I wouldn’t say justified, buuuuuuuuuut where else could he have gone? China is about the only other possibility.

To be clear, I think he should be pardoned, and thing USA-Patriot act should be overturned.

Yeah, we’re doing the same in the US… :(

The essential problem is that the people working now are paying for the people that are retired. It would make more sense for the gov’t to have taxed the people prior to their retirement, and have invested those taxes, so that in their retirement they would be getting out what they had previously paid in. And switching over to a system like that would require double taxation on the population now, which will make such a proposal very unopopular.

But if your retired population is growing, and you have fewer people working, then you either need to increase the retirement age–so that more people are paying into the system–or increase the taxation overall. If I recall correctly, Denmark has been seeing a negative population growth; that’s a real problem for retirement schemes that rely on current taxes paying for retirees.

Is this fair to people that have been working in trades and have beaten up their body for 40 years? No. Likewise, it’s not really fair to people that have working in white-collar jobs that may still be more than capable of excelling at their job, and still want to work. (My dad had mandatory retirement at 72 due to company policy; he immediately got re-hired as an on-site consultant, and has been doing that for over a decade.)

EDIT - this is a huge problem in the US. The social security taxes now on working people are immediately paid out to retirees. SS benefits go up to account for inflation, but the amount coming in is decreasing because population growth has slowed. Without major reforms, social security in the US won’t be solvent by the time I retire, IF I ever retire.

It’s been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I’ve forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)

It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.

SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.

Wut?

No, silencers weren’t regulated into the NFA by the ATF; congress put them in there, way back in '34. You can read the text of the act here. It’s in the very first section:

AN ACT

To provide for the taxation of manufacturers, importers, and dealers in certain firearms and machine guns, to tax the sale or other disposal of such weapons, and to restrict importation and regulate interstate transportation thereof.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of American in Congress assembled, that for the purposes of this Act -

(a) The term “firearm” means a shotgun or rifle having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length, or any other weapon, except a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such a weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm [emphasis added] whether or not such a firearm is included within the foregoing definition.

It’s right there in the text.

Aside from that, the ATF per se didn’t even exist prior to '72; before that, it was part of the IRS, rather than an agency within the DoJ, and before the IRS, it was part of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

It’s not up to the ATF to make laws; congress is supposed to do that.

Also, “sensible” gun control is functionally no different from “sensible” abortion restrictions. If you want to fix gun violence, fix the problems that lead up to it. If you want to stop abortions, it’s easier to teach factual sexual health and make sure that everyone has free access to birth control.

First - the place to shoot is the hard part for many people. Indoor ranges don’t allow you to do the kind of practice that you would need to do in order to become proficient with an automatic firearm. Outdoor ranges are quite a drive for most people.

Second, and more important - the fact that people can learn doesn’t mean a lot. Most people, including most gun owners, don’t. A shockingly large percentage of gun owners don’t practice regularly, or at all.

Hard pass on discussing anything with your denialist guns r gud mentality

Yeah, isn’t is strange that someone doesn’t want the state to have the monopoly on violence, and believes in civil rights? Weird, right?

From your article:

“Platkin said Glock is profiting by continuing to sell the adaptable version in U.S. markets, even as they make and sell handguns in Europe that cannot accommodate such a switch.”

 This is something I've having a really hard time finding a source on. Everything I can find says that that about half of the Glock pistols that are sold in the US are made in Austria. And, as I said, sales in Europe for pistols are very tightly controlled, meaning that very few pistols--relatively speaking--are getting into the hands of anyone other than cops and military, so I'm not sure that there's a strong motive for them to make the design alteration in the EU.
 Aside from the assertion from New Jersey's AG, I just can't find a source for that. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, and, if the AG is correct, then yes, Glock should change their design in the US. There's already precedent for this; open bolt semi-automatic firearms manufactured after 1986 are banned because they can--in general--be readily converted to full auto. However, given how many Glocks currently exist in the US, that would be an enormous legal mess that could possibly result in the National Firearms Act being declared unconstitutional.

“Also known as “auto switches,” the devices, which are already illegal in New Jersey and some other states, […]”

They’re illegal in EVERY state; it covered under federal law, specifically the National Firearms Act (1934) and Firearm Owners Protection Act (1986). Even if it was legal in New Jersey, it would still be a felony to possess or use one.

How many people actually go out to a range every single week and burn through a couple hundred rounds working on training drills though? I did shooting at distance today (100-550y with .223) and burned through about 140 rounds, and most ranges don’t even have that kind of distance available. (Thank fuck the RSO had a spotting scope; I couldn’t see my splash in the grass to see where my rounds were going when I didn’t hit. He was able to see trace with his scope though.)

Do you have evidence to support that? Because AFAIK, the Glocks made both in the US and Austria have exactly the same design. OTOH, in most of Europe, it’s very difficult to get the appropriate license for a handgun, so it’s largely irrelevant.

Yes. Trump is not actually friendly to gun rights.

If he was, he’d be pushing to get the Hearing Protection Act (HR 404) and the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (HR 2395) out of committee and to the floor for a vote.

Biden wasn’t friendly to gun rights either. I don’t think most politicians are friendly to gun rights, since if they actually managed to expand them to what they should be, they wouldn’t have any major issue remaining to campaign on.

But it doesn’t.

An automatic firearm shoots multiple bullets each time you pull the trigger, until you release the trigger; the trigger does not reset.

With most semi-automatic guns, you have a light spring that resets the trigger once you release your finger. A forced reset trigger (FRT) forces the trigger to reset. The FRT pushes the trigger forward, even if you’re trying to keep the trigger pulled back. If you keep tension on your finger, as soon as it’s reset, you’re pulling it again. So, legally, you are pulling the trigger multiple times, because the trigger is resetting each time a bullet is fired.

Based on the way that a machine gun is defined in the National Firearms Act of 1934, an FRT is not a machine gun. The ATF can’t re-write the law to say what they want it to say; that requires an act on congress.

The is compounded by the fact that Rare Breed ran the idea by the ATF before they went into production, and they have/had a memorandum from the ATF saying that an FRT was not a machine gun, and not subject to the NFA. After they had approved it, and *after Rare Breed had produced and sold a few hundred/thousand, the ATF raided Rare Breed, and also showed up at customer’s homes demanding items that the customers had legally purchased (e.g., unreasonable search and seizure, a 4A violation).

Machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1986, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept.

This is… Not true. The Firearm Owners Protection Act–among other things–made it illegal to transfer automatic firearms manufactured after '86 (i.e., “post ban”) to non-police/military people. Machine guns produced prior to '86 that were already in the hands of non-police/military people can still legally be own and bought/sold. A pre-ban select-fire AR-15 will run about $30k+ these days.

Secondly, there are a number of groups and people still actively fighting to overturn the NFA as being a violation of 1A. There was a case out of the 5th circuit (?) not that long ago that points out the circular logic of the gov’t in re: machine guns. E.g., per Heller, guns in common use can’t be banned, and machine guns aren’t in common use, so they can be banned. But they aren’t in common use because they were largely banned by the gov’t. The gov’t created the condition of them not being in common use by banning them, and then used the lack of common use–due to the ban–as justification for the legality of the ban.

I have noticed that ICE usually wants to conduct their splashy raids in areas with very low gun ownership, e.g., NYC, Boston, etc.

It’s more or less a textbook example of why the ‘community standards’ standard is bad, but it’s still current case law. I sincerely wish that some large white-shoe law firm had take the case as part of their pro bono work, but, fuck me, that just never seems to happen.

It definitely does not. Look up Boiled Angel; I think that case was an absolute fucking travesty, but as of right now, it’s still good case law.

Pretty sure that Alito, Thomas, and Barrett would be all-in on that. Not sure about Goresuch, Roberts, or Kavanaugh.

There’s SCOTUS precedent saying that pornography–but not obscenity–is covered by 1A. (Obscenity isn’t very well defined, but it’s generally understood to mean pedophilia/anything involving minors (including drawings), certain acts of violence combined with sex, bestiality, and possibly necrophilia. Other extreme sexual acts–such as crush fetishes–might also fall under obscenity.) You can’t pass laws to unspool constitutional rights; your only legal recourse is either stacking the court with people that want to change precedent, or amend the constitution.

Technically everything you’ve done is in the past, unless you’re doing it at this very second in time. So by that rationale, a priest could say, well, they’re confessing, it’s in the past, they’re repentant–not an ongoing risk–therefore I don’t have to report. But that’s obviously bullshit.

An M134 shoots up to 6000 rounds per minute, and it shoots 7.62x51mm NATO (.308 Win). 12 seconds would be a maximum of 1200 rounds. If I’m buying some of the very best match-grade ammunition I can get (Hornady 168gr ELD-M) at $2.15/round, that works out to a maximum of $2580. Which ain’t chump change, but is still about $397,420 short of $400,000.