In typical American legal parlance a “machine gun” is any firearm that fires more than one round per trigger pull, so it’s more or less correct.

I would say it is a problem when criminals have a way to magdump a police cruiser in literally under a second with a concealable weapon.

A prior lawsuit filed over the “Trump Train” alleged the San Marcos Police Department violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by failing to send a police report after multiple 911 calls were made and a bus rider said his life was threatened. It accused officers of privately laughing and joking about the emergency calls. San Marcos settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $175,000 and a requirement that law enforcement get training on responding to political violence.

In case you were still wondering what side the police are on, and whether you could count on their help if these people came after you.

“Made for NATO Army”

No military issue weapon is marked like this. Some idiot with a laser engraver had a little side project, possibly to inflate the value of the gun.

I imagine a lot of the Western arms flowing around that part of the globe right now come from Afghanistan and the US’s chaotic retreat.

I know you mean well, but really you have an unorthodox opinion that the vast majority of users, civilian, professional, even at the organizational level, disagree with.

If you’re relying on a mechanical safety on the firearm itself to prevent tragedy, you’re already screwed. Kids can bypass that stuff with enough fiddling. They just make the firearm more complicated to use, which can paradoxically create more mistakes in some instances, especially under pressure. Nothing replaces responsible handling.

I predominantly shoot Beretta 92 pistols. Traditional double action, comes with a manual safety/decocker from the factory. On the one I shoot the most, I purchased a kit from Beretta that disables the safety to make it only a decocker. It doesn’t make the pistol less safe, it is a dangerous weapon either way. It just simplifies it.

Send me your “dangerous” Glock pistols instead of destroying them.

Starting your own business should not be the best or only vehicle to prosperity. You should be able to make a comfortable living working a normal job that doesn’t break you.

Failure rate of small business is high, and you can’t blame all of that on lack of startup capital. Bad concept, bad execution, bad location, etc. could all play into it. The taxpayer should not be obliged to keep a “quirky” store running if it doesn’t bring in customers. Throwing good money after bad isn’t going to bring prosperity to anyone in the end.

Not to mention that they compete with each other, not just the megacorps. I’m pretty sure there are half a dozen hair salons on our main street alone, and most of them sit empty at any given time, endlessly changing hands. Incentivizing startups will only make competition more fierce, so a few more winners but much more losers.

We don’t need more restaurants giving the community more below minimum wage jobs that can’t be filled. We need that money helping everyone, with rent or groceries or something, so that they can actually have money to spend at the small businesses that exist.

My [likely ignorant] take is that we need better incentives for workers, renters, and first-time homeowners, not MBA shysters “entrepreneurs” creating “new businesses” dropshipping imported garbage and other ventures that add little value to society.

My understanding is that the drill is fixtured in position in procedures as delicate as this, so that it really can’t move and drill anywhere except where it needs to. Likely why Dad thought (wrongly) that it was harmless.

I think with these kinds of suits the core conceit is that gun manufacturing/sales is a sordid, immoral business along the lines of cigarettes, and that the very existence of a consumer market for their product implies their misuse and negative impact on society. Therefore, they should bear more responsibility for that impact.

They were emboldened by the suit against Bushmaster/Remington that succeeded and ultimately bankrupted Freedom Group.

I worry that they felt confident laying this out because they believe the fix is in, and that no popular resistance is going to stop it.

I feel like there’s a followup with that fucking dragon as the giant hologram, and I’m trying not to imagine it.

In a more just world they’d be treated like Milosevic’s Serbia.

“Other Emergencies” is a euphemism for liberal/non-white protests. The idea of their home town being overrun by “leftist” mob violence occupies both the nightmares and the fever dreams of the kinds of gun owners who would respond to this call-up.

DeSantis reactivated the Florida State Guard on similar grounds of “disaster relief” then started training them like soldiers. Now he has a force of 1500 or so that reports directly to him and cannot be federalized. He even sent a few of them to the Texas border to test the waters.

Expect to see more of these yokels try to muster up armed thugs in the coming months. I fear the worst no matter the outcome of the election.

Mmm fecal microparticles

There’s some subtle differences in the frame shape and other things that I’m too dumb to articulate. The only marks I can see are import marks from “CAI” - Century International Arms, which would be strange to see on a USGI 1911.

I think this model is a Star BM, and surplus retailers were hocking these things for ~$250-300, about 6/7 years ago. I almost got one but decided against it.

It’s some Star model pistol, looks like a 1911 but not quite, and in 9mm.

A cheap springer airsoft pistol works pretty good in my experience

I’ve thought about this a lot. I think its more the sheer oversaturation of “culture” than it is a true lack of imagination. People alive today consume exponentially greater amounts of “culture” (for the broadest term possible) than anyone ever before, and it’s not even close.

When tech enables you to experience a movie or a video game or a performer 30 years after the death of everyone involved, in essentially the same fidelity as the day it debuted, “old culture” has a much harder time making way for “new culture.” If Star Wars exists, why care about Rebel Moon or whatever that movie was called?

I think the public consciousness can only maintain cognizance and interest in so much, but at the same time creatives are constantly adding to the Culture Pile. But the more tech enables us to hold on to our past, it becomes more and more difficult to move on, and the majority of new stuff goes unwanted and unappreciated. And so the mass market dives into keeping the old alive with reboots, remakes, remasters, and now AI recreations, because that’s what people respond to.

How else are cops supposed to buy new sidearms every 3 years?

With something like 2/3 of American military-age men being too overweight or obese to serve, these drugs would likely be considered strategically essential in any [hopefully] theoretical throwdown.