This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
“Looks like tyranny’s back on the menu, boys!” - American politicians, bad cops, the 80,000 new armed IRS agents, etc.
Eh, I don't think the US government is likely to slip into tyranny, I'm for big government not against it. Bad cops would still be a problem of course, but overall i think the trade would be worth it. Though see the below discussion there are probably other Thanos snap interventions which would be more useful (if perhaps more immoral, depending on your POV).
Agreed it would take at least a decade of permanent citizen firearm disarmament for American politicians to turn full tyrant.
But I bet in that time, the combined rage and innovation of the new “guncels” will come up with a ranged weapon which is deadlier or safer, or both. I’m guessing phasers with stun and kill.
I’m betting on Elon’s STEM minions finding the end-run around the gun ban.
Though note, we're not talking about a ban, we're talking about Thanos snapping away every gun and every future gun in private hands, depending on how you word your "wish" that might include anything that acts like a gun. This is magic (of a sort) not law.
As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.
In Northern Ireland when the British Army shot into crowds it wasn't stopped by other people with guns (in fact it was soldiers fear of that which often presaged such events), it was stopped by a largely unarmed populaces horror.
The chances of the US nation descending into tyranny in the next say 50 years is in my opinion, very close to zero, no matter which side wins elections.
Magical (or advanced tech indistinguishable from it) aside, the problem with removing guns through banning them, isn't that I think it would make the government more likely to be tyrannical, privately owned guns have a negligible impact on that in my view. Its that criminals would still have them, and that even the attempt of a ban would create (understandable!) widespread instability and violence among legal gun owners which is I think is much more of a risk than government tyranny to long term civilizational stability.
So pragmatically the 2A should remain, at least in my view.
More options
Context Copy link
Rittenhouse is killed by government agents without the gun; they beat him to death with the skateboard. The problem with "gunless utopia" is that it makes mob violence a lot more difficult to resist.
For instance, if you have 30 KKK members coming to drag you off, or 30 Hutus coming to chop you into pieces for shits and giggles, a man with a gun can kill every single one of them given sufficient aim and time. The fact that a potential victim can not only resist, but resist in a way that makes him 30 times as strong on defense (but don't actually make him that much more powerful when attacking), is actually kind of a big deal.
“Might work” only in the limited scope that reply chain was talking about. There are innumerable reasons for private citizens to remain armed, as you’ve enumerated with excellence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Air rifles are very under-developed. US federal law has never considered them to be firearms.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science. The last time anyone seriously tried to make a military firearm of this nature was the late 1700s, though there are a few current manufacturers that make manually-repeating hunting rifles based on this concept.
Combining that with electronic controls (and a lack of NFA- so for this application computer-based fire control, full-auto, and integrated suppressors will obviously be standard) provides even more interesting options. Want to fire a non-lethal burst at a target before the next trigger pull fires a burst that's going fast enough to penetrate? That's impossible with a traditional firearm simply due to its nature but eminently practical with an air rifle (liability issues aside).
The only problem here is how you're going to turn that into a handgun, but cartridge-and-captive-piston storage technology might be sufficiently promising in that regard to obviate that concern as well.
My own experimentation indicates that it's possible to get:
Such a weapon would have a number of tradeoffs, but it illustrates another corner of the possibility space. It's all a question of what you're optimizing for; right now, almost all optimization is happening in a very small area of the possibility space, focused on a very narrow cluster of factors, because the gun culture has not generally been sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and really thought about the nature of the problem for five minutes. There's low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere in terms of legal frameworks, capital-intensive manufacturing, DIY, you name it. The fruit isn't being picked because people in the gun culture, generally, aren't looking at things from the correct perspective to make that fruit visible. They're thinking in terms of incremental shifts from what the current state of things, not about desired end-states and the most efficient route to them.
Even this inefficient search method is probably enough to get us where we need to go, but if the perspective shifts, we could get there a hell of a lot faster.
[EDIT] - I want to elaborate on the subject of optimization.
The gun culture has moved from the standard longarm being a shotgun or bolt-action rifle to the AR15. That was an optimization process driven in large part by political and social conflict, and the route it optimized down was capital-heavy industrial production. One of the tradeoffs it largely accepted was conforming not only to the letter but also the spirit of state and federal firearms legislation, with the goal of getting the highest-quality firearms possible under the constraints they imposed. This has worked really, really well, with the result that we now have arrived on more or less the pinnacle of industrially-produced cartridge-firing autoloading firearms. All longarm designs converge on the AR15, and all handgun designs converge on the Glock, and both designs are well into their grind to the asymptote.
Now that we're chasing the asymptote with capital-heavy industrial production of small arms, the best value comes from expanding out into optimizing other factors. One of these is erosion of existing weapons controls by dropping adherence to the spirit of the rules; we see this with bump stocks, FRT triggers, pistol braces, suppressor paperwork streamlining, all of which are a good start. One of the obvious bits of low-hanging fruit is to do for destructive devices what's been done for SBRs, full-auto and suppressors; there's some small activity visible on this front, but clear potential for much, much more. Another piece of low-hanging fruit is what we might call the Liberator angle pioneered by Defense Distributed: focus on cutting cost and complexity of manufacturing to get the simplest, cheapest, easiest-to-produce firearm possible, and then work back toward effectiveness from there.
And in this factor, it's interesting to note how the logic of crowds flows through the possibility space, and how memetic effects determine the rate and direction of flow. DD established a paradigm of 3d-printing guns, and now the DIY space is focused on optimizing the 3D-printing paradigm, so we get the FGC-9. But while the FGC-9 is a fantastic development, you can already see how people are still thinking in terms of capital-intensive high-quality manufacturing: they're trying to reproduce a commercially-produced pistol-caliber-carbine from the low-cost DIY angle. 3d printers are still relatively expensive and relatively complicated to set up and operate, and the guns they turn out vary significantly in quality. They're working toward "effectiveness", but their definition of "effectiveness" is based on a commercially-produced cartridge firearm. It seems to me that there's more opportunity in defining effectiveness in terms of lethal effect, total input costs, ease of manufacture, and ubiquity of material. The community obviously appreciates this, with their efforts to answer questions like "what about barrels" and "what about ammo", but there's a sense in which they're committing to building a pencil, when they could in fact use clay and a stylus or, indeed, a printing press. Is the goal to have a pencil, or is it to write a text? Is it to write a text, or is it to disseminate ideas as widely as possible? To what extent does commitment to specific forms and factors get in the way, especially in a contested environment where powerful interests are to a lesser or greater degree actively hunting communications infrastructure?
And there's considerably more besides, but that's at least a start.
I remember an episode of CSI where someone mounted an ammo box’s worth of rounds to a plastic printed sheet on a wood board, connected all the rounds to electric triggers, and used these ammo-board guns to turn people into goop in a single moment. Still using existing ammo but it opened my eyes to what makes a “gun”.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link