Quote of the day—Marissa Edmund

The technology is there, and it’s pretty basic, standard. To not have it implemented is kind of mind-boggling.

Marissa Edmund
Gun violence analyst at the Center for American Progress
June 3, 2022
Gun control after Uvalde: What could work, what won’t work, and what we can learn from the world
[She is referring to “smart guns”.

For someone who claims to be a “gun violence analyst” she is mind boggled by the wrong thing. It’s mind boggling that anyone who has studied the topic believes they will ever be accepted on anything more than a gun used for hobby purposes.—Joe]

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14 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Marissa Edmund

  1. I favor an extended field test by the Secret Service and the protection details for Congress.

    • Yes, indeed.

      One of the biggest “red flags” (see what I did there?) about so-called “smart guns”, is that no police department or government agency is willing to issue or mandate them for their officers, even though they were developed specifically to prevent officers being shot with their own guns.

      They were developed literally to be “police-only” weapons, but the pols want to require them for non-police, and the actual police won’t use them.

      Makes perfect sense, huh?

  2. She, like many others including even conservatives, is proposing ‘solutions’ to society’s problems that involve punishing everybody for the sins of a few especially when trying to prevent crimes. For example, at our local park a water spigot was provided, but because of theft management locked it (or at least that is what the sign says).

    So, what are the solutions to prevent school shootings that do not end up punishing everybody? In the bigger picture are we not talking about what it means to live in a civilized world?

    For me, I see the violence as a breakdown in our civilization due to a lack of a common understanding of what is right and wrong along with even a willingness define right and wrong. Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind.

    • As Miguel Gonzales wrote on his blog, the fundamental answer to school shootings is to stop requiring defenseless victim zones, as the Uvalde school board did. It can easily be done by state laws overriding such local policies, mandating that school staff with CC permits may carry on school grounds if they wish. Miguel also suggested allowing such persons to get refunds for the cost of training (including supplies).

      A small step along those lines was just taken in Ohio, which stopped requiring teachers who wish to carry to go through full police officer training. They still have a training requirement, but modest enough it probably isn’t a big barrier. More problematic is that the Ohio law apparently still says that the school board may ban carrying. That discretion is exactly the problem and that is exactly what has to be done away with.

      In none of this does the Federal government have any role, of course, just as the Constitution makes clear.

    • What concerns me is that people in government have a goal of “preventing crime”. The problem is that crime cannot be prevented at the government level.

      Government’s role is to act as a neutral arbiter of guilt, and then punish the offenders. Both of those actions happen after-the-fact.

      At best, the punishments may be severe enough to act as a deterrent, but that’s as far as government “crime prevention” efforts can go. (And as we’ll see, it’s not a deterrent at all.)

      Real crime prevention happens on an individual level: maintain situational awareness, be a hard(er) target, respond appropriately during the crime, and be a good witness afterwards.

      Inserting government into the “crime prevention” role transfers all of those individual responsibilities to the government, in the form of mass surveillance and police power.

      However, the government is just as incompetent and ineffective at these as it is at everything else. In addition, the push for more lenient sentencing or pleading down serious crimes to lesser offenses (thus removing the “deterrent”), paired with the propensity to use the new extra-legal surveillance and police powers for things other than crime prevention and reporting, creates the ideal framework for citizen harassment and oppression.

      • Exactly Archer.
        One of the problems with a tech world is they always think the answer is in tech.
        We’ve been brainwashed into letting the professional handle it….Whatever it is.
        As Col. Cooper said it best. When speaking on how to end crime. “It is only the intended victim that can stop crime.”
        Until people are willing to fight back. Arm themselves and tell the government to butt-out. If we need to you to clean up the blood, we’ll call. That’s how it ends.
        We didn’t have school shooters in my day. It would have been a pointless exercise, and many, if not most of our teacher were WWII and Korean war vets.
        That Uvalde punk wouldn’t have made it through the front door with those people around.
        People got to learn to fight again. No one cares, and no one else is coming to save you. Not tech, and especially not some government robot. Human or otherwise.

    • sir:
      as the donald has noted, these things will cease when evil ceases to exist. i figure an extended “wait period” will be involved.
      john jay

    • You have to realize that at long as it’s politically profitable for school shootings to happen, meaning people can be manipulated by school shootings or other fear-inducing atrocities into supporting more government, fewer freedoms, and more control of their life, (also see: climate change) then there will continue to be these sort of things… because they work. They make people afraid, so they make people willing to give up freedom for a promise. Once you have paid the Danegeld…. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Note this didn’t happen nearly as much under Trump than it did Obama or Biden. Why? Because there was no chance any significant gun laws would be passed and signed by Trump. Why burn a wind-up toy for no possible lawfare gain?

    • Or to put it another way, why did we not have mass school shootings 50+ years ago when anybody could just buy a gun if they could put the money on the counter?

  3. Just take the broader point that the globalist authoritarians are hyper focused on using technology to build their new world system, and understand all the implications of such, and you’ll have something of a predictive model, or heuristic. How it could be applied to your and my guns in the U.S. is far from the main point.

    Therefore, ask what, in the over-all scheme of things, they could do with the best of high tech, combined with the best of modern psychological manipulation techniques, and that’s what you’ll find them in the process of implementing.

    • Yep. In the mid-80s I implemented a hypertext like application for simple models on the original Mac 128 and I remember comments from a 3-star General who saw the potential. Unfortunately, in addition to building wonderful things, we have also built the capability for our own prisons.

      Now 40 years later, we have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, the question has become “Can keep it and our freedoms too!” I am not sure that answer it is in the affirmative.

  4. 1. i don’t like the new format, i much preferred the old. progress? meh!!
    2. re: “gun control.” a.) i once built an ar-15 lower from “hobby slats” (.175″ thick strips of walnut and/or mahogany), b.)i don’t own any, but, other than the barrel rifling involved, i believe a glock format pistol would be pretty easy to build, in your basement, from any number of things. 3) the israeli’s built arms “under the noses” of british army types, who were not kindly souls, without much difficulty.

    in short, it is easy to build firearms. they can be made with common machine tools, or, if necessary, with hand tools. to my mind, only the rifling of barrels presents much difficulty.

    there will never be a shortage of firearms. if confiscated, millions of the things are simply not “find-able,” or “traceable,” or capable of being taken by anyone who can keep his mouth shut. simple as that. whoever can pay for them, will have them. they may be a little crude if made by “home manufacture,” they may be of the finest quality if a bit old, but they will work as intended.

    they will work as intended by the bearer. that has always been the fundamental truth of hte matter. and, for that matter, a cross bow, or a knife, will do the same. a prime minister of japan was killed by a sword, hip deep in surrounding security people. skewered, right on the spot, at arm’s length.

    final observation. it is not “gun controled” that is involved, it is “people control.” plain and simple.

    • Rifling can certainly be done in a basement. Single edge cutter is probably easiest, at least it seems that way to this marginally skilled amateur mechanic.

      • It can also be done with EDM machining. Basically an electro-nibbler process. Eating away the metal with electricity through an electrolyte.
        What little I saw of it was pretty simple. Were talk garage, 5 gallon plastic bucket stuff.
        Hammer forging is very simple also.
        And as you say. Putting a few thousands of a scratch down a barrel is not that hard to do.
        On top of all that were Americans. We scare the crap out of the rest of the world. We’ll figure something out. For no other reason than to maintain our reputation!

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