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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.

Certainly they are not. There have been some Supreme Court decisions, but the blue states just ignore or even defy ("Spirit of Aloha", "No Second Amendment in New York State") them. And with Rahimi the Court is poised to neuter Bruen. ATF is getting shirty (and shooty) with gun dealers again, not to mention classifying every L-shaped piece of metal a firearm. In New Jersey I still can't buy a gun or carry one if I had one. And even in Virginia, didn't they pass a bunch of new gun control?

Abbott did beat them on the border, I was wrong there. But that's a tiny light in a sea of darkness.

Certainly they are not.

Certainly they are. The guns are never, ever going to go away. Registration is not going to happen. Confiscation is not going to happen. They're still trying to go after the manufacturers and dealers, but DIY manufacturing gets easier and more accessible every year, and we're well past the point where this process can be stopped or even meaningfully slowed. Enforcement on any of this, whether against the gun culture or against criminals, is a complete joke.

Meanwhile, the Gun Culture has learned to actively erode existing laws through malicious compliance and technological innovation, and are doing an excellent job of radicalizing the community as a whole to reject the legitimacy of gun control laws. The Fudds are all but extinct, and the people who replaced them are moving from "I lost them in a boating accident" to "I didn't lose shit." I am pretty sure I'm going to see the NFA die in my lifetime, one way or the other. Concealed Carry continues to steadily expand. And as fantastic as all that is, we've barely started on the low-hanging fruit. There's beautiful avenues of practical lawfare/tech development just lying around, waiting for someone to pick them up and thus further beclown state and federal laws.

Yes, it's easier for the blues to violate the letter and the spirit of the laws they don't like, thanks to their stranglehold on institutional support. But it is not only possible to do as they have done, it is inevitable.

The guns are never, ever going to go away.

A gun buried in your backyard might as well have gone away. They may eventually do sweeps to gather up the majority of them, but even if they don't, in time you or your children will have forgotten about them.

DIY manufacturing gets easier and more accessible every year

Making guns isn't that hard, for competent machinists (of which fewer and fewer are being produced). Making ammo, on the other hand; as far as I know there's no way to even make firearm brass from non-firearm materials, never mind the chemicals. Smokeless powder requires restricted materials (nitric acid). Primers require restricted materials AND are super-dangerous to manufacture on the sly.

The gun culture has gotten more radical, but with ATF declaring firearm parts to be firearms, they'll start rolling up people soon enough, probably starting with those who post videos on the internet. This will "encourage the others" to keep their mouths shut (lest they get picked up by the feds), and the knowledge will no longer be passed along, and the culture will die.

are doing an excellent job of radicalizing the community as a whole to reject the legitimacy of gun control laws

Well, see, there's the problem. They don't. The community isn't radicalizable. At their base, they think the laws preventing me from getting a gun in New Jersey -- a requirement to be vouched for by 2 unrelated adult residents, and a requirement to produce the name and hospital affiliation of any mental health professional I've ever seen -- are reasonable restrictions if administered by decent people. They may be upset by the time it takes to get things approved or the requirement to get a new set of vouchers for every handgun or shit like that, but basically they don't believe in personal freedom or individual rights because they're not liberals (in the Lockean sense). The "second amendment" people are, but they're a small subset. Most red tribers would be fine if they could be assured they could keep their personal guns.

I am teaching my children the importance of firearms in defending liberty. When they're old enough, I'll show them where we've "buried in your backyard" the family firearms that are illegal today (regardless of whether that cache grows, shrinks, or has become unnecessary due to changing laws). I think it's a bad assumption that most people hiding firearms aren't doing the same with their children.

They are literally tracking all the online purchases of people buying 3d printers, checking them against social media and reports by leftist informants, and raiding people at 3am.

Thinking about "revolution" is insane with the kind of tyranny you're facing.

Surely the number of people buying 3D printers is far too high to perform meaningful background checks on all of them.

Not when you can casually cross-reference all credit card transactions to automatically detect "home grown violent extremists" who shop at sporting goods stores and search for political topics. That narrows it down well enough to make a target list for manual investigation.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEEkKBDWgAA6g4R?format=jpg&name=large

You do not seem to realize what the Democratic party are capable and willing to do to maintain power, and what a powerful tool the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is when used as a political weapon.

This is just cons complaining about the lib version of 'noticing'. Pattern recognition applies to everyone. If they've detected specific transaction patterns highly predictive of possible mass shootings, why is it wrong to acknowledge that? Would you have the same sympathy with some Muslim garden supply business owner regularly profiled and investigated for his high-volume fertilizer purchases? I know for a fact that this kind of transaction analytics is responsible for preventing a lot of successful terrorist attacks, and I also know that conservatives don't care when it's used on their outgroup.

If they've detected specific transaction patterns highly predictive of possible mass shootings, why is it wrong to acknowledge that?

This is facile. There is no specific transaction pattern highly predictive of mass shootings, in that it is both selective and specific; there can't be, because there are way too few mass shootings. The way they get "highly predictive" is by reversing the order and noting things like "gee, looks like nearly all mass shooters purchased guns recently", maybe we should check out anyone who buys a gun?

Again though, this is attacking the system rather than the rationale. I don’t agree with using this kind of thing to harass random gun owners, but do think this kind of analysis could help track down actual terrorists, or people undertaking illegal gain of function research or things like that. The problem is more that the entire federal government was co-opted by the enemy and the right went along with giving it the tools to do this.

Just going to let this post speak for itself.

Fair enough, I just think conservatives should own up to the ways in which politicians they elected are in part responsible for the dramatic escalation in state surveillance of financial transactions and other data in search of allegedly malicious actors.

Conservatives were stupid enough to think these weapons were only going to be used against Osama bin durka durka jihad, which is why all the original "counter-terrorism surveillance tools" had foreign activity requirements.

None of them ever suggested using them against domestic political opponents, and naively believed Democrats would also consider that out of bounds.

If I was going to own up to how stupid I think conservatives and their politicians are, I would be at it all day and inevitably get banned.

More comments

They are literally tracking all the online purchases of people buying 3d printers, checking them against social media and reports by leftist informants, and raiding people at 3am.

Could you provide a source for this? I like to keep abreast of current developments on this front.

In any case, what do they do if you have a 3d printer and no social media?

Thinking about "revolution" is insane with the kind of tyranny you're facing.

I suppose that depends rather heavily on how you expect a revolution to work. Some are easier to execute than others.

Were you, uh, going to acknowledge that article?

I thank you for it. Like I said, I try to keep abreast of this sort of thing. I don't think it changes the fundamental math, but I do want to see this guy defended to the hilt, and I do maintain that the surveillance and enforcement against him is fundamentally illegitimate. What more are you looking for in terms of a response? Do you think that them getting this guy demonstrates that DIY firearms are a genie that can be put back in the bottle?

"ghost gun raid on Staten Island nets arsenal of firearms"

"Members of the financial crimes task force are embedded with Homeland Security Investigation's NY EDTF"

"We just basically track Internet purchases from eBay, PayPal, Amazon, different various online companies. We get a list every other month... With people purchasing components that could possibly create a ghost gun, like the rails, the 3d printer "

Should a certain number of purchases related to making a ghost gun be made, Vaughn says the task force moves toward in conducting investigations on the individual, including social media

The last two paragraphs were edited out of the article, but you can still see them on archive.is. DHS and fincen are still trying to keep it under wraps that literally every bank and store sends them complete customer data to comb through, but every so often some junior dumb fuck assigned to a state task force brags about it on record.

For convenience’s sake, here’s a direct archive.is link: https://archive.is/wIt8h.

Thanks, my phone absolutely dies trying to do that

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