Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

[Meikle641]

I had a pair of stupid/clever ideas and I'd like you to tell me how stupid they are.

1. Gun buyback programs are great, but they won't happen in America. What if the government set up an optional buyback and made resale of guns to anyone else illegal? It seems like this could do something to prevent all the cases where someone who really shouldn't have been allowed a gun buys one secondhand.

Probably wouldn't do much, given how easy it is to get around. It'd just be a matter of torching the receiver (legally what counts as the firearm), then selling the not-firearm to whoever you want, since it is now legally a hunk of metal in the shape of a gun. You'd then either re-fabricate the receiver (3D printing for AR-15s or basic fabrication for AK-pattern rifles) or just buy a new receiver for the fraction of the price of a rifle.

Optionally, people would just not follow the law at all during private sales. Probably some legal shell games one could play as well.

[Orca]

I had a pair of stupid/clever ideas and I'd like you to tell me how stupid they are.

1. Gun buyback programs are great, but they won't happen in America. What if the government set up an optional buyback and made resale of guns to anyone else illegal? It seems like this could do something to prevent all the cases where someone who really shouldn't have been allowed a gun buys one secondhand.

2. For most people who work, a whole lot of piracy is just not worth it. With the sheer amount of time and effort it takes to pirate some things, you could just buy them with your wages from a fraction of that time. So, what if there was a legal site for piracy that was just extremely time-consuming. If done right, it could reduce other sources of piracy and actually increase revenue.

1. Sounds like how to pay the political cost of a gun buyback program (interfering with my property rights! The next step will be to make guns illegal!) without receiving the benefits to society of a gun buyback program, at least unless it ran for a decade or more. And even if you made it happen I expect people would want to see benefits sooner than that so the program would likely die after the next election.

2. Sounds like something the music industry would try to shut down anyway. Expect many lawsuits.

[Username17]

Probably wouldn't do much, given how easy it is to get around. It'd just be a matter of torching the receiver (legally what counts as the firearm), then selling the not-firearm to whoever you want, since it is now legally a hunk of metal in the shape of a gun. You'd then either re-fabricate the receiver (3D printing for AR-15s or basic fabrication for AK-pattern rifles) or just buy a new receiver for the fraction of the price of a rifle.

Every time anyone brings up gun control measures of any kind, someone brings up the stupid idea that they wouldn't work because people could do elaborate home manufacture of firearms or some shit. And you know what? That's a stupid idea. An obviously discredited idea.

The reality is that people don't go out and make zip guns. Sure, they could, but they fucking don't. The vast, vast majority of people who get firearms do so because they are fucking idiots who think that guns make them safe or cool. These are not shadowrunners who forge their own screws like Ted Kaczynski to get around the wandering eyes of Big Brother. These are the mouth breathers who when they do get their hands on them, promptly leave them around so often that toddlers end up shooting people every fucking week.

The reality is that when you make it hard to buy firearms through legal official channels, people just have less guns. And the further reality is that when people have less guns, less people get injured and killed. Because guns are really dangerous, and the people who want to own them are by definition the most irresponsible sector of society.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'd really like to know how many American gun-owners got their firearms as an impulse purchase/hand-me-down as opposed to the hardcore collectors/survivalists/sportsmen/anti-government criminals. I doubt that there are even 15 million people with hunting licenses in the US -- and people in those other categories would be even smaller. Moreover, I bet that if you made prospective hunters spend just a couple of hours fabricating and then assembling their gun half of them wouldn't even bother.

I mean, it won't deter dedicated domestic terrorists and smugglers and organized criminals. But deaths and injuries from criminals are completely dwarfed by those from non-criminals anyway.

[Meikle641]

Every time anyone brings up gun control measures of any kind, someone brings up the stupid idea that they wouldn't work because people could do elaborate home manufacture of firearms or some shit. And you know what? That's a stupid idea. An obviously discredited idea.

The reality is that people don't go out and make zip guns. Sure, they could, but they fucking don't. The vast, vast majority of people who get firearms do so because they are fucking idiots who think that guns make them safe or cool. These are not shadowrunners who forge their own screws like Ted Kaczynski to get around the wandering eyes of Big Brother.

This may shock you, but installing a new receiver into a firearm isn't that hard. It can vary on the model, of course, but firearm manufacturers do sell them by themselves. People make rifles from parts all the damn time.

AR-15 lower receivers
AK-47 lower receivers

Installing that receiver into a firearm is like, maybe an hour of work assuming you have the rest of your easily purchased parts. No manufacturing of raw materials needed.

Combine one of the brand new receivers you bought, and you can then combine them with kits:
AK-47 part kit
(I had trouble finding an apple to apples comparison with an AR-15, but that's because their components are sold piecemeal everywhere.)

Let's say you don't want to buy an actual receiver from a store, due to reasons. Got options there: 80% lowers or full on fabrication.
AR-15 80% lower
AK 80% lowers

An 80% receiver is a partially manufactured firearm receiver, but isn't legally a firearm until the remaining 20% is completed. Typically requires a bit of drilling, cutting, folding, etc but no hard to do, especially if you find a build party in your area.
Finishing 80% AR-15 receiver
Finishing 80% AK receiver

The proposed bill would have result in a lot of people saying "Fuck it" and doing as it says, but the it is trivial to work around it for anybody that bothered.

[Username17]

This may shock you, but installing a new receiver into a firearm isn't that hard. It can vary on the model, of course, but firearm manufacturers do sell them by themselves. People make rifles from parts all the damn time.

No. It doesn't shock me. It's just a pointless observation that has no impact on policy. Yes, people could make their own firearms to bypass laws on transit and sales, but they don't do that. The amount of crime committed with zip guns in countries with harsh gun control laws like Australia, Great Britain, and South Korea are close to zero.

The reason I name checked Ted Kaczynski is because he actually made his own weapon parts to evade laws and flummox forensics. It totally worked even. He wasn't caught by the tracking of his materials or forensic evidence or any of that shit. He was turned into the police by his brother. Anyone could do that kind of thing. All you have to do is dedicate yourself to a life of crime and be a badass shadowrunner. But people don't actually do that a statistically meaningful amount of the time. For fuck's sake, Ted Kaczynski published his manifesto twenty years ago. There's a firearm related murder in the United States every 48 minutes.

Worrying about super criminals who make their own weapons from scrap and spare parts or whatever the fuck is a complete distraction. It is a thing that exists, but it has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on any serious discussion of gun control policy.

-Username17

[Meikle641]

People do make guns using 80% lowers. It's not even comparable to zip guns in terms of ease and safety. It's mostly because 80% lowers are inexpensive, nothing criminal about it.

[Kaelik]

I'm sorry, is there any particular reason why we are pretending that the law can't also talk about gun parts even though the district of columbia and the aborted school zone guns laws both refer to components of guns?

[DSMatticus]

"Laws don't work because people can break them" is a stupid thing said by stupid libertarians. Murder is illegal, and the fact that murder is illegal has not erected magical no-murder barriers across the country. People can and do still murder eachother just fine.

Laws are promises from the government to its citizens that if they do particular things that police will show up and do bad things to them, and citizens follow or break those laws in a very predictable fashion based on how much they stand to gain, how much they stand to lose, how much effort and expense it will require to break them, how likely they are to get caught, and a bunch of other shit blah blah blah. Vague declarations that a law cannot work because it can be broken are fucking stupid. All the laws you give a shit about can be broken. Are we going to get rid of prohibitions against rape or murder or tax evasion as unworkable pipe dreams because people can and do still rape, murder, and evade taxes with those laws in place? No, no we aren't, that's retarded. This is an argument whose conclusion is the the complete and total futility of government.

The pertinent discussion is how many people are likely to home-fabricate gun parts in order to break gun laws with minimal risk of detection, and the answer is not fucking many, because the vast majority of gun owners do not have the tools for that and do not give enough shits to do so. And as such, the laws will be completely successful at their intended goal; reducing the guns in circulation. Mass murderers in countries with strict gun laws don't home fabricate their own assault rifle pieces. They just grab a big ass knife and kill a lot less fucking people. Because they're not calm, methodical individuals with elaborate plans and a concrete vision of how to enact them. They're impulsive, unstable crazies who've finally gone over the edge.

And that's mass murderers. Meanwhile the vast majority of murders aren't premeditated at all, and they are done with whatever the murderer can get their hands on in short notice. These aren't people who woke up one day and decided that at some distant point in the future they were going to kill someone and that they need to start preparing. These are people who catch their lover cheating on them or get a divorce notice and flip the fuck out for a few hours. Keeping a gun out of their hands for those few hours will save lives.

[Grek]

I just want to reiterate it one more time: While it is demonstrably true that the effectiveness of a law as a deterrent is based more on the assuredness of the punishment than on the severity, that doesn't particularly matter in this case because the sort of people who would start milling their own gun parts in response to a government ban on resale of firearms are exactly the sort of people who the government already knows about and is keeping an eye on. There are very few people out there who love guns enough to know how to assemble replacement parts in their garage and who are otherwise stable enough to do so without ending up on a watchlist for right-wing extremist groups.

[Prak]

Well, I mean, zip guns are a thing, but, I would imagine as like (if not more) to injure or kill the user as their intended target. Also, not by any means a reason to not control guns sales.

[Shatner]

(Relevant Onion Article)
You Take Away Guns, And Someone’s Just Gonna Invent, Manufacture, And Use A High-Powered Knife Launcher

We could take away everyone’s firearms tomorrow, but for any psychopath bent on causing death and destruction, killing a dozen people would still be no further away than designing a long-distance knife thrower, building it, calibrating it to accurately hit targets tens or hundreds of feet away, and ultimately going into a public area and inflicting significant casualties on unsuspecting civilians.

Sadly, it’s just that simple.

[Meikle641]

There are very few people out there who love guns enough to know how to assemble replacement parts in their garage and who are otherwise stable enough to do so without ending up on a watchlist for right-wing extremist groups.

Putting in a replacement receiver is like, I dunno, replacing your brake pads. People do this, and it isn't something rare and fringe. Aftermarket parts are a massive market because people buy them.

This isn't even the same thing as zip guns, as the parts are already manufactured.

All I'm saying is that the law as written is unlikely to get the desired result. Much like how making AWB compliant rifles was a trivial task, since the law itself was poorly written. Hire an engineer or something to advise and maybe you can make a law that is likely to work the way you want it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So I take it that are you just going to ignore everyone that said that the vast majority of American gun purchases are impulsive and not deliberate and thus when confronted with the minor barriers of inconvenience will fuck off and do something else with their life?

For fuck's sake, Americans find pizza so difficult to make that most pizzas are bought from restaurants even though grocery stores do most of the work and they take about 10 minutes to bake when non-frozen, tops.

[Username17]

You know what? While it is in fact fairly easy in a couch quarterback sense to make weapons that get around the assault weapon ban or the machine gun ban, you ever notice how few murders are actually committed with fully automatic weaponry? It's not zero, but considering the thirty gun homicides committed in the United States every fucking day, it's pretty interesting how almost none of them are committed with machine guns.

Yes, you can describe in a few sentences how to go about modifying a perfectly legal semi-automatic gun into a machine pistol or whatever, but people don't actually do that. They just don't. It's not a thing that happens.

What people actually do is they grab whatever gun happens to be lying on top of the dresser in their parent's house, stuff it in their pants, and then shoot the fuck out of someone when they get into a dumb argument about network television. And you are damn fucking right that any impediment, any impediment at all, is going to save lives. Literally thousands of lives.

And if you're going to mope around and whine about how people could theoretically get around whatever restrictions by being competent and carefully reading the laws and jury rigging something in their garage, then you are part of the problem.

-Username17

[Meikle641]

I don't get what the problem is here. A law was proposed and it has a loophole big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through, so I pointed it out. The solution is to fix any loopholes, not try and claim that none exist. I suppose you could claim the firearm has to be complete: upper and lower receivers, internal components, barrel, etc.

Still leaves the question of how the government would enforce the no second-hand private sales thing without a registry on, though.

[DSMatticus]

I don't get what the problem is here. A law was proposed and it has a loophole big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through, so I pointed it out. The solution is to fix any loopholes, not try and claim that none exist. I suppose you could claim the firearm has to be complete: upper and lower receivers, internal components, barrel, etc.

Still leaves the question of how the government would enforce the no second-hand private sales thing without a registry on, though.

No, the point is you are saying dumb things and they are almost 100% verbatim the usual dumb libertarian concern trolling about how "can laws really do anything, man?"

Probably wouldn't do much, given how easy it is to get around. It'd just be a matter of torching the receiver (legally what counts as the firearm), then selling the not-firearm to whoever you want, since it is now legally a hunk of metal in the shape of a gun. You'd then either re-fabricate the receiver (3D printing for AR-15s or basic fabrication for AK-pattern rifles) or just buy a new receiver for the fraction of the price of a rifle.

Optionally, people would just not follow the law at all during private sales. Probably some legal shell games one could play as well.

There's your first post. You make exactly two points.

1) "Legally, the receiver is the part that makes a firearm a firearm. People could still buy everything but the receiver (legally) and then fabricate the receiver themselves (legally) and end up with a complete and functional gun." Do you or do you not think that forcing people to home fabricate receivers will reduce the number of functional guns available to the public, yes or no? Hint: don't bother answering. If you say yes, you're admitting the law will do exactly what it intends to do, and if you say no, you're an idiot. Your response is completely unneeded here.

2) "Well, nothing stops people from breaking the law." Nothing stops me from breaking the law by stabbing people who've pissed me off. Laws are not magical forcefields that permeate through the territory of the enacting body and obstruct attempts to violate them with the assistance of magical fairies. And yet a lot of them still fucking work, because breaking them isn't worth the trouble, and having a gun you sold illegally end up used to murder someone's wife sounds like a whole lot of trouble, especially when you could have just sold it to the government instead through their optional buyback program.

[RobbyPants]

Putting in a replacement receiver is like, I dunno, replacing your brake pads. People do this, and it isn't something rare and fringe. Aftermarket parts are a massive market because people buy them.

I'm sorry, is there any particular reason why we are pretending that the law can't also talk about gun parts even though the district of columbia and the aborted school zone guns laws both refer to components of guns?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Is there some sort of reason why everyone who does walkthrough of difficult customer Mario levels show EVERY FUCKING DEATH. I don't understand why peopel don't either just show the last time where they make it through, or at least edit it so after they die they skip to the point where they got to the point where they died. I don't want to see some chucklefuck play the first part of a level 50 times, I want to see how the level.

Also, invisible coin blocks used to kill you are lazy design and anyone that uses them needs to be punched in the dick.

[hyzmarca]

Is there some sort of reason why everyone who does walkthrough of difficult customer Mario levels show EVERY FUCKING DEATH. I don't understand why peopel don't either just show the last time where they make it through, or at least edit it so after they die they skip to the point where they got to the point where they died. I don't want to see some chucklefuck play the first part of a level 50 times, I want to see how the level.

Also, invisible coin blocks used to kill you are lazy design and anyone that uses them needs to be punched in the dick.

Because the dying is the entire point of those absurdly difficult games. It's what makes them funny.




Is abortion legal in Antarctica? I can't find any information on Antarctic abortion law, just recommendations that you not go there if you're pregnant and that you try not to become pregnant while you're there.

[Pixels]

If you're there as a citizen of a country that signed the Antarctic Treaty, you're subject to the laws of your own country. In other words, traveling to Antartica from your country won't make an abortion any more or less legal.

If you're a citizen of a non-signatory you might be in more of a grey area, but frankly it seems like more effort than could possibly be worth it.

[Username17]

Remember that the laws restricting abortion are in most countries complicated and also stupid.Laws restrict abortion based on the provider more than they do the receiver. Because for all the anti-abortion rhetoric comparing the practice to slavery or the holocaust or whatever, when you put them on the spot and say "If a teenage girl gets raped and has an abortion rather than dropping out of school and spending 40 weeks carrying their rapist's baby to term, how long should she go to jail?" most anti-abortionist zealots just sort of mumble something. Far easier to levy harsh penalties on the disinterested doctor for whom there is no stark choice and no months of agony if the procedure is not performed. So first of all, there are lots of countries where it is essentially legal to get an abortion but not legal to perform an abortion.

And secondly recall that while Antarctica is subject to the national laws of the country from whom each person is a citizen, it is not part of any of the regions of any of those countries. So any sub-national jurisdictions of any countries do not matter. In the United States, for example, most restrictions on abortion providers are at the state level, and Antarctica is not considered part of any state. Many countries have regional, provincial, or municipal laws that restrict abortion in various ways and none of those would apply in Antarctica.

So yes, it's entirely possible for a pregnant woman from Poland to get an abortion from a doctor from Mississippi which would not be legal where either party is from but would be legal in Antarctica.

-Username17

[Shrapnel]

I've always wondered... what happened on Oct 19, 2011 that made 224 people decide to be on the Den at the same time? Favorable mating conditions?

[angelfromanotherpin]

I assume it's a period when anti-adbot measures were at a low.

[Maxus]

I've always wondered... what happened on Oct 19, 2011 that made 224 people decide to be on the Den at the same time? Favorable mating conditions?

I'd almost want to say some edition warring. Like, someone on another forum linked over here and we got a lot of spectators.