I spent all afternoon reading that comic, having to call it a night on chapter 93. Thanks for the link!

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

Welcome to the club! I love my P1S. Biggest problem so far has been some squeaky pulleys, but a little bit of oil fixed that right up.

I’m glad I’m not the only one with that criticism. I enjoyed the first game so much more because of that.

I would guess the logic behind going harder on repeat offenders is that they’ve already been punished once and didn’t stop breaking the law, so we should punish them harder this time. Not sure that’s super effective reasoning, but w/e.

Carries a gun

Violently terrified of others carrying guns

This guy was never not going to murder someone.

Yep. Prisoners and homeless people are there to remind you what happens if you stop making money for the boss man. Plenty of horrible, exhausting, unsafe jobs get away with paying dogshit wages because it’s either that or being thrown into the maelstrom of human misery that is being incarcerated / unhoused. How many people would die of heat exhaustion in an Amazon warehouse if they knew their basic needs would still be met if they quit?

Silly question, but are any of your people vegetarian? Looks like those survival meals have meat in them. Only potential explanation I can think of.

I would love to only be accountable to “guidelines” instead of “rules” or “laws”.

These guns are different enough in actual use to make one more dangerous than the other. They both can kill you dead, but one literally is designed specifically to be deadiler in several ways. It’s one of the reasons mass murders keep using it specifically to mas murder people.

Others have already explained how they’re both equally lethal, but to your point about mass murderers using the one over the other: The top rifle can be had for ~$400 & looks like the one all the soldiers and video game guys use. The bottom is closer to $1000 and does not look as cool (to the young adult male demographic that commits most mass shootings, at least). I would argue those two factors account more for their difference in mass shooting use than anything else.

In the US, there is a history of white performers using blackface to play caricatures of black people, leaning hard on racist ethnic stereotypes. From Wikipedia:

The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of theater developed in the early 19th century.[1] The shows were performed by mostly white actors wearing blackface makeup for the purpose of comically portraying racial stereotypes of African Americans. There were also some African-American performers and black-only minstrel groups that formed and toured. Minstrel shows stereotyped blacks as dimwitted, lazy, buffoonish, cowardly, superstitious, and happy-go-lucky.[2][3] Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people specifically of African descent.

It’s Lemmy. We’ve got to have at least one “America Bad” comment per thread, no matter how irrelevant.

The RPD pointed out that an attorney for the Abbouds had released home security footage of the raid online, which the police said made releasing the body camera footage redundant. At the same time, the RPD claimed that releasing the body camera footage might expose confidential information about search warrant execution or damage officers’ reputations.

You busted in a door and pointed an AR-15 at a baby. Your reputation should be fucking damaged.

Raleigh police “wrongfully executed a ‘Quick Knock’ warrant”—meaning they kicked in the door before the Abbouds had a chance to open it[…]

This is just a no-knock raid. Let’s not pretend knocking on a door a half second before pulling out the battering ram is some magical third category of warrant: no-knock raids should be banned, and whatever the fuck these cops did should be considered a no-knock.

Yeah this whole thing may seem minor to some people but that’s what companies want you to feel.

Remember when Oblivion’s horse armor DLC was considered outrageous? $2 for an in-game cosmetic is hardly a blip on the radar now

I still stand by this being a clear indication of being unfit for gun ownership though.

I appreciate that you’ve been a good faith interlocutor so far, but I wanna push back on this just a little more.

The current rules governing SBRs in the United States were established in the 1930s in anticipation of an outright ban on handguns. The thought was that “sawed-off” or short-barreled rifles would be a way for people to circumvent the ban. And, because the law enforcement thinking at the time was distinctly classist, the mechanism for keeping these guns out of the hands of criminals was not an outright ban but a ludicrously high tax, in the neighborhood of $4500 in today’s money.

But that ban on pistols never materialized. So now, we’re left with a nearly 100 year old vestigial law that doesn’t really serve much of a purpose: short-barreled rifles aren’t any more deadly than full-length rifles (they tend to fire the same bullet louder and slower), and they aren’t any more concealable than handguns. There really isn’t an obvious public good that is served by these laws, and their enforcement gives away that the ATF understands that on some level: basically no one is ever charged for just having an unregistered SBR, it’s almost always a rider-on to a different crime or an excuse for a cop to fuck you up if they don’t like you.

Enter pistol braces. Ostensibly, they are a device that assists shooters that have lost the use of one of their hands to stabilize an AR pistol with the forearm of their one good hand (and to be clear, they serve that purpose well). However, some people notice that they happen to be shaped in a way that provides a lot of the function that a stock would, and begin using them on AR pistols as a way of getting the ergonomics and aesthetics of an SBR without paying the additional tax and waiting months for approval.

And for a really long time, the ATF was okay with this. Pistol braces were specifically allowed. That was, until a few years ago, the ATF decided to… Change their mind? “Re-interpret” existing rules was I think what officially happened. No new laws were passed, no democratic process took place, and no clear and present danger was being addressed. They just kinda decided “Hey these are illegal now, you have X days to comply”.

Does aquiescing to that “interpretation change” have anything to do with being a responsible gun owner? To my mind, whether someone complies with that or not says more about their obideience to authority / fear of consequences than it does their responsibility or danger to society. There is no inherent moral good to following the law, and history is filled with responsible people who flout pointless or harmful laws.

The estimates for the number of pistol braces out there ranged from 3 million on the low end, to 40 million on the high end. During the grace period to register braced firearms as SBRs without having to pay the tax stamp, the ATF received 255,162 applications to do so.

Even if we take the low number & account for folks destroying or converting their firearms, we can reasonably estimate a rate of non-compliance in the hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions. There is a very real possibility that arresting all those people would literally double the already ludicrous US prison population overnight. In a country that already has a worryingly militarized police force, I cannot imagine the mass arrest of millions of armed people will reduce gun violence.

Ultimately, guns are not very complicated machines. I’m making a semi-automatic rifle in my home office right now out of stuff you can get at a hardware store & some 3D printed parts, and I’m amazed at how simple it all is.

A lot of proposed gun control feels like trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Even states with hefty assault weapon bans like California and Maryland still have plenty of legal loopholes allowing people to own semi-automatic guns, and gun manufacturers are finding more all the time. I honestly think that anything short of straight up banning the sale of gunpowder will have a temporary at best effect on gun violence, and do less than nothing at worst.

The fact of the matter is that gun control bills at the federal level will cost a lot of political capital. A federal challenge to the 2nd amendment will rally conservatives in the same way that the recent overturning of Roe caused a surge for liberals. This is to say nothing about enforcement: it’s a common position among gun owners that they would simply refuse to comply with a gun confiscation / surrender, and I believe a significant chunk of them would follow through with that. See the recent ATF rules about pistol braces for an example of mass non-compliance.

So, we can fight the uphill battle of gun control for perhaps marginal returns, or we can try to address the things that drive people to violence in the first place. And I’m not just saying “muh mental health” either; we need to address housing costs, healthcare costs, education costs, wages stagnating behind inflation, broken-windows policing, the war on drugs, the mainstreaming of far-right propoganda, the decay of public schooling, white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, climate change & doomerism, corporate personhood, and a fuckload of other things making people angry and desparate and hopeless enough to kill people & themselves.

I firmly believe that addressing the material conditions that create killers will prevent more murders than any gun control bill, especially in the USA.

Something you hear a lot from EMTs is that they take a lot of care not to make a medical emergency worse by adding to the number of victims. “Scene safety” is a big thing, the logic being that if you try to help someone in an unsafe way, you may end up just adding to the problem.

You’d think the same would apply to cops? Doing 75 in a 25 seems like the same kind of thing, especially in an area with pedestrians around. Doing 50 over to get to someone that needs help and hitting someone along the way isn’t actually helping.

Oh, also:

Kandula’s death ignited outrage, especially after a recording from another officer’s body-worn camera surfaced last September, in which that officer laughed and suggested that Kandula’s life had “limited value” and the city should “just write a check”.

Jesus Christ, fuck the police.

I did some numbers because it sounded fun.

Earth’s diameter is 41.804 million feet. I’m not sure if you meant that or Earth’s circumference when you said “Earth’s surface”, but I figure either one is gonna get us a really big number.

The first result I can find for string comes in a pack that weighs 2.89oz and contains 328 feet of string.

Using that as our standard, you would need 127,452 packs of string (assuming you find a way to perfectly attach them without wasting any length on knots).

127,452 * (2.89 / 16) = 23,021 lbs of string total.

So if we ignore the string stretching, compressing, or breaking, you’d only need to be able to pull 11ish tons of string to ring the bell!

EDIT:

Just for fun: Assuming the motion of the string travels at the speed of sound (I have no idea if it actually would, it just sounds right), there would be about 10.5 hours between you pulling the string and the bell ringing on the other side.