As a single person you’d be pretty good for the rest of your (still probably short) life. But honestly, I think ascribing button pushing to some of these people is a stretch. They know the particular buttons to open their social media, or maybe even access their banking, but any mention of settings and you get a blank look. I see that with every generation now, working in IT. It used to just be the boomers, but tech knowledge seems to have degraded over the years.

I agree with you. A majority of the mass shootings (all shootings, really) would disappear overnight if we increased financial security and had free healthcare. Couple it with a cultural push for mental health awareness and care and you wouldn’t need too many gun laws on the books.

I agree. I use very little gas to heat my water for my hydronic system and the tap. I replaced an old oil hydronic heater and traditional electric water heater with a natural gas combi boiler that does both home heat and hot water. My utility bills went through the floor, and over the whole year I put a fraction of the CO2 into the atmosphere than I did in just a winter of the old oil furnace.

Plant-based meat tastes like what vegans think meat tastes like. I’d much rather eat the vegan foods that are prepared without imitation ingredients.

They said “choosing,” which is the key word in their statement. Some people don’t have a choice like you said, but that’s really just a matter of the push/pull forces of migration at this point.

Yeah, go for a good quality one like a Spears or a Cepex. Those hardware store white ones get brittle, lock up, and snap like you saw. I spend the 30-40 on one of the good ones and it stays smooth forever.

The brass took away the giggle switch from the crayon eaters to save on their ammo bill. There’s a reason “marining” is a verb, after all.

But every gun is designed to kill people, all the way back to the musket. And your suggestion of an integral magazine doesn’t do much, even if you could somehow round up all the ARs with detachable mags and “fix” them. The M1 Garand and it’s stripper clips are a historic example, and the modern ejection port mag loaders the neutered California ARs have to use make it trivial to reload.

You want to tackle this issue? Safe storage laws, building a culture around free, government-provided training and safety, and harsher punishments for NDs are a place to start. That’s not even getting into the quagmire that is our terrible healthcare system, and law enforcement that on average can’t do their jobs and act on tips that would stop many of the recent big mass shootings.

You’re good! In many ways that’s exactly what the marketing people on the anti-gun side wanted to happen. They knew that psychologically the two terms would become synonymous with each other. Unfortunately the attitude problem you highlighted in the loud minority of gun owners only helped that advertising campaign.

Not to go off on a tangent, but it’s “assault weapon” that’s the boogeyman term, meant to confuse the uninformed with assault rifles. Assault rifles are select fire, full auto and burst fire capable rifles. Assault weapons are semi-automatic rifles that have the same or similar cosmetics as assault rifles.

The trick is a person latches onto the adjective, not the noun, and a rifle is a kind of weapon, so it makes it seem like assault rifles fit under assault weapons, when I’m fact it’s the opposite.