Tag: guns

I’d forgotten how much I loved watching this short SF film five years ago…

… and hate living it now.

(Incidentally I don’t recall the bit with Stuart Russel at the end being part of this when I first watched it, and feel it dilutes its power now: there is no reason to say “Given developments in A.I. and drones, someday soon this is going to be real!” It’s already real; it’s called guns: 1 out of every 20 Americans owns an AR-15; 3 in 10 own a gun of some sort. Only half of those guns are stored under lock and key, and only a third unloaded.)

Who’s holding the camera?

Jack Teixeira, dressed in camouflage fatigues, his finger wrapped around the trigger of a semiautomatic rifle, faced the camera and spoke as though reciting an oath.

“Jews scam, n—-rs rape, and I mag dump”

from the Washington Post: “Alleged leaker fixated on guns and envisioned ‘race war’”

First and foremost a video like this gets me thinking “Who’s coming to hurt us?”

(Answer: This guy #duh Me and my kids, we scam. He shoots. You get to score points tallied in our blood. End of story.)

But after that, videos like this get me thinking of how the camera fundamentally misdirects: we get so fixated on what’s in the frame, we forget about what’s outside the frame, who is holding the camera, pointing it, choosing what it shows and what it hides.

So I wonder: who was holding this camera? What have they left out? What choice did they make, and why?

Incidentally, if you want to watch a better man than me really stunningly dive into this issue, you can do worse than Errol Morris’s documentary about the American war crimes at Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure:

“Big Dick Brigade!” *tee hee!*

Yes, this was a real ad for a real thing, with no entendre intended. And, yes, I have the mentality of a toddler.

Although lines of ad copy such as “Get Big Dick and be envied by every boy in town,” “Become a member of the ‘Big Dick Brigade,’” and “How to get BIG DICK free” might seem like obvious double entendres to modern audiences, they were not read as such by customers of the time.

“Is This a Real Ad for a ‘Big Dick’ Machine Gun for Kids?” by David Mikkelson
vintage advertisement for "Big Dick" toy gun via https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-dick-machine-gun-toy/

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s claim that “the leading cause of death among children is a firearm” is actually MUCH MORE upsetting than you think

Yes, “the leading cause of death among children is a firearm” is an extremely upsetting sentence—and also, a sadly accurate one (given that you define children as “humans between the ages of 1 and 19”; infants in their first year die from lots of stuff that doesn’t kill you after your first year; if you include them in this number, then it skews toward premature birth, birth defects, and SIDS).

But, the truly upsetting part is buried in this chart (shown below with a big dumb pink circle to emphasis the “Mechanisms” section), which was an addendum to the original source Schumer’s staff cited. 

Guns are the leading cause of death among children, and most of those deaths are murder.

Population wide, gun deaths are usually ~66% suicide and ~33% homicide. Among children, that’s now basically flipped.

In other words, in America today most gun deaths are suicide, and most adults will die of something else (probably disease). But for kids in America, the leading cause of death is guns, and most of those gun deaths are murders.

This is a fun little film…

… but just a reminder to my American readers: We already live in this reality. This country isn’t just full of guns; it’s full of ammunition. If you have access to even a single bullet, you are $10 and a trip to the hardware store from making a wonderfully lethal weapon: unserialized, untraceable, highly concealable, nearly foolproof.  You won’t be doing any civil massacres with a hardware-store slam gun, but you can mostly definitely kill the guy standing in front of you with little effort.

The reason no one will shoot you today is because no one feels like shooting you today.

Why Bulletproof Hoodies and Backpacks are Bullshit

This video isn’t about “bulletproof backpacks” and “bulletproof hoodies” and all the other misery-profiteering school products out there—but it illustrates an important point, which is that this shit isn’t a +4 magic shield; you have to stop the projectile, and you have to do something with the force it’s exerted, and you have to be able to get up and get moving to avoid getting shot in the face or the crotch or anywhere else that’s exposed because you’re on the ground and gasping.  Life isn’t a video game:

Heck, just jump to ~3:34, and see the wreckage caused by an extremely common, extremely legal gun—even when the bullet is stopped.

Incidentally, here’s the testing documentation for the bullet-resistant hoodies featured in that BoingBoing article linked above. 

Do those hoodies stop a .44 Mag?  Yup!  Zero penetration.  That is indeed impressive.  But look closer at these results: the witness panel was deformed by 1.25 inches on average. That’s how far that bullet would go into your body—even though it hasn’t torn the fabric. It’s called “soft body armor” for a reason, folks.  The manufacturer implies that the hood will protect you, but that’s a load of shit:  If your skull suffers a blunt penetration of 1.25 inches, you are dead. Your brain is only about .5 inches from the outside world.