Can we please just admit that maybe gun control is a good idea finally?

Slate (with Twitter feed @GunDeaths) takes a look at the number of gun-related deaths in the US since the Newtown massacre.

Overwhelming. Tragic. Fucked Up.

...and then, when wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

"Newtown".

Again, I'm continually impressed to see the breadth of expertise available in animal control and resource management. Why not the national guard? WHY NOT INDEED. I'm sure that deploying small units of the worst-quality soldiers in the military all over the place to work in tandem with civilian assets in order to control pigs would be the best answer, and the notoriously efficient and inexpensive logistics that underpin their deployments would be no big deal. Maybe we can pair them up with Jason's free wolves and just undo the last century and a half of enclosure because that will be much easier to do. In fact, let's make a voltron of halfassed ideas and combine the National Guard WARG brigades with a bunch of fucking bb rifles, that should turn out great. If our next secretary of defense doesn't redesign huge swathes of the military, and the next secretary of interior doesn't take on the entire notion of private property around this noble goal, then we have failed as a nation.

Or you can just work out a simple system of permits for edge cases that will continue to arise, and combine it with federal level animal control strategies that allocate funding to locally appropriate resources in order to sweeten the deal. If the goal is absolutism on guns being banned regardless of the quality of criteria, well, I bet I know where the story ends.

That "like" is to be read as an endorsement of National Guard WARG Brigades.

I'm sympathetic to opening hunting season on things that various factors have allowed to get dangerously overpopulated.

But I also think that if your answer turns into mass slaughter via helicopter, your problem has escalated well past private permits as a solution. And the National Guard are also better off helping disaster areas.

Naturally, this means we should turn to Drone Strikes.

I'm sending about 20 incidents a day to them (i use a mega set of newspaper rss feeds to find them). It should really be called "gun homicides" because it misses virtually all suicides, which are about 2/3 of gun deaths. It is fucked up.

I don't think there's much good information on the pig problem in its own right in this thread, merely its current intersection with a particular type of gun and easily refuted out-of-ass corrections to the pig problem. If you want data-based, efficient, non-hunting answers, have at them. But it's much easier to simply acknowledge exceptions for the sake of gun regulation per se and address that other thing separately.

If you think the NRA is irritating when it pretends people are going after hunting, that's got nothing on how annoying this conversation will be when you actually do go after hunters.

That's how populations were kept under control before humans killed all the predators! I'm not remotely an expert here, but uh that's why populations didn't grow without limit before we came along.

I don't care about the gun angle, it's just a strange focus on inventing a solution that lives independent of the ecosystem.

If you know a better way to hunt than pumping dozens of rounds in the general direction of your quarry I'd like to hear it.

Eh, suicide is a whole nother sticky wicket. In many ways it's best that the stick with homicides/accidents, just so the message can't be derailed.

I had a strange exchange on Twitter today. In college I had a summer internship with this guy, we've stayed in touch on and off since. He's mildly geek famous -- in the movie King of Kong he's the guy at Funspot who says "I don't drink, I don't do drugs... I play video games." Anyways. Today he retweets a quote from Ron Paul, "Banning guns because of their misuse is like banning the First Amendment because one might libel or slander." I reply that killing people with guns isn't misuse -- that's their intended use. Anyways we go back and forth, with him basically saying that any immoral use of a tool is misuse. I think we're just having a lively debate, and then he blocks me and calls me a sociopath.

Wait... what?

Anyways, I emailed him apologizing, but I'm still sort of baffled.

I think you're right that sticking with homicides/accidents would make sense. My point is just that whoever's running the @gundeaths stream and Slate are calling it "gun deaths" when it misses an entire category that makes up about 2/3 of "gun deaths." Not only is it inaccurate, it undercuts their own point by undercounting the number.

Also, the @gundeaths tweeter claims the total is for "North America" by which s/he apparently means "Canada and United States (includingi Alaska and Hawaii but not Puerto Rico)" because s/he ignores the PR deaths I send and doesn't include Mexico. But that's a different irritation.

.177 @ 495 fps is insufficient for large rodents.

Okay, is that listed somewhere in the chart? I clicked on it but didn't see it, or do you have another link? (No snark intended, genuinely curious if there is a chart or a guide for what grain/caliber to use versus animal size.

There are a lot of unintended consequences with reintroducing predators to hunt feral pigs in areas adapted to other uses, and I don't think you have any idea of the breadth of regions you are talking about. For one thing, the pigs themselves are an invasive species (p273-4) introduced by humans. What possible downside could there be to placing even larger animals all over the country, other than then having a pig problem alongside a wolf problem?

At the risk of beating this down further, I think the original link was useful as context especially given its relatively credible source. But I think we hit diminishing returns with respect to the topic a bit back.

Personal experience. A .177 hunting pellet (as opposed to a BB) will bounce off their head, but the wound from a torso shot won't kill cleanly unless by some miracle you can bullseye a rodent heart.

A .22LR, on the other hand, you can shoot for the torso and it will flop over dead, because they have 7x the kinetic energy.

I know pro-gun control types can come across as "ban all the scary things", but personally I don't have too much problem with it being possible to acquire even military style rifles. I just think "possible" should be a heavily qualified term, increasingly so the more dangerous [insert whatever definition of dangerous you think is reasonable here] the weapon in question is. If you want to own and fire an AK-47 or AR-15 that should be accompanied by strong regulation as to purpose, storage, automatic capacity, magazine size, areas of use, and so forth. It's quite evident the harms that can result from such weapons being kept in residential properties all over the place, but less so if they need to be stored in clubs/ranges with a high level of security, for example. The same reasoning can apply to specific purposes such as hunting, animal control, etc.

That said I don't have too much problem with these being banned outright either, as in the UK, but perhaps qualified restrictions better suit a country already saturated in firearms.

Adding a new species to an existing ecosystem usually has unexpected consequences. Wolves were once found all over North America, but that pre-human ecosystem has been gone for a long time now. They certainly wouldn't subsist on pig alone.

I guess I just automatically mistrust their assessment of the situation, that rapid massed fire from the anti-pork militia is essential, since it appears to not have solved the problem or even mitigated it.

Historically, invasive species along these lines are really difficult to address effectively. I don't think anyone in their "assessment" of the situation is claiming things are going well; quite the contrary. The point is that right there, right now, is a use for which the AR-15 is exceptionally well-suited, and if you're interested in reducing the presence of assault weapons you ought to have a strategy in mind for addressing these situations. A strategy other than ad hominem attacks, that is.
Because I guarantee you that underlying this pig solution is a non-trivial amount of gun money, as no doubt the people in that training video could tell you if they were in the habit of disclosing their roles as propagandists. So I guess you can keep field testing softball pitches that the NRA can hit out of the park, that works too.

Yes. Try to reason with the guy who reTweets Ron Paul. You'll get far with that.

Warthogs hunting warthogs: make it happen America.

The text of the bill is up at the Feinstein link from earlier and this appears to be a legitimate list. Essentially, they are trying to ban the future manufacture and sale of new rifles of any caliber (other then .22) that look like military style weapons. That includes among the above pistol caliber rifles.

I know there is no way this is going to pass the House and I'm not even sure it would pass the Senate since a number of Senators from rural states have already indicated that they think something like this goes too far. So this is more about PR.

It's going to make the gun market go even more crazy as well.

It looks like Stephen King is trying to make money off the gun control debate by selling an essay titled "Guns" on the matter for 99 cents on Amazon's Kindle store.

Can we all just agree that this is incredibly tacky, and would be regardless of the positions espoused in the essay?

If he's really trying to communicate to anyone by doing this, it's only preaching to the choir since I can't see a gun rights advocate going, "Hey, an 8k word essay that regurgitates everything I've already pretended to listen to from everyone else? Holy shit, take my dollar!"

So, yeah.

edit: Just reread the blurb, grammar much, Steve-O? Guess his editor was off fishing in the Keys.

Heck, I'd be happy to sell you my 8,000 word screed for only $.49!

In fact, if we just turn this thread into an e-book we could probably charge at least $.79!

Oh wait, we're already giving it away for free.

Is there a non-stupid explanation? Like, how hard is it to put up something for free on Kindle?

If only we had some sort of interconnected web where people could share information with others for free.

Lots of folk who think of themselves as "highly rational people" have poor regulation of their emotional states and a lack of insight into the interconnections between their thoughts and their feelings. Accepting that you have feelings and that they play a role in how you think and what you believe is an important step towards the kind of maturity that allows one to engage in lively debate without feeling personally attacked by other's disagreements with one's opinions.

While neither factor is perfectly predictive, I'd say there's a definite positive correlation between being a nerd, being a libertarian and this kind of alienation from one's emotional self.

Hey look someone else shot himself at a gun show. His excuse was... it wasn't loaded earlier in the week.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/ar...ntal-shooting-reported-at-Des-Moines-gun-show

P.S. Feinstein's bill is apparently equivalent to rape. http://www.teapartynation.com/profiles/blog/show?id=3355873:BlogPost:2418249

How cute, he's trying to say "we're getting fucked" in a clever and not at all insulting way. I love how he starts by basically saying "I haven't actually read the bill but I watched people talk about it" -- welcome to civics in America, folks.

It's not Florida, Arizona, or Texas!

I want to believe that Sheriff Clarke is trolling the public in an effort to get funding back.

...which isn't the question I asked. Poking around it looks like $0.99 is the minimum price on Kindle. You can manipulate their rules to trick them into publishing a free book on Kindle, but it's not easy. Christ, people, you can look these things up.

As to "why didn't he just put it on a blog or something" my guess it that it's some contractual obligation, or a channel thing, or it's a publishing experiment around fast turnaround in the traditional space there. Because, you know, there's no reason to immediately suspect Stephen King is some sort of profit-mongering dick, so there's probably an easier explanation.

Christ, people, you can figure these things out.

The e-publishers take their cut on everything you want to push to their markets unless either you can manipulate them otherwise or it's a public domain work that they see fit to put up on their store. There's nothing stopping anyone from releasing an epub off the grid, although that requires the consumer to discover the work elsewhere and get off their ass and download it from somewhere other than their device's store (trivial on most devices, not so trivial on some). I'm assuming that if King's simply doing it to get the essay out there, it's easier and more visible to just push it to Amazon and charge a buck.

I wouldn't question his motives if he made it available elsewhere, and if his publishing contracts forbid him from making publicly available a not-for-profit non-fiction personal essay, he has a pretty shitty publishing contract because a contract like that could potentially forbid authors from saying anything online.

It's 25 pages and he put it out as a Kindle single to get it in front of his many fans in the Amazon store, which probably reaches more eyes than his webpage - he's also not the blogging kind of author, so to him it probably makes more sense this way.

As Jason hints at, King is not known to be a profit-mongering dick. He supports many charities and disagree or agree with his views, which from reading summaries doesn't sound any deeper than what's presented in this thread, he's not the kind of guy to try and profit from tragedy or a heated political debate.

And you oly have to go to stephenking.com to find this on the front page:

So give it a rest.

Why he doesn't make it available for free through other channels? I don't know.