Truth is always worse than fiction 
Valid question. And the answer is?
They’ve got a point. A pile of bullets is a strong statement at any time. Right now, it’s hostile and immature. You absolutely have a weird little fetish.
[quote=“puzzlegal, post:476, topic:965045, full:true”]
Not to hijack the thread further, but I think this will become another conservative stick to beat American higher education with. As college football organizations become more uneasy and cautious about potential long-term effects of player injuries, conservatives will continue to mock and dismiss the issue (like Donald Trump sneering at new NFL rules on concussions), and shame players, coaches and parents for being concerned about it.
Then if we really start to see some disastrous long-term effects with widespread player and parental outrage and a lot of expensive lawsuits, conservatives will gleefully chortle about those “liberal ivory towers” getting bankrupted.
The final sentence of this essay is “We can all be safer from gun violence if we’re willing to stand up to the gun lobby and the politicians who champion their dangerous extremism in pursuit of profits.” The biggest “'Well DUH” I’ve seen in a seen in a while.
That’s it. No practical solutions, no suggestions or plan of attack. He might as well have said Thoughts’n’Prayers! 
™.
In case anyone missed it, the husband of Irma Garcia, the fourth-grade teacher killed in the Uvalde shooting along with her co-teacher, died Thursday morning after returning from placing flowers at her memorial. Dropped dead of a heart attack. They had been together for 25 years and had four children.
Another death that the subject of this thread, the other one with the pile of bullets as his avatar, and the other gun nuts here can all write off as “well worth it” to protect their asinine killer hobby. And the grief of the couple’s two sons and two daughters who are now orphaned – well worth it, too, I imagine, in the opinion of these heartless dumbfucks. What kind of world would this be if you couldn’t shoot beer cans off fence posts with an AR-15?
I assumed it was Bone when they were moderator.
Which curiously, despite their continued use by “well regulated militias” to this day, are not protected by the Second Amendment.
So do I, but mine doesn’t get kids killed.
Fuck you weirdo
In all sincerity, I am adversely affected by the post Port Arthur laws because they nonsensically banned pump-action shotguns and self-loading .22 rifles for anyone who isn’t a farmer, which means there’s a number of sporting disciplines we can’t effectively participate in, plus it makes it harder for dealing with feral pest animals (which is what “hunting”, at least where I am, generally consists of) as a shooter but not farmer. There are a lot of feral pigs, goats, rabbits, and foxes around where I am. Something like a Ruger 10/22 or a Remington 870 would legitimately make dealing with them more effective.
They also require collectors to weld up (essentially destroy), yet still licence and keep locked up, semi-auto rifles, even WWII-era/Korean War vintage stuff like the M1 Garand, Gewehr 43, SLR or SKS, which as a historian I am not happy with at all.
We have laws here that ban guns for looking “scary” (resembling a military firearm in appearance). I’m not OK with that, especially because the law is so inconsistently applied.
I also don’t think registration of individual firearms works; the registries here are widely known to be inaccurate and cost literally millions of dollars each year to run, but haven’t been shown to prevent or solve a single crime. Licences? Yes, absolutely. Registration? No. Take the money spent on maintaining ineffective registries and divert it to social services or education or something instead.
I fully support requiring people who want a gun to get a license from the police and keep the gun secured properly. I fully support people needed a proper reason to have a gun, and in Australia I’m OK with self-defence not being one of those reasons.
As I’ve said before, if the law changes had been “You need a genuine reason for a gun (and that includes target shooting, hunting, collecting, or occupational use), you need a police-issue licence, you can’t own a gun for self-defence, No modern military-style semi auto rifles, no magazines over 10 rounds, and you have to keep the gun locked up when you’re not using it” I’d say “Fine with me, I can work with that.”
The issue for me, and many other shooters I know, is the ban on pump-action shotguns and semi-auto .22 rifles for competition and hunting use. Get rid of that ban and most of the shooters here (including me) will be pretty much happy.
Now, I know several people in this thread are going to say “Oh boo hoo, you can’t use a pump action shotgun to shoot rabbits and foxes, fuck off I hate you”, but you asked a sincere question and I’m giving you a sincere answer; I hope you’ve found it insightful.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I’m a firearms historian. I like old guns. I set the profile pic ages ago. Until this thread, literally no-one has ever commented on it to me. As a show of good faith I’ve changed it to something else, not that I expect anyone to say “Thank you” or stop being an abusive fuckwit to me as a result.
I’m not sure I understand this. I know there are legal exceptions for “primary producers” (which I presume means farmers) and professional hunters to possess such guns for those purposes. But if you’re not a farmer or a professional hunter, then why do you need the same pest suppression capabilities as those people?
I guess it’s a societal hazard of interacting on a messageboard largely peopled by inhabitants of a country where deadly gun violence is much more of an ongoing crisis than it is in most other parts of the world.
Similarly, I could see how a historian of criminal justice who specializes in archaic modes of execution might be fascinated by old paraphernalia of capital punishment. But I wouldn’t advise such a person, however well-intentioned, to participate in discussions of race relations in a US-based message board with a picture of a rope noose in their avatar. 
Short version is there’s a strong tradition among shooters here of volunteering to do pest control on farms for free, as a way of helping farmers out (because they’ve got quite enough to do running the farm without having to deal with mobs of pigs or stay up all night chasing foxes etc).
The state I’m in doesn’t have state land hunting - the only place you can hunt is on private property; you can’t go into state forests or national parks or just empty land the government owns that isn’t being used for anything and hunt there. As a result, if you want to shoot, you have to do it on someone’s farm, and the sort of stuff they’ve generally got that needs shooting are feral animals.
It’s extremely difficult to get a professional pest controller gun licence - the system is deliberately made complicated and difficult to stop people doing it, because professional pest controllers are allowed to own AR-15s and other semi-auto centrefire rifles.
As a result, a huge amount of pest control work on farms is done by “regular” hunters as a sort of community service. And the sort of guns we’re talking about are considered pretty standard sporting guns almost everywhere else except Australia. Even the UK, which has even stricter laws than Australia, doesn’t stop hunters and target shooters from owning pump-action shtoguns, for example.
Why are y’all still engaging with this dipshit? And by “this dipshit” I don’t mean the subject of this thread. Forget about Max_S and his “meh” stance on slavery: this dipshit y’all are engaging with in a pit thread that isn’t even his pit thread would rather be pro-child murder than pro-gun control.
Put him on ignore, and let him get his jollies taking pot shots from inside the cone of silence with octopus and the like.
I see, like this Farmer Assist organization for example? Are they eligible for the gun exceptions?
I’ll say thank you. The old avatar was small, and i didn’t realize it was a pile of bullets until someone pointed that out. But yeah, that was pretty creepy.
The NFL is going to have bigger lawsuits than the big football schools, which will have bigger lawsuits than the “liberal ivory towers”.
Doubtless true but not particularly reassuring?
No, they aren’t. But they’re a good example of the sort of thing I’m talking about.
I see. If a farmer is allowed to own one of the “exception” guns for pest control, are you as a licensed/insured/whatever volunteer pest control shooter allowed to use his/her gun?
(I am not just trying to pester you with naive questions about this btw, I did look around the Farmer Assist website and some text of legislation but could not find the answers.)