SirEDCaLot

Pretty sure Halo 1 and 2 were already remastered?

But has a bunch of tracking bullshit and harvest your phone number and device ID and whatnot And of course it asks for location permission so they can sell that too

I think you do me an injustice, and needlessly so.

The US is not 'just one country' with the same ideals and attitudes everywhere. We are 50 states, and while there is an overall American culture, each state or even city area has its own local culture, ideals, politics, etc.
I live in a 'blue state' (IE Democrat-majority, Democrats are generally an anti-gun party). There's not a big gun culture here. There are not people with 10 gallon hats and a 6-shooter on their hip riding around in a giant pickup truck with a gun rack. My state has more gun control laws than most in the union.
When I grew up we had no guns or interest in guns. During my whole childhood the only exposure to guns I had was once at summer camp there was an activity shooting .22LR rifles (small caliber), lying down, at targets. And once on vacation we went to a shooting range that was part of a resort.

If we'd had this conversation 10 or 12 years ago, I'd have been mostly on your side. I recognized the 2nd Amendment was a thing that existed, but I saw no reason anybody needed an 'assault rifle', I thought gun free zones were a pretty good way to improve safety, and overall a lot of 'gun culture' seemed like needless penis extension.

It was actually one conversation that kicked off a change in my position. An old friend of mine and I were getting lunch together. This guy has always been very Republican (pro-gun/conservative party), owns several guns, goes hunting, etc- but we have a lot of mutual respect despite differing worldviews on many subjects. Anyway, as we finished lunch he mentions that he's going to buy an AR-15 rifle and would I like to come along? I made a dumb joke like 'damn man, I didn't realize it was that small, I'm sorry dude'. He just laughed and said 'You know my deer hunting rifle, the one you said you have no problem with civilians owning? Well it's actually a lot MORE powerful than an AR-15.' I started to argue but he said 'look, nothing I say is going to convince you. So just Google it when you get home, okay?'.
I KNEW he was wrong- a 'military weapon of war' would definitely be more powerful than a stupid wood stock hunting rifle like Elmer Fudd would carry. Surely the military wouldn't be carrying weapons inferior to those of random civilian hunters, right?

So I went home and Googled it. And I found he was right- his .30-06 hunting rifle has SIGNIFICANTLY more muzzle energy than the .223 AR-15 he was planning to buy. The hunting rifle was larger and heavier and in almost every way, more powerful.
I'm usually not wrong about technical things. So I was curious what else I was wrong about on the subject, turned out it was a lot. Not about policy or position, but about provable technical things of how guns work and how deadly they are and whatnot.
So I decided the best course of action was to basically forget everything I thought I knew, and start fresh. That kicked off a good 3-4 week deep dive on the subject, reading articles, watching YouTubes, doing research on both sides of the issue.

This brought about a few basic conclusions. The biggest is that most of the politicians who talk about guns appear to know little or nothing about guns, as many of their gun control arguments are easily disproved on basis of fact. And many of the laws they promote do nothing to regulate the actual lethality of guns, but rather try to describe 'scary looking guns' and ban those. For example, my own state's laws regulate rifles that have ergonomic features like a pistol grip or collapsible stock that have NO bearing on the rifle's lethality.

I then started doing research into use of force, defensive situations, etc. And that brought a very sobering realization- I lived in a bubble. Violence is not a part of my life (and I prefer it that way). My area is quite safe. But that doesn't mean I am immune to violent people- and there ARE people out there who ARE violent. Not many near me, but they exist.
And I'd say I've done more research than most into what happens in a fight. I've seen a lot of videos of defensive situations- robberies, fistfights, assaults, kidnapping, and straight up attempted murder. I've seen what happens when people get shot (you won't find it on YouTube). And I've seen how easy it is to seriously harm a human. We live safe lives in civilized society, but on the scale of the world, our bodies are pretty fragile and it doesn't take much to seriously damage them.

And that's why I say thought experiment for how to kill someone from 100' away. It's why I say that if someone wants to kill people, they will, gun or not. It's why I reject the logic that removing guns will save lives, because I recognize that gun regulations affect the law-abiding more than the criminals who are doing the most harm.

Point is-- I have done the thought experiment, a few different ways.

Do I want guns in vending machines? No. Is the absolute ideal to have everybody armed? No, the ideal is where nobody needs to be armed. But absent that perfect future, I think civilian armament as a deterrence to criminals works.

oh fuck yes.

Or websites that exist as nothing but a 'click here to download our shitty app!' placeholder

And you're missing the most important part of the point here. WOULD you?
Whether you can kill me from a distance or from up close, WOULD you do so? I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't.

There's a few who would. And a few of them think it's fun.

You say you can't kill me from a distance. I think you can, even without a gun. Consider this a thought experiment. You need to kill me from say 100' away. You don't get a gun. How do you do it?

I think the problem is a community full of bot reposts basically guarantees there will be no original content posted on Lemmy, which is what we really want.

modern layouts with tons of wasted whitespace and lowercase buttons that have no obvious widget borders.

I don't care if it looks cluttered- I'd rather have one page that I have to stare at for a second and then learn it than 5 pages that I have to scroll through every time.

Excuse me what? The Grandma is shot dead before she could even pull the trigger.

And she could be stabbed from behind, or hit in the back of the head with a bat before she even saw her attacker. Yeah there's no guarantees in any sort of fight.

You are right on one thing- she'd probably never be quite as happy. I think you assume gun owners are spoiling for a fight, eagerly awaiting 'their moment to shine'. It's really not true though. Not for myself or anyone I know at least.

As a gun owner, I've spent a lot of time thinking about such things. Being shot isn't like in the movies where someone falls down and music plays and the hero rescues the girl, it's ugly and painful, it's like stabbing someone with a giant screwdriver by remote control. I hope I can live the rest of my life without ever shooting anybody or taking a life by any other means, because I'm pretty sure I'd never be quite whole ever again. I've always declined invitations to go hunting because I don't want to be the one to take the life of an animal, I don't even squish insects most of the time I capture and release them outside. So taking the life of another human is not something I ever want to do.

But what I want even less than that, is to do nothing while people I love are harmed. And so, if I have to trade my conscience and mental health for the physical wellbeing of my family or myself, then I will consider that a more than fair trade.
And I think the granny in our analogy would rather be alive and feeling guilty than dead. I know I would be.

Yes, mental illness might also be an issue but you also dont do shit to solve that issue.

This is one thing I HATE about my country- we have forgotten how important it is to take care of our own citizens. And I blame conservatives (the usually pro-gun ones) for this a lot more than liberals, but liberals deserve plenty of blame as well. Both parties find it effective and expedient to whip up voters with 'those other guys hate America!'.
It's not just mental health, it's everything. Look at student loans- kids take on crushing debt because they're told it's the only way to get a good job, only wages are stagnant and they can't make ends meet. Do we help them, the millions of our fellow countrymen who are in a really bad situation? Nah, fuck them, they did it to themselves.
And look at healthcare as a whole. People get cancer and go bankrupt with health insurance and it's just like oh well, like that's the way things are supposed to be.
Meanwhile the wealth of our nation is being extracted by a bunch of business interests that basically have the government in a state of regulatory capture (that video is from 2011 and it's even worse today) and the people of the nation are too busy blaming each other to work together and FIX some of our VERY REAL problems.

So yes, I support gun rights. But please don't lump me in with the loud and obnoxious lemming-conservatives who only use mental health as a way to defend against gun control then do nothing at all to actually improve mental health.

If it were up to me, we'd be spending BILLIONS on mental health, if not tens or hundreds of billions. If it were up to me, our defense budget would get a haircut (we really don't need to spend more on military than the next 10 nations, including all of our major enemies, combined) and that money would be re-invested in America's PEOPLE. Education, mental health, health care, etc. Schools should be palaces and teaching kids should be a well-paid, sought-after, competitive position that carries respect and prestige, not the current situation where teachers are basically underpaid babysitters that are expected to teach the test and then we act confused when entire generations of kids grow up with no critical thinking skills.

I believe the markets, and the corporations, and the government, do and should exist for the benefit of the populace overall, not the other way around. I think many in the US have forgotten that ideal.

Being forced to defend yourself from a person with a gun is a thought no child should ever have.

I agree 100%. I think it's a failure of our society that ANY child has to think about defending themself from ANY sort of violence- be it a psycho with a gun, or crime on the street, or a bully who will beat them up. We should aim to do better as a society.

But the society I'd consider ideal is not the society we have. We have violent people in our society. A few go psycho and commit mass murder, most don't. And thus, we do our children a disservice by pretending otherwise.

We do a bigger disservice by doing little or nothing to identify violent people and help them become less violent.

Blaming the gun is a placebo pill we can take to make ourselves feel better about Doing Something. But it's like blaming the car for the actions of a drunk driver.

“Having a gun means you can defend yourself” is a dangerous thing to let live.

It may be dangerous, but it's also not wrong.

If 65yo grandma is approached by a 25yo male thug, she cannot defend herself whether thug is armed or not. The thug is bigger, stronger, and faster than she is.
If 65yo grandma is approached by a 25yo male thug, and she has a gun, she CAN defend herself. The worst case scenario for her is he also has a gun, in which case they are physically equal.

To be clear- I agree with you that we should not HAVE to defend ourselves. I'd love a society where nobody ever needs a gun. But pretending that society exists when it really doesn't does nobody any favors.

Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

Ok you say it's selection bias... Can you show me some news stories of people who's guns were taken from them? Surely if as you say a successful defensive gun use is one in a million there are tens of not hundreds of millions of failed DGU gone wrong stories...

I doubt you will find many. Even anti gun researchers say there are minimum 4x as many DGUs as firearm homicides. I can cite stats on that when back at my desktop if you want them.

There's plenty of valid reasons to be against gun ownership. But the idea that DGU is one in a million is not one of them.