• 0 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

    Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

    There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

    That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.



  • That analogy was chosen for a reason. Ada was originally developed by DOD committee and a French programming team to be a programming language for Defense projects between 1977 and 1983 that they were still using at least into the early 2000s. It’s based on Pascal.

    It was intended for applications where reliability was the highest priority (above things like performance or ease of use) and one of the consequences of that is that there are no warnings - only compiler errors, and a lot of common bad practices that will be allowed to fly or maybe at worst generate a warning in other languages will themselves generate compiler errors. Do it right or don’t bother trying. No implicit typecasting, even something like 1 + 0.5 where it’s obvious what is intended is a compiler error because you are trying to add an integer to a real without explicitly converting either - you’re in extremely strongly-typed country here.

    Libraries are split across two files, one is essentially the interfaces for the library and the other is it’s implementation (not that weird, and not that different than C/C++ header files though the code looks closer to Pascal interface and implementation sections put in separate files). The intent at the time being that different teams or different subcontractors might be building each module and by establishing a fixed interface up front and spelling out in great detail in documentation what each piece of that interface is supposed to do the actual implementation could be done separately and hypothetically have a predictable result.









  • If they actually believe in that whole originalism thing they claim (basically that the text of the constitution means what it would have meant at the time it was written, and shifts in the definition of words don’t change that meaning) they still can’t allow it. There’s basically no way to interpret the Constitution that would result in mandating a specific religious affirmation be in public facilities isn’t “promoting an establishment of religion”.

    The best they could hope for without just ignoring the Constitution entirely and making something up (which all their conservatism.aside they generally haven’t done yet) would be arguing that this requires opening the door to any similar list of religious tenets by literally every faith on the planet.




  • All they are a modification to turn a semiautomatic gun into a full automatic weapon.

    They don’t though. And I went into great detail as to what exactly they do and how it works to explain why they don’t do that.

    An automatic weapon fires more than once per operation of the trigger by definition. Any gun that fires once per operation of the trigger is not automatic by definition.

    A bump stock doesn’t change that, it makes it easier and more accurate to bump.fire, which is basically using the recoil to bounce your finger off the trigger and back onto it to pull it faster than you otherwise would.

    With practice you can bump fire with a regular stock, that doesn’t mean all semiautomatic weapons are actually automatic.

    Like the binary trigger thing - eventually that will be challenged in the courts and the argument won’t be over whether or not the words binary trigger are in the law, but whether or not lifting your finger off the trigger counts as a second operation of the trigger or as part of the previous one because that is what would determine if it fires one or two shots per operation of the trigger and thus whether or not it’s legally automatic and whether or not it is controlled as an automatic weapon.

    The law doesn’t say what you wish it said, and it isn’t exactly vague.





  • A bump stock does not function by a single action of the trigger and does not meet the statutory definition as a result. The ATF rule banning them got struck down because Congress hadn’t authorized the ATF to regulate machine guns beyond that specific statutory definition.

    They had several cases along these lines involving several agencies, and I feel like people don’t understand the underlying legal idea - rule making power belongs to Congress. Federal agencies under the executive branch that have rule making powers receive those powers by Congress delegating it to them in a limited fashion through legislation. Those powers extend only so far as the passed legislation delegates them and no further. Even in cases where it seems like it would be useful, or the name of the agency suggests it would be something in their sphere of influence.


  • However this supreme court said that the magic words ‘bump stock’ wasn’t in the legalisation.

    A bump stock doesn’t make a gun automatic fire, therefore a prohibition on modifications to make a gun automatic fire does not include it. It’s a basic “the law says what it says, you don’t get to add things you don’t like and call them close enough” argument. It’s not about the words “bump stock”, but that the law prohibits modifications to make a gun automatic and a bump stock does not make a gun automatic, it merely makes a method for firing a semiautomatic gun faster easier to achieve.

    Bump firing is basically using the recoil from a shot to bounce your finger off the trigger and then pull the trigger again, which increases the rate of fire. It’s even less accurate than automatic fire (because of the way the gun has to literally bounce around), and not quite as fast (but pretty close). You can do it without a bump stock, but it’s easier to achieve, more accurate and more comfortable to do with one. The fact that when bump firing you only fire a single round for each function of the trigger makes it not automatic by definition.

    The binary triggers mentioned earlier in the thread are basically triggers that will fire both when the trigger is pulled and when it is released, which hypothetically doubles the firing rate of a semiautomatic weapon by not requiring you to release the trigger and pull it again to fire another round. Binary triggers basically come down to an argument of what counts as an “function of the trigger” and whether both pulling and releasing the trigger can count as separate functions of the trigger - if they can then it’s not automatic, if they cannot then it is.