131–140 of 523 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As are the guns themselves.
Nah, it's an onerous process but plenty of people have concealed carry permits in NYC.
You can't carry in like 90% of Manhattan even with the permit. Even carrying in your own apartment is prohibited without an additional permit.
So why is wealth concentration bad for society apart from that? Because the ultimate form of wealth distribution is war and revolution. It's way the descendants of Rockefeller, the Medicis or Caesar don't own the world. Society eventually snaps and a lot of violence ensues. Eventually you end up with the French Revolution and heads end up on pikes or separated by guillotines.
One of the messages of Fight Club is that the rich and powerful cannot insulate themselves from the people they are oppressing. Your gardener, your driver, your chef, your security guard. Any of them is capable of taking matters into their hands and they will only be pushed so far.
You saw this play out in Japan with the reaction to Shinzo Abe's assassination a couple of years ago. While world leaders were outraged, the Japanese kinda got it. You can dig deep into this with the Unification Church, its influence on Japanese politics and, if you really want, how the Unification Church is tied to the CIA.
United Healthcare is quite literally killing people for profit. Just like the Sacklers and so many others. We've become completely desensitized to this. Private health insurance is completely inefficient (look at how much the US pays per-capita for health care vs any other developed nation and then compare our coverage). We could literally save millions of lives and cut costs by getting rid of these lecherous middlemen.
So I don't condone or justify violence like this. It's simply analysis to see that this kind of thing is going to continue to happen as material conditions worsen and wealth inequality rises. In his ~3 year tenure are United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson quite literally killed thousands of people yet there's so little outrage over that.
Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.
This is the comment that has been in my head since the news broke, and I feel like we are only at the beginning, like the pause before the first drop of a rollercoaster with the forward looking macro (political and economic tension, broadly speaking). Laws and rules only matter so long as we're all willing to believe they do.
I wonder if we'd see slightly more ethical behavior from corporations if their C-level staff and board members had to routinely practice lock-down drills because they were getting offed once a week.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, it's an onerous process but plenty of people have concealed carry permits in NYC.
Costly permit. Requires authorization by high-ranking NYPD. Only given out to people in certain jobs or with bribes. The only practice range is in Ridgeland. You're required to transport it in your own car, in the trunk, ammo separate from the gun, and only to and from the range. That puts it well beyond the reach of the vast majority of NYC residents.
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If you took this idea and worked it into a script with characters and drama you'd get something close to John Q starring Denzel Washington. Not his best work, but a pretty good watch.
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It's wild that we let insurance companies label government triage as "death panels" while for-profit denial innovation got a free pass.
Source?
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In the interest of brevity, they're not called silencers, they're called suppressors since they don't "silence" anything like in a Hollywood movie. Typically a suppressor will reduce the sound signature of a gunshot from something like 140dBA to 110dBA. Still enough to cause hearing damage and be heard a quarter mile away.
They're called suppressors among gun nerds. But silencer is the standard term in American English. If you have complaints about how language has evolved, you may contact Richard Stallman and ask him for advice.
the guy who eats his toenails? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ&rco=1
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the interest of brevity, they're not called silencers, they're called suppressors since they don't "silence" anything like in a Hollywood movie. Typically a suppressor will reduce the sound signature of a gunshot from something like 140dBA to 110dBA. Still enough to cause hearing damage and be heard a quarter mile away.
They are called silencers. It's the number one definition for the word in my dictionary.
But it's extremely incorrect-- suppressors don't silence guns. Suppressed firearms are still loud.