- effectuate mass synthesis of illicit substances in commercial laboratories
- handle massive intercontinental logistics
- build semi-submersible boats
- hire and kidnap radio engineers to help with communications and electronic warfare
but gee, they just can't figure out how to buy a machine shop and hire or kidnap talent to make 100-year-old firearm designs - that's just too much for them?
How is this a counter argument? You are playing GOP vs. Dem games. All I am saying is that the USA is a major firearms manufacturer and exporter. That scandal just reinforced the point.
I think the point was: it might be a bit more expensive for them, but it wouldn't stop them from getting guns. Guns are important to their business, they would manufacture them themselves if they could not buy them.
Would it cost them more? yes. would it be the "number 1 priority" because it's so impactful? no, obviously not.
Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of making guns. But I'm aware of zero conflicts in which small arms were manufactured in situ. Even in e.g. Myanmar/Burma. The fact that even remote conflicts go through the trouble of importing arms suggests this might be more difficult than you suggest.
> Maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of making guns
These are centuries-old objects. Manufacturing technology and materials science have advanced nearly 100 years since Ma Deuce first rolled off the line. Society didn't get dumber, and manufacturing has only gotten more accessible.
Just look at the current state of 3D printed firearms: they're completely useful and viable. CNC machining has never been cheaper or easier to do.
I'm fascinated by your point on Myanmar/Burma since I'm quite sure you used that point since it's common knowledge that is the most commonly cited example of the use of in situ firearms by militia. Maybe you're inviting a debate on why you think the reports on in situ firearms reported there are false, or maybe you just randomly came upon that, but it doesn't seem a coincedence.
Myanmar/Burma the strategy was build-to-capture: make improvised, unreliable firearms that could be used to ambush security forces and take their firearms.
Evidence against the point above that it's trivial to replace professionally manufactured small arms.
It's quite evident their point is that they don't want gun control and have pre-committed to whatever opinions are necessary to prevent it, including an opinion as absurd as "having to manufacture their own firearms would not be a significant impediment to their operations."
Mass synthesis of the drugs that cartels produce is trivial (that's why they produce them)
Putting drugs on trucks is trivial (that's why they do that)
Rudimentary semi-submersible vessels are impressive but you only need a few and they're not that hard to make (again, that's why they make em)
The telecom stuff they do is legitimately pretty impressive, but this too is just significant capex for long term benefit -- not so with self-made guns which are significant capex and you get out the other side a low volume of low-quality, non-dependable, often-breaking guns.
This is a popular idea amongst American liberals who rejoice at any possible means to eliminate/curb/add friction to lawful firearms ownership and manufacturing.
Where are they buying firearms in America at an "industrial scale?" An AR-15 receiver can be turned out in tens of minutes on a fast VMC - good luck stopping this.
What’s the relevance of who “this is a popular idea” to? It’s either a good idea or it’s not.
If it’s so easy, then why aren’t they doing that today and instead we just encounter thousands of guns bought in the US? Must be because that’s easier, correct?
I get the sense you’re a bit pre-committed to your position here though and perceive this as a bit of an identity question.
Yes, showing the preponderance of evidence against your easily disproven argument is actually "my agenda." Great job on calling that out.
I grew up hunting. Like any other redneck, I fired a .308 at 13yrs old, and yes it knocked me to the ground, lol. Skinned a dear that same year. I just didn't choose to make guns my entire identity.
All I am stating is the obvious. The USA is a major firearms manufacturer and exporter.
How do you know "empirically" that they aren't? Who says that the US-sourced guns that they are tracing are even a substantial fraction of the overall guns in use? How can you prove empirically that the data provided by the notoriously-reliable and agenda-less Mexican government is accurate?
> Who says that the US-sourced guns that they are tracing are even a substantial fraction of the overall guns in use?
Statistics?
Believing your implication that homemade firearms or widespread and just don't show up in the seizure data is a little silly unless you can explain why this would be the case.
I think it's still a relevant point. The point isn't necessarily that it's easier for cartels to make it themselves than to smuggle guns or divert them from military sources. It's that the cartels can easily replace smuggled guns with manufactured guns and their demand for them is inelastic enough at either price point it's unlikely to effect the access to cartels.
The more likely effect is it disproportionately stops normal Mexico citizens from obtaining "illegal" guns to protect themselves but the cartels still have them, making things even worse for the Mexican people.
I mean yes if they can truly just replace all the labs and people for not much addition cost, then you're only hurting yourself to raid/jail/prosecute by arresting and raiding the labs because it comes at great cost to yourself while costing your enemy very little and not changing their operations.
You've just explained why the drug war failed and ultimately hurt us more than helped us while doing nothing to destroy the profits of the cartels.
If that's the argument the other fellow would like to make, then sure. But that's not the argument he's making. He's specifically taking issue with trying to add friction to small arms manufacture and trafficking.
I know for a fact that mass methamphetamine and fentanyl synthesis is more technically-difficult, more time consuming, and more capital-intensive than mass-manufacture of firearms - but good luck pushing your "Iron River" narrative lmao.
At the risk of setting off the flame war detector on this website, please explain to me why simple chemistry that can be done anywhere, is easier than setting up a mass-manufacturing factory.
I challenge you to explain to the exact relative differences.
Also, why did you bring up fentanyl? How is that related to the very well documented Iron River? Well, I suppose it actually is, as the USA's very well documented supply of guns to Mexican cartels helps them bring up fent into the USA. Yay! Sorry to interrupt your previous narrative. Please, go on king.
Gee, one requires huge industrial laboratories complete with niche equipment, highly-controlled precursors in massive quantities, and trained chemists.. the other requires commonly-available machinery and universally-obtainable, cheap materials and a scrappy high-school student who excelled in shop class.
Seriously, you have no idea what you are talking about. I can have a receiver milled from billet in the time we've spent discussing this.
Even the data you linked explains:
Privately Made Firearms
Law enforcement agencies recovered and submitted 37,980 suspected privately made firearms4 (PMFs) to
ATF for tracing between 2017 and 2021. It is probable that current trace data significantly
underrepresents the number of PMFs recovered in crimes by LEAs due to a variety of challenges
presented by PMFs, to include:
• PMFs involvement in crime is an emerging issue and LEAs are just beginning to institute
uniform training on the recognition, identification, and reporting of PMFs that can lead to more
accurate PMF data being collected.
• PMFs by their nature may have no markings at all, duplicative markings, counterfeit
markings, or markings that appear to be serial numbers on parts of the firearm other than the
frame or receiver. These duplicative, counterfeit, or erroneous markings can be mistaken for
authentic serial numbers and markings causing law enforcement to not recognize the firearm as a
PMF and/or potentially follow false leads based on these markings.
As Figure OFT-04 reflects, the number of suspected PMFs recovered by law enforcement agencies and
submitted to ATF for tracing increased by 1,083% from 2017 (1,629) to 2021 (19,273).
So, just domestically, home private firearms manufacturing totaled more units than all guns traced into Mexico in every given year.
lol making meth or fentanyl doesn’t require very sophisticated knowledge or expertise.
From readily available precursors, you can make fentanyl in less than one day.
The Gupta method (from readily available precursors) takes three steps, all at room temperature, and no specialized equipment at all.
That’s why it’s everywhere.
Versus non-professionally manufactured guns which… statistically pretty much don’t exist. Rounding error on any statistic you could come up with on firearms.
Yep, I'm sure cartels worth billions of dollars in annual revenue are producing tens of thousands of kilos using one-pot tweaker methods. Also which "readily-available" precursors are you referring to here? Can I pick up 10000 kg at Wal-Mart?
Non-professionally-manufactured firearms do exist, the aforementioned ATF traces indicate that they are far more prolific than Mexican imports. VICE produced a documentary almost 15 years ago on cartels in the Philippines manufacturing completely viable firearms without issue - in the woods.
Now you're making a different claim. You said that manufacturing fentanyl requires all sorts of specialized equipment and knowledge. It simply does not.
Does that mean cartels aren't sophisticated manufacturers? No, of course they are.
Second straw-man: no one said homemade firearms literally don't exist. The claim is that they are a rounding error.
There's zero chance that the DC ground in the laptop is tied to earth ground in the charger: they use LLC resonant converters and flyback converters (depending on vintage) - an earth ground tie would defeat the purpose of these isolated topologies.
Desert Storm involved half a million troops on the ground. Iran is about 4x the size of Iraq and has more than 3x the population. The part of Iraq involved was flat desert terrain. Most of Iran is mountainous.
> During Desert Storm, US batteries returned fire before enemy rounds even hit apogee.
That's something ground-based. And to avoid counter-battery fire, tanks move after every shot.
The Arleigh Burke class of destroyers[0] might have similar capacity since each one holds 90 missiles in the vertical launch system[1] (so they might be loaded with anything: anti-ship, anti-sub, anti-satellite, anti-aircraft, ground attack or maybe anti-missile missiles). However, to reload those missiles involves several days in port. There are only 75 Arleigh Burke destroyers at this time. Not all are near the Gulf. It wouldn't be too hard for Iranian forces to fire $10k drones that require $1M missiles to stop.
The Iranian regime doesn't care what "age" their people are living in and have been stockpiling weapons for enough decades to follow through on their threats.
And every time I read "we have destroyed 3000% of Iran's weapons capability", I read about more missiles and drones flying.
The DNS lookup will take an indeterminate amount of time and the cors failure is cached. You can't really effectively do a timing attack, especially if the client and the real server take a random time to respond. You get exactly one sample.
An internal PCIe slot can be had in up to 16x 5.0, whereas Thunderbolt 5 maxes out at 4x of 4.0.
Plus you have another Thunderbolt controller in between the CPU and the hardware, and it takes more energy to push that many bits 1m over a cable vs a few dozen cm over traces.
Also Thunderbolt is trivially disconnected, which in many critical workflows is not a positive, but an opportunity for ill-timed interruptions. Plus I don't have to buy a fucking dongle/dock for a real goddamn slot, make room for external power supplies, etc.
Awesome idea: Texas can become four states, Northern California can become a state, Northwest Dakota, Northeast Dakota, and Upper New York can all become states too with equal Senate representation.
Or did you perhaps have some gerrymandering-esque idea to limit these 'benefits' to liberal metropolitan areas?
> Awesome idea [...] Or did you perhaps have some gerrymandering-esque idea to limit these 'benefits' to liberal metropolitan areas?
What? It sounds like you're crowing over some kind of "gotcha", but what is it?
If we both agree on the same principle, what's the problem? Namely, that citizens being disproportionately (un)represented in their "democratic" government is typically bad, and especially when it's just from ancient quirks of boundary line development.
On reflection, I suppose there's another explanation: Some people go through life with no real principles, flip-flopping based on whatever is temporarily advantageous to "their team". Is that it? Are you projecting your lifestyle onto me, and feeling the thrill of "winning" at being badder?
But they weren't just "ancient" quirks. They were commitments made to your fellow Americans in smaller states. Commitments that were required to allow the formation of the country at all; and as such should be shown a little more respect than being referred to as ancient quirks. That's not to say that they should be forever set in stone, but we should at least proceed with an honest portrayal of why we're in this situation in the first place, and what's at stake for the different parties affected.
> That's not to say that they should be forever set in stone
In fact, they were intended to be _actively_ reviewed and updated every 2-3 decades. But we don't and haven't done that, for and around the EC in particular, since at least the Civil War.
And when people talk about it, they're immediately assumed to have ill intent. In fact, they too, by talking about it, are also following the covenants of the same people who made those "commitments".
How else would you describe the way populations grew more places labeled X and not places labeled Y over the course of 250 years?
> They were commitments made to your fellow Americans in smaller states. Commitments that were required to allow the formation of the country at all;
Is this just a complaint about phrasing, or are you claiming some commitment would be broken?
My proposal has no effect on any commitments made to states, neither in letter nor in spirit. It doesn't change the rules for Senate nor House representation, and it doesn't infringe on the sovereignty of any state. If anything is restores state-sovereignty in one narrow scenario, a scenario no signatory ever believed was an intended feature.
Namely, the betrayal which happens when when humans (residing within the borders of a high-population state) are partially disenfranchised, and coalition of low-pop states vows: "Even though it's entirely within your own borders, we will veto any attempts to fix it. No other states except us can be small, we are pulling up the ladder. In order for us to keep an advantage your residents must suffer."
> If anything is restores state-sovereignty in one narrow scenario, a scenario no signatory ever believed was an intended feature.
The most direct fault leading to that is the massive expansion of the Commerce Clause and the following elevation of every major issue to the federal level. The founders never expected this because the federal government wasn’t even supposed to be able to dictate most intra-state things.
The idea of the Senate makes sense, at least to me. States give up some sovereignty to be in the union, the Senate gives each state equal representation because they’ve each given up the same level of self-governance. The House reflects people equally as members of the union, and the Senate reflects states equally as members of the union.
Without the Senate, small states are giving up way more sovereignty than larger ones. Eg Rhode Island would have practically no sovereignty, they’d just be captives of Texas, California, etc. They don’t have enough people to swing a vote, so no federal party is going to campaign there or listen to what they want.
Making more states dilutes power in the Senate, and I don’t see a clean way to do that. If we allow arbitrary divisions of states, we invoke a race to the bottom where states can just fragment into a million tiny states and chaos ensues. If we enforce a lower population limit then the Senate just reflects the populace and becomes a pointless copy of the House.
Representation in the house is supposed to be proportional to population. Unfortunately that's no longer the case and we should fix that.
Yammering on about unequal representation in the senate as though it's some great injustice is either partisan or ignorant. The senate was never supposed to provide representation relative to population and attempting to game the system by subdividing certain states but not others is no better than attempting to pack the supreme court or any other blatantly disingenuous behavior.
> attempting to game the system by subdividing certain states but not others
Oh, so you're against sneaky "some but not others" schemes? Great! Me too! So why are you going the opposite direction?
You're supporting a status-quo where a partisan bloc on the federal level can already go: "It's OK for Florida, but prohibited for New-York", or vice-versa.
You're opposing something that'd fix the-thing-you-hate by giving both of those states equal capability.
> The senate was never supposed to provide representation relative to population
So what? That doesn't change. It's non-changing was a core requirement in the proposal, and I've pointed it out several times now. That aspect literally can't change via amendment. Why are you suggesting it'd change anyway?
This is about enabling people (enough of them, anyway) to (re-)choose their states. It's always been an entirely different segment of the pipeline!
I'm supporting a status quo that was voluntarily and very intentionally entered into by our predecessors.
You are arguing that the current arrangement is somehow a "quirk" and that we should attempt a legally dubious end run around the constitution. It's a self serving line of reasoning directly equivalent to packing the supreme court.
What is this thing I hate exactly? Because I very much support the way the senate and house were set up originally prior to the house being frozen. I think that the disproportionate representation is a good thing provided that state's rights are respected and thus we really are a union rather than a monolithic whole. Unfortunately there are a number of issues in that regard such as the rampant abuse of the interstate commerce clause; I think we should try to fix those things rather than abandon the system.
For the record I'm not opposed to the subdivision or agglomeration of states in the event that there is a direct and legitimate reason for it. But such a reason must convincingly hinge on the internal politics of the state itself as opposed to being an end run around the constitution because a segment of the population doesn't like the way the system was intentionally designed to work.
That's wonderful: the option of a payment portal isn't the point. The purpose of snail mail is process can be served prior to seizing/applying a lien on the property when you don't pay (online or otherwise.)
These cartels can:
- effectuate mass synthesis of illicit substances in commercial laboratories
- handle massive intercontinental logistics
- build semi-submersible boats
- hire and kidnap radio engineers to help with communications and electronic warfare
but gee, they just can't figure out how to buy a machine shop and hire or kidnap talent to make 100-year-old firearm designs - that's just too much for them?
reply