I actually agree with you mostly, but you're not gonna like it.

One thing I will point out though - "I just don't connect gun regulations as an effective solution to mass murder."

We have data on this. Take Australia. In the 21 years leading up to Port Arthur and that massacre itself, which triggered the nation into heavily regulating guns, there were 16 mass murders of four or more people, totaling 137 murders. Since then, there have been 12, with a total of 76 murders. This despite there being population growth.

Violent crime rate has dropped from 1996 to now, mainly from reductions in robbery and a small drop in homicide rates.

There is very clear evidence that if most guns are removed from circulation, there are very real and likely benefits when it comes to reducing violent crime in general and murder.

I'm a political moderate and pragmatic. I go with what works. Don't care how liberal or conservative the solution is. I'm never in favor of regulation that is ineffective at solving problems.

And to that end, I'm against most gun control measures. I'm on board with banning assault weapons, fully automatic weapons, armor piercing bullets, but most gun control things like psychiatric evaluations, universal background checks? No.
Why? Because societal models we know that provided real progress on problems seemed to suggest one thing - it's the prevalence of guns that is the problem. If you make it marginally harder to buy guns by things like...

Three day waiting periods
Universal background checks
Psychiatric evaluations

They don't work. Banning guns works, though. It's worked time and time again. Australia, Britain, over and over and over, if guns lose prevalence, violence, murder, etc. decrease significantly.

At some point, society has to decide that giving up guns is worth it. But until that time, "common sense" gun control is a waste of time, and I quite frankly think it might do real effective gun control measures harm because when nothing gets better from these mild measures, they're going to point that out.

Wait...your take there is that Muslims are <1/4 as violent as Christians? Did you get whiplash turning around that fast?
What would I propose?
First, more assistance for the indigent, as economic status is far more important than race when determining a person's likelihood to use a gun on others. Remove the desperation, I expect you stop well over 1/2 of gun violence.
Second, recognizing that fighting the advanced military with semi auto rifles is futile, I would ban all full auto and mods, and extended mags with a buy back at market value (granted, a ban doesn't remove them, but stops more from being legally sold).
Don't pretend that, because that wouldn't stop all gun crime, it's useless. There is no silver bullet, that's no reason to take a moonlit walk on the moors during werewolf season. You can't stop all auto deaths, but we still stop people from jogging on the freeway

Edit: I agree with better mental health reporting/testing and better background checks (not necessarily longer, but remove the congressional roadblocks to making it near instant, nation wide, computerized, and more thorough)
Gun free zones are a failed experiment...ask DC. Unless you search everyone and everything entering the zone, it's worse than useless.

You said almost 3 times that speed, continuously for over 10 minutes....and not with a lightweight speed shorting pistol.

If someone wanted to kill with each shot on moving targets at 3-400 yards in the dark, yeah, 5 seconds+- per shot still seem reasonable, maybe half that for someone who practices on living, moving targets often. Your claim some people can continuously do that 120 times a minute including mag changes is just laughable. They might shoot that fast, but not hit anything accurately at that distance.

You have to prove it to convince me...better? If it's as common as you say, that should be easy to provide with a comparison video instead of a suggestion to buy and read a certain book. The videos I found are all short range small target, not at all the same as what we're debating. Show me a comparison of a field layered deep with 10000 balloons getting shot at from distance, that would be informative, short course accuracy target shooting isn't.

My claim is you will have more control at full auto than absolute maximum possible finger speed.
My other claim is you will put more lead down range with most full autos. In a crowd situation where missing is basically impossible and aiming wasted effort, like this one, more bullets means more damage. Once the crowd dispersed, aiming a high powered rifle would probably be more effective, but not before. Were this not the case, why would any military allow them, ever?

In this Turkey shoot situation, you get more hits on target in full auto. In target shooting, you won't. This was not a series of targets at 20 yards, it was a target zone at 3-400 yards in the dark.

Does it bother any one else to hear politicians and news reporters incorrectly calling things "machine guns," "assault rifles" and "clips?" It makes them look ignorant, just like watching Fox News report on anything scientific.

Machine guns are primarily support weapons for sustained automatic fire. They usually have an active or passive cooling mechanism to prevent the barrel from overheating during sustained fire.

An assault rifle is a rifle which has a select fire mechanism that allows it to switch from semi-auto to burst or full automatic fire. An assault rifle can overheat if fired fully automatic (or even semi-automatic) without letting it cool, which can lead to failure of the weapon (if you can even hold on to it when it's that hot).

A magazine is simply something that holds bullets. Guns can have internal magazines or external detachable magazines. A clip is a mechanism used to load bullets into a magazine.

I think his point is it's not a 10% difference, more like >90%.
Assume they're right and it only shoots 3 times faster, and your finger of steel doesn't get tired 100 rounds in, shooting at max manual speed is even less accurate. Full auto allows far more bullets for a longer time with far more control. In a crowd shoot, it clearly makes a huge difference imo.
It wouldn't make it a non tragedy, but would certainly meaningfully affect the outcome.

My fear is they'll only ban bump stocks and not the dozen other methods of making semi auto go full auto.

Hmm. I disagree with your description text, @ChaosEngine.

I've never shot something fully-automatic. I have shot an AR-15 semi-automatic, and I know where you're coming from when you say that hitting a target on full auto would be difficult, especially for a relatively untrained person (recoil control).

However, I think Vox and others are basically correct when they say that this modification (bump stock) contributed to the Las Vegas shooting being so deadly. Specifically in that sort of scenario.

The dude wasn't picking targets and sniping, going for accuracy. He picked an ideal shooting location (elevation with clear LOS) and sprayed into a crowd. He'd have been more accurate by keeping the weapon on semi-auto and actually aiming carefully, and certainly would have gotten more hits per bullet fired, but on the other hand the rate of fire difference would have so different that people would have had more time between shots to scramble for cover, etc.

He had position, an abundance of bullets, and lots and lots of time. Given those givens, having a rate of fire approximately equal to fully-automatic means a much higher body count than if he'd have been limited to traditional semi-auto.


The NRA is being more cunning than I figured they would, and has come out in favor of banning bump stocks. I agree with you that they see that mostly as a pointless concession, and a distraction from additional / better stuff that needs to happen.

But it isn't a pointless concession. If banning fully-automatic firearms in 1986 (minus the ones grandfathered in) was the right thing to do, extending that to include bump stocks is also the right thing to do. For the same reasons.

@newtboy is correct to note that technically, a rifle with a bump stock isn't a fully-automatic "machine gun". The user's finger still pulls the trigger once for every bullet that comes out -- semi-automatic.

However, I think that the "spirit" of the distinction is that with semi-automatic firing you have to think and consciously decide to pull the trigger each time you want to shoot a bullet, whereas with fully-automatic you consciously decide when you want to start and stop shooting. By the letter of the law, weapons with bump stocks are semi-automatic. But by that definition of the "spirit" of the law, they are fully-automatic. Pull the grip/barrel forward to start shooting, pull it back to stop.

It's a pretty frequent occurrence for technology to outpace the law. The definitions of semi vs fully automatic include the word "trigger" because they didn't anticipate this kind of conversion that makes the trigger sort of one step removed from the conscious decision to fire. The law would have similar hiccups if a weapon was developed that used a button or switch to fire, rather than a traditional trigger.

When those hiccups happen, the solution is to clarify the intent of the law and expand or clarify definitions as necessary. I'm pleasantly surprised that many legislators seem willing to do that with bump stocks, and that the NRA seems like it won't stand in the way. Mission accomplished, situation resolved? No. But a step in the right direction.

Ok, gotta point out that it is not illegal to own an automatic weapon in the US. Any owned before the ban are grandfathered. I also think certain types of firearm dealer/manufacturer license holders can buy, sell, and make them under certain circumstances. Plenty of people legally own full auto weapons in America, you can rent them at certain ranges (remember the little girl that shot the instructor in the head), and there was even a TV show about a guy who's business was making them that ended just recently.
I think it is illegal to sell them to non license holders in America...but that's a far cry from saying no one can legally have them.

They missed the NRA's contention (that the courts agreed with) about why bump stocks weren't machine guns too. The argument was that since only one bullet comes out of the gun for every trigger pull, it's technically not a machine gun, it's still a semi auto.

Thoughts:

1) There has been a ban on sales of new, fully-automatic firearms ("machine guns") since 1986. That leaves some loopholes (can still buy them if they were manufactured before then, but that demand plus scarcity makes them expensive, etc.) but in general, there isn't a whole lot of uproar over that 20-year-old ban.

2) These bump-fire stocks don't technically convert a firearm into fully-automatic; the trigger is still being pulled 1 time for each bullet that comes out (semi-automatic).

3) However, they easily allow for rates of fire (bullets per minute/second) comparable to fully-automatic weapons. So, I think an unbiased and reasonable person would say that while a firearm equipped with one of these does not violate the letter of the ban on fully-automatic firearms, it does quite reasonably violate the spirit of that ban.

4) Doing anything to correct that discrepancy will require updated laws. Updating the law requires a legislature that generally supports the update and a president that agrees, or a legislature that overwhelmingly supports the update and can override a presidential veto.

5) None of that exists at the moment in the US. So, it is (perhaps coldly) logical to say that these bump-fire stocks will not be banned as an extension to the 1986 ban on full-auto firearms, at least not in the short term.

6) However, before quietly accepting that, it is worth noting that political fallout amongst those individuals in the legislature that refuse to consider updating the law is a very real possibility. Plenty of people, even on the right, even plenty of gun nuts, say that they are in favor of some degree of "common sense" gun control. Pointing out that bump-fire stocks essentially circumvent the already in-place ban on fully-automatic firearms seems like a good way to test that professed adherence to common sense.

7) Get that word out there, and pretty importantly, try to do it in a way that is as respectful towards the average "gun nut" as possible. Their minds can be swayed. Hunters, sportsmen, and even people that have guns for self defense can be persuaded with reason -- they can still do their thing even without bump-fire stocks, just like they can do their thing without fully-automatic firearms. Congresscritters probably can't be convinced, because they've already been bribed"persuaded" with campaign donations, NRA lobbyists, etc.


So, don't preach to the choir. Try to convince the people that do actually own guns. The good news? You've got "common sense" on your side.

Cops keeping the streets safe.

FYI Michael Brown received every bullet he deserved.

Cameras prove the cops to be in the right but still hard leftest can seem to grasp reality.

I'd have to beg to differ on America having similar Aboriginal/White conflict. IMO the divide between aboriginal/white in Canada is actually much deeper, and with a greater potential for future violence than even black/white relations in the US. The conditions on Canadian native reserves are MUCH worse than in the US. It's severe enough that the first time a Canadian is driving past an America aboriginal reserve they have to ask twice to confirm it really is one. The general state of broken down infrastructure, housing and in general is so bad it's even visibly unavoidable up here in Canada. In the US you can't tell you've gone past anything different unless something culturally relevant is posted up.

It's also made worse by systematic segregation that the reserve system in Canada creates so any seed of racism has lots of fertile ground and lacks any reference to counter balance it.

When a car is stolen is something goes missing on farms near a reserve the immediate default assumption is that someone 'aboriginal' took it. It's only made worse when more often than the statistical distribution should dictate, it actually was someone from a reserve that did it. Recently a car of young aboriginal kids pulled into a farmers yard and one of them was shot and killed. They said they had a flat and were just looking for help. The case is on going, but the courts have heard that the neighbour had already put a call in to police about a theft minutes before the shooting though. Of course, white folks on the internet made such helpful comments as suggesting the farmers mistake was 'leaving any witnesses'. It's also not just white racism against natives though, the racism against settlers(whites) amongst aboriginal populations can be just as ugly and rampant. When Canada decided to have our border crossing guards carry guns, we had to close a border crossing that was in a Mohawk reserve because they wouldn't allow it. The border station there was already riddled with bullet holes before this. If the government DID try and enforce the same law there as the rest of the border, people were going to die.

As someone who went through 2 rounds of sex ed -- through my family's church (better than you think, but not by much), and public school (worse than you think; mostly consisting of "here's a picture of a dick with gonorrhea, LOOK AT IT"), it seems like videos like this available through YouTube are likely to be a massive improvement on practical sex ed. So kudos to the consistently awesome Green brothers for figuring that out and doing something about it!

However, I would point out a misleading bit in the YT text:
"Probabilities eventually collapse into reality, and then that couple no longer has a 2% chance of probability, they have a 100% chance, because they're pregnant, and everyone else has a 0% chance."

...Yeah, not really. That couple is still subject to the 2% probability, they just happen to be one of the statistically (mildly) unlikely examples that make the chance 2% instead of 0. And much more importantly, everyone else still has a 2% chance, not a 0% chance.

Misunderstanding statistics / probability in that way leads to all kinds of erroneous assumptions and behavior. Like putting a huge bet on red + even in roulette because the past 5 hits have been black + odd and red + even is "due". Or driving around with no seat belt because someone you know was just in an accident, thereby biting the "statistical bullet" and making everybody else safe for a while. Every roll of the dice is a new event with the same odds as the roll before it.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

I agree that a disturbed person with more power is a bigger problem. To go straight for the Godwin's Law example, there have probably been people more evil and messed up than Hitler in the history of Earth, but very few had the power and opportunity to act on that evil to the magnitude he did.

However, you brought up magnitude of problems and compared the two as "equally disturbed". The Republican Congressman (with admittedly more power/influence) "body-slammed" a reporter. The Democrat nutcase shot up 6 people and (I think) didn't manage to kill any of them, but not for lack of trying.

We don't really know what was going on in either persons' heads when they did these things. What led up to them, etc. Maybe the reporter had been doggedly following and questioning/harassing the Congressman to such an extent that he snapped. Happens quite a lot with paparazzi, and we tend to give the celebrity targets a lot of benefit of the doubt in those cases. The only long-term result of the bodyslam incident that I know of is that the reporter's glasses were broken. Glasses can be repaired or replaced. Bullet wounds are rather tougher to fix.

However my main point isn't to get into a dick-measuring contest about who did more harm or who is more fucked up. My point is that the person entirely responsible in either incident is known. GOP Congressman physically assaulted a reporter of his own volition. Democrat nutcase shot up that baseball practice of his own volition. Those individuals are 100% responsible for what they did, no matter who or what they might claim drove them to their actions. Just like it isn't Ozzy Osbourne's fault when some nutter offs themselves after listening to his song "Suicide Solution", or John Carmack's fault for Columbine even though Klebold and Harris liked playing Doom.

I like how their bullet cams:
•Have a flat trajectory
•Have no spin whatsoever
•Are only $10 each
•Produce video quality on par with a drone flight speeded up really fast

Take my money that is just as real as this product!

I love these videos, can't explain why.

I liked Sean taking that last bullet for him. Or at least choosing the cannonball dab over the BB... And props to Tom for getting through in spite of clearly NOT being built for it!