Toxn

Not much madness in the Cambrian, apparently.

Ah, thank you for the clarification. I will, however, use it as an excuse to join Tied in punting AKMs

I didn't know well-publicised mass murders were so easy to cover up in terms of body count. Since we're basically just spinning in circles here (or spirals, as I'm getting the impression that you're driving to another topic), let's simply drop it and return to sharing stories about far-off places. ~ Germany I cannot comment too much on, since I haven't been there. However, we do have a big German community where I live and I'm friends with a bunch of German South Africans. So I guess some aspects of German culture just don't seem that strange to me? Japan, on the other hand, was really different. Like, culture-shock different.

I know, but we could use some variety

More requests: Choose whichever takes your fancy http://mysite.mweb.co.za/residents/brent_best/misc/shack/20060924_010762_1280.jpg http://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/images/uploaded-images/2012/2/24/189764.jpg http://www.capetowndailyphoto.com/uploaded_images/puma_helicopter_IMG_3385-722695.jpg South Africa: Drive it like you stole it

Regarding evil black rifles: how hard would it be to just make the furniture out of wood and give the workings a neutral steel look? I mean, if hippies are going to be so dumb as to judge the things solely on how they look, why not disguise them a bit? Plus, I really like wood/plain steel. So it would be more to my taste than black plastic and anodised aluminium

My bitter intuition is that they'd still be likely to murder, but it would be their spouse who gets it rather than a school/church/workplace. I don't think you're wrong though. We seem to have forgotten that people are actually simple creatures: give someone sufficient food, shelter, a community, a companion, sex, exercise and sleep and 99.999% of the population will be happy. All the goods, drugs and distractions in the world can't make up for the lack of basic human contact. For the rest (0.0001%), I suspect nothing could ever be enough. Which leads to the question I end up asking all the psychologists/psychiatrists I know: is there any evidence whatsoever that human happiness increases with an increasing per-capita number of psychologists/psychiatrists? This is a bit unfair, of course. But as far as I can tell, there is simply no statistical correlation - just as there is no statistical correlation between income and happiness once you've covered the basic cost of living. Example: http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/does-everyone-who-suffers-trauma-have-ptsd/ Edit: since I'm posting stuff from Aeon, here is another take on mass murder in the U.S.: http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/what-explains-mass-shootings-in-the-us/ Because Aeon is shit at doing proper references, I went and dug up the study referred to: http://hsx.sagepub.com/content/18/1/125.full.pdf+html

Hasn't that been one of the documented effects of the legalization of porn? In any case, I'm all for legalised prostitution - it sucks that you have people doing something for which there is clear demand (and no obvious downsides), whose reward is then to be treated like scum and have their rights stomped on. Let's be honest, though: a lot of these shooters give off the stink of a man who could only get laid if he was paying. You can hardly blame the dating scene for the rejection of bowl cut-wearing obsessive-compulsive racists. The figures for how many people get killed/wounded in a given incident are not exactly open to interpretation. Where you put the cut-off for what should count as a specific class of incident is. My assertion is that, by almost any metric you care to name, the US has an abnormally high number of guys (it is always guys) going out and killing a bunch of people in cold blood for reasons other than money or group politics. What you have, which I have tried to qualify for you, is something like a terrorist movement without the movement. Again; you provide a definition around which we can discuss things, instead of endlessly warping the conversation back to your obsession against bureaucrats.

'The dating scene' is a new argument to me.

It's amazing how often people who use that line know fuck-all about statistics. As for my metric, what is your definition of insanity? Of mental illness? You want to talk terms, so I'll repeat myself: come up with a definition that satisfies you, render it into intelligible terms and we can discuss it further.

You realise that this is like saying that all arguments are wrong, then pointing to the ramblings of the town drunk as your example? You are correct that "mass shooting" is a fuzzy term. So define your own terms and we'll go from there. Personally, the metric I'd use for a "spree killing" is this: a small number of perpetrators (one to three maximum), with no material support from outside organisations, the perpetrators displaying premeditation and preparation before killing (or attempting to kill) a number of people in order to make some sort of point (political, philosophical or whatever). If this definition looks a lot like terrorism, that's because it is. Spree killers and the like are simply the atomised, disconnected expression of terrorism that atomised, disconnected developed countries seem to favour. In any case, the remarkable thing about this form of killing is that, whichever definition you use, the US is still the most prolific producer.

Indeed, but they're still more common in the US than SA. If we had your rates we'd see at least one or two incidents a year. Still not much of a contributing factor to the murder rate, but definitely a phenom of some sort.

Germany sounds a lot like South Africa, only with more old buildings and much better museums. As for gun kultuur, we have all sorts. Spree shootings, however, seem to be a genuinely western/developed world phenomenon - we had one attempted a few years back but that's it.

Unless you really like ruining an exceedingly expensive piece of kit by turning it into a cut-rate saw. I guess the tests do reflect a greater likelyhood of breakage overall, they just do it in a dramatic (read: inaccurate) way. Shots of parallel stress and strain testing would be considered boring.

Welcome!

Running the numbers on explosive rounds, I worked out a large-bore cartridge with a similar length and powder charge to 9x19mm. 15x14mm HE would carry about a gram of explosives (assuming a thin, double-walled shell design), weigh in at close to 12 grams and move at something like 200m/s. A single stack ultra-compact could carry 6 rounds, which should be enough to kill one thing exceedingly dead. As an additional bonus, you could probably make a pretty effective hollow-point given all the bullet space you have to work with. Plus, the bigger-is-better crowd might finally be satisfied.

This thing looks set to somehow cost more than a traditional steel-and-concrete structure, deteriorate sooner and burn hot enough to actually melt steel when/if it goes up in flames: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/01/vienna-plans-worlds-tallest-wooden-skyscraper

I'd go with 'the devil', but old scratch is supposed to have good taste. That thing looks like some sort of heretofore-undiscovered building disease.

As will have become apparent to everyone by now, an additional problem with self-defence weapons is that they invariably make even better offensive weapons. This is one conflicting requirement that I honestly have no answer for, other than to look at purely defensive ideas (read: armour) which have major problems of their own.

Unfortunately, you also need to have it be as foolproof as possible - hence the lots of small rounds approach.

15x15mm HE - for all your instantaneous death needs. To defend my idea a bit - encapsulated and stabilised toxins can, depending on the toxin, be hella stable and safe to use until the seal is broken. Best not to handload. More esoteric idea: ditch the gun as something to be handled by the user. Stick it on an A-class drone (duration may be an issue) with gyro-stabilised mount. There are really good algorithms for motion tracking these days, so all you need is something allowing the user to designate. Failing that, simply have the drone kill anything not complying with the lie-down-on-the-floor request. Note: works with other types of platforms as well.

To start, something conventional: A micro-calibre pistol, geared for burst or automatic fire with toxin-filled bullets. I'm not talking about something that will kill you in a few hours, by the way. I'm talking about etorphine, concentrated conotoxins, taipan venom, batrachotoxin, type H botuninium and the like. This thing would kill with a hit to any part of the body, with penetration to any depth and with fragments. More, it would do so in seconds. If you've ever heard an argument about how a pistol 'levels the playing field' between a hypothetical ultra-petite woman and hulking assailant, then this thing is its reductio ad absurdum. It makes even the weakest person capable of dealing instant death to anything short of an orca.

We have occasionally talked about self-defence weapons, with quite a few disagreements on all aspects of the subject. Part of the problem, to my mind, is that a perfect self-defence weapon has a bunch of conflicting requirements: compactness, ease of use, availability, stopping power (lethal or nonlethal) and reliability. Added to these conflicting requirements, we have a whole gamut of legal issues which limit the solution space which can be realistically explored: limitations on substances, types of weapons, their form and operation and so on. To really game this one out, I propose that we completely throw out the rulebook and try to imagine the ultimate self-defence weapon. Again, this must be something that anyone can use, that is always available, that always works and that kills or incapacitates instantly. Have at it gents.

I'm liking this one because it's simple, statistically easy to control and covers a variety of times/places/technologies/magic/etc. I am a bit leery of the resulting buckets of dice that would be needed to make it work, but them's the breaks. Suggestions on this one are welcome. In the interim, I will work on a bunch of character attributes and items to populate the model a bit. Edit: and maybe some example characters and creatures.