Source – The Economist
Not only has there been an increasing incidence of rampages in the US in the past thirty years but it seems that average kill scores have been ramping up.
I think this trend will only intensify in the years ahead.
A couple of years ago there was a lot of agitation around TrackingPoint, a weapons company that coupled a gun with a tracking system. All you had to do was tag your target, press the trigger, and align the reticle with the tag, which would automatically fire the shot while making adjustments for range, wind conditions, your own motion, etc. Accuracy far exceeds what even the best marksmen are capable of with a traditional rifle and scope outfit. You can also shoot around corners and barricades with special eyeglasses (this was once an exclusively military technology which has now made its way into the civilian market).
Now TrackingPoint’s products aren’t really the sort of weapons you can do a productive rampage with – crucially, it is single shot, and extremely expensive ($20,000) to boot. But it should soon be possible to create far more effective solutions. For instance, a standalone mod that contains a database of common gun models (and maybe the option to input custom data) that you can strap onto any old AK. An accomplice can tag targets remotely through a connected smartphone, or even automate the process entirely on the basis of face recognition. Think of the kind of head shot percentages you can achieve.
Even more creative solutions can be thought up. Just the sort of stuff you can do by coupling this with drones can provide material for countless cyberpunk stories.
Once you have a certain penetration rate of such technologies and a high enough percentage of mentally ill, highly aggrieved, and/or high risk ethnoreligious groups in your society, I suspect draconian gun control will become all but inevitable – even in a society as traditionally liberal on this question as the US.
Anglos basically set both Russia & India to fail Vs islam in the 19th century ad.
As a Scythian, do you really feel any sympathy?
If I could, would just move all muslims to us & uk. They deserve itit,
I’m not sure how draconian gun control could work, if you’re unable to control the border. I mean, if people can move freely, sure some of them might have guns, which they can sell in the US. They can then return to purchase some more guns in Mexico, where illegal weapons are rampant.
Isn’t it just a function of population growth? Wouldn’t a per capita adjustment make more sense? I thought Florida had reasonable gun laws. Maybe just a better system of background checks is needed.
The US wasn’t involved in that
Sandy Hook, Orlando where are the body bags? Anyone have irrefutable evidence these events really happened or are we to automatically believe our television sets?
Are hand grenades legal for civilians in the US?
What exactly are the limits of the 2nd ammendment? I know fully automatic weapons are banned, but what about flame throwers, landmines etc?
The people that want gun control in the USA are Trotskyite gun controllers, that is their system is for the entire world. There are many countries that produce guns, but the two main ones they would have to clamp down on is Russia and China. How they will enforce this is beyond me, economic bullying is not going to cut it, total war and a regime change with US puppets would have to occur. This of course would mean the death of hundreds of millions, possibly billions or the end of civilization itself.
Then there is the proliferation of 3D printers, where working guns have already been shown to work.
I have a stupid question about military technology:
Why are US and Russian militaries using live pilots in Syria? What are the advantages of live pilots and of the planes that were designed for them, compared to remotely-controlled drones?
They’re much faster and carry a much larger payload.
Why can’t a remotely-controlled plane be as fast and carry as large a payload as a traditional one?
They can, and potentially will be. However, as of yet, the options available are quite limited. Mostly they are employed for recon, rather than large scale bombings. USA’s most frequently employed UAV is the MQ 9 Reaper, whose performance statistics are far inferior even to the A-10 from the 70s. I don’t know if the Russians have anything comparable – the only UAV I’m aware of is the now defunct Mig Skat project.
The issue is not with size, speed and payload; the real issue is control. Human pilots on the spot (i.e. in the cockpit) are still far more reliable and capable than those same pilots sitting hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. With remote-0perated drones you are far more reliant on uninterrupted communications between the drone and the operator, and those communications are far easier to disrupt. You can disrupt the communications between base and a live pilot, but the live pilot can still think, make decisions, and operate the airplane.
The only weapons that are legal are rifled or non-rifled (shotguns) personal firearms up to .50 caliber, not on full-auto. No explosive rounds, no explosives of any kind, no flame throwers. All of the latter are explicitly banned, IIRC.
Thomas Hammes believes this nascent phenomenon–“super-empowered individuals”–is a possible candidate for “fifth generation warfare”.
“Gun control” as we understand it currently won’t do the job. The stuff that will enable really nasty personal automated weaponry is just dual-use ubiquitous electronic control and sensing with crude explosives or toxins basically duct-taped onto them.
Frankly, none of it poses an existential risk to humanity, discounting some of the more lurid predictions about synthetic biology. Humanity once lived and worked under much higher than current odds of violent death in daily live; in a worst-case scenario the chance of being a homicide victim could increase by orders of magnitude and people would probably just learn to live with it, unfortunately.
Nature culls its defectives, mankind tries to rehabilitate them.
It’s definitely time to let people assort themselves by means other than political entities. That concept is a self-reinforcing 10,000 year failure.