Pit thread for Martin_Hyde {He has been BANNED}

The BBQ Pit
421

Exactly right. As a strong proponent of strict gun control, in the interest of full disclosure I admit that when I was a youth I bought a .22 cal CO2 pellet gun. Target shooting was fun for awhile, but I tired of it quickly. Also, the hazards of even a pellet gun were evident. One time a pellet ricocheted off something and hit my roommate in the arm. He wasn’t injured but he damn near punched me in the face. Good thing it wasn’t a real gun, considering how undisciplined I was with it, being just an immature kid.

Why is it that guys – and it’s almost always guys – can’t find hobbies that don’t involve guns, exploding objects, or overpowered cars? It infuriates me when they try to glorify these testosterone-induced “hobbies” – especially guns – by cloaking them in the noble virtue of “liberty”.

422

Your weird little fetish gets people killed and we need to come up with some rules for what you can and cannot use to practice your weird little fetish in a way that reduces the number of people your weird little fetish kills.

423

Also, there are about a gazillion target-hitting games people enjoy that don’t use guns at all. Darts, archery, golf, marbles, pool, carnival games, croquet, not to mention all the competitive games with a critical element of hitting a target, like basketball, football, hockey, polo, lacrosse…

People obviously enjoy aiming for targets. I was trying to disentangle the special pleasure of shooting guns as distinct from every other target-shooting hobby.

424

You know guns - even purely sporting/hunting firearms - come in more varieties than “single-shot target rifle”, “double-barrel shotgun”, or “AR-15”, right?

The standard bolt-action hunting rifle capacity is 5 or 10 rounds, depending on the gun, and has been since the about the 1880s, for example. The lever-action Winchester Model 1894, which is one of the most numerously made hunting firearms in the world, holds 7 rounds.

And you’d be wrong. I’ve never heard a competition target shooter - and I have a bunch of target shooting trophies on my shelf, so you can imagine I’ve spent a lot of time around target shooters - ever make a comment about “the feeling of power” being one of the reasons they enjoy shooting. The skill, the challenge, the being part of history (when using WWI/WWII rifles for target shooting), the camraderie, the social aspect, the focus - all of that. Power? Never.

“I don’t get why you’d like to do that, so you shouldn’t get to do it and should do something else because I enjoy something else” isn’t exactly a productive approach.

Target shooting is very different to other things like darts and archery. It requires a different skillset, different mindsetm

For example: F-Class (Long-range) shooting involves trying to put a .308" projectile into a bullseye roughly the size of a coffee cup saucer (about 5in) from up to 1km away. It’s really, really difficult, even with specialist equipment and optics and hand-loaded ammunition; you have to take into account the wind, heat haze, etc.

That’s just one of the target shooting disciplines; others bring their own challenges.

I’ve never said we shouldn’t. I’m not American and am broadly in favour of things like requiring gun licences (background checks), not being allowed to provide guns to unlicensed/unsuitable people, and requiring secure storage (ie not leaving guns lying around the house).

What I have a problem with is apparently angry, uninformed people coming up with nonsensical restrictions on something they apparently deliberately don’t want to understand.

If you said “No modern military style semi-auto rifles, no magazines over 10 rounds” I’d say “Yeah, OK, sounds fair to me”. But as we’ve seen in this thread, not only is that not what people are suggesting, they’re being angry and abusive towards people who disagree with them.

I appreciate this is the Pit, but seriously, a lot of you need to chill the fuck out.

425

I know you not an American, yet you always come in to gun threads with your weird little fetish bullshit. Fuck off

426

Do you feel better now? You’ve sworn at a random person on the internet, well done.

427

God forbid we live in a world without F-Class shooting.

So? IDGAF. You want hunting rifles to be legal, tell me how many bullets you actually need to fire before pausing to reload. When you say 5-10, I’ll say go fuck yourself you shitty excuse for a hunter, learn how to use your fucking tools before asking for nonsense.

When we’ve decided on what a hunting rifle actually needs to do, in order to be an effective tool for this (truthfully) important wildlife management activity that is also benignly recreational, then we make them designed to do those things, and not as useful other things, like shooting up an elementary school. Normal people who own tools are happy when those tools are functional, and don’t lose their shit when the tools can’t be repurposed for gaming, or showing off, or don’t look super cool.

428

Perfect summary.

429

Hey, now, as a guy, I resent that.

My hobbies involve swords and spears :slight_smile:

430

I think this is critically important to understand. The question of why America can’t construct a sensible policy regarding guns isn’t really about guns. Just like the abortion issue isn’t really about abortion. It’s all wrapped up in the conservative backlash resulting from, as Kimstu appropriately calls it “being wrong about everything.” That’s the reason behind almost every insane thing happening in American politics right now.

431

Holy crap, that underlying Kimstu post is good. Kudos !

I’ve very often cited this keyboard study as informative:

[Why does the URL show that this is filed under Obituaries ?]

My dog is terrified of many types of hard-surface flooring – ceramic tile, vinyl tile, laminates. He loses traction, overcompensates, and panics. It’s sad.

When I see Kimstu’s “They were wrong about …” post, I think of the above. Too many RWers are fundamentally panicky people, certain/convinced that – like my dog – any movement will result in disaster.

Constantly reinforcing those fears, as both our culture and our R politicians do, makes the underlying (fear) problem worse and ensures that their audience clings ever more tightly to what they think is the lifeboat.

But it pretty much never is a lifeboat. It’s a grifter. It’s a con-man. It’s a person who wants your vote, takes your money, and generally gives you nothing in return. He promises to ‘handle’ all that terrifies you by maintaining the status quo.

It’s generally a fascist, ‘wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.’

It’s never honest. It’s almost never true. It’s almost never the better route, anyway.

But – just like my dog only has to make it three feet to the next rug – the solutions to the problems that paralyze so many conservatives with fear are usually not far away, usually don’t create much risk, and usually wind up with the majority of us ending up in a better place.

432

My apologies WE. It was years ago and I was unable find the thread. At the time i was frustrated and butthurt and I felt like it was immensely unfair.

433

I never said you shouldn’t get to do that. I said that if i could wave a magic wand and prevent every gun death in the US by banning your hobby, I’d do it in a heartbeat. And that’s true. Your fun hobby isn’t worth the gun slaughter in the US.

And I’d give up my favorite hobby I’d it magically resulted in that many fewer deaths, as well. In fact, one of my favorite hobbies is square dancing, and as an organizer of dances, i helped shut down all the dances i care about during the pandemic, until everyone could be vaccinated. And that shutdown may, in fact, end up killing my hobby. So I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.

But in the real world, where there’s actually very little overlap between any plausible gun regulation, let alone any useful gun regulation, and the exercise of your hobby, I’m honestly surprised you even bother to get upset by people talking against guns. No one is seriously talking about sitting down shooting ranges, it getting rid of historic weapons.

434

No problem, btw, my memory is nowhere near that good. I went to your profile and there is an option Top Topics Clicked that and it generally shows all the threads you started. I looked for a closed gun thread. Discovered I was the one that closed it and said to myself, WTF? I’ve never promoted guns and rarely talk about them at all.

435

Yeah I’d never have guessed that YOU were the complained upon “pro-gun” mod.

436

I could say the same thing about football. You don’t have to like a sport but that’s not a reason to ban it or decide it shouldn’t exist because fuck you, people who like it.

As for the rest of it: You’re clearly not a hunter. 5-10 rounds is standard in bolt-action and lever-action hunting rifle (not the tacticool AR-15 type rifle, a normal hunting rifle like a standard Remington 700 or Winchester Model 94) and has been since the 1880s because that’s what everyone agrees is appropriate and necessary. And I don’t just mean in the US, it’s an international standard. European-made hunting guns hold that many rounds too.

So we did make guns designed for hunting animals and not readily suitable for shooting up schools or shopping malls, and we did it about 140 years ago, and they still make those guns and sell them today - and yet here you are, swearing and insulting people who use them because you think you know better than them about what a hunting rifle (an actual hunting rifle, not an AR-15, which is not an actual hunting rifle) is and how many cartridges it should have in its (non-detachable) magazine.

In my case, it’s more that people are making those statements based on incorrect information that isn’t coming from a place of knowledge or understanding, but ‘feels’.

For a messageboard full of people who think they’re smartest and most enlightened people in the room/on the entire internet, so many of them lose their collective shit when it comes to guns. Look at the personal insults directed at posters who like guns in this thread. At least one person here in this discussion has told me the board can do very well without me (in other words, they think I should leave the messageboard) and the amount of name-calling and personal insults is just off the charts.

Is it any wonder the boards have trouble attracting and retaining members?

437

I disagree–I think you’re just assuming a maximal utilitarian position is the standard ethical position, which it is simply not. People get mad in gun threads if you make analogues to anything else, so I won’t delve into specifics, but the reality is a huge portion of our society, our culture, our concept of rights etc implicitly makes tradeoffs that trade some level of human death for other things. Exactly how much and the specific mechanisms varies, and in many ways with gun rights the results are most obvious and direct–arguably other things have larger total impacts in terms of death, but either way we just aren’t structuring our societies the way you’re talking about right now. I think that is because we as a species are not interested in totally ceding everything to the paean of maximal death minification.

And as you note, from a practical standpoint this is kind of a sidebar–the unrealistic hypothetical will always remain that, a pure hypothetical, in the real world as I’ve stated many times, I am in favor of a number of strong gun regulations.

I certainly find that description of this way of thinking to be accurate, but this just comes off as incredibly childish to me. But frankly, I have always seen the wing of the Democratic party that uses rhetoric suggesting winning doesn’t matter unless they can remain ideological pure…to be incredibly childish. Much of the good we have built in our society has actually come from a combination of incrementalism and political savvy. I think people often remember history as being about big events, but it rarely is that simple. The Civil Rights movement of the mid-century for example involved a good solid 15 years of legislating and winning court cases, there were people each step of the way who angrily said the reforms were not going far enough–LBJ and even MLK were criticized for supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act by some segments of the movement specifically because it was seen as a watered down bill.

It’s a apologue in the business world but one that I’ve always thought has application more broadly–“boiling the frog” is sometimes the best way forward.

438

Not yet. Fuck you weirdo fetishist. Your avatar is a literal pile of bullets, mine is two grieving Texan parents, the outcome of your weird little fetish. One of you pig fuckers had a bulletgasm all over a bunch of kids.

439

We probably WILL live in a world without football ‘as we know it’ soon enough, the concussion scandal is truly outrageous and eventially it will hit full force

440

There’s also a long and ongoing history of trying to make American football safer:

And this is in spite of the fact that these changes don’t necessarily inure to the economic benefit of all of the actors involved in that sport.