… No serious hunter who is hunting with an AR 15 is going to be emptying an entire magazine into a single target.

It is a weapon that can be used for fairly rapid suppressive fire or successive point fire… but it can also just shoot one bullet at a time, pretty accurately, a pretty decent distance away.

And while sure, a 5.56 is maybe not strictly optimal as a hunting round in some scenarios… it is totally capable as a hunting round in many hunting scenarios.

There are many rounds that are specifically geared toward hunting… that are comparable in size and velocity to the .223 / 5.56.

There are many kinds of game where a round roughly the size and velocity of a .223 / 5.56, from the right range… where that round is a reasonable and effective way of taking down your target, with a single well placed shot, without overkill, and without being underpowered.

Yes, there certainly are some animals and ranges where a 5.56 would be ineffective and you’d basically just be needlessly harming and injuring the animal but not likely to kill it any kind of quickly.

Generally speaking, in the US, there are a myriad of laws that govern what kinds of animals can be legally hunted with which kinds of rounds, through which kinds of guns, at which ranges, though the specifics of this vary considerably by region and locale.

Its not really accurate to say that the .223/5.56 is like, somehow, uniquely unsuitable as a hunting round.

It is entirely possible to take down the approriate sized game from an appropriate range, with one well placed .223/5.56 round.

Indeed, the 5.56 … basically just is a beefed up, militarized version of the .223, which was originally a hunting round.

The .223 also just still is a common hunting round.

Also your reasoning about how hunters do or should reduce the animal’s suffering doesn’t make that much sense.

With most kinds of game, an ideal shot will go through both lungs and the heart.

But big animals are big, and it’ll take em a while to bleed out. This is this case with basically any kind of round being used to hunt any kind of game of moderate to large size.

Its pretty rare to get a shot that just instantly kills an animal.

You are basically always going to be tracking them for some distance… and even if they drop dead in place, you have to make the trek from where you are to where they are, which could be … roughly a 1/4 of a mile, 1/2 a kilometer, across difficult terrain.

Guns are also not as easy to shoot, and many more factors go into their accuracy, than you would think from just watching movies or playing video games.

Shooting, marksmanship, is a skill, really a set of many skills, and no amount of … perfectly made, superior weaponry… will magically make an unskilled or low skill marksman into an expert.

For the record: I’ve never actually gone hunting. I do not own an AR 15.

I don’t think I could bring myself to end another living creature, aside of being in some self defense situation like for some reason a mountain lion is inside my apartment.

But I’ve known hunters, know at least something about hunting, and I do enjoy going to a range and just target shooting, every so often.

An AR 15 is a practical weapon, that can be used to moderate or great effect in a wide variety of possible scenarios.

They are also plentiful and fairly cheap, at least you can get some variants fairly cheap.

They are also very modifiable and customizable so that they can be better at certain tasks, then reconfigured to be better at some other task.

I’m not even trying to argue that… mass civillian ownership of AR 15s is good or bad, I am just trying to explain why a lot of people have them, and do not necessarily have them for dubious or delusional reasons.

Though there certainly are a lot of people who I would say do have them, or maybe, have as many as they have of them, for dubious and delusional reasons.

Yep.

I guess maybe a less verbose way to say it would be:

Company towns, but…! Everything is computer!

Yes, that’s true, but I meant more like uh…

The Disney+ life supscription is partnered with Starbucks, which is also partnered with Amazon Whole Foods and Trader Joes, and Verizon, and Subaru and GM.

The Netflix life supscription is partnered with Costco, Cox, and McDonalds, Chevy and Toyota.

The HBO Max life supscription is partnered with Walmart, ATT, Honda and Ford, … Cluck’in Bell, fucking whatever.

And then also some kind of alliance type structure with various regional or national landlords/land developers.

Like, uh, roughly the idea of a Japanese Keiretsu, or a Korean Chaebol, but kind of inverted, applied much more thoroughly to the consumer side, than to the finance/internal corporate structures.

So yeah, you just pick one of those three life subscription plans, they all have various tiers, etc, and you… well you rent or lease or finance basically everything.

Thats how the idea of a kind of Corporate Citizenship will start, something like that.

That’s my nightmare/prognostication.

It won’t be based around like, families of business that define your employment paths, as exists in much more uh, ‘classic’ cyberpunk, I guess.

It’ll be oriented around consumption, getting things, because… practically no one will even have ‘real’ jobs, having a career will become a defining marker of being born into an upper crust corpo elite class of some kind, the rest of us proles will just be shuffled between gig work, retail jobs, jail, prison, military, etc.

Well alright, thanks for the info!

Yep, yep, you’re right.

Dozzi92 set me straight, I goofed.

I would counter that with: no, no it did not.

It just turned people into hypocrites, hypocrites with better marketability.

Brevity? Maybe, kind of, if you count a barrage of snippets as brief.

Clarity? … No. Because without a format that fully allows a nuanced but actually coherent and consistent position or explanation… it just makes you into a hypocrite.

takes out ear phones

Oh, haha!

Whoops, I made a typo.

Bio engineered, not ‘buo’.

Either way… you don’t happen to have a donut, do you?

pathetic puppy eyes

absolute necropost, but:

Oh my god thanks man, my stash was getting low, I start to get ancy without my …'s, I just … shit there I go again.

I just need em, ok?

Fuck.

But yeah, thanks.

sniff

Oh, fuck you’re completely right.

I somehow totally glossed over the digi cam.

… In my defense, I did not have my glasses on, and… well, the camo worked.

Fuck.

Ok, ok so… by your uh, constraints, this would have been basically more like mid 00s?

04 or later, but… prior to 09?

And, by old deserts… you mean the ole ‘chocolate chip camo’?

… I guess if you’re willing to induldge my mil-nerd questioning… do you know if the Army and Marines are mostly swapped over to some variant of MultiCam now?

Or does the digi stuff still exist in large numbers?

… Or am I just wildly off base with that line of questions?

I made another comment but my guess is the image in the meme is roughly Gulf War era… I’ve not been in the military but I don’t think ACOGs became a thing that was basically standard issue untill… well even before you went to boot in 09.

I’m thinking this picture was taken some time in the 90s, probably, maybe early 00s, is what I’m trying to say.

I think the used picture is even older than the meme itself, my guess would be that it is from roughly the Gulf War era.

EDIT:

I am wrong, see below comments.

And I know a buo engineered half human half angel thing who prefers .45 Long Colt…

… but also prefers to never use it to kill.

Give the GEP Gun.

Never know when you need to make a silent take down.

Yeah, this rule really irked me.

This is… its an older meme, motivational poster format, wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was made by a gung ho Gulf War vet either before or not long after Iraq 2 Electric Boogaloo commenced, drenched in Americana gun culture pride.

There are plently of pistol rounds other than .45 ACP that are quite good in combat scenarios, most at this point would probably agree that having more 9mm over less .45 is preferable, otherwise 2011s wouldn’t even be a thing.

Also: its less common, but uh… 5.7?

5.7 is actually more likely to pen body armor, than a 9mm or a .45, if your scenario is you’re fighting against other people with body armor.

And you can make a double stack magazine with it.

And there are a fair number of Police, Intelligence, Military organizations that use the FiveSeven regularly.

And… there are now even a growing number of hunters who will tell you that some kind of pistol in 5.7 is their backup, in case of something big ambushing them.

357 is of course very powerful, but they’re also huge rounds in comparison to .45 or 9m… kinda hard to fit into a semi-auto pistol.

Unless you wanna talk about the .357 SIG.

… but we don’t talk about the .357 SIG …

I mean… its worse than that.

Its definitive proof that we live in an anti-meritocratic society, that is ruled by nepotism and violent and dangerous sociopaths.

Yes, its violence if it goes through a complex system for the violence to happen, is done indirectly.

So yeah, our lives are ruled (and ruined) by utterly incompetent dangerous sociopaths, who will gleefully destroy the entire economy because… they like buzzwords and feeling like they are smart.

We either need to kill these people, or they will kill all of us, just give it a decade.

… in a decade?

Uh, no, more like 3 to 9 months.

Things are about to get very bad, very fast.

Huh! Ok, fair enough.

Ah ok!

So… is open carry … functionally legal in MN/Minneapolis? Or… is it basically not? Or is it contentious and complicated?

Fuck, I was gonna make this comment.

So yeah, this is a pistol, it has a shoulder brace, not a proper buttstock, its basically a very thin piece of plastic that is intentionally designed to be uncomfortable to use as an actual buttstock.

If this person wanted to put a real buttstock on it, well, they’d have to apply to register the weapon as a short barreled rifle, which costs money and takes time, and gets you on a registry.

Now, you say that to carry this weapon, a pistol, you need a concealed carry permit.

… Things get really complicated here depending on your exact location in the US, but uh… what this guy is doing is called open carry.

As in, it isn’t concealed. It is plainly visible, open for all to see.

Broadly speaking… as long as you are not brandishing the weapon, threatening others with it, committing crimes while open carrying, not in like a school zone or something… in many parts of the country, this is legal, and you don’t need a CC permit for it.

I don’t know exactly how it works in Minneapolis though, and the technicalities of this get astonishingly complex very fast.

But yeah the original idea of a Concealed Carry permit… is that it is for weapons that are not plainly visible, not on an externally visible holster, but are instead in some kind of holster inside your vest, under your shirt, deep in a pocket, etc.

Also also, for any confused ‘leftists’:

Marx & Engels:

The whole proletariat must be armed at once with muskets, rifles, cannon and ammunition, and the revival of the old-style citizens’ militia, directed against the workers, must be opposed.

Where the formation of this militia cannot be prevented, the workers must try to organize themselves independently as a proletarian guard, with elected leaders and with their own elected general staff; they must try to place themselves not under the orders of the state authority but of the revolutionary local councils set up by the workers.

Where the workers are employed by the state, they must arm and organize themselves into special corps with elected leaders, or as a part of the proletarian guard.

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

Yeah uh thats actually more of a pro-gun sentiment than what is currently legal in the US.

Marx is saying that the proles … should have cannons.

You know, where the modern equivalent would be like, a field artillery piece, a howitzer.

Interesting!

Would you know where to find just the average/median income of a household, instead of an individual?

That would be closer to the same rough math I’m doing with the US figures.

If you were to try to set this up for another scenario, not a family of 4, but say, a single mom or dad with one kid, well then all the numbers change significantly.

And yeah, the … the whole mess of it is… who actually qualifies for what actual benefits, at what income levels?

A huge problem with the way the US is set up (the article goes into this) is that basically you end up with multiple glass ceilings that you have to break through.

You have to increase your income by substantial, not incremental amounts, for the net income gain to actually offset the benefits you now lose from only slightly breaching some income threshold.

So the whole system actually functions to disincentivize or punish people who… ‘succeed’ more… but not enough more.

Now, take that as your base scenario, and now… you tell me:

How much debt does it make sense for you to go into, to get a college degree, that… may or may not actually result in you either… staying at the same income level, only slightly breaching some threshold/glass ceiling, or perhaps, substantially breaching that threshold/glass ceiling?