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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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Ten years ago, I'd make that argument, but the state of the art in disposable firearms hasn't been the Liberator as zip-gun-adjacent for the better part of the intervening period. The undercovered part of 3d2a analysis is that you don't just have zip-guns-but-worse and lovingly-crafting custom 1911s; there's a lot of capability to make hipoint-grade guns that fall in the middle. That space is largely underexplored in the United States (again, because you can buy a HiPoint, or because the ATF will shoot your dog, or both), but a good deal of it is potentially highly lethal, often in ways that would not be great to find out the hard way (further information not available here).

((But, yes, the OP's gun-free magic wand also needs to handle zip guns, in the same way it needs to handle people buying aluminum-grade CNCs for 1k and steel-grade ones for 8k. But the OP's not really engaging with the core point enough for this objection to really be relevant.))))

That space is largely underexplored in the United States (again, because you can buy a HiPoint, or because the ATF will shoot your dog, or both), but a good deal of it is potentially highly lethal, often in ways that would not be great to find out the hard way (further information not available here).

AR-15s are a coordination mechanism, not a strategic weapon, but no common knowledge of the shape of the possibility-space exists. Even within the gun culture, it appears that everyone visible is completely unaware, fixated on antique memes and larping.

The basic problem is that secret black-ball deterrence doesn't exist. If you don't pull the ball out of the jar, people won't believe it exists. if you do pull it out, the presence of a black (more accurately light-to-medium grey) ball makes deterrence moot.

It's a wicked problem. The Red memeplex is optimizing for low memetic cost, and so has little pressure to evolve under current conditions. Blues are reasoning off the memes they see, not the memes that logically follow, so detect no incentive to maintain current conditions.