Goodbye, New York, California and Illinois – Hello where?

Please don't take HN threads further into regional flamewar (or any flamewar).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I hear you. But that’s like suggesting defeat. The problem here is bad city planning and Sacramento shenanigans. A very cunning move of turning people against people so the govt can get away with doing nothing while pocketing all the cash.

They are literally pitting us against each other instead of fixing infrastructure, public transport, homelessness, community services and tax reform so its less taxes, not more.

Imagine you are a household and you want to maintain a standard of living. As family size grows, it makes sense to cut down the budget, eat out less and making the money and resources stretch more over more heads.

What the govt is doing is essentially vying for free money by taxing people more and creating more cash rich people. And pocketing the cash for the care and feeding of big Gov. they are making out like bandits. This is what Kings and feudal lords did...just tax working class more.

Just follow the money. I did it with just one thing. Prop 47. They don’t even charge people anymore for crimes that involve goods valued less than $950.

Why? Because it costs money to maintain prisons, police force and courts etc. waste of time and resources to petty crime.

This has resulted in more petty crime. Car break ins, property theft, chain snatching, lap top snatching, shopping mall robberies etc. the police won’t even take a report so there is a record of it. Who knows what that number is..

So you’d think they’d save oodles of money, right? Where is it going? It goes back to unfunded pension liabilities. It costs $70k per prisoner. Prison guard unions are the most influential unions. It’s going back to fill the hole that is unfundwd pension liabilities. It’s the same with teachers union, police officers unions, Fire Dept unions. These departments keep shrinking as density increases but they become more and more expensive and have larger budgets. Where is the money going? Pensions negotiated by unions.

Look at homelessness reforms. Where is all the millions going? Half the budget is for salaries and employees. It’s all coming from our taxes. Take every expense and scratch the surface. Beneath all the goop and gunk obscuring transparency, there is the govt playing with our money. With no accountability. We don’t ask questions because we are fighting amongst ourselves. Turning tech workers against seniors. Homeless against working class. Teachers against parents. And indoctrination begins at public schools where kids walk out to ‘support teachers unions’.

This has to end. Let’s not be suckers. This is the oldest game in the book. This is how the British colonized my people for 250 years. They called it Divide and Conquer.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22079750.

People we know are leaving (I have been in SoCal -- Santa Barbara, LA, and Orange counties -- for the last 12 years) but are clearly being replaced, and then some, by am influx of migrants and immigrants.

Just of note, automatic weapons where ban in the early 80's those that are left in the US are tightly regulated and require a FFL class 3, have strict rules on transfer and the local sheriff must approve the transfer. Many sheriffs will not allow class 3's in their county. If they will not, the resident is out of luck on getting one of the few automatic weapons left. Those remaining weapons sell for upwards of 10 to 20K and not one has been used in a mass shooting in recent history. People buying automatic weapons are by and large collectors.

What you are referencing is semi-automatic weapons, which require you to pull the trigger each time you want a bullet to fire. Many hunting rifles are semi-automatic. The difference between a semi-automatic hunting rifle and a semi-automatic black rifle is the difference between a Corvette and a Corvette with a Ferrari body kit. It's all cosmetic they are at the core the exact same rifle. A Remington semi-auto .223 hunting rifle is in spirit the same gun as a AR-15.

Handguns and homemade explosives are a much greater public threat and that is the reason most gun rights advocates see no value in compromise. The issue is completely a emotional issue and the facts, which advocates are well versed in, weight out contrary to the arguments that gun control advocates are making. The reality is that other than the occasional mass shooting people are just not being killed by rifles of any kind. Handguns are used in orders of magnitude more than rifles to commit violent crimes. A sincere effort to remove guns from criminals would focus on handguns and not rifles. Therefore rights advocated jump to the conclusion that the effort is to disarm the legally owned, armed population as that is the majority of rifle owners. The simple fact is the majority of criminals use handguns, they are more easily concealed, easier to wield and easier to reload.

The only exception to this is mass shooters who want to LARP Call of Duty. Which is why they choose rifles if FPS's and movies used handguns, mass-shooters would use handguns because in their crazy minds they are role playing. That being said, you have a slightly higher chance of getting killed in a mass shooting than you have getting hit by lighting. By the number it's just a non-event. In saying that, I am not trying to minimize them, just stating the facts, they are horrible events and we should certainly do something about them. But disarming millions of law abiding citizens to prevent a lightning strike event punishes the masses for a statistically small problem.

Common sense gun control would have at it's core handgun controls as well as mental health protocols. If they don't then they are conceived via emotion rather than statistical fact.