I have to presume you are a LEO or military. I have no issue with trained people like yourself having guns. Everyone else, no. This is the 21st century - there is really no need for people to hunt. Maybe we can allow people on the frontiers where they might encounter deadly game - but even then there is bear spray, etc. Yes, deer are a nuisance. Imagine what a nuisance WE are to the deer?
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Here you go, way over my head (I hope)
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And mine!
But I doubt many action movie directors have read it either! 
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i get that people have strong moral positions about guns. but they exist, and fascists have most of them, and they’re not giving them up, and i don’t see the wisdom of sitting around tsk tsking about it rather than doing what one can to protect oneself and the vulnerable in community.
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when your going to check impunity do it high def… like watching fireflys
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I used to think that YouTube comments was the nadir of the internet. However that position has long since been taken by news site comment threads.
According to a maker of ballistic water tanks (those tanks of water you see on Mythbusters that forensics people fire into to slow and collect bullets), “the angle of the fired bullet should be approximately 30° to avoid ricochets off the surface of the water and minimize damage to the bullet.”
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I think it is more of a pragmatic position than a moral one, but I might be wrong, of course.
Even with a gun, you’re always at a disadvantage against a fascist, because they have the superpower to simply exclude you from the pool of what they consider human beings, so that they can inflict on you whatever cruelty they see fit. Not being a fascist yourself, you don’t have that ability (or it at least comes at a very high cost), you would still consider them human beings, and treat them as such, because that is the essence of what sets you apart from them.
Therefore, if you and similarly minded people are in a majority, you are in a position to change things without guns, and would be well advised to do so, that is the way towards sustainable change. However if you are in a minority against fascists, enablers of fascists and police, the guns won’t help you much and you better get the hell out of there.
Also, let’s put things in perspective a bit: You said white supremacists kill on average 30 people per year (30 too many), on top of that you have 15.000 homicides with guns and 25.000 suicides with guns in the same period. I find it hard to believe that you would argue what you need is more guns.
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Good lord. I had been hoping he was shooting tracers only for the demonstration. Hadn’t considered the alternative.
Yes, please do not shoot at water or hard surfaces such as rocks. You can’t control where they are going to ricochet off.
And while it may be fun to go to a remote location where no one else is around for miles to try it, please don’t, just in case.
Also - never read the comments anywhere… even on BB! It’s all garbage.
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i think there are some tremendous flaws in your position and you seem to be equating the will/ability to do violence against another person with fascism, which is an ideology that historically has been responded to with violence. are fascists human beings? of course. is that a consideration if or when they are threatening my life or someone else’s and i have the theoretical ability to stop them? it had better not be.
I find it hard to believe that you would argue what you need is more guns .
listen, if i could snap my fingers and make all guns disappear, i would do that. in the meantime, people in my country who are emboldened by the federal government and law enforcement to hurt and kill other people based on their race, religion, political affiliation etc. are organizing heavily armed militias and openly demonstrating that they are willing and able to terrorize and worse with guns. the idea that they can be deterred reasoned with by some appeal to common interest or mutual disarmament based on what we know about history and human behavior is delusional and frankly it’s fucking irresponsible.
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It’s not about reasoning with them - it’s about the fact that we have legitimate armed agencies that we can call to deal with them if/when they start trouble. The fascist take over of Germany was largely due to the ineffective government response to the beer hall putsch a decade earlier. Any government worth the term “government” would have either shot him or jailed him for life. Our government (the US) seems to be pretty good at dealing with these assholes when they start killing people. Yes, someone does end up dead in order for that to happen, but the odds of it being you (see 30 vs. 30,000…above) is pretty low.
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I believe in responsible people being able to own and use guns, within reason. The problem is that so many irresponsible yoicks get their hands on a gun and proceed to act like jackasses, or worse yet, go out with a gun and an agenda. People using them for responsible kill-and-eat hunting, especially in areas where game has overreproduced (introduced for sport or natural predators gone), are okay, as are people who take their guns periodically to a shooting range for practice or certification, and keep them locked away in the meantime. Friends who hunt have given me venison, bunny, pig, and goat, and I have gladly accepted all of it.
They are a bit more than a nuisance. They’re fucking devastating to endemic plants and animals which evolved in an environment without mammals - either predators or herbivores. The introduced pests definitely need to be controlled, and ideally eliminated.
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That’s too bad. I think a lot of the low opinion is fomented (really, I’m not kidding) by corporate media, online media (what a circus!), and viral media. I don’t meet many people that I would put firmly in any camp. They may be pissed off about some issue one day, then the next they come across something contrary and then get really pissed off at the complexity of wondering who the hell is right. Sometimes they even realize that it’s all a mess.
Hey, don’t be so sure of yourself. As an old fart, I (sad) can remember many (toooooo many) times I was sure of my right thinking and now I look back and think that I, along with everyone I argued with, was way off from actually understanding anything I was adamant about.
Still happens by the way, and I’m especially bothered that I still find myself blaming everybody for being too dense to understand the world like I do.
Your brain (mine) is a liar.
The culture is a big mess, the environment is a big mess, the economy is a big mess. The winners are obvious and self-congratulatory. They are sand in the gears to be addressed and use their power to deflect blame with corporate media, online media (what a circus!), and viral media
The way forward is compounded with error and complexity, but wholesale blame of “countrymen” isn’t going to settle anything, but it will confuse and accelerate
…or not…
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The president of my country is now blaming individuals in conceptually colored states for dying too much and making him look bad.
His HHS secretary is blaming democrats for wanting people dead.
I cant even put into words how deep my hatred goes for my countrymen to claim such atrocious inhuman things, and that’s just today.
This is hell on earth to me, not exaggerating. I cannot give words to how angry and miserable I am every day because of the leaders of my government and the fools that parade with comparisons to George Floyd dying to not wanting to wear masks.
I could never manufacture such atrocities if I tried.
So no, when it comes to Americans, I wish I lived on another planet rather than here.
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Bullets hitting a shifting surface: Why would anything other than ricocheting all of the place be expected?
So, I’m a Brit, and my first exposure to guns was in my geography classroom at school, aged about 14. This wasn’t a school shooting or anything, we were being trained to use them.
The reason is, a lot of private schools (and some state schools) have what’s known as the Combined Cadet Force, which is basically the junior version of the OTC in a lot of universities. The aim is to find the next generation of officers (not grunts! these are private schools we’re talking about) for the UK forces.
As Army Cadets, we were taught how to (safely!) operate a rifle, which in this case is the L98*, a non-semi automatic version of the army’s SA80. And because this was at school, the obvious place to do this was in one of the classrooms. Obviously, we never got our hands on live (or even blank) rounds unless we were on an army range (Sennybridge, what a shithole), and personally I’d say there’s no better was to learn gun safety than to have army sargents shouting at you when you’re a young kid. I cringe every time I see an American waving a gun around because I learnt as a kid that if my weapon was ever pointed anywhere but down the range, I’d have a guy twice my size shouting at my face from a few inches away. In my opinion, gun ownership should be well regulated.
It wasn’t until I was in my twenties when I mentioned this to a friend in the pub, and from their shocked expression I finally thought about the fact that for the average British person, the idea that kids in schools are being taught to use weapons is deeply odd.
(I swiftly moved over to the RAF branch, where we got taught to fly planes at the governments expense, which was fucking awesome. I reckon I could still pick up an L98 or SA80 and remember the entire manual of arms, it’s so ingrained I use it instead of counting sheep when I want to go to sleep).
*- obviously, as we were expected to maintain them as well, they were crap, and would jam on practically every magazine, even though you were manually cycling the bolt every time. Of course, it probably didn’t help that at 14 I had the upper-body strength of a ten year old.
