From a global perspective, the average middle class or even working class American who drives everywhere in an SUV, eats huge portions of meat products at wasteful restaurants, and generally consumes ten times as much as the average person is part of the rich. And yes, we deserve it.

In typical American legal parlance a “machine gun” is any firearm that fires more than one round per trigger pull, so it’s more or less correct.

I would say it is a problem when criminals have a way to magdump a police cruiser in literally under a second with a concealable weapon.

A prior lawsuit filed over the “Trump Train” alleged the San Marcos Police Department violated the Ku Klux Klan Act by failing to send a police report after multiple 911 calls were made and a bus rider said his life was threatened. It accused officers of privately laughing and joking about the emergency calls. San Marcos settled the lawsuit in 2023 for $175,000 and a requirement that law enforcement get training on responding to political violence.

In case you were still wondering what side the police are on, and whether you could count on their help if these people came after you.

“Made for NATO Army”

No military issue weapon is marked like this. Some idiot with a laser engraver had a little side project, possibly to inflate the value of the gun.

I imagine a lot of the Western arms flowing around that part of the globe right now come from Afghanistan and the US’s chaotic retreat.

I know you mean well, but really you have an unorthodox opinion that the vast majority of users, civilian, professional, even at the organizational level, disagree with.

If you’re relying on a mechanical safety on the firearm itself to prevent tragedy, you’re already screwed. Kids can bypass that stuff with enough fiddling. They just make the firearm more complicated to use, which can paradoxically create more mistakes in some instances, especially under pressure. Nothing replaces responsible handling.

I predominantly shoot Beretta 92 pistols. Traditional double action, comes with a manual safety/decocker from the factory. On the one I shoot the most, I purchased a kit from Beretta that disables the safety to make it only a decocker. It doesn’t make the pistol less safe, it is a dangerous weapon either way. It just simplifies it.

Send me your “dangerous” Glock pistols instead of destroying them.

Starting your own business should not be the best or only vehicle to prosperity. You should be able to make a comfortable living working a normal job that doesn’t break you.

Failure rate of small business is high, and you can’t blame all of that on lack of startup capital. Bad concept, bad execution, bad location, etc. could all play into it. The taxpayer should not be obliged to keep a “quirky” store running if it doesn’t bring in customers. Throwing good money after bad isn’t going to bring prosperity to anyone in the end.

Not to mention that they compete with each other, not just the megacorps. I’m pretty sure there are half a dozen hair salons on our main street alone, and most of them sit empty at any given time, endlessly changing hands. Incentivizing startups will only make competition more fierce, so a few more winners but much more losers.

We don’t need more restaurants giving the community more below minimum wage jobs that can’t be filled. We need that money helping everyone, with rent or groceries or something, so that they can actually have money to spend at the small businesses that exist.

My [likely ignorant] take is that we need better incentives for workers, renters, and first-time homeowners, not MBA shysters “entrepreneurs” creating “new businesses” dropshipping imported garbage and other ventures that add little value to society.

I think with these kinds of suits the core conceit is that gun manufacturing/sales is a sordid, immoral business along the lines of cigarettes, and that the very existence of a consumer market for their product implies their misuse and negative impact on society. Therefore, they should bear more responsibility for that impact.

They were emboldened by the suit against Bushmaster/Remington that succeeded and ultimately bankrupted Freedom Group.

I worry that they felt confident laying this out because they believe the fix is in, and that no popular resistance is going to stop it.

In a more just world they’d be treated like Milosevic’s Serbia.

“Other Emergencies” is a euphemism for liberal/non-white protests. The idea of their home town being overrun by “leftist” mob violence occupies both the nightmares and the fever dreams of the kinds of gun owners who would respond to this call-up.

DeSantis reactivated the Florida State Guard on similar grounds of “disaster relief” then started training them like soldiers. Now he has a force of 1500 or so that reports directly to him and cannot be federalized. He even sent a few of them to the Texas border to test the waters.

Expect to see more of these yokels try to muster up armed thugs in the coming months. I fear the worst no matter the outcome of the election.

Doing everything possible to dismantle it as an organization short of Tim McVeighing the headquarters?

I was under the impression that basically every commercial weather station just copied the NWS’s homework, which is a decidedly Republican arrangement: have the taxpayer foot the bill for the actual work while private interest reaps the benefits.

If the NWS goes away, they’ll have to do their own meteorology. Maybe there’s some way to spin some profit from that situation that I’m not degenerate enough to see yet, but it seems like it’s against their own interests.

They ain’t called “a gas station masquerading as a country” for nothing. The world switching to renewables, either proactively now or out of desperation later, would be a massive hit to them.

Other than that maybe climate refugees? But they likely intend to conquer the places these people come from anyway, and don’t have many qualms about “dealing with” unwanted populations.

How else are cops supposed to buy new sidearms every 3 years?

With something like 2/3 of American military-age men being too overweight or obese to serve, these drugs would likely be considered strategically essential in any [hopefully] theoretical throwdown.

Suing the Church of Scientology for wrongful death? Yeah, good luck with that.

This is kind of where I’m at. I don’t imagine any amount of cash in a bank account is going to prepare us for what’s to come. Even if you could put money aside, the money you typically put towards retirement might just be better off towards becoming a doomsday prepper. Probably wouldn’t save you either way, but it may buy you a little time that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

Like others have said, I imagine my “retirement” as bearing witness to the collapse of modern society and ultimately dying in some lousy brawl with other desperate refugees, or by some untreated bacterial infection.

This country will break before anything meaningful happens, just like with chattel slavery.