Ulric

The only major thing it's missing is reopening the registry for new machine guns. If you are going to make bump stocks machine guns, provide a legal pathway to own them.

I'll give you the summary, and it will shock no one: Lobbyists and special interest groups have a greater effect on the legislative process than the general population, and have for a long time. In other news, a thug was shot in Chicago today.

What did he do this time? Also, @Donward, Zuckerface is pretty good, but it's hard to top Fuckerberg.

I guess all of the complaints that I heard about clan wars reward tanks has made me tone deaf to certain sentiments. The people who earned the rewards are the people who where both incredibly good and highly dedicated. Clan wars was a rough time, and when I was in Foxey, we had 50-60 people showing up almost every evening for several hours, for a month.

Not really. Like anything in life, you have to work for what you want. I've wasted way to much time (and money) acquiring pixel tanks when I could have been doing much more productive things. I've basically switched my video game time over to Solidworks for now, and it's a similar all consuming monster.

my expectation is that WoT is still a turd of a game, but with a nice new coat of paint on it. I might give it a try, after I beat SolidWorks on the hardest difficulty setting.

More guns in school is never the answer, though....

Preloaded with all of his speeches, too. A priceless heirloom for sure.

We are often regaled with tales of "The good old days" when elementary school boys would bring their .22s to school and keep them in their locker. On the way home they could go to the dump and shoot rats, or set up cans on a fence along a country road and knock them down, etc. When they got into high school, the trucks in the parking lot would all have rifle racks in the back window, and every rack would be full. To echo what Oedipus said, you need to be able to legally carry firearms around in public, because you need to be able to handle them in a wide variety of situations that would not constitute "brandishing" or other threatening behavior. Some people push this a little too far and open carry their AR down main street just to cause a scene because "it's my right", but that would be like yelling obscenities outside of a library just for funsies: yes, you can do it, but you look like an inconsiderate, irresponsible jackass because of it. It's a similar chilling effect on the public that the flamboyantly gay activists have, which is to say, the opposite of the effect that you want. Instead demonstrating that this is a normal, every day occurrence, you are shoving your kinks in everyone's face and expecting them to accept it.

You are preaching to the choir. I will always have a rifle, regardless of what any piece of paper may have written on it.

There are some places that make sense, and they are exclusively places that have their own dedicated, heavily armed and trained security forces to monitor and control access. One job that would have been interesting back when I was a security guard would have been a post at a nuclear power plant. While the company I worked for had DOE contracts, there are no facilities anywhere near me....

Hell, give me Blazer ERA and slap a couple .50s on it. It's a fun tank so far, but it really doesn't feel like it should be at 7.7. I may have been spoiled by the Brits with their two plane stabilizers and APDS at 6.7, though. I have no complaints about the automotive or gun performance of the Magach, but it's large and poorly armored.

I found a Magach 3 in my garage, so I had to decorate it.

It would be really cool to split this off into it's own topic so we could really dig into it without distracting from the original topic.

Police are pretty low on my list of people that I trust to properly handle a firearm. For them, weapon manipulation is a very small part of their job, and they personally might not be that interested in firearms to begin with. Combine the exposure time they have to firearms with the lack of training on them, and it's a recipe for problems. I'm sure it's been stated before in this thread, but some police officers only fire their weapons once a year for annual qualifications, and the standards are not that high to begin with. It is usually a measure of basic marksmanship, and does but account for any dynamic environments. There are many pervasive myths in broad subject of gun control, with one of them being that the police have some type of magical training and ability with firearms that civilians are unable to achieve, which is why it's dangerous for your everyday people to have guns, and we should just leave it to the police. How often do we hear things like "you're more likely to shoot yourself" and related nonsense when they talk about CCW holders? I specifically used the word magical earlier, because it is a form of magical thinking. The notion that for some inexplicable reason, being a police officer imbues someone with some type of firearms superpower.

@Waffentrager Another thing to understand is that typical civilian "training" (i use that word loosely, as there is no codified, official training for this, but it is more of a conclusion that is broadly arrived at through critical thinking) is that in an active shooter situation, most concealed carry holders will not try to "hunt down" the shooter for a great number of reasons. Instead, the correct thing to do is to secure yourself and those in your immediate surroundings, and shelter in place until the police arrive. This allows you to have a good understanding of what direction the threat might come from, and if you have a good spot, it will allow you to spot and identify the threat before they are even aware of your presence. The long and short of it is that you secure yourself and set up an ambush in case the perpetrator finds you. There are stories from any number of these incidents where teachers (or on colleges, students) attempt to secure a room by blocking the door with their body, only to receive several bullets for their heroic effort. Allowing teachers to carry would mean that they might be able to defend their class with more than just their body should the shooter come to their room, and potentially end the incident right there.

The death marches are part of the experience! They give you an even deeper appreciation for firearms and the second amendment.

Hell, I'll drive down and join you!

just letting me know

So, I log into War Thunder today and see this. I'm surprised it took this long..... JK, this came out of the blue since I refrain from using foul language to other players on the basis that being polite, collected, and unrustled is the last thing they would expect, and it usually aggravates them further. Either way, someone has recognized my efforts and has reported me for something, so all is well in the world.

If we outlaw guns, then we won't have any gun crime! Except that gun crime will skyrocket for a number of reasons. The definition of gun crimes becomes much more broad. Things that were perfectly legal no longer are, do those get counted as gun crimes? Even if it's only violent crimes involving guns, is every case of legitime self defense going to be counted as a gun crime? There are plenty of reasons why the numbers could wildly fluctuate, even if human behavior stays relatively unchanged. Getting accurate measurements is a bitch if you are constantly moving your point of reference.

Maybe some justifications will be sympathetic to the cause and establish sanctuary cities, counties, and maybe even states to shield the "undocumented" from confiscations.

So, [gun owners] basically have had two options: slowly and incrementally give up our rights over the course of several decades, or give them all up at once. According to this fruit loop, we blew our chance at the first one, because we weren't willing to "compromise" (surrender) on "reasonable" (by the metrics of the zealots proposing them) gun "reforms" (registration, limitations, and ultimately confiscations). So now we have to capitulate to their ultimate goal, or else what?

back to back salt in War Thunder this morning, a good start to a good day. Both from wehraboos, too.

The poll was obviously corrupted by Russian bots that are trying to destabilize our society. Everybody knows that Americans want to ban assault weapons, we just have to make the poll results match what we know they should be.