This might be a dumb post.

Disclaimer: I am not religious, I hate organized religion to a point of (self-recognized, regretful) prejudice, and believe that nothing is certain. Not even "god", or the absence of such.

That said: you kind of touch on this later in your post, and herein lies the eternal futility of arguing with religion, but who is to say we are not clay?

The clay pot stores and radiates the heat-Those BTUs' aren't lost to dissipative cooling(made that up)-Heating surface area, mon!

Yeah, I've heard this analogy about how we might be insignificant compared to god/aliens/whatever, and it is complete and utter crap.

A piece of clay cannot reason. It has no concept of self, it has not figured out even the most basic mathematical or physical principles, and we have no way of communicating with it.

Humans have achieved all those things. As Eddie Izzard said "When you [Americans] landed on the moon, that was the point when God should have come up and said hello. Because if you invent some creatures and you put them on the blue one and they make it to the grey one, then you fucking turn up and say, ‘Well done.’ It’s just a polite thing to do."

I'm willing to admit that there's a possibility we are just infants in our understanding of the universe. In fact, I hope that is the case, although I fear we've actually covered a lot of the basics and there may not be anything truly life-changing left to discover (i.e. it's almost certain we will never find a "warp drive").

Either way, a superior being should be able to communicate with us in a meaningful manner. Even if it is like talking to a particularly stupid child for them, *we* still manage it. We communicate with beings of lesser intelligence all the time (small children, animals, republicans).

If we are so far below god that it is unable to make us understand him, then that's his failing, not ours.

The slingshot does "hit harder" i.e. impart more momentum into the target and thus more likely to knock you down.
Intuitively this seems like it would therefore cause the most damage and for several 100 years this was the prevailing logic with muskets and cannonballs.

So much so in fact that when Charles Whitworth first introduced his rifle it was dismissed by the British army partly for having too small of a bullet. Whitworth used a smaller more stable round for its increased range and accuracy/stability (though there were also concerns about "muzzle fouling" and slower reload time).
It was believed at the time that the larger (slower) much less accurate bullets from the Enfield were more effective at actually injuring enemy soldiers, but history later demonstrated that speed and penetration can have just as much (if not more) effect on soft bodies than sheer mass and momentum.

Simply put, that large slingshot round would likely knock you to the floor in the same was as an MMA fighter landing a roundhouse square in your guts would. It might even penetrate the skin a bit and embed itself in you. What it won't do however is travel through your soft tissues at high velocity and create a large "temporary cavity" which is how most firearms do their real damage.

The 9mm etc. don't carry as much overall energy as the slingshot, but they do deliver it to a soft target much more effectively (that is to say lethally). A much more informative test would have been to fire them into ballistic clay, this would have highlighted the differences between speed, momentum and penetration much more clearly. The slingshot would leave a massive dint, the bullets would leave tunnels.

That said, the point they are making does stand to some extent. If you used that slingshot on someone that was trying to shoot you there is a good chance you'd knock them down (or at least stop them taking an aimed shot back for a few seconds). Hell you might even hospitalise them with a good shot!

It's not fair to say that the slingshot is a more "powerful" weapon but I think they did clearly demonstrate that it's a viable alternative under some circumstances. In fact for defending yourself in your own home etc. it might even be better!

Little/no risk of collateral damage (unless you miss really badly)
Very cheap
Would put most people on the floor with one good hit
No firearms licence or background checks needed
More difficult for a child to misuse (Most kids would lack the strength)
Enemy wouldn't expect it
Much less likely to kill
etc. etc.

Hell I'd get one myself if UK law wouldn't fk me over for using it.
It's illegal here to use a weapon specifically intended or kept for defense. i.e. if you grab a random object like a chair and beat up an intruder that's ok, if you have a baseball bat etc. by your bedside for expressly this purpose then it's not.
Handy then that one of my broken computer chairs happens to contain a loose 1ft long iron bar. Naturally I'd never even consider using such a thing violently, but who knows what might come to hand when faced with an intruder

(Seriously though, as broken furniture its a viable means of defence, if I kept it by my bedside as a "weapon" I'd be breaking the letter of the law by using it. Fucking stupid!)

if you are made of clay. don't do drugs

Nope, or security guards, PSO's, hunters, clay target shooters, or anyone else with a reason to own a firearm.

I don't think police are generally armed in New Zealand, and they never used to be in the UK, and it didn't seem to affect their ability to do their jobs. In either case they could call on armed colleagues where required, they just didn't carry a firearm all the time.

That said though, Australian police have always been armed.

Controversial Baby Yoga Draws Outrage has been added as a related post - related requested by Mobius.

Russian woman flips baby around like "a blob of clay" has been added as a related post - related requested by Mobius.

WTF of the Week: Baby Yoga. has been added as a related post - related requested by Mobius.

The Wire - Senator Clay Davis gets SERVED has been added as a related post - related requested by SlipperyPete.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/The-Wire-Senator-Clay-Davis-gets-SERVED

Tell her it's a lot harder when the clay pigeons are 30 feet in front of you and flying through the air! Good practice, sort of.

The wikipedia article on magnets is a good place to start. Magnets can lose their magnetism, but that's not the same as saying they have energy in them that's being used up like a battery.

If you stand next to a large lump of clay and then step onto the clay you've gained some potential energy. The taller the lump of clay the more potential energy you've gained. However, this energy hasn't come from the clay, you've had to use energy to gain it. It took you more energy to step onto the clay than you gained in potential energy so this couldn't be the basis for a perpetual motor.

Next to the lump of clay is a large bellows attached to a balloon. You step off the clay onto the bellows. You drop down to ground level and pump up the balloon a bit. You can repeat this process over and over until the balloon is pumped up. However, each time you step onto the clay it sags a bit and you're not so high up. After a while if you do this for long enough the clay will be well trodden down and each time you step off the clay onto the bellows it will have hardly any effect. The clay has lost it's ability to help you pump up the balloon. It's lost it's height. But at no point did it give you any energy to pump up the balloon. You used your own energy to step up onto the clay to give yourself the potential energy, which you then converted to kinetic energy by stepping onto the bellows and pumping up the balloon.

This is exactly the same as a magnet losing it's magnetism. It's not like a battery losing power by powering something else. There's no energy in a magnet. It never gives energy to anything else. Like a drive shaft doesn't power a car, it just helps move the energy from the engine to the wheels.

Magnets fool everyone by working at a distance. Everything else we deal with in a physical way has to touch something else to affect it. You can't get a nail into wood without physically hitting it with a hammer. Magnets confuse us and that makes it easy for scammers with their perpetual motion devices to make us believe things that aren't true. We don't have the right wiring to easily figure out what's going on intuitively.

Magnets simply don't work how you think they do, or how the maker of this video wants you to believe they do.

that device is for launching clay pigeons. It probably harms the squirrel to hit it that hard.

No, I don't need to research "properly cleared" firearm. You do.

By definition if it is properly cleared then it has no cartridge in the chamber and is safe.

If a person makes a mistake and assumes a firearm is cleared when it is not - then they have not - by definition - properly cleared the firearm.

If a person is shot by a firearm they assumed was cleared or they did not clear properly then by definition they have not cleared it properly.

"not a single one of them saw the bullet in the barrel" is usually caused by a squib load. It is easily detected both when it happens and visually by looking for light down the chamber end of the barrel (no light = projectile stuck in barrel). If you mean to say that you had a cartridge in the chamber and 30 people familiar with cleaning firearms didn't see it then you have 30 people in need of reeducation.

A self discharing firearm is not common but yes it does happen. That's why we practice muzzle safety at all times with a loaded firearm.

"Now, if you truly believe a firearm was invented for sport, you have seriously deluded yourself."
I don't know where you got this from. I never wrote any sentiment similar to this. I wrote about the difference between design and use. A firearms first use was for killing animals (people included). This is now outnumbered by sports shooters by an order of magnitude.

I think it is pretty obvious I'm familiar with firearms and you don't need to describe a 22lr Hammerli, 22lr Anschutz, etc. sports pistol or rifle to me. These are not nearly as common as other multi-use sporting firearms. Sporting includes all the disciplines in my link a few posts back and hunting game animals.

"if you truly truly deep down in your gun loving heart believe an AR-15 was invented for sport . . . well, there's nothing anyone can ever say to make you see reason."
I never suggested I did.

"If you truly believe hallow point bullets were made for sport, then we live in a very strange world."
I never suggested I did. They're for expansion upon contact with body fluids to help bring about hydrostatic shock and give a larger hole with expansion of the bullet. They may have been intended for hunting (which is a sport) by its designer - I don't know and I doubt it's recorded in the history books.

"If you truly believe a recoiless machine gun that fires 30 rounds per minute was made for sport"
This is getting boring.

Look it's pretty obvious you're confusing "intent of design/invention", with "design", and "purpose of use". They are three different things.

The intent of the original design for firearms was for it to be used as a weapon to kill animals (again people are animals). No two ways about that.

A firearm is designed to accelerate a projectile down the barrel.

A firearm is used for more than it's original intention. So nowadays we use it more for sports using paper, cardboard or clay targets than hunting (which is also a sport) or killing other people.

"Guns, well, you're just in fantasy land there."
Now that you've finished your embarrassing diatribe could you try to be a little nicer and pay attention to what I write - not what you imagine I wrote.

No, you're accusing me of being a dick. I'm being polite. I'm being accurate with my words. If I've inadvertently been rude then I apologise. In my opinion you answer aggressively and rudely (without cause or need).

You must be confused in regards to complacency - you were having that discussion with "messenger" - not with me. But your confusion aside - I agree 100%.

Yes I deny guns are "designed to kill". Guns are designed to accelerate projectiles and there are no two ways about that. You can go argue with my engineering professors if you want to redefine what "design" versus "purpose of use" means - I'm not going to bother again.

My apologies - I didn't mean you were paraphrasing about the lethality of weapons - I meant you were paraphrasing the part about respecting the firearm - which may not be clear because I was agreeing with you as a response.

They are not using the paper for "target practice". The shooting of paper is actually a sport across several different disciplines. Here is a list of said sports - almost all of them shoot at paper, cardboard, steel or clay targets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_sport

Now I've given you the list - are you still going to say these sports are irrelevant?
Keep in mind tens of millions of people participate in these sports. It's pretty obvious who is getting what - I'll leave you to believe what you like though.

What's with your inappropriate sarcasm? It didn't add to the discussion.

It may be semantics in your opinion but it's not like there is any confusion between the word "design" and "use". It's engineering. A firearm is designed to do something - and that something is not killing. We designed it to propel a projectile at high speed. We use it for multiple purposes - but mostly we use it for punching holes in paper or shooting clay pigeons. Yes, it is fantastic at killing animals/humans. We use it for that too. Yes, when it was first designed that was its primary purpose of use. But that does not mean it does not have secondary purposes. I'd guess that more rounds are fired at paper targets and for hunting animals than at people each year in the USA (and probably by several orders of magnitude).

Knives are fantastic at killing. A sword (which is a long knife) does a lot more vascular damage than a 7.62 mm NATO round (i.e. it is better at killing). Knives were superseded because they are not a ranged weapon.

You are suggesting that the tens of millions of sporting firearm users in the USA do not constitute a legitimate use of firearms. That is short sighted.

We accept the premature deaths of car crashs because it is a convenience we are not willing to live without. The collateral damage of people dying in vehicles is a cost we are happy to accept to continue using this convenience (we don't need cars to get around - they just make travelling easier). You'll find that the huge amount of legislation surrounding vehicles is to reduce deaths and the cost that crashes impose on the economy (which is billions).

The same for knives (humankind's most used murder weapon). We aren't giving it up as a kitchen tool just because someone used it for murder.

The same should of course apply to firearms.

America should have better legislation surrounding firearms (something I fully support). That's a no brainer. A full registration scheme for all firearms should be enacted. Firearm safes should be mandatory. Criminal and mental health background checks should be mandatory. For ownership of semi-automatic/automatic military style weapons you should need to be in a firearms club. This would both legitimise its ownership and use - so you can't just own one for the hell of it but it doesn't stop you from owning it in total (preserving the 2nd amendment). It would also force social contact - so other club members will recognise if a person should not be a club member and therefore a non-owner of these firearm types.

America could also implement a nationwide free mental health system. It basically has none. This is probably the most important thing it could do.

What are your suggestions for legislation?

(btw I'm not American - but I've closely followed this topic for years).