Gun Detection AI is Being Trained With Homemade 'Active Shooter' Videos (vice.com) 293
In Huntsville, Alabama, there is a room with green walls and a green ceiling. Dangling down the center is a fishing line attached to a motor mounted to the ceiling, which moves a procession of guns tied to the translucent line. From a report: The staff at Arcarithm bought each of the 10 best-selling firearm models in the U.S.: Rugers, Glocks, Sig Sauers. Pistols and long guns are dangled from the line. The motor rotates them around the room, helping a camera mounted to a mobile platform photograph them from multiple angles. "It's just like a movie set," said Arcarithm president and CEO Randy E. Riley. This process creates about 5,000 images of each gun floating ethereally. Arcarithm's computer programmers then replace the green backdrop with different environments, like fields, forests, and city streets. They add rain or snow or fog or sun. A program then randomly distorts the images. The result is 30,000 to 50,000 images of the same gun, from multiple angles, in different synthetic settings and of varying degrees of visibility.
The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America's 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries. Among the other sellers are Omnilert, a longtime vendor of safety notification software, and newcomers ZeroEyes, Defendry, and Athena Securities. Some cities employ a surveillance system of acoustic sensors to instantly detect gunshots. These companies promise to do one better and save precious minutes by alerting police or security personnel before the first shot is fired.
The point of creating this vast portfolio of digital gun art is to feed an algorithm made to detect a firearm as soon as a security camera catches it being drawn by synthetically creating tens of thousands of ways each gun may appear. Arcarithm is one of several companies developing automated active shooter detection technology in the hopes of selling it to schools, hotels, entertainment venues and the owners of any location that could be the site of one of America's 15,000 annual gun murders and 29,000 gun injuries. Among the other sellers are Omnilert, a longtime vendor of safety notification software, and newcomers ZeroEyes, Defendry, and Athena Securities. Some cities employ a surveillance system of acoustic sensors to instantly detect gunshots. These companies promise to do one better and save precious minutes by alerting police or security personnel before the first shot is fired.
Ummm Ok. (Score:3)
I am not seeing what the big deal is. If you are going to be making an AI to detect guns, you will need give it information to help identify it. Hollywood depiction of guns and how they use, are often considered fake. Often because they need to be sure that people see the Gun, and a lot of focus on the actor and he is holding a Gun in a way that is more dramatic, vs practical.
Homemade videos probably will work better. As it is difficult to plan and record a real high quality Active shooter shot, as it crosses many ethics violations.
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The way guns are used in Hollywood is quite often impractical, and often quite dangerous. I remember a podcast where the host commented on the common pose people playing police officers and detectives he called "the full Sabrina". I didn't get the reference but he explained this was from the show Charlie's Angels where the camera would focus in on the face of a female character where she's holding a pistol with both hands, pointed into the air, an inch from her nose. This is exceedingly dangerous.
The fir
In summary (Score:2)
The panoticon expands.
Incidentally, if you're a madman intent on going on a rampage with a firearm, there's an easy fix for your problem: choose a little-known gun - or better, one that doesn't look like a gun [youtube.com].
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The real key to all this is to detect who are the violent assholes before they do violent things and stop them.
I have a feeling the real key to solving the problem of violent idiots with firearms is to bring up children in a society that does not promote violence with firearms and idiocy, so that they have a chance at becoming mentally stable, educated, peaceful adults.
Take the Swiss for example: each and every one of them has a rifle, yet you never hear stories about rogue shooters in Switzerland.
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Oh I'm not imposing anything. By all means, keep your cultural 12,000 homicides by firearm per year my friend. Actually, really keep them for yourself: we don't want them over here.
Children are going to be soooooo much safer! (Score:2)
I can't wait to see the video where the minigun zeros in on the bad guy and safely shoots the fire arm our of his hand!
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From half a mile away while spewing dozens of rounds and not hitting anyone else in the vicinity.
First, military planes now this (Score:2)
So in the near future, you have a gun, and the drones come and take you down. Way to go for Skynet! And all are a hack away from being maliciously used.
The fuck are they selling here? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Some cities employ a surveillance system of acoustic sensors to instantly detect gunshots. These companies promise to do one better and save precious minutes by alerting police or security personnel before the first shot is fired.
Guess I'm calling bullshit on this one rather quickly.
We act as if the difference between life and death these days is measured in seconds by recognizing something that looks like a gun in surveillance videos that will somehow be connected to some kind of rapid-response-law-enforcement-only 911 system. Have any of you actually SEEN what "surveillance" STILL looks like in the 21st Century, or better yet, law enforcement response times? Give me a fucking break. I'm not sure who's the bigger snake oil salesman here; those selling "life-saving" gun-detecting bullshit, or those selling "HD" surveillance.
Thought it was SmarterEveryDay (Score:2)
SmarterEveryDay did a video [youtube.com] last year where he covered some tech just like this that basically hooks straight into security cam footage. I found it pretty coincidental that Destin is also in the Huntsville area as well. Seems the company he showed off though was Lantern LLC -- completely different. The technology is the same idea though.
watch out for them ethereal guns (Score:2)
This process creates about 5,000 images of each gun floating ethereally
Is there a big problem with disembodied firearms shooting places up?
This is part of the problem of failing to understand the problem; guns really don't float around killing people, criminals and the mentally deranged kill people with guns (and knives, and ropes, and cars, and airplanes, etc).
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Guns don't kill people... Wait a minute. They do?
Good to know (Score:2)
They'll shoot up the next school with the 11th best-selling gun.
A big sock (Score:2)
I thing a big sock with strategically placed holes is all that would be required to get a handgun past this kind of detection. And that's just in five seconds of thinking about it. There would be LOTS of ways to successfully camouflage handguns without compromising their usability very much. Longer guns would be more difficult, but where there's a will there's a way, and human ingenuity in such matters is pretty much limitless.
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Longer guns would be more difficult, but where there's a will there's a way, and human ingenuity in such matters is pretty much limitless.
Paint it pink?
I wonder at the training set. (Score:2)
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This.
I can see the politics of this going horribly wrong [theregister.com].
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From the description, it appears that the AI is only trained on the invisible man. In my limited experience, guns hung from the ceiling by strings are fairly inert.
It will work as well as facial recognition.... (Score:2)
Sorry for shooting your wife, but that our algorithm detected the corn dog she was eating as a Glock 19.
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a Glock 19
Corn dog is probably deadlier than a 9mm.
No Toy Guns? (Score:3)
So they are not including toy guns, nor pellet guns, nor other objects that are similar to a gun like a cell phone or sandwich.
It is not identifying the gun that is the problem, it is identifying when something looks similar to a gun but is not a gun.
I'll bet ... (Score:2)
Best-selling firearm models (Score:2)
Just train the AI system on Hi-Points. That'll cover most of the problem cases.
Obfuscated? (Score:2)
Do any of the pictures include a hand being wrapped around the gun? A book bag? A long coat? I don't often see guns waving around in mid-air.
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Getting rid of all firearms is a pipe dream. You might as well offer up a solution like teaching every child to resolve problems in a non-violent way. It would have about as much practical effect.
If we did take firearms from most law abiding citizens, gun suicides and accidental gun fatalities would go down. That's something at least, but anyone who tries to sell confiscation as a panacea to our social problems is either naïve or a liar.
Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:5, Insightful)
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>Getting rid of all firearms is a pipe dream.
At least in the US, where guns outnumber people. A few other countries, that don't have such a gun-idolizing frontier culture, have mostly managed it.
As I recall though, that doesn't actually change murder rates much though - you just replace gun deaths with an increase in knife, club, and poison deaths. You do eliminate the high-profile active shooter scenarios, but those are such a tiny fraction of murders that it doesn't make much difference except to new
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I suspect you're being sarcastic - but honestly, me too.
Of course, cars are a highly functional device, and our country's transportation infrastructure has been built around the assumption that everyone has a car, which is a bit of a problem.
Wouldn't mind seeing registration fees and insurance increasing with the formula
mass*(top speed)^2
to reflect the potential damage the vehicle can do. Possibly even with an additional term of
+ (mass per axle)^4
to reflect the damage the vehicle does to the road.
That migh
A cultural thing? (Score:2, Insightful)
Over the pond, in the UK and most of Europe, this problem, largely, doesn't exist.
Sure, we have the occasional tragic mass shooting event, but it pales into comparison to what the US faces.
So, is it *really* a pipe dream to get rid of, if not all, then most firearms?
I guess, for the US, it probably is - it is so deeply embedded in the culture. ... and all hell breaks loose. Crazy.
You can flash a gazillion lethal weapons on TV, but flash a nipple
You can have TV shows glorifying guns, even in the 'watershed'
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A cultural thing?
So, is it *really* a pipe dream to get rid of, if not all, then most firearms?
Yes and yes.
It's a combination of things that makes US culture significantly different than UK culture, even if we speak (roughly) the same language. A big part is the consequence of how we handled a cold war between two nuclear-armed super powers for a significant part of the lives of a generation of people. But even small things like our fascination with the "wild West" and personal liberty earned by the strength of the righteous (with God on their side) over the criminals and villains. You can see this k
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Courts could rule increasing restrictions on the right to bear arms,
Shall not be infringed. Meaning, don't even put your pinky on it.
You people don't give a fuck about the rule of law, or you'd attempt to achieve your aims by properly proposing an amendment, convincing the citizenry, and holding a vote in our legislation.
Instead, you'd rather convenience for your personal ideology. No. Fuck you. The rule of law and the Constitution matter more than your ability to impress your narrow morals on others.
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Shall not be infringed. Meaning, don't even put your pinky on it.
It's already been ruled that that Commerce Clause allows the Federal government to regulate gun ownership. If that level of convoluted logic is already widely accepted by courts, then there is a broad gap between your opinion and the current status quo.
You're going to have a real trip when you find out how they regulate free speech and religion in this country.
You people
who?
Instead, you'd rather convenience for your personal ideology.
I'm a pragmatic gun owner. I understand the arguments and can express them without becoming emotionally driven over it.
The rule of law and the Constitution
Courts decide what that al
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Over the pond, in the UK and most of Europe, this problem, largely, doesn't exist.
We had a war with you guys for a reason, and we couldn't have won without our share of guns. BTW, it's not a problem.
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The Americans who claim you can't apply Europe's experience with gun control to the US are... probably correct.
The US has the greatest number of guns per capita, but several other countries have unusually high rates too. There are some hell holes, Yemen, Lebanon, but also Switzerland, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Canada.
The key seems to be the attitude towards guns. Places where people think guns are for shooting people have more gun violence.
The solution is still gun control. Getting rid of most of
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Mass shootings are extremely rare here too.
I mean, if you were going to see them in the numbers the left would have you think they occur, you'd have seen them during all the antifa/BLM riots and you really did not see that.
You didn't see it happen during the election either.
Rifles, including the popular AR/.AK style
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Well, that was definitely one of the entities that the US founding fathers were wanting the populace to be armed against. They had to do it themselves, and they knew it possibly might happen again.
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A government that is answerable to the people is a good one, an armed populace helps ensure the government is answerable to the people.
Hopefully doubtful it would happen, but in modern history we have seen things like the rise of the N@zis, and dictators come to power. Thats a bit more difficult to do when the general populace is armed to the teeth.
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But ... yeah, it's too late for the USA, that bottled genie was unleashed centuries ago.
Because guns are so available, pretty much all thieves, even small time crooks, are going to be wielding one.
Again, this perpetuates the sale and ownership of them - and I guess, if I lived in an area where all crooks, from the most desperate up, carried firearms, I'd probably get one. Sad times.
For many years, I lived in Johannesburg - and in all that time, I never owned a firearm, despite it being, for decades, in the
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Care to elaborate?
It's super easy to make a statement like that without providing a scrap of evidence, argument or anything vaguely sensible.
But then, I expected this - so I guess rating my post as "flame bait" (thanks whoever did that), was probably valid.
There's zero smugness, zero fanaticism and zero 'fucking bubble' here - just a normal human being who wonders why we have millions of devices capable of killing other humans pretty much instantaneously.
If that amounts to a 'fucking bubble' or 'smugness' o
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True. The GP probably lives in an extraordinary bubble of safety, likely one of the OECD countries that is not the US.
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Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost all gun crimes aren't committed with hunting guns, the thousands of death each year are done with handguns. Plenty of countries with nearly zero gun crimes allow guns for hunting (and handguns for target shooting for that matter). The anti-gun crowd always like to harp about Japan... in ignorance, since Japan allows long guns for hunting and target handguns.
Since getting rid of guns won't ever happen, I'd suggest doing something about the inner city subcultures breakdown of family structure and no lack of respect for human life and property, they're the ones committing most the crimes with guns.
Where I live, everyone has guns, ammo sold over the counter... but almost no crime. Of course, I'm not in inner city but a suburb.
Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:5, Interesting)
> I'd suggest doing something about the inner city subcultures breakdown of family structure and no lack of respect for human life and property
Indeed. We already found a solution that worked to minimize gun-related violence -- Name and Shame -- of all things. Scroll down to section 7. The Harvard Man of Rolling Stone's How America Lost the War on Drugs [googleusercontent.com].
Sadly, no one was interested in solutions that worked as greed got in the way. :-(
Here is a copy of this very interesting section:
The War On Drugs was a tremendous success (Score:3)
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Thank you for that article, very interesting.
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That's a weapons grade stupid view of people. Criminals aren't cowards. Criminals are poor at risk assessment. If what you said was true, armed bank robbery would never happen - and yet it happens *regularly*. Some criminals are desperate. Some are pathological. Some have mental impairments. Some are high as a kite. Some are in the throws of addiction and are willing to do anything because they're driven by pure biological imperative.
That's aside from the fact that your "solution" involves something that wi
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Many are excellent at risk assessment. Bank robberies happen a lot, because criminals often get away with it, and when they are caught they get 3 hots and a cot for a while. If they start figuring more permanent punishments into their calculations they move on.
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They aren't worried about you fighting back. They will be worried about the wife in the other room that they didn't see coming in, or the husband waiting in the car that they weren't looking for. The mugger doesn't know that another person is waiting, armed and ready, but they don't know that they're not either. The uncertainty will coerce them to look for greener pasture. Like, maybe, getting a job.
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Almost all gun crimes aren't committed with hunting guns, the thousands of death each year are done with handguns
It always fascinates me how focused people get on rifles while completely ignoring handguns, when logic would suggest the opposite would have a better effect.
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That's racist.
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when the U.S. government required all persons in this country who owned a gun to register with the government so they knew who to call up as part of the militia.
When was this? A link or citation would be helpful.
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Reading comprehension isn't your strong suit, is it? You can't carry ammo with you anywhere in Japan unless you're going to use it. Here is a much longer discussion [loc.gov] of the laws of Japan regarding owning a gun and ammunition. You need a permit to purchase ammunition. Also, The applicant for a bullet-purchase permit is currently required to submit a "plan for bullet use."
So yes, you can carry ammunition with you, but you a) need a p
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And yet japan still has one of the worst suicide rates in the world, worst organized crime problems in the world, and is a racist and xenophobic culture rivalled only by communist china.
The fact is that gun restrictions don't meaningfully correlate with homocide and suicide rates in any way, just compare the UK or France to Finland.
Re: Swords to plowshares (Score:2)
China is not Communist by definition.
Anyone who says "communist China" is outing themselves as best as a person who it is meaningless to talk to because they ignore what words actually mean.
You cannot have a Communism if you have currency or a class system. China has both.
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Easy right?
Well we have a lot of issues.
1) The United States Second Amendment, with a conservative judicial system. We are debating, if hacks to a semi-automatic guns, that turns them into an automatic rifle (which is illegal for most people). Banning guns will have an impossible set of litigation which no politician on either side can stomach.
2) How do we get rid of guns that we already have. A lot of people have guns, many are not registered, some are family heirlooms.
3) The Star Trek V issue: Ban Guns
Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. There is something to be said for restricting gun access for individuals belonging to known high-risk groups (aka background checks), but actually eliminating guns in this country isn't a realistic option unless and until we eliminate the gun-loving culture. And I really don't see that happening any time soon.
Personally, I could see a compelling argument for requiring a firearm license to be able to buy or own a gun. Something low-cost, not unlike a driver's license, that proves you've passed a recent background check and safety test. Possibly with an exception for heirloom firearms that have been functionally neutralized. And possibly with a more rigorous, higher tier license (akin to a commercial driver's license) required to own guns designed specifically to kill people - aka handguns and other (semi-)automatic weapons. Though it's important to note that many historical mass shootings occurred with bolt-action hunting rifles, so there's not necessarily a huge benefit to be had there.
With such a licensing system, you'd even have an avenue to partially plug the "personal sale" loophole - transferring ownership of a gun to someone without a valid license is itself a crime. With ubiquitous internet access it should even be easy to require validating a possibly forged or revoked firearm license - just enter the ID# on the firearm license web page and ensure the government database agrees with the ID card. No need for background checks, etc. on a per-sale basis.
Incidentally, I could see a similar argument for alcohol licenses rather than just a proof-of-age. Losing your alcohol license would likely be a far greater deterrent against irresponsible consumption than losing your driver's license, and might even be effective at reducing domestic abuse, along with other alcohol-related violence and vagrancy.
Re: Swords to plowshares (Score:2)
" While I hate "If you make guns illegal, only criminals will have guns" statement. It will become a product which will put law abiding citizens at a disadvantage for the criminals."
So you hate it while agreeing with it? How does that work?
Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're an IDIOT.
Do you really, honestly, unironically believe that criminals and whack-jobs who would shoot up a school or public place give a flying fuck about a ban on personal firearms? NO THEY DO NOT AND NEVER WILL. Leave our 2nd Amendment rights alone. If you're not from the United States, then shut the fuck up, it's not your business.
I may disagree quite a bit with so-called 'Conservatives' in my country, or whatever cheap excuse for 'conservatism' passes for it these days, but this is one of those issues we can agree on.
Identify nutjobs before they can shoot up a school or something, make sure they don't have easy access to firearms? YES. That only makes sense.
Prohibit felons on probation from owning firearms? YES, they have to earn back our trust first.
Take then away from everyone for no reason? HELL, NO.
Also guess what, buddy: someone intent on causing chaos and mayhem, like a school or mall shooter? They would find some other way to kill people. They would make bombs, or drive their car into a crowd of people, or find a way to poison people en masse, or just get a bunch of sharp pointy things. You want to ban pointed sticks, rocks, and kitchen knives while you're at it? Why not just cut off peoples' hands, too? Makes about as much sense.
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They would have considerably more difficulties obtaining firearms because many of illegal weapons are legal bought ones that have been stolen from their owners.
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Facts don't care about whether you disagree with them or not. Besides, the bullshit about the police state is a non sequitur. Why don't write that it will lead to communism, while you are at that? Makes about as much sense in the context.
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You called the police and then hid in the bushes with a gun?
You are obviously trolling. That would be the most idiotic thing you could possibly do. I'm not sure you would call that suicide-by-cop or just being plain dumb.
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I mean, this is a dumb argument, because most people who shoot up schools acquire their guns shortly before they shoot them up. So if your argument is simply that "school shootings won't end for a year", that's a bad argument.
Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:5, Insightful)
Try telling farmers they can't have a rifle around for scaring off or shooting coyotes attacking the herd. Or heaven forbid, quick death for suffering animals in their care. I personally don't understand gun ownership for city dwellers, but have witnessed more than a handful of times a gun was absolutely necessary on a farm.
That's a point that rarely gets brought up in the gun debate. And when it does nobody really seems to have a realistic argument against it. No, sorry, a bow isn't a replacement for a gun. Nine times out of ten, it's the noise that scares off a pack of attacking coyotes. A bow will be effective against ONE coyote, and the rest of the pack will just keep on coming. A knife or spear would have the same problem, plus you'd have to get close enough to put yourself at risk.
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It's to protect themselves from those who would walk down the street and shoot someone just because they could [snopes.com].
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If you're getting shot on a street, odds are you're shot before you can even shoot back, let alone defend yourself. And if you have the time, evading bullets is probably a higher priority in a drive-by than shooting back.
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Nine times out of ten, it's the noise that scares off a pack of attacking coyotes.
I agree with your broader point, but coyotes don't hunt in packs.
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Brain fart. Was thinking of the wolves. Which is rare in this part of the country, but I had seen it happen out west some.
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So, a starter pistol is a replacement for a gun??
The problem is that the supreme court has shot down city specific gun laws pretty hardcore. So location specific laws are impossible.
Re:Swords to plowshares (Score:5, Insightful)
If we got rid of all the firearms in the country, this wouldn't be needed.
The right to bear arms is baked into our constitution. That right is not going away.
If you want to reduce firearms deaths, you should stop fantasizing and focus on practical solutions. America has far fewer gun deaths than 30 years ago. This decline is usually attributed to a reduction of environmental lead. Today, the city with the most gun deaths is Chicago. Chicago is also a city where children still have high blood lead levels. 80% of low-income homes in Chicago get their water through lead pipes.
So instead of a Quixotic quest for more authoritarianism, perhaps we could just stop feeding our children neurotoxins.
If you want to hunt, use spears, slings, and bows like all of our ancestors.
Long guns used for hunting are not what is causing human firearms deaths.
You aren't going to convince many people by saying "We should ban guns because <<expression of profound ignorance about guns>>."
He's a troll dude (Score:2)
if they can get rid of the 2th then 1st is next (Score:3)
if they can get rid of the 2th then 1st is next after that it's the end of the USA.
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If we got rid of all the authoritarians who are more than willing to confiscate everyone's guns, the guns wouldn't be needed, meaning this wouldn't be needed.
If you could just change human character, there wouldn't be authoritarians seeking to subjugate people by first taking their guns.
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I, for one, welcome our . . . uhh . . . new dangling overlords.
I will certainly feel safer the next time an unsupported gun points at me in midair with no visible means of support, knowing that there is an AI that could recognized it . . .
hawk
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please don't romanticize civil war. It's not as exciting and heroic as you think. If you would talk to people outside of your country's own borders, you'd learn that war is shit. And the winners of a war are usually the last people you'd want in charge long-term.
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:5, Insightful)
War is shit.
Slavery is ALSO shit.
I would rather die than to condemn my children to live as slaves, and, by definition, so would every decent human being who ever lived or ever will.
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:4, Insightful)
The last time we had a civil war in the USA, it was the people who wanted to KEEP their slaves which started it.
This term continues to be misused in US history :(
A civil war is one in which the conflict is over control of the same government. The slave owning states were not trying to take over the federal government but rather trying to secede and form their own country. It was the internal version of the revolution from England.
The amazing irony being that a generation before, the people who made sure slavery was never legitimized by name in the federal constitution were from slave owning states.
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia says you're wrong [wikipedia.org]. Quote:
"A civil war, also known as an intrastate war in polemology, is a war between organized groups within the same state or country. The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region or to change government policies"
The only question now is whether you'll change your opinion when faced with evidence, or ignore it like you never saw it.
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I agree with you, but quote from Wikipedia is not evidence. It would barely rise to the level of hear-say.
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, this is Slashdot. A favourite rhetorical technique is to make up some weird definition for a term, then insist you're right and everyone else is wrong no matter what.
The GP did make one mistake though. He told us what his weird-ass definition was. He's supposed to make us guess.
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According to Webster's Encyclopedic (in print), Mirriam-Webster (online) and Oxford English condensed (in print) all agree: a war between political groups within the same state or country.
Only Wikipedia adds the bit about it may be to achieve independence. Is Wikipedia really your source of final authority?
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Oh, now you have changed your definition. Before you said "A civil war is one in which the conflict is over control of the same government." Now you are saying it is "a war between political groups within the same state or country."
Why did you switch definitions? Which one did you prefer?
Also, checkmate [youtube.com].
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course it started out as a war of secession. But the name, characterization, and ultimately the definition of the war was only decided after the victors were declared, as it true of many wars (WW1 was only so named after WW2, for instance). Since the Union won, it was The Civil War. If it had been the Confederates that had won, it probably would have been their Second War of Independence. But as it stands today, it's entirely proper to call it a civil war, because ultimately, it was US citizens fighting against US citizens, even if viewed retroactively.
At the time of the Revolution, slavery was a very contentious issue, and was essentially fobbed off to future generations to deal with for the sake of the immediate need for national unity. And I'm not sure why you think it was never legitimized in name by the US Constitution. What do you think the 3/5ths compromise was?
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That's one way to look at it. The other way, which DOES make it a civil war (actually, several) by your definition, is that there were citizens of the US in those states that wanted to remain US citizens, and another group of citizens who wanted to have their state independent (and then joined to another polity). So the civil wars were in each state for control of that state, with outside allies and sometimes outside command and control for the forces.
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The last time we had a civil war in the USA, it was the people who wanted to KEEP their slaves which started it.
Read some history. Fourth paragraph of Lincoln's inaugural address: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."
The south wanted to leave the Union. That's what got Lincoln to start a war. He literally thought states could join the union, but they had no right to leave. They were slaves (along with the citizens) to the union.
Slavery is wrong. So
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:4, Interesting)
We have slaves right now, right here. It's explicitly permitted by the 13th amendment as punishment for a crime. We take away your rights, lock you up, make you labor for a commercial profit (e.g., farming Idaho potatoes, and don't pay you at all, or if you are paid, it's a token sum like $1/day or less.
Btw, the 13th Amendment was created as a concession to the South in the year the Civil War ended. It allowed them slavery as long as they dressed it up in criminal charges. It was written in January, proposed, the war ended in May of 1865, and it was ratified in December of that year.
Re: Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:2)
The nation at the time could only persist in unity. Letting the south secede would have been a recipe for failure.
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If you had actually looked at the link, you would have seen that the south fired the first shot before the North marched down there with an army.
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Of course! It was about states' rights. Read the declarations of independence. It was explicitly about the southern states' right to engage in slavery.
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Take your concerns and complaints to the ballot box, the courts, and the newspapers. Reaching for your gun the everytime you don't understand how a free democracy works is premature.
Re: Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:2)
Claiming the USA was ever a democracy is nonsense. It never has been. Notably, the electoral college is a perversion of the whole idea.
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It's common practice to use the term "democracy" to describe systems other than direct democracies. Pedantry doesn't suit you, you're not good at it.
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:4, Interesting)
If we assume you're right that "Democrats hate guns" (which, IMHO, is a "correlation does not equal causation" kind of thing), I can think of a few reasons why.
I grew up in a rural area. Most people owned a gun. The reasons were mostly about safety and not necessarily from bad humans. In rural areas, you have to be a bit more self-sufficient because the things that you expect society to provide aren't necessarily close enough. For example, from where I lived, if something broke into my house and I called the police, it could take them up to 30 minutes to get there. So it's good to have some sort of way to defend yourself from a bear or a burglar.
Now I live in a city. Most people don't own a gun. The reason is if something breaks into my house, I can get on the phone and call 911 and have a cop at my door within 5 minutes. They'll get rid of the bear or--most likely--the burglar. I don't really need to own a gun. In general, guns in the city are used by criminals to rob and murder other people. So people who live in a city have more experience with guns being used for harm than for good.
Since most Democratic voters live in cities, it's reasonable that they would call for restrictions on guns based on their experience with guns compared to rural voters and their experience with guns.
Or, it could be that it's all part of a huge conspiracy to enslave the country.
Gee, I wonder which one is more likely...
Re:Why do Democrats hate guns? (Score:4, Insightful)
You honestly think a cop will be there in 5 minutes? Try 50 minutes on up. Unless you're a senator you're on your own and the criminals who don't bother listening to the laws about things like owning guns or rape or murder will have their way with you in the meantime.
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Why do Democrats hate guns? Maybe it's because they're always pushing heavy handed rules down people's throat, and they're afraid that someday, they're going to push back.
Why do Republicans love guns? Maybe it's because they watch too many unrealistic movies where the hero with the gun saves the day and they're afraid that someday, one of the groups of baddies their news sources keep inventing will invade their home. Guns in the hands of the citizenry serves as a distraction from the catastrophic failure of trickle-down-economics.
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Firstly every ablebodied citizen is the militia. Second virtually everyone getting arrested at BLM "protests", when police bother to actually do their job, is white. Third burning down apartment complexes and looking local businesses isn't anyone's "right".
As for mass murders more people are killed by lightning in some years than by mass shootings, and some 80% of gun crime is committed with already illegally trafficked guns. Virtually no gun crime is committed with lawfully purchased long guns, concealed c
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What police brutality? Do you have studies indicating significant number of occurrences, or are you going to rely on a rapist getting shot while going for his knife and a guy dying from an overdose?