But Seriously...

Give it a month.

I posted earlier that I saw it in person at a gun show when it first came out. It's called SlideFire. This was around the time of sandy hook if I remember correctly. I wish there was an alarm bell I could have rung that alerted the FBI or some other place important like "hey yall! Someone just made something here that's gonna wreck shit when it gets into the wrong hands!"

If I was an asshole I'd buy up some of those systems now and sell them for a pretty penny once they're forced to stop making them. You know people are doing it (everything on their website is out of stock right now). The fucker had 12 of them in his hotel room.

However, it's not *just* the stock. Bump firing is nothing more than a shooting technique, and it's possible to make bump fire systems from something as benign as a rubber band.

 

About 35 years ago one of my friends had a semi auto MAC 10 and figured out if you put a certain size of pipe behind the trigger it was firing full auto.

 

You can also convert an AR-15 to full auto with just a few a minutes of drilling.

While the term 'assault weapon' hasn't yet been narrowed down into any meaningful category, banning the sale of firearms that are so easily modified to be fully automatic is one that I could actually get behind.

 

Another loophole I expect them to close, or perhaps I should say hope they close, is that it is legal to buy, sell and/or own M-16 parts but not legal to install them into a gun.

So basically, owning an M-16 autosear and bolt is perfectly fine, and it's perfectly fine to own an AR upper. But the second you get that AR lower (the lower has the serial numbers on it and is considered the "gun"), then you get into trouble. And if you get caught with an AR lower with a third hole drilled into it, you're REALLY fucked. Basically, having the parts to assemble an illegal weapon is treated the same as having an illegal weapon itself.

 

Yeah, it does make a difference. We ban shit all the time and accordingly their use is extremely rare. How easy is it to procure a hand grenade? A rocket launcher? Why didn't he just set up shop with a .50 caliber machine gun? Could a guy acquire those items on the black market and use them to lay waste to the public? Sure, he could if he was motivated and wealthy enough, but there's still a very very very high barrier to entry. So high in fact no one (to my knowledge) has done it yet. I'd argue we are fairly good at regulating those things.

I think it's silly to say "Welp, bans just don't work in America." They can. We do it with a lot of other things, including other types of weapons, and other countries have banned guns full stop to great effect. Not all bans work (drugs, abortions, that rare bird people eat whole or whatever). But we could do it with guns if we, as a country, thought the price we paid for not having guns was less than the price paid for the blood shed by them.

I'm not saying we should or that a political reality exists that makes it possible at this time. But that political reality could exist if we wanted it to. The people who deny that such a political reality could ever exist in America are often those who don't want it to. You are apparently someone who loves guns and will fight tooth and nail to keep them in your hands. Okay, I can kind of understand that. But it doesn't have to be that way.

I like guns, I grew up with them, I own one, but I don't get the defensiveness and outrage of people who don't like being questioned about their status in society.

 

Re: America's Next Great Shootout, you guys are overthinking it. Winter is coming, and with it come long, heavy coats, and holiday travel. You know how our airports are designed.

 

I finally saw my roommate that was at the attack. Physically he's unharmed, mentally...we'll see. He said there were bodies everywhere, people were getting picked off as they were trying to scale a fence to escape and the strangest one...people were crowding 4-5 into porta potties. I only hope if I ever find myself in a situation like that I have the good sense not to seek shelter somewhere that would provide absolutely no shelter.

 

And we have an answer:

"The hail of gunfire stopped when security guards approached Paddock's Mandalay Bay hotel room, McMahill said. Paddock turned his attention to those outside his door and fired, wounding a security guard who was advancing towards his room.

The security guard was "very heroic" and provided police with information about the shooter's location, McMahill said. When officers entered the hotel room, they found Paddock dead. Authorities believe he killed himself."

It was also reported today that 12 of his guns had a bump stock and that between 10/16 and the attack he had purchased 33 guns. So, I'm guessing he's been planning this about a year. Now the question is "Why?". None of the info thus far points to anything at all as far as a reason.

 

I may have brought this up before, but when my aunt was in her final days relatives came over to see her one last time. I looked around the room and there were a dozen or more people staring at their phones while my aunt lay dying in the corner. No one was saying a word or even acknowledging her, they were all just self absorbed in the little screen in their hands.

 

And the people who look for shit like that to watch (not saying you did) knowing what it was are no better than the shitbag who recorded it.

I do think it's a symptom of our society, but I'm not entirely sure exactly what.

 

You're absolutely right. We can ban things fairly well when we put the cost of ownership very high. My point about whether it makes a difference though was to illustrate that even though something is illegal, there's really no mechanism to prevent it if someone is willing to pay the price for it. In this case he was willing to use what appears now to be legal weapons in a very illegal manner in exchange for his own death. Either way, once he pulled the trigger the first time he was going to die, either by his own hand or the State of Nevada's. Laws are great, but they're only effective on people who fear their consequences

True again. However, the countries who banned guns didn't start with 300-400 million of them along with a constitutional right to own them. How many things have we banned successfully? I'll give you automatic weapons and DDT to start, but in both of those cases there were viable alternatives that made the elimination less painful. If we go for a complete ban, what happens when the guns nuts feel like they have nothing left to lose and decide to fight back?

You have read me completely wrong. I am just a person who recognizes the real challenges we face in reducing gun violence and I'm willing to discuss them honestly. One of the biggest obstacles with this issue is the refusal of both sides to consider the unintended consequences and admit that the solution is not as simple as they imagine. I'm actually not opposed to banning guns in the U.S., but I am vehemently opposed to wasting our time debating and passing useless legislation that will have no effect on crime just to appease people - like the Brady Bill.

 

YouTube and the internet in general have created this epidemic of wannabes by making people aware that "fame" no longer needs to be worked tirelessly for in order to achieve-- You can become famous overnight in your own home. It's as simple as pushing the button on your phone and getting someone else to watch.

So now people who were formerly obsessed with fame are now obsessed with becoming famous themselves, and their sociopathy runs as deep as the sea. The world is our own movie studio lot, and we are all potential entertainment subjects constantly working on a hot set.

 

There's no escape. Not long ago, when you were a kid you had at least one horrible and embarrassing moment/thing happen to you. It happened to all of us. We wanted to erase it from memory. Eventually, time and maturity healed the wound.

Well, fuck healing. Now your most embarrassing moment has been witnessed, caught on camera, posted on social media and now every single human being on the planet can watch it. For an eternity:

 

I honestly feel like social media has contributed to that thing you all are trying to describe. There’s a disconnect we have while at the same time being connected too fucking much. It used to be that your only real exposure to politics was what you learned from your family or in school. Maybe your uncle at Thanksgiving had too much to drink and spouted off about something. But as a kid, we played street hockey with our friends. Maybe some video games. Played in the woods. Shit like that.

Now that has transformed into constantly staring at screens and reading shit that people write to get attention. Watch a video that someone filmed of a person doing a thing that pisses everyone off. And we read shitty stuff designed to make us angry and then we read more of it. And then we share it so other people can see what made us angry. Does it also make you angry? It doesn’t? Well fuck you then!

Rinse and repeat.

The idea is that we aren’t really people anymore. We are online entities and we are anonymous. We’ve lost our ability to care because you aren’t being abusive to a human. You are typing something to a profile. And there’s no consequences.

Some of the most disgruntled people I know are white dudes 60-70 years old. A lot of them, like my dad and future father in law have fallen victim to having their personal views made extreme because of shit they see on Facebook. They simply just believe everything they see because the time they come from, you believed the news and news sources.

 

Check out this poor family that's getting death threats. What's their crime? One member of the family was once married (Now divorced from) the girlfriend of the shooter here in Vegas. They didn't know the guy at all, they'd never even heard of him. But fuck them anyway.

The internet has become an awful place.