Gov’t funded doesn’t drop the cost that much. Countries in the west that are single-payer and/or have national/socialized healthcare systems pay between 1/5 and 2/3 of what we do per capita, on average. It might be better in countries where the entire supply chain is subject to price controls (e…g., China), but I don’t know. But, regardless, if our system cost 20% of what it does now, or $900B, $3B would still be only .3% of the entire expenditure. Part of the problem is that, as far as western countries go, the US is just big. The population of Israel is estimated to be about 9.5M, compared to 340M or so for the US.

Again, to be clear: I’m not suggesting that we should be giving–or selling–Israel anything at this point.

Yes, $24B, sorry.

If they spent $24.00 on their own defense, and the US gave them $3B, then, uh, they’d be 100% dependent on the US.

It wouldn’t even be noticeable. We spend a total of about $4.5 trillion [EDIT: on healthcare]; $3B is 0.07% of that total.

And, BTW, we have terrible outcomes for how much we spend.

They won’t; sponsored by the big capital

Yes, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get away from it. Sanders managed to run very strong presidential primary campaigns, twice, and almost all of his funding was from individual donors giving his campaign under $100 each.

Dems could do this, if leadership had the will.

3rd parties can’t, or they can’t yet, because none of them have put in sufficient work at a grassroots level yet to consistently win places on state legislatures, much less federally.

This is both true, and not entirely accurate.

Israel spends something like $24 on their defense. The $3B that the the US gives them (and it’s $3B, not $4B, based on what I can find) is largely in the form of military materials: ammunition, bombs, air defense systems, etc. So what we give them is about 20% of their total defense spend, and yeah, that’s a lot.

But the flip side of that is that American workers in American factories are the ones building the bombs, missiles defense systems, making the bullets, etc.; the money that the gov’t gives Israel ends up creating a benefit for workers in the form of work that wouldn’t otherwise exist. I’d have to see a real economic analysis, but this might be a case of each dollar that the gov’t spends creating more than a dollar of effect. (And yeah, I know that a lot of that effect is going to e.g. Raytheon shareholders rather than line workers. But still.)

BUT

The fact that we see an economic benefit in terms of jobs and growth by giving Israel aid doesn’t mean we should. Because we’re directly funding the genocide of the Palestinians.

Meh.

IMO, the problem is that Dems aren’t focusing on the economy in the correct way. Yeah, Biden did some good things. But you’ve still got massive wealth inequality, high rents and home prices, venture capital firms buying up small companies and jacking prices way the fuck up, executives raking in huge profits and salaries while laying off workers, etc. Dems keep saying, “the economy is great!” while working class people–the vast middle class in the US, which includes mid-level white collar jobs–are feeling like they’re working hard for less. Ever since the crash in '08, jobs have been less stable, and people have been turning to gig work to make ends meet, or to have anything extra in their budgets. Sanders is the only left-leaning politician that’s really banging on that drum.

Dems used to be out there running for good jobs for hard working people, work with dignity that you could live on. But they’ve been ignoring their roots for the last 40 years, and have been bought and sold by corporate America. The liberlization/globalization of the economy [EDIT] has largely been a disaster for working-class people, as they’ve been forced to compete against lower-wage workers, while the capitalist class gets even larger profits. (OOH, the liberalization of America’s trade policies has resulted in millions of people outside of the US being able to live in something other than grinding, abject poverty.)

In addition to that, Biden’s debate performance was a fucking disaster, and made it very, very clear to everyone that he was absolutely not fit to be president. Harris should have put some distance between herself and Biden, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t; she was suggesting that we continue the same policies that are squeezing the working class, rather than calling for systemic reform.

Meanwhile, Trump was promising that he’d make foreign companies pay, and that he’d bring good jobs back. If you’re a low-information voter that doesn’t understand how tariffs work, and don’t think about the logistics of bringing all the manufacturing back, then this sound great.

Meanwhile, you’ve got the whole right wing media machine telling people–mostly men–that they’re right to feel screwed. And yeah, they are. It’s just that it’s not ‘libs’, women, typical immigrants, etc.; it’s corporate profiteering, trade globalization, the loss of power from unions, importing highly-skilled labor to displace higher-paid American workers (e.g., H1-B abuse), outsourcing everything, etc.

If Dems want to win, they need to get serious about good jobs that pay a living wage for middle America, putting a choke-chain on corporate profiteering, and rebuilding the power of labor.

The low birth rates aren’t just rampant capitalism though; it’s also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that’s almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I’d treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture–much like Japan–seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you’re still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.

Wut?

No, silencers weren’t regulated into the NFA by the ATF; congress put them in there, way back in '34. You can read the text of the act here. It’s in the very first section:

AN ACT

To provide for the taxation of manufacturers, importers, and dealers in certain firearms and machine guns, to tax the sale or other disposal of such weapons, and to restrict importation and regulate interstate transportation thereof.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of American in Congress assembled, that for the purposes of this Act -

(a) The term “firearm” means a shotgun or rifle having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length, or any other weapon, except a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such a weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm [emphasis added] whether or not such a firearm is included within the foregoing definition.

It’s right there in the text.

Aside from that, the ATF per se didn’t even exist prior to '72; before that, it was part of the IRS, rather than an agency within the DoJ, and before the IRS, it was part of the Bureau of Internal Revenue.

It’s not up to the ATF to make laws; congress is supposed to do that.

Also, “sensible” gun control is functionally no different from “sensible” abortion restrictions. If you want to fix gun violence, fix the problems that lead up to it. If you want to stop abortions, it’s easier to teach factual sexual health and make sure that everyone has free access to birth control.

First - the place to shoot is the hard part for many people. Indoor ranges don’t allow you to do the kind of practice that you would need to do in order to become proficient with an automatic firearm. Outdoor ranges are quite a drive for most people.

Second, and more important - the fact that people can learn doesn’t mean a lot. Most people, including most gun owners, don’t. A shockingly large percentage of gun owners don’t practice regularly, or at all.

Hard pass on discussing anything with your denialist guns r gud mentality

Yeah, isn’t is strange that someone doesn’t want the state to have the monopoly on violence, and believes in civil rights? Weird, right?

From your article:

“Platkin said Glock is profiting by continuing to sell the adaptable version in U.S. markets, even as they make and sell handguns in Europe that cannot accommodate such a switch.”

 This is something I've having a really hard time finding a source on. Everything I can find says that that about half of the Glock pistols that are sold in the US are made in Austria. And, as I said, sales in Europe for pistols are very tightly controlled, meaning that very few pistols--relatively speaking--are getting into the hands of anyone other than cops and military, so I'm not sure that there's a strong motive for them to make the design alteration in the EU.
 Aside from the assertion from New Jersey's AG, I just can't find a source for that. I'm not saying that it doesn't exist, and, if the AG is correct, then yes, Glock should change their design in the US. There's already precedent for this; open bolt semi-automatic firearms manufactured after 1986 are banned because they can--in general--be readily converted to full auto. However, given how many Glocks currently exist in the US, that would be an enormous legal mess that could possibly result in the National Firearms Act being declared unconstitutional.

“Also known as “auto switches,” the devices, which are already illegal in New Jersey and some other states, […]”

They’re illegal in EVERY state; it covered under federal law, specifically the National Firearms Act (1934) and Firearm Owners Protection Act (1986). Even if it was legal in New Jersey, it would still be a felony to possess or use one.

How many people actually go out to a range every single week and burn through a couple hundred rounds working on training drills though? I did shooting at distance today (100-550y with .223) and burned through about 140 rounds, and most ranges don’t even have that kind of distance available. (Thank fuck the RSO had a spotting scope; I couldn’t see my splash in the grass to see where my rounds were going when I didn’t hit. He was able to see trace with his scope though.)

Do you have evidence to support that? Because AFAIK, the Glocks made both in the US and Austria have exactly the same design. OTOH, in most of Europe, it’s very difficult to get the appropriate license for a handgun, so it’s largely irrelevant.

Yes. Trump is not actually friendly to gun rights.

If he was, he’d be pushing to get the Hearing Protection Act (HR 404) and the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (HR 2395) out of committee and to the floor for a vote.

Biden wasn’t friendly to gun rights either. I don’t think most politicians are friendly to gun rights, since if they actually managed to expand them to what they should be, they wouldn’t have any major issue remaining to campaign on.

But it doesn’t.

An automatic firearm shoots multiple bullets each time you pull the trigger, until you release the trigger; the trigger does not reset.

With most semi-automatic guns, you have a light spring that resets the trigger once you release your finger. A forced reset trigger (FRT) forces the trigger to reset. The FRT pushes the trigger forward, even if you’re trying to keep the trigger pulled back. If you keep tension on your finger, as soon as it’s reset, you’re pulling it again. So, legally, you are pulling the trigger multiple times, because the trigger is resetting each time a bullet is fired.

Based on the way that a machine gun is defined in the National Firearms Act of 1934, an FRT is not a machine gun. The ATF can’t re-write the law to say what they want it to say; that requires an act on congress.

The is compounded by the fact that Rare Breed ran the idea by the ATF before they went into production, and they have/had a memorandum from the ATF saying that an FRT was not a machine gun, and not subject to the NFA. After they had approved it, and *after Rare Breed had produced and sold a few hundred/thousand, the ATF raided Rare Breed, and also showed up at customer’s homes demanding items that the customers had legally purchased (e.g., unreasonable search and seizure, a 4A violation).

Machine guns have been illegal in the United States since 1986, a notion that even gun rights groups have come to accept.

This is… Not true. The Firearm Owners Protection Act–among other things–made it illegal to transfer automatic firearms manufactured after '86 (i.e., “post ban”) to non-police/military people. Machine guns produced prior to '86 that were already in the hands of non-police/military people can still legally be own and bought/sold. A pre-ban select-fire AR-15 will run about $30k+ these days.

Secondly, there are a number of groups and people still actively fighting to overturn the NFA as being a violation of 1A. There was a case out of the 5th circuit (?) not that long ago that points out the circular logic of the gov’t in re: machine guns. E.g., per Heller, guns in common use can’t be banned, and machine guns aren’t in common use, so they can be banned. But they aren’t in common use because they were largely banned by the gov’t. The gov’t created the condition of them not being in common use by banning them, and then used the lack of common use–due to the ban–as justification for the legality of the ban.

I have noticed that ICE usually wants to conduct their splashy raids in areas with very low gun ownership, e.g., NYC, Boston, etc.

I’m exceptionally doubtful that clearly established constitutional rights aren’t being violated by the behaviors of ICE under Trump,

Given that what’s happening is absolutely unprecedented, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any specific court cases dealing with that kind of shit that’s going on right now. Do I WANT all ICE agent to have severe legal consequences for this, if we ever have an election again? Absolutely. But fuck it, I’ll settle for some extrajudicial rendition to the Mariana Trench.

Oh, sure, and I 100000% support that. (In fact, why wait? Start today!) But that isn’t going to be people in camps.

…Except that qualified immunity exists, and you can’t make a law and apply it retroactively.

An M134 shoots up to 6000 rounds per minute, and it shoots 7.62x51mm NATO (.308 Win). 12 seconds would be a maximum of 1200 rounds. If I’m buying some of the very best match-grade ammunition I can get (Hornady 168gr ELD-M) at $2.15/round, that works out to a maximum of $2580. Which ain’t chump change, but is still about $397,420 short of $400,000.