Airsoft?

Most of the truly ridiculous knife laws are in states with equally ridiculous gun laws. A few have been challenged under 2A grounds with some degree of success but it just isn’t being pursued that much.

Yeah, my degree is in comp sci and I am very aware of what is possible. 99.9999% of the time scripting just results in the desired content being covered by something unnecessary and making what the user is attempting to view/interact with jump to somewhere else against their wishes. This is absolutely the best usage of scripting I’ve ever seen on the web.

I normally hate heavily scripted websites but holy fuck this is one of the cleanest user experiences I’ve ever seen. This is truly a work of art.

It’s not a conspiracy or even hidden. The media shows what they want to show. They showed this shooting until they achieved their goals and stopped showing it. It is absolutely possible that each major media corporation did exactly what they wanted for their own goals at the time, no coordination needed, just that most of them are politically similar so their goals were fairly close. Shootings where attention promotes left leaning ideology are kept in the spotlight so long as they generate attention, any time that a right leaning narrative pops up they instantly drop all coverage. This isn’t a crazy conspiracy, it is a simple fact. Vegas resulted in Trump banning bump stocks; it succeeded and then was forgotten for whatever the next useful headline was that popped up.

The bump stock ban was enacted in 2018 which marked the end of coverage for the shooting. It wasn’t passed, it was dictated by arbitrary fiat. After it passed continued discussion could have had a negative impact, especially due to the investigation deliberately refusing to determine if they were actually used or not.

You hear about mass shootings (random public ones that are committed to generate news stories, not ones where it’s crime, usually gang related, with multiple people shot due to poor aim) when the media wants to leverage it for a specific angle. Shootings that play into the desired narrative linger for a very long time, shootings that go against the desired narrative disappear in a few hours to a few days. It has nothing to do with how many people were killed or what questions have or have not been answered; it is simply a function of how much it works towards the desired narrative.

The desired outcome of a gun ban was achieved and the fact that there are still unanswered questions means that continued discussion hurts the desired narrative, so it isn’t discussed. Not only has it “served its purpose” but bringing it up now could have a negative effect for those that control the media so the media never brings it up. No, we don’t know why he did it, we don’t even know for sure if he actually used bump stocks, but none of that matters; the headlines got the immediate response they were designed to get and then they moved onto other headlines before questions outside of their narrative were asked.

I have one on my pocket knife that goes with me almost everywhere.

I’ve had people ask me to write reference letters and need to decline. It was super awkward but I just couldn’t put my name to one.

It’s not separating them out to groups because it’s a fun thing to do, it’s a literal function of how rights work. Negative rights are things they can’t take away and positive rights are things they have to give you. Both positive and negative rights can be absolute rights, but whether or not they are something that can’t be taken or must be given is important in how they are implemented in any system of government.

Think of it this way, any negative right can become a positive right if someone gives it to you. A positive right can’t exist without it.

The 2nd Amendment states that you have the right to keep and bear arms. This means that you can own and utilize a gun for self defense, which is a negative right. It can be made a positive right if the government provides everyone with a a gun for this purpose, but the right to self defense is different from the right to be given the means to accomplish it. Meanwhile the right to vote is something that can’t exist without the government providing it. For $20 I can make a gun with supplies from Home Depot. With $1,000,000 I can’t vote without an existing government system.

Abortion is a function of the right of bodily autonomy and freedom of religion. It’s not the right to have the government “un-pregnant” you on demand, but the right to decide what biological functions you wish to perform. The primary argument against it is based in religious morality, which violates the 1st Amendment’s separation of church and state. The government cannot establish an official religion and impose a specific religious doctrine on you. Since it is something that require you to seek it out and implement it is a negative right.

The real reason abortion is such a delicate political issue is that its true morality is based in religion. If you believe that the soul (a religious concept) begins at or before conception, it is murder which makes it inherently evil. If you believe that the soul becomes a person at viability or birth, it is simply a regulatory restriction like a highway having a speed limit of 60 vs 65 mph. The inability of either side to acknowledge that personal religious beliefs determine whether or not it is literal murder makes a lot of the back and forth shouting an exercise in futility. At the end of the day “Congress make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise.” Saying you can’t do something because someone else’s religion forbids it is a direct violation of that, but ignoring that to some people it is literally murder makes it harder to have honest debates on it. At least having a basic awareness of why the other side is so rabidly opposed to it is very useful in breaking through the emotional arguments that dominate the discussion over the fundamental factors of what is and is not an actual right.

The US version is a system that calculates the risk of loaning money vs being paid back. In order to be approved for a loan the credit score is used to evaluate whether or not it is likely to be paid back within the terms of the loan. As a result those with bad credit have trouble getting favorable terms for cars, housing and basically anything that can’t be purchased outright. Does it negatively affect people for things outside of their control and perpetuate cycles of poverty? Absolutely, but it is based in actual fiscal risk to calculate sustainable loan practices.

China on the other hand took the US term of “credit” and abused the everloving shit out of it to punish people that the government dislikes. Did your cousin post a Xi Jinping Winnie the Pooh meme? Well too bad that you were shopping for a house, because your “credit” is no longer high enough to not be homeless. You should have thought of that before you were related to someone who disagreed with the government!

Not being able to demonstrate to a bank that you are financially reliable enough to pay back a loan is unfortunate, but a rational reason for an unfavorable interest rate or denial of a loan. Making people ineligible for even renting an apartment that is within their financial means because the dictator in charge dislikes you is a completely different thing altogether.

Wallet right cargo, phone left front, keys/knife right front, ID left rear. Used to be on my belt to the right at 3 o’clock but that’s where my magazines go now.