This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Mostly because it's a truism.
Real question is how many gun deaths would occur in the process of trying to enforce the confiscations.
Estimate about 50 million gun owners in the U.S., conservatively estimate 1% of them decide to put up a fight rather than comply. Conservatively estimate that in 10% of such encounters that at least 1 LEO is seriously injured or killed.
50,000 casualties. Out of ~800,000 police officers in the U.S.
And this is assuming large-scale compliance by gun owners, and a relatively low rate of LEO injury. Granted it'll probably be spread out over the course of years.
And one cannot ignore the fact that 3D printers can turn anyone into a gun manufacturer too.
Printing what? They may make it easier to build certain types of guns, or better guns. But what you want to build clandestine guns is a machine shop; the hardest part of a gun to build is the barrel. Especially if you are talking about rifles. Yes, dedicated clandestine gun manufacturers can and have overcome these difficulties. But barrels are the bottleneck. Not easy at all to drill a straight, centered hole through a bar of steel with a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch or better. Nor is it easy to then rifle that barrel.
the current tech as of last year was a 3d-printed mandrel, threaded with copper wire, which is used to electrochemically etch functional rifling into an appropriate steel tube. No drilling or other heavy machining equipment necessary.
Is there a problem with building the tubes themselves? If gunmakers can get those barrels drilled to the right precision...
steel tubing of the appropriate specifications is a fairly basic industrial/construction raw material, I'm given to understand; there's probably a way to make it from round stock, square stock, ingot and ore as well, but at some point there's no additional benefit because the materials necessary are ubiquitous and uncontrollable.
Got it. They just need to expand/widen a hole in .25 inch tubing to get it to be .308 inches or something like that.
Yeah...clandestine gun manufacturers could do pretty well IF they put some thought and preparation, as well as a decent amount of resources, into it. I'd think it'd cost...roughly as much as a used car to get what you need to build a good gun and decent ammunition.
Think, however, about the crude gun that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. It was essentially a crappy homemade shotgun. That is about what your lone wolf criminals are working with; larger, more organized groups could get better tools.
Or just use tubing of the correct diameter. There's other options as well that I haven't seen people exploring as much, like rolling a barrel from sheet steel.
Cost here is very dependent on exactly what you're trying to accomplish, and is one of the most obvious areas where the conversation's focus on rote abstractions hides a number of significant realities. There's cheaper and much more effective things you can make for less resources than a DIY masterpiece 5.56mm NATO cartridge factory. Nullifying gun control 1:1 with DIY tech can be done, but the fact that people are pushing it so hard is an artifact of memetic incentives, not a reflection of baseline reality. In the actual event, I do not think people will be making 5.56mm cartridge factories, because the memetic incentives will no longer be those of performative activism, but of deadly conflict.
That particular weapon was seriously over-engineered. As an offhand example, the steel pipe barrels aren't actually necessary: you can make a perfectly functional large-bore black powder firearm out of literal paper. Again, the common knowledge generated in this space is not remotely exhaustive, and is largely shape by the incentives of performative activism, not practicality. cartridge repeaters and even automatic weapons are absolutely within the skill range of the top 30% or so of the population now, and technological progress will lower the skill floor significantly in the near future. Powder and cartridge production might be a bit harder, but not much. Smallarms are at the bottom end of the effort/reward curve, though, even for individuals, and organized groups have access to entirely different spheres of capability.
There seems to be this intuition that technology is somehow magical or mysterious, or otherwise unreachably complex. It's not. It's astonishing the proportion that's purely social, purely memetic; people consider one thing easy and another thing hard not necessarily because of actual differences, but because social effects have streamlined one process and not the other. One sees this quite a bit in the gun culture, even before 3D2A took off, but I think it's difficult for people to really appreciate the implications.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link