OT: US is a Weird Place to Live

Wrong. The distance was not all that great. What was it? 300 or 400 yard s. Lots of game is killed at ranges like that with ordinary deer rifles an d no tripod. Obviously you do not have a rifle and have not hunted.

And your earlier statement about guns being primarily for killing people is also wrong. There is a shooting range in PA not far from here that regula rly brings a pick up truck load of brass to the local scrap yard. I am tal king about a 3 foot cubed triwall box. So no way is that all for killing p eople.

Myself I am looking forward to taking my grandson to a local range this mon th. He is learning how to hit clay pigeons. We went the last time he was here and he shot both his .22 rifle and his 12 gauge shotgun. He shot a 5 shot groups of about 3 inches at 25 feet offhand.

Dan

I do not think there is any logic in allowing state and local taxes to reduce federal income taxes. It isn't as if the states pay for an army or navy to supplement the federal army or navy.

Dan

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the hotel, on the 32nd floor. It was easy enough for the police to shoot hi m when they finally worked out where he was (which does seem to have taken a while - well-placed snipers are hard to locate). None of the concert-goer s would have had much chance of locating the shooter, and few people carry the kind of long gun (ideally with telescopic sights) that works for taking out a sniper.

Sniper shots are extremely difficult to near impossible when the barrel is aimed even a few degrees off vertical. The round always goes over the targe t if the the same aimpoint is used as on the level. Whole battles have been lost due to this effect. What they should have done is load a drone up with a breaching charge. Get that thing to reconnoiter the building until they find the room, fly it thr ough the window and detonate the charge. Even a little 1/2 lb TNT in a clos ed space should generate enough concussion to kill him.

aken him out is the kind of fatuous nonsense that Cursitor Doom find in the alt-right media which he is gullible enough to take seriously.

s attractive, but happily he represents a rather small audience, and the ma in stream media prefers to cater to the rather more numerous rational majo rity.

When the shooter climbed the tower in Texas back in the 60s, there were a w hole bunch of "good guys" on the ground taking pot shots at him. No luck wi th that approach.

rds. Lots of game is killed at ranges like that with ordinary deer rifles and no tripod. Obviously you do not have a rifle and have not hunted.

is also wrong. There is a shooting range in PA not far from here that regu larly brings a pick up truck load of brass to the local scrap yard. I am t alking about a 3 foot cubed triwall box. So no way is that all for killing people.

onth. He is learning how to hit clay pigeons. We went the last time he wa s here and he shot both his .22 rifle and his 12 gauge shotgun. He shot a

You could start shopping for his hearing aids at the same time. One of my d entists in the UK liked opera music, and had liked competitive target shoot ing, until he realised what it was doing to his hearing. He stuck with the opera music.

There are lots of problems that do need to be solved, but the capacity of pork-barrelling politicians to preserve the problems so that the money keeps flowing through them on the way to solving the problem is a well-known issue.

The US is notoriously bad at keeping politician's snouts out of the trough.

I blame the Moderate Enlightenment. The US constitution was written around the hidden sub-text that the people who owned the country ought to run the country, and when it was first put into action, only the property-owning 6% of the population got to vote.

The franchise got widened, but political power remained firmly in the hands of those that had money. The US now has the highest level of income inequality in the advanced industrial world

and it isn't doing them any good at all, but they like it. Just like they liked prohibition, and now like the war on drugs.

More bunk. The local range requires hearing protection and eye protection. Typical hearing protection reduces the noise level by about 30 db. And if you also wear ear plugs under the ear muffs you get another 10 to 20 db reduction.

Not a problem shooting clay pigeons or shooting the .22 rifle. But some of the shooters at the range for rifles and pistols were really loud.

Dan

Is there any reason why you would want him to have a semi-auto to shoot or a full auto?

Once I worked in an office which was directly over a shooting range. I don't know what they were shooting but it sounded like they were stacking volkswagons. Through a concrete floor it was *loud*!

This all happened in TEN minutes! How the hell could anyone get a drone loaded up and head off to deal with the perpetrators' location in that time frame?

Or does living in the US now require that the police have to have helicopters, armed drones, etc. flying constantly around looking for snipers?

Talk about a war zone!

John

John Robertson wrote on 10/4/2017 1:32 AM:

I think you just described any of a number of TV shows, Continuum comes to mind, Terminator too.

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of the hotel, on the 32nd floor. It was easy enough for the police to shoot him when they finally worked out where he was (which does seem to have tak en a while - well-placed snipers are hard to locate). None of the concert-g oers would have had much chance of locating the shooter, and few people car ry the kind of long gun (ideally with telescopic sights) that works for tak ing out a sniper.

is aimed even a few degrees off vertical. The round always goes over the t arget if the the same aimpoint is used as on the level. Whole battles have been lost due to this effect.

Get that thing to reconnoiter the building until they find the room, fly it through the window and detonate the charge. Even a little 1/2 lb TNT in a closed space should generate enough concussion to kill him.

They carry little hand launched drones in the trunks of their patrol cars n ow...

...along with grenade launchers and fentanyl bombs...

e taken him out is the kind of fatuous nonsense that Cursitor Doom find in the alt-right media which he is gullible enough to take seriously.

inds attractive, but happily he represents a rather small audience, and the main stream media prefers to cater to the rather more numerous rational m ajority.

a whole bunch of "good guys" on the ground taking pot shots at him. No luc k with that approach.

r a

There are lots of semi-automatic shotguns in use, and I am not against them . But the shotgun that he has is a pump. I think pumps are just as fast a s semi-automatics. If he ever buys a shotgun, I would want him to have wha t ever he wants.

And most pistols sold now are semi-automatic guns. For target shooting a s emi-automatic makes sense. With a revolver you have to c*ck the hammer and then re-establish your grip. With a semi-automatic you do not change your grip between shots. So almost no one shoots a revolver in competition. If he ever takes up pistol target shooting , I would want him to have a se mi-automatic.

My brother in law had a Thompson sub machine gun. At least that is what I understand. I never saw most of the guns he had. He did not show people his guns. I think he did not want anyone to talk about the guns he had for the same reason one would not talk about having gold in their home. No se nse in letting people know you have something valuable in you house. Anywa y I think the Thompson was kind of a pain in the ass with having to have a license in addition to having a gun safe. But he probably made a nice pr ofit when he sold it.

But to answer your question, I do not have any strong feelings about his ha ving a full automatic. I just think he could find better things to spend h is money on. Things that he would enjoy more. I am not going to buy a ful l automatic for him.

Dan

I'm confused by lots of our tax laws. Why are 'payroll' taxes paid 1/2 by your employer? Why do health care/insurance costs come right off the top, before any taxes? Why do you right off mortgage interest, charities? Why is interest income at a lower rate than the sweat of my brow? And I know nothing about the right-offs that allow big companies to avoid a large share of the 35% rate on corporate profits.

George H.

The crowd would have shot out every window of every hotel around them.

I credit the general public with a great deal more sense than you do, clearly. There is much truth in the old adage: "an armed society is a polite society" and the sooner compulsory carry is mandated, the sooner we can kiss goodbye forever to outrages such as this.

That's easy - to hide the cost of SS.

These costs are only deductible for employers because it is a cost of doing business, like electricity or even salaries. Why it's not counted as income is a fluke of history, like the entire employer-paid healthcare system. Blame socialism,

Because it's in "society's interest" to promote home ownership and charity.

Because it's in "society's interest" to promote investment. Note that this money has already been taxed at least once so it's not at a "lower rate".

You'd have to be more specific but much of this is "cost of doing business". We don't tax revenue or wealth (generally, or intentionally[*]), rather income.

Major exceptions exist, like property and inflation.

Cursitor Doom can't tell us how armed people in the crowd could have taken out the shooter in room 32135, but he's convinced that if they had had hand guns (and some of them did) fewer people would have ended up killed.

The people being shot at who did have guns weren't prepared to get them out, on the not unreasonable basis that if they did, the police would think that they were the shooter, and kill them.

There are times where Cursitor Doom is merely mindlessly fatuous, but here he goes even further around the twist, and contradicts the comments of the people who were actually being shot at.

Not so, according to some were in a position to do that

Effectively their weapons were *useless* - they decided they *daren't* *use* the weapons for fear the police would shoot them!

"Caleb Keeter?, from the Texas country music Josh Abbott Band, wrote in an emotional post that he had been a proponent of the 2nd Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms his whole life, but had now changed his views.

?I cannot express how wrong I was. We actually have members of our crew with concealed handgun licenses, and legal firearms on the bus. They were useless,? he wrote.

?We couldn?t touch them for fear police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us."

And for once this (non-MSM) website's full article is worth reading; normally the headline contains everything

You do realize that restrictions one semi-automatic weapons won't be a total ban? If someone wants to shoot for sports or competitively, they would be able to get a permit and have a weapon. For sure having 23 weapons would not be allowed. I don't know how high capacity magazines get into circulation, but that should be enforced better.

I have a friend who had a Japanese machine gun and his friend had a bazooka. So? The point is they aren't outlawed, (well, I dunno about the bazooka) but they aren't in the hands of criminals or nuts either.

I keep thinking of Jim Jefferies. He explains there is only one reason to own guns, "Fuck off! I *like* guns!" Everything else is rationalization.