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Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I understand fear of handguns a handgun is an easy to procure object in a hurry that allows someone to commit a crime suddenly and violently.
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get? (except of course using it to commit a crime is obviously very illegal)
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
A handgun is a very convenient tool for the casual homicide. You don't have to be smart to use it, and it is a minimal inconvenience to carry it around while you go about your daily business until one day, you decide that someone needs to die (or be stopped from whatever he is doing) and can enact your decision within a few seconds.
There are plenty of other tools which can be used for murder in a pinch, you can use screwdrivers to stab someone, or hit them with a blunt object, or run them over with your car, or pierce them with sharpened Hufflepuff students' bones.
If a reasonably smart person wants to off her neighbor and does not care about the consequences to herself, she will probably find a way to do so. Most likely, it will not involve any flashy homebrewed chemicals. (H2S is a terrible choice in particular because humans can detect it in trace amounts and find it deeply unpleasant, and having your victim inhale HCN is difficult unless you have trapped them in a gas chamber.)
Of course, if she cares about not getting caught, she will most likely use a method which is already common (such as handguns), because anything clever and original will exclude 95% of the suspects immediately.
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Some gangbanger fool on the street is highly unlikely to put the time and effort into making a bomb drone he'll have floating around with him in case he wants to mug me, or drop it on some other gangbanger and I'm in the vicinity.
That same fool can easily get a gun and start shooting and hit people not at all involved. CBS has an entire "drive by shootings" page for Chicago. And just being in the same area as when the bullets start flying gives you a good chance of being a victim:
Americans often make jokes online about the UK and "have you a licence for that knife", but it's the same principle. Guns are harder to get over here (though not impossible, in parts of Ireland we have our own native gang culture shooting away at each other), so stupid dumb teens tend to carry knives instead and when they get into a stupid dumb fight people end up dead, even if not intended to end that way, though overall knife homicides are falling (due to the police cracking down):
Being smart and disciplined and patient and minimally skilled enough to make a bomb or plan how to use a drone is not the street-level thug who is the most dangerous to ordinary people.
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Nobody does that. /thread
Seriously, I don't understand how you think this is a dunk on the hypothetical person you're mad at. Your argument actually makes the safety standards seem very reasonable: they restrict only those tools of crime that are actually commonly used to commit crimes, and not those that are not commonly used to commit crimes even though they could be. The restrictions target the minimum reduction of liberty necessary to secure a large reduction in crime.
Would that be the case, but safety people seem to end either end up fixated on very specific, relatively rare crimes (see magazine limits, long guns/assault weapons vs. hand guns), aesthetics (assault weapons) or narratives (suppressors, 3d printed guns) with a limited sense of balance. To the OP, folks using any of those alternates are more likely to kill themselves then anyone else. The low hanging fruit is a pressure cooker and some fireworks (see the Boston Marathon bombing) which any idiot could acquire.
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The safety people are concerned about is usually downstream of their political paranoias and conspiracy theories.
Middle class fratboys are "rape culture", but afghan hill people are "diversity of consent". etc
The left-wing focus on guns is mostly a dodge to redirect public anger over black crime and liberal judges throwing violent criminals into the population at law-abiding Republicans who own guns. If only Billy Bob couldn't buy an AR, DeQuarious wouldn't be shooting LaShontrakayze with a Kel Tec.
Yeah, “rape culture” is a thing to the extent you don’t ask further questions as to who is committing the raping, or the raping can be blamed on white males with plausible deniability. A similar example is how #StopAsianHate quickly died when it became too undeniable who was actually committing the acts of Asian hatred.
When black men commit gun homicide it highlights socioeconomic inequities and why we need to fight for racial justice and impose greater gun control.
When white men commit gun homicide it highlights white male entitlement and why we need to combat white male privilege and impose greater gun control.
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I think this is applying conflict theory where mistake theory would be more appropriate.
Handguns are, in practice, orders of magnitude more dangerous than long guns, looking at (murder, suicide and negligent) death tolls. The difference between America and other broadly pro-gun countries like Switzerland and Canada is that America has ubiquitous legal private handgun ownership, and lots of people shooting themselves or each other with said handguns. The pro-gun movement in America largely consists of people who routinely carry a handgun for personal self defence (or would like to if it was legal in their jurisdiction). And they (you?) are winning politically.
And yet the anti-gun movement's best argument is to point at spree killings and call for bans on scary-looking and/or high-powered rifles, because blue tribe normies who are susceptible to anti-gun messaging are not actually worried about the chav-on-chav shootings going on in the rough parts of their own cities, they are worried about the spree shootings they see on TV.
If the anti-gun left were serious, committed gun-grabbers at both the elite and mass levels, I don't think they would be so stupid about guns. I think normie fear of spree killings is very real, is largely driven by media amplification (which in turn is driven by if-it-bleeds-it-leads incentives, not partisan bias), and is grossly disproportionate to any real threat. But the pro-gun right don't have a very persuasive response to it - the real argument they believe is "one classroom of dead kids in a every 4-5 years in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread rifle ownership for shooting sports, hunting, rural home defence, and tyranny prevention." And that is a non-starter in the public debate because most people are innumerate. [FWIW, I think the tyranny prevention argument is mostly bullshit and I still think the tradeoff points in favour of broadly legal long guns. But if I got my sense of how common spree killings actually are from the MSM, I wouldn't]
tl;dr - the reason why the debate about long guns isn't as one-sidedly pro-gun in the US as it is in Switzerland is because normies overstate the risk of spree killings, not because of a conspiracy of evil gun-grabbers.
I would have to disagree with this. The anti-gun types could get a lot of concessions and/or enhancement of their credibility if they agreed to national shall-issue concealed carry. The data is pretty overwhelming that automatically issuing concealed carry permits to anyone who passes a background check does not result in a significant increase in crime.
What concessions do you realistically think the pro-gun people would be willing to make?
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The Brady campaign is currently a numerate, cogent, reasonable organization aimed at gun control supported by the data(they didn't used to be, but they are at the moment).
They are not popular or influential, because gun politics in the US is 100% partisanbrained conflict theory. The NRA and the Brady campaign are both doing things that meaningfully(but perhaps not massively) reducing gun deaths with things like safe storage campaigns and range instructor training. They're not the most popular organizations on either side.
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If only this innumeracy applied to "a few dozen mauled kids every year in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread
dog piss, dog shit, dog slobber, dog barking, dog dander, dog odorwhatever people see in these things."I think conflict theory is apt here. At the end of the day, if most people liked guns at even 0.1% of their emotional investment in dogs, they'd overlook the tradeoffs too. Some people just really like guns and are fine with a couple classrooms paying the tradeoff ("Some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make"). Other people don't care at all about owning guns, so for them no societal cost is really worth it. But a blanket gun ban costs these people absolutely nothing. They were never going to own a gun anyways. Ask them how many babies mauled by dogs per year is acceptable before they're willing to let the government take away their precious doggos and you'll get a very different attitude.
As somebody from a country with very low levels of Civilian gun ownership and who has fired a firearm like... three times maybe in my whole lifetime which was cool to tick off but not some profound experience I need to revisit. I get the nominal self-defense argument, but I also feel like widespread gun ownership in the USA has a bunch of secondary and tertiary effects creating a loop of 'there is more violence since people expect guns to enter encounters since people expect more violence'.
If I'm personally exceedingly unlikely to own a gun I'd rather be in a disarmed society since IMO PR(Random encounter happens where somebody else belligerent is armed who wouldn't be otherwise) is significantly greater than PR(Random Encounter where I both have a gun and have an occasion to use it prosocially to successfully defuse something)
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In the United States, gun control is so conflict theory that nobody even tries to convince anyone anymore. When Democrats get power, they simply implement all the gun control -- Virginia demonstrates this perfectly. Anti-gun states have been banning AR-15s (most popular RIFLE in the US) and Glocks (most popular pistol) left and right. Republicans, being divided on the issue, sometimes reduce gun control, sometimes do nothing, and sometimes increase gun control. But the convincing stage is long since over.
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You make some good points, but I don't think it quite addresses the, as you say, unseriousness of the anti-gun left. They used to lean much more deeply on the crime angle, but there are too many fatal weaknesses to that take for it to be effective in a less controlled/favorable media environment. The normies get upset about spree-killings, but not in a way that obviously and naturally leads to blaming the tool. One can easily imagine a slightly different world where the mass media blame was displaced onto, say, SSRIs, possibly with a "greedy, overprescribing pharma companies" angle. But the pattern for sprees is something hitting the news bigly once every 2-3 years, with maybe a few copycats in the following weeks, and then most everyone goes back to not caring. That doesn't translate into political will.
The reason there are safety people at all seems much more driven by outgroup dynamics. Gun are red tribe totems, and attacking enemy totems is always a fun time.
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Police tools and surveillance have gotten to a very advanced state in the US. Many murders go unsolved, but I'm not sure it's so much that police can't solve the murders. I note after that Mangione's assassination of Thompson, police went all-out. They take assassinations and terrorism seriously. And there are cameras everywhere. In people's pockets, on the walls of buildings.
Basically, it's hard to get away with any kind of political violence. That reduces the number of people who are willing to do it.
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I mean the Unabomber was quite smart, and also opted for bombs over guns.
I'm not sure how wise it is to be giving such recipes on this forum either. I doubt you'll direct the Eye of Sauron our way, but it never hurts to be safe, especially when your point could have just as easily have been made by simply saying something like, "You can make homemade C4 out of materials that are freely available in the US, and then delivering it via a drone would be trivial" or something like that.
I do think it is lucky that people who want to hurt others are mostly uncreative. I have definitely come up with ways of doing mass damage that I'm surprised have never actually happened in the United States, since I wasn't thinking particularly hard about the problem. It just seems like we are lucky that when humans are high in the desire to do mass violence, they mostly tend to be low in traits like intelligence that correlate with successfully perpetrating the most harmful kinds of mass violence.
That's one of the worrying things about AI for me. While I know all of the big AI labs test for this, and have their own systems in place to detect users trying to use LLMs in this way, I really worry about what will happen if someone is able to manufacture a bioweapon they otherwise wouldn't have been able to manufacture thanks to an LLM.
Fortunately, the type of amateur idiot trying this is indeed more likely to blow their own face off in their basement or garage before they can get around to leaving their bombs in a public place. Handguns are different.
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Agreed. I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of ways to cause absolute chaos which generally don't get pursued because 99% of people don't have the experience, intelligence, and diligence to do it. And the few people who do have the skills are, for the most part, not interested in being terrorists. Why would they be? For the most part, they've achieved high status in life and they've done so by being rule followers. And in any event, most people are not psychopaths.
The obvious areas are making bombs, poisons, and bio-weapons. But even people who are skilled in areas like law, finance, and banking could cause a lot of issues by creating phony documentation.
AI potentially offers the opportunity for low-discipline people to get around this soft but very real obstacle.
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ok but you'd actually probably kill yourself if you used my recipe to do anythingAlso discussing hyper narrow techniques is fun at the end of the day nobody is going to actually do any of this, this is all elaborate textual role play to me. There's no way anyone is stupid enough to try to make cyanide gas in their parents garage, or get on a government watchlist for buying nitromethane.
Using Pliny prompts I have been able to get it to teach me how to do fun very dangerous experiments then go to the local college chemistry lab and confirm they work. ~~PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME
yeah aside from the 9/11 highjackers and the Unabomber I can't remmber a single smart terrorist. Even the unabomber wasn't the smartest at actually carrying anything out.
The unabomber got what he wanted- he promoted his ideology so that future critics would pattern match onto it, establishing kleos influence that pushes towards, eventually, what he wants. He's replaced Thoreau in the popular consciousness, which gives him influence broadly.
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Nitromethane is the main component of fuel for some model airplanes and drag racing cars, which leads to lawful excuses for having it.
Lots of people are stupid enough to make poison gases and explosives in their parents' garage, though usually all they do is end up harming themselves.
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The IRA and the old-school PLO had a lot of smart terrorists.
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As usual, Gwern has the canonical post on this topic.
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