
When the structure of society is based upon fairness, such problems seldom occur, and take care of themselves. Passing laws requires some people to be “more equal” than others, which perpetuates injustice. For instance, what is the typical accepted response to somebody with guns shooting people? To call more people with guns to shoot people! It seems very much a double-bind which needs to be sidestepped rather than perpetuated. A society based upon influence and coercion causes these problems, and will never solve them through application of more of the same. It is an unattainable ideal, not a practicality.
That’s not true either. It is completely honest in what it is trying to do.
Sounds like you’re having a cultural problem.
Too bad this has never happened and never will.
The rest of it is, effectively, you complaining about living in a democracy and a society which passes laws based on representation of its members. Other than you, most people here don’t want to live in an anarchistic society. I am perfectly happy with a constitutional system with laws that has a democratic basis.
Except the people I know talking about this as if it was common knowledge are pretty mainstream Republicans. They believe this idea - which is obviously insane - because the NRA and Fox News are pushing that narrative. (In Fox’s case they’re not explicitly pushing that narrative- they leave that to their guests - but they’re pushing a number of narratives that collectively amount to the same thing.) Decision matrix be damned - this is something that very clearly cannot happen because a) it relies on the President having powers he clearly does not have and b) relies on the government response to something that happens with alarming frequency to be totally different from every other time it happened, for no particular reason. That’s far from rational.
I am all for democracy, but it seems obvious that any system which is not a direct democracy eventually develops agenda of its own, and only represents their supposed constituency as little as they can get away with. I can appreciate that it sounds great that we “should be able” to create a privileged class of people to manage our affairs - yet who will not exploit those who put them there - but it has never worked this way for any significant length of time. How and why do people suppose such systems will eventually work as advertised? I agree that many other systems (and non-systems) are worse, but people’s biases seem to encourage them to accept some naive compromises.
Direct democracy is prone to rule by an uninformed mob swayed by opinions. That’s why we have republics where we designate representatives to make it their full time job to be informed and develop the skillset to govern effectively.
When you can point to a better system with an actual example of it existing and working for hundreds of millions of people, I’ll consider switching to it.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” - Winston Churchill
That is certainly a risk, but it seems more indicative of a populace with little discipline rather than a system of government. A fair society allows for repairing of collective cognitive defects, rather than requiring them for exploitation. Basically - people are conditioned to have opinions, and pressure others.
There has never been any such thing as a fair system of government for millions of people, and I doubt if there ever will be. Such a large sampling of people will not have similar values or goals, thus requiring, as Chomsky calls it - manufactured illusions of consent. Groups can only be robust and stable at much smaller sizes, in the thousands at most. Unless we are willing to attain the appearance of stability through holding a captive audience of politically impotent people.
Although this probably sounds like a tangent to those who assert that safety will be achieved by discussing the dos and don’ts of firearms. So I will bow out.
Something bad happens. People say we should ban things. People who maybe just thought “someday maybe I’d like one of those” or “if they ban it, this will go up in value” are prompted to make a purchase while they can. Legitimate FFLs sell what people want. EVERY SINGLE new gun purchase goes through the NICS background check.
So what you are having is more law abiding people buying arms. Oh noes! Someone doing something you don’t like!
And liberty for all - give me a break.
Also after Newton, IIRC, Dicks actually cancelled a huge promotion they had on AR-15s and cancelled their order (IIRC from Daniel Defense).
ETA - headline says “future earnings” - skimming the article all of the quotes look like analysis of trends in the past. Which is an honest assessment that sales increase, vs increase due to new products or marketing.
Also, just as a reality check, the FBI report says that around maybe 4% of all gun homicides are using long guns, and probably less than 1% using “scary black rifles”. So you gun grabbers are all having a fainting spell over people not wanting to confiscate 50 million rifles from law abiding citizens, to lower a risk of death by “assault rifle” which is already about one in a million or maybe a fraction of that. grow up. If we passed a constitutional amendment banning handshakes, we could cut preventable death by infectious disease by a factor of thousand higher than “assault rifle deaths”. But that would interfere with your freedom, would it not? Every time you shake hands, you’re killing some old people or babies or immunocomprised individuals.
There’s a complicating factor though. As you are, apparently, a member of “Team Toluene,” many see themselves as members of “Team Gun Buyer.”
The purchase of leaded solder can be seem as a political act.
Any lunatic who feels strongly enough about their cuddly gun lobby might commit a shooting to do them a favor, or because they think that it would make Carly or Mike or somebody happy. In a roundabout way, if $ = happy, then it kinda’ does.
How’s that different from “cries for limiting of gun accessibility”? Isn’t it exactly the same in different words?
With politicos you can never be sure what they will produce. Hedging against the most adverse possibility can be a reasonable tradeoff.
Because the Republican Noise Machine overreports the crazy ones calling for crazy stances. With such filtered data the world looks more adverse. And because Oh-bummer became something like a lightning rod to blame everything at, kind of like Shrubya was for part of the Left.
Why complicating? There is something I want, that’s available now and may or may not be available tomorrow. So better get it today. As simple as it can be, whether it is a gun, a solvent, or a flight ticket for a certain date.
Everything you do can be spun as a political act. Including doing nothing. Including accepting the change whatever it is this time and meekly rolling over. Including rigging up a precision CNC machine so you can make yourself whatever you want whenever you want it.
Better avoid the politics, let others spin the tales, and spend the time in the lab and spin up the lathe instead.
Informal anarchism worked de facto all over the planet for thousands of years before various empires conquered the indiginies. Anarchistic systems are responsible for most of the basic technologies that we take for granted, like oh, farming, and the concept of society. Also, the Zapatistas, Paris Commune, Spain '36-39, anarchist role in Russian revolution prior to Kronstadt and Leninist consolidation of power.
Mostly the problem with anarchists is whenever they take power everybody else, from communist to fascist, concentrates on eliminating them to the exclusion of all other goals.
Also, it’s a little careless to discount the various world movements in which anarchists play important roles. Don’t expect to see favorable coverage in mainstream. There was a recent article on Al Jazeera about the Greek anarchists, it was very condescending and superficial but at least acknowledged that they are building infrastructure in the country.
Also in Spain there are numerous anarchist-run coop’s. That’s real, not some political rhetoric bullshit. Anarchism is replete with practical solutions, but demanding that anarchism provide an example of successfully abolishing capitalism and defending gains in order to be considered seriously is bogus. Nobody has been able to unseat capitalism or even the most basic tenets of the status quo owing to capitalism’s power and violence.
And remember, the wealth and power of feudalism was for the most part preserved under capitalism. It’s hard to beat opponents with a 1000 year head start when they have all the power and armies. It’s a fucking miracle that anarchists have accomplished what they have.
Homage to Catalonia and The Spanish Cockpit are excellent books on practical anarchist success amd failure in Spain, and a must-read imho. Talk about scale, the anarchists collectivized thousands of factories and millions of acres of farmland and were even beating the fascists before Italian/German/Soviet intervention.
Also…Rome and Greece didn’t really have democracy. They were slavery-based city states and only male citizens could vote. Not even remotely democratic. Neither are our current systems.
No, mostly the problem with anarchists is that they don’t propose a functional system of governance for nations the size of, say, the United States with 300 million people.
Oh my!!
Which again, isn’t how you govern an entire country. I’m not talking about new modes of structuring a business with employee ownership.
According to them they did and they invented the term though, in all fairness, Rome was actually a republic and only for 450 years after all. You realize the plebes directly elected the Tribunes, who could veto Senate laws, right?
But, good to know you anarchists are still out there. When I was 22, I still believed in you.
