I don’t know that my parents were ever the kind of person that bitched about paying taxes. They might have privately, but i don’t remember it ever being a big deal. Me, I understand that my taxes are too low for what I expect the gov’t to be doing.

And you’re exactly right about the social experience. One of the enormous struggles for atheists has been building a community. Churches fill that need, even though they cause real harms in other ways. If you go to a church, it’s easy to meet people and make friends when you move to a new community. If you don’t, well, good luck because you’re going to need it.

Honestly, this is why I don’t discuss Mormon history and the massive, gaping chasms in their claims of Truth with my parents. My parents are old–old enough that the family is talking about who is going to call the coroner, who’s going to deal with tying up finances, etc.–and knowing that they’ve wasted an entire lifetime and hundreds of thousands of dollars in tithing on a con isn’t going to do anything useful at this point. Fifty years ago? Sure, they would have had plenty of time to come to terms with it. Now? Meh.

Not where I am; DOT 5.1 costs 2-3 times as much as DOT 5 locally.

DOT 4, $.375/oz.

DOT 5.1, $1.42/oz.

It’s 3.8x more expensive to buy DOT 5.1 locally.

I’ve had a car with where the oil pressure sensor failed; combine that with an oil leak, and you quickly have a major problem. So, what happens when the sensor telling you the oil level fails? A dipstick is extremely unlikely to ever fail to work correctly, so…?

You can use DOT 5.1 to significantly increase that wet boiling point, but it’s expensive for normal car use. I usually use it in my motorcycle, since I’ve experienced brake fade on that before, and it’s… Not fun.

Depends on how much you drive, and what the recommended interval is. If the interval is 7k miles, and you drive 18k in a year, yeah, you need to change the oil 3x/year.

It seems to me that counting the number of cycles each makes, and basing your intervals off that would make more sense than mileage. If I’m constantly running at high RPM, that should require more frequent oil changes in terms of mileage.

I misspelled it; it should be galdrastafir. It literally translates as ‘magic staves’, but it’s understood to mean symbols that are a part of a magical spell. …Or ‘magickal’ if you want to draw a distinction between parlor tricks and ‘real magick’. The books that contained them were sometimes called galdrabók, although that’s also the name of a specific grimoire. It’s complicated because, while galdrastafir are currently believed to be explicitly magical, in some cases they appear in books alongside herbology, which would seem to indicate that either they weren’t contemporarily perceived as ‘magic’ per se, or that herbology was.

Anyway. It’s a form of folk magic. The general idea is that you draw or scribe a specific symbol on a certain kind of object, perhaps with particular tool, and use the object in a specific way, and it will produce some kind of effect that would not otherwise happen. The most well known ones are ægishjálmur (the helm of terror; said to protect you in battle, make other people fear you), and vegvísir (a compass to help you find your way home in bad weather; supposedly used by sailors). But there are a lot of others as well. Draumstafir was a symbol scribed in silver on wood (linden, maybe?, I don’t remember anymore) that was supposed to let you dream at night of what you most desired.

Supposedly–and there’s not a ton of really solid, scholarly writing about this–the Catholics were pretty forgiving of the people practicing folk magic, as long as the people were still paying their tithes. Supposedly a Catholic bishop (?) in charge of the area was also a practitioner of black magic, and had a grimoire called the rauðskinna full of exceptionally powerful spells. When Denmark became Lutheran, they also supplanted the Catholic heirarchy in Iceland with Lutherans. The Lutherans were quite a bit less accepting of folk magic; they burned ever grimoire that they came across. So there are only a handful of examples that still survive, and they all date to late 1700s to late 1800s. Keep in mind that Iceland was very backwards relative to Europe until fairly recently, so it’s entirely conceivable that there are people currently alive that had grandparents that were galdr practitioners.

/autistic monologue

Go ahead, don’t follow laws.

Hope you have a good attorney already, and a few hundred thousand to fight the charges. If you’re American, you might try seeing if you can get Ken White; he does a lot of 1A stuff, plus criminal defense. He’s probably only about $500/billable hour.

Good luck, you’ll need it.

I don’t have that kind of cash, so I don’t very, very publicly break laws and dare cops to come get me.

So you are intentionally being obtuse.

Got it.

???

They both obligate moderators and administrators to remove illegal content, and failure to do so can result in criminal penalties for the people running the site.

Are you intentionally pretending that you don’t understand that both types of content–regardless of any morality–can land the admins in jail?

If both CSAM and criticism of the state of Israel are illegal in Germany, then the admins and mods are legally obligated to remove both. Their feelings and beliefs are not relevant to their legal obligation.

I don’t see how you are incapable of understanding this.

Wut?

No, silencers weren’t regulated into the NFA by the ATF; congress put them in there, way back in '34. You can read the text of the act here. It’s in the very first section:

AN ACT

To provide for the taxation of manufacturers, importers, and dealers in certain firearms and machine guns, to tax the sale or other disposal of such weapons, and to restrict importation and regulate interstate transportation thereof.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of American in Congress assembled, that for the purposes of this Act -

(a) The term “firearm” means a shotgun or rifle having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length, or any other weapon, except a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such a weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm [emphasis added] whether or not such a firearm is included within the foregoing definition.

It’s right there in the text.

Aside from that, the ATF per se didn’t even exist prior to '72; before that, it was part of the IRS, rather than an agency within the DoJ, and before the IRS, it was part of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

It’s not up to the ATF to make laws; congress is supposed to do that.

Also, “sensible” gun control is functionally no different from “sensible” abortion restrictions. If you want to fix gun violence, fix the problems that lead up to it. If you want to stop abortions, it’s easier to teach factual sexual health and make sure that everyone has free access to birth control.

First - the place to shoot is the hard part for many people. Indoor ranges don’t allow you to do the kind of practice that you would need to do in order to become proficient with an automatic firearm. Outdoor ranges are quite a drive for most people.

Second, and more important - the fact that people can learn doesn’t mean a lot. Most people, including most gun owners, don’t. A shockingly large percentage of gun owners don’t practice regularly, or at all.

I can’t see who is catching a ban for what comment, because the comments have been censored. Q.E.D.

…Much like I have been for pointing out how the law functions. So, that’s cool, I guess.

FWIW, a number of states int he US have passed anti-BDS laws; it should be blatantly illegal under 1A to prevent institutions from boycotting Israel, and yet, so far, those laws haven’t been seriously challenged.

Hard pass on discussing anything with your denialist guns r gud mentality

Yeah, isn’t is strange that someone doesn’t want the state to have the monopoly on violence, and believes in civil rights? Weird, right?

From your article:

“Platkin said Glock is profiting by continuing to sell the adaptable version in U.S. markets, even as they make and sell handguns in Europe that cannot accommodate such a switch.”

 This is something I've having a really hard time finding a source on. Everything I can find says that that about half of the Glock pistols that are sold in the US are made in Austria. And, as I said, sales in Europe for pistols are very tightly controlled, meaning that very few pistols--relatively speaking--are getting into the hands of anyone other than cops and military, so I'm not sure that there's a strong motive for them to make the design alteration in the EU.
 Aside from the assertion from New Jersey's AG, I just can't find a source for that. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, and, if the AG is correct, then yes, Glock should change their design in the US. There's already precedent for this; open bolt semi-automatic firearms manufactured after 1986 are banned because they can--in general--be readily converted to full auto. However, given how many Glocks currently exist in the US, that would be an enormous legal mess that could possibly result in the National Firearms Act being declared unconstitutional.

“Also known as “auto switches,” the devices, which are already illegal in New Jersey and some other states, […]”

They’re illegal in EVERY state; it covered under federal law, specifically the National Firearms Act (1934) and Firearm Owners Protection Act (1986). Even if it was legal in New Jersey, it would still be a felony to possess or use one.

How many people actually go out to a range every single week and burn through a couple hundred rounds working on training drills though? I did shooting at distance today (100-550y with .223) and burned through about 140 rounds, and most ranges don’t even have that kind of distance available. (Thank fuck the RSO had a spotting scope; I couldn’t see my splash in the grass to see where my rounds were going when I didn’t hit. He was able to see trace with his scope though.)

Do you have evidence to support that? Because AFAIK, the Glocks made both in the US and Austria have exactly the same design. OTOH, in most of Europe, it’s very difficult to get the appropriate license for a handgun, so it’s largely irrelevant.

Yes. Trump is not actually friendly to gun rights.

If he was, he’d be pushing to get the Hearing Protection Act (HR 404) and the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (HR 2395) out of committee and to the floor for a vote.

Biden wasn’t friendly to gun rights either. I don’t think most politicians are friendly to gun rights, since if they actually managed to expand them to what they should be, they wouldn’t have any major issue remaining to campaign on.

But it doesn’t.

An automatic firearm shoots multiple bullets each time you pull the trigger, until you release the trigger; the trigger does not reset.

With most semi-automatic guns, you have a light spring that resets the trigger once you release your finger. A forced reset trigger (FRT) forces the trigger to reset. The FRT pushes the trigger forward, even if you’re trying to keep the trigger pulled back. If you keep tension on your finger, as soon as it’s reset, you’re pulling it again. So, legally, you are pulling the trigger multiple times, because the trigger is resetting each time a bullet is fired.

Based on the way that a machine gun is defined in the National Firearms Act of 1934, an FRT is not a machine gun. The ATF can’t re-write the law to say what they want it to say; that requires an act on congress.

The is compounded by the fact that Rare Breed ran the idea by the ATF before they went into production, and they have/had a memorandum from the ATF saying that an FRT was not a machine gun, and not subject to the NFA. After they had approved it, and *after Rare Breed had produced and sold a few hundred/thousand, the ATF raided Rare Breed, and also showed up at customer’s homes demanding items that the customers had legally purchased (e.g., unreasonable search and seizure, a 4A violation).

Machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1986, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept.

This is… Not true. The Firearm Owners Protection Act–among other things–made it illegal to transfer automatic firearms manufactured after '86 (i.e., “post ban”) to non-police/military people. Machine guns produced prior to '86 that were already in the hands of non-police/military people can still legally be own and bought/sold. A pre-ban select-fire AR-15 will run about $30k+ these days.

Secondly, there are a number of groups and people still actively fighting to overturn the NFA as being a violation of 1A. There was a case out of the 5th circuit (?) not that long ago that points out the circular logic of the gov’t in re: machine guns. E.g., per Heller, guns in common use can’t be banned, and machine guns aren’t in common use, so they can be banned. But they aren’t in common use because they were largely banned by the gov’t. The gov’t created the condition of them not being in common use by banning them, and then used the lack of common use–due to the ban–as justification for the legality of the ban.