TechyDad @ TechyDad @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I've often wondered if weapons like AR-15s should be only allowed to be owned by gun ranges and similar setups. You'd go in, rent an AR-15 for a certain period of time, get a safety lesson on how to use it, and then go to a shooting range where targets have been set up for you to shoot at.

When you're done, you turn the weapon back in and go on your way. The gun range locks it up and is responsible for it. If an employee makes off with the gun and shoots someone, the gun range is liable. If the guns aren't locked up properly and someone breaks in and steals it, the gun range is liable.

There would be regular checks to make sure the gun range was compliant with safety procedures. Kind of like what restaurants go through to make sure that they are storing food properly.

This would allow people to fire weapons like an AR-15 in a safe manner with minimal risk that this gun would be used for a mass shooting.

Of course, given the current Supreme Court makeup, I fully expect that this would be deemed unconstitutional.

And DeSantis attacked reporters who asked him if he denounced them. Denouncing Nazis should be the softest of softball questions that politicians need to answer right alongside "do you think American democracy is good" and "are puppies and kittens cute."

When asked the question, any politician should be able to easily reply with "I find Nazis abhorrent and they don't represent what America stands for." Even if the politician is lying and actually loves Nazis, they should be able to lie about this easily.

But DeSantis can't even lie about liking Nazis and instead attacks anyone who asks him his opinion on Nazis.

I'm in New York also and a friend had to deal with a fake CPS call. There was another person (let's call her B) who had an actual issue reported to CPS involving abuse and drug/alcohol abuse around young kids. CPS started to take the kids away from B.

Then my friend had a report filed against her. We're pretty sure that the report was filed by B as revenge because B thought that my friend was the one who filed the report.

My friend complied with the search of her residence and showed that she wasn't mistreating her kids in any way. Still, it was frightening because there was still a chance that CPS could walk out saying that they were taking her kids.

The only Republicans willing to speak up are Republicans who have retired. Any Republicans who speak up against Trump while in office get primaried and kicked out of office. The Republicans who are left would follow Trump into a dictatorship as long as they were promised a small sliver of power. By the time they realize they're getting nothing, it would be too late.

Exactly. If Trump becomes President then we'll still have elections, but they'll be like the Russian elections. You can vote for Trump or you can go to prison. At best, votes against Trump wouldn't be counted. Trump would "win" all future elections with 99% of the vote.

And after Trump passes away, the reins of power would be transferred to some other dictator who would carry on this "American tradition" of imprisoning opponents and rigging elections.

Or just declare that amendment null and void. Then arrest any judge who rules otherwise and replace them with judges that say "The amendment doesn't specifically say that Trump can't run for as many terms as he likes, it just bars everyone else."

The biggest damage for Trump might be even larger than that. Trump likely will lose control of the Trump organization. In addition, he could face hundreds of millions in fines. Despite claiming that he's a billionaire, this will hit him extremely hard financially - the very place where his ego is situated.

But even more than this, I read reports that the Trump name might be tied to the Trump Organization. So if he loses control of this company, he might lose control of the Trump name. It could be sold off to some other buyer who could launch a series of "Trump" products that have nothing to do with Donald J Trump.

If this happens, I wouldn't want to be a ketchup bottle in Mar-A-Lago!

The problem with "if they don't have guns, they'll just use knives" is that knives aren't as effective at mass killing from a distance.

Suppose you have two similar mass killing attempts. In one, the person has an AR-15. In the other, they have a knife.

The AR-15 killer can kill many people from across rooms. Depending on how much ammunition they have, they can reload quickly and kill many more. People trying to run away from the killer would be quickly killed.

Meanwhile, the knife killer would need to physically stab each victim. This means that they would need to be within arm's length of their victims. If the person kept away from the killer, they would be safe (relatively speaking). People running away from the killer wouldn't be killed.

Perhaps the knife wielder could throw the knife at the fleeing victim, but this would need good aim (vs spraying an area with bullets using the AR-15) and would require the knife to end up pointy side in. If it hit them on the handle side, it would hurt, but wouldn't be fatal. Where they get stabbed would also matter. Then, there is the problem (for the killer) of having tossed away their only weapon. (Though they could have multiple knives.)

Could a knife wielding killer kill a lot of people? Yes, but it would be far less than an AR-15! wielding person.

Of course, the one thing this comparison does show is that more needs to be done besides gun control. We need to be better at identifying people likely to commit acts of violence and get them help before they snap. Any solution needs to address the gun problem AND the mental health problems that this country faces.

This latest batch of conservatives seem to dial this trait up to 11. Before, it was mostly a callous indifference. "Oh, you need this social program to survive and we are cutting it for budgetary reasons? Well, why aren't you investing your money better? If you just invested your money better you'd be a millionaire by now even though your minimum wage job doesn't pay enough for you to survive."

Recently, though, they have gotten actively antagonistic to various people merely existing. "We need to shoot and kill these immigrants as they cross the border. Liberals should be rounded up and sent to prison. Globalists (aka Jews) should be killed. You disagree with me? Let's fight! I'll beat you up and then kill you!!!"

It's really scary and these people need to never get anywhere near power.

Trump keeps claiming that he's being treated differently by the justice system. He means that he's being treated worse and he's wrong about that, but he is accidentally correct in that he's being treated better than any other defendant would be treated. If you or I were facing 10% of the charges Trump is facing, we'd (rightfully) be sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial.

There's also the delayed anti-semitism of evangelical Christians. They think that Jesus will come back when a Jewish-controlled Israel suffers a huge attack. Then, as Jesus pulls them all to heaven, he'll toss all of us Jews into hell for all eternity. By "supporting Israel," the evangelicals think they are setting Jews up to burn in hell as soon as possible.

This is also why evangelicals are big supporters of groups like the settlers. After all, they need a big attack on Israel and peace in the region would reduce the chances of this happening. If they added a few gallons of gas to the raging fire there, though, they might be able to get things so bad that the "Jesus Returns Attack" happens.

Many of these anti-semites love having Israel as a Jewish state. They imagine that it means there's someplace for them to send us American Jews off to when they take over. Nevermind that most American Jews were born in America, have never been to Israel, and don't want to go. The anti-semites think that's where we belong and they'll ship us all "back" there as soon as they can.

My mother-in-law's sister survived cancer once. Years later, she started feeling pain and worried that the cancer had come back. Her insurance company repeatedly denied basic scans/tests to see if the cancer had returned.

My wife's cousins finally got sick of all this and paid out of their own pockets for the tests. She had cancer again. Only by this point, it had spread. It was in the base of her tongue and was blocking her throat. They had to remove her tongue, but that didn't stop the cancer. She eventually passed away.

Would she have survived if the insurance company approved the tests in the beginning? There's no way to guarantee this, but she would definitely have had a better shot at survival.

But at least the insurance company saved some money, right? Isn't that the most important thing? 😡

If he referenced Sodom and Gemorah then he doesn't really know why the Bible says those cities were overthrown. It wasn't because they had gay sex. It was because they abused travelers.

The modern day version of the travelers are immigrants. Remind me which party is a fan of abusing immigrants again?

The reason for the abortion policy in Judaism is that Judaism sees the fetus as merely "potential life" and part of the woman's body until it is born. There are Jewish groups fighting against the Republicans' restrictive abortion bans because they are based on Christianity's views of the life of the fetus and infringe on Jewish views.

Perhaps we should just make the order random to make it as fair as possible. Every state would have an equal chance at being the first, second, third, etc state and it would be different every time.

Have states that are interested in being among the first to hold primaries apply to the national party. The party then has a nonpartisan third party run a random number generator or roll a dice. The first state chosen goes first. Then the next state goes second, etc. Some states might not get picked and thus might go during "Super Tuesday" (or might choose to go then). At least the initial list of states would be random and not chosen by party heads to prefer certain candidates or chosen by states who insist that they always go first because they called it a hundred years ago.

I'm Jewish and thus not an expert on Jesus, but from what I know if Biblical Jesus were to appear in the US today, the only reason he'd enter one of these churches would be to flip over some tables.

The only ways that response could have been less mature would be if Greene responded "I know you are, but what am I" or replied "I am rubber and you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you!"

I was harassed years ago despite not (at the time) putting my real name online. I was on Twitter (back when Twitter was actually decent) and someone messaged me about my religious beliefs. Now, I never would force anyone to follow what I believe, but I'm always willing to discuss it in a purely informational sense. ("This is what I believe and why and I'll never judge anyone for believing differently.")

Quickly, however, something seemed off. Her questions started veering into "if you knew someone did something really bad wouldn't you have to report it or shouldn't they turn themselves in" territory. I stopped replying, but that didn't stop her.

What I didn't know at the time was that this lady, let's call her D, harassed many people online (including Boy George and the then-CEO of Firefox). D literally thought that God spoke with her and told her bad things that people did. Obviously, there's no arguing against "God told me you're guilty" and she would harass various people as well as anyone else people talked to. As far as what she thought we did? Let's just say she thought we were doing disgusting things with children.

Now, D targeted me because I was blogging at the time and liked photography. One of her other targets lived in New Zealand and liked photography as well. Of course, we all know that all photos on the Internet are just posted by one guy so D figured that he and I must be the same person. All those photos of my family? Faked.

D was determined to report me to the police for all my crimes as well as contact any companies I was working with to "warn" them. Thankfully, she wasn't Internet savvy or she could have tracked me down. She also wasn't the type of Internet stalker to try to travel to her victims. She did send threatening messages. A lot.

Now, I was lucky because I was "anonymous" (as far as her skills were concerned). The "other me" in New Zealand, though, had used his real name and mentioned his employer - a school. She contacted his school to report him (luckily, he warned them) and contacted everyone she could find in New Zealand with the same last name. He needed to have some very uncomfortable discussions with family members.

I finally got her off my case with some web developer trickery. I got her IP addresses from comments she left on my blog and set my htaccess file to return 404 for those IP addresses. Sure enough, she crowed on Twitter about how she brought down my blog and told everyone to see how I was taken offline. Meanwhile, everyone else was able to see my site just fine.

Last I knew, D is still online and harassing people. When she was targeting us, we'd report her and her account would be suspended, but she always had 5 or more backups ready to go. It's possible that she's still going through her normal cycle of harassment - only with Twitter/X less likely to suspend her account unless "God" tells her to target Musk.

Why didn't Greene walk out there to ask those people to leave? After all, if they were just patriotic Republican tourists, then they would have listened to her, right?

Oh, what's that? They were violent insurrectionists and she was hiding from them too? But she somehow thinks that the Democrats should have yelled "Democratic Avengers Assemble" and charged out there? (And now I'm picturing Bernie wielding Thor's hammer.)