HelixDab2
I have noticed that ICE usually wants to conduct their splashy raids in areas with very low gun ownership, e.g., NYC, Boston, etc.
Dude. They're my parents. Don't fucking gaslight me; I know what happened.
Yes, they hate Trump. But if it was just Trump, they'd still be voting Republican. But they're not. Seeing the hypocrisy of what Republicans said versus what they did, as embodied by Trump, was what allowed them to see the hypocrisy.
Also, quit fucking shitting on people that are trying to resist this latest authoritarian bullshit. You're preaching hopelessness and apathy.
It's more or less a textbook example of why the 'community standards' standard is bad, but it's still current case law. I sincerely wish that some large white-shoe law firm had take the case as part of their pro bono work, but, fuck me, that just never seems to happen.
Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan.
Sure, but at what cost to the Afghanis? 176,000 Afghanis (some fighters, some non-compbatants) were killed during the US occupation. In contrast, the US saw 2,459 people lost. That's pretty brutally asymmetric. Same thing in Vietnam; yes, we lost 50,000 troops while we waged war against the people of Vietnam, but around 400,000 Vietnamese were killed. IMO, unless you want to maximize losses, resistance by the population is not the ideal way to go. An enemy that is willing to commit atrocities can certainly do far more harm, more quickly, than a non-military defense force can stop.
The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks.
...Who were, IIRC, recently pulled from combat in WWI. If I remember my history correctly--and I'm quite fuzzy on WWI--the war was very unpopular in Russia, and it was people deserting and mutinying from the army that gave the Bolsheviks the ability to win a revolution. If the tsar hadn't signed on to the war in the first place, it probably would have staved off the revolution for years, possibly long enough for Russia to turn into a constitutional monarchy. Or maybe not; the peasantry was really upset with the tsar for other things too.
The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group.
I'm very, very aware of that. Which is why I say that the whole thing is incredibly complicated, and involves a lot of tradeoffs. It takes a lot of people working together to make a stateless, classless society work well, but it only takes one or two people to fuck it all up. The whole thing is a version of the prisoner's dilemma; when everyone trusts everyone else (e.g., small societies), it works, but as soon as trust starts getting broken it tends to fall apart quickly.
Again, I don't know how to solve the problem; I'm not even sure that there is a single solution that perfectly preserive individual autonomy and liberty, while also ensuring that the needs of society as a whole are met.
Linemen for the power company will always stay busy regardless of the economy, and it pays stupid well.
My boss is a former lineman; he quit because there was a lot of bullshit dealing with the power company. I gather that the pay in my area wasn't that great either. When storms roll through, shifts are going to be long and brutal.
...Unfortunately...
I'm not sure how many men are able to realize when something they're saying, or something a friend is saying, is making women uncomfortable. I think that takes a certain level of self-awareness that a lot of men lack.
I know that I do. But I'm also autistic, so reading social cues isn't my strong suite.
There's some --some---reason to not want women in front-line infantry positions. The combat load that infantry has to carry around works out to be over 100#, and it's a struggle to get cis-men fit and strong enough to carry that, and still ruck 20+ miles at a time without collapsing. Most women are unlikely to be able to achieve that, particularly when they may weigh only 25# more than the load that they have to carry. But, IMO, as long as they can meet fitness standards, let 'em serve in the infantry if that's what their ASVAB scores allow and it's the MOS they want.
Give that the new rifle--XM7, I think?--weighs more than the M5, and the ammunition is heavier, that load is gonna get heavier, and people that are more in-tune with the military than I am tend to believe that we need to get the combat load lighter, by a lot.
Honestly, most of it really comes down to Pete Hegseth being sexist.
InRangeTV and A Better Way 2A.
I've met other supporters of both groups, and they've all been pretty cool people.
I'm strongly considering supporting Galen Druke's GD Politics now that FiveThirtyEight has been shuttered.
It definitely does not. Look up Boiled Angel; I think that case was an absolute fucking travesty, but as of right now, it's still good case law.
But it doesn't.
An automatic firearm shoots multiple bullets each time you pull the trigger, until you release the trigger; the trigger does not reset.
With most semi-automatic guns, you have a light spring that resets the trigger once you release your finger. A forced reset trigger (FRT) forces the trigger to reset. The FRT pushes the trigger forward, even if you're trying to keep the trigger pulled back. If you keep tension on your finger, as soon as it's reset, you're pulling it again. So, legally, you are pulling the trigger multiple times, because the trigger is resetting each time a bullet is fired.
Based on the way that a machine gun is defined in the National Firearms Act of 1934, an FRT is not a machine gun. The ATF can't re-write the law to say what they want it to say; that requires an act on congress.
The is compounded by the fact that Rare Breed ran the idea by the ATF before they went into production, and they have/had a memorandum from the ATF saying that an FRT was not a machine gun, and not subject to the NFA. After they had approved it, and *after Rare Breed had produced and sold a few hundred/thousand, the ATF raided Rare Breed, and also showed up at customer's homes demanding items that the customers had legally purchased (e.g., unreasonable search and seizure, a 4A violation).
This is... Not true. The Firearm Owners Protection Act--among other things--made it illegal to transfer automatic firearms manufactured after '86 (i.e., "post ban") to non-police/military people. Machine guns produced prior to '86 that were already in the hands of non-police/military people can still legally be own and bought/sold. A pre-ban select-fire AR-15 will run about $30k+ these days.
Secondly, there are a number of groups and people still actively fighting to overturn the NFA as being a violation of 1A. There was a case out of the 5th circuit (?) not that long ago that points out the circular logic of the gov't in re: machine guns. E.g., per Heller, guns in common use can't be banned, and machine guns aren't in common use, so they can be banned. But they aren't in common use because they were largely banned by the gov't. The gov't created the condition of them not being in common use by banning them, and then used the lack of common use--due to the ban--as justification for the legality of the ban.