Officers later recovered a replica GLOCK 17 Gen 5 handgun with a detachable magazine from the scene, the statement said.

Just so everyone is clear this is what they’re talking about. Without the orange tip–which is easily cut off–this is going to be indistinguishable from a gen 5 Glock 17 to an observer. Things like this are used in Airsoft games, are used for training indoors when you don’t want to use a real gun (they operate on blowback like a real pistol, so you get simulated recoil)), and they’re also modified and used by people that are committing armed robbery when they can’t get a real firearm.

I’m quite familiar with firearms–I have a bunch, I compete–and I couldn’t tell the difference between a replica like that that had had the orange tip removed and a real Glock without holding the item.

If all of the information that’s currently being reported is accurate–and that is a very, very big “if”–then I don’t know what people expect.

I have a friend that used to be a stripper (“exotic dancer”, if you prefer). She tried to get a concealed carry permit–in Detroit–long before Heller v. D.C. and McDonald v. Chicago because she had a stalker. She was denied, because she didn’t have any greater need for self-defense than any other person.

Who defines psychological wellness? For reference, I’m a gun owner, and I compete in shooting matches on a regular basis. About a decade ago, I failed to complete suicide; I attempted suicide because I was being seriously abused (verbally, mentally, emotionally, financially, and sometimes physically) by my ex-spouse, which had lead to serious isolation and depression. I believe that I am mentally healthy now–as did my last psychiatrist–but I am forever barred from owning a firearm in Illinois because I was held for observation at a hospital in the state. Moreover, people with serious mental illnesses are more likely to be victims orf violence rather then perpetrators.

Why should people that are less physically capable be less able to defend themselves?

No, it doesn’t prove that guns in school won’t solve the problem.

It proves you can’t trust cops to do the bare fucking minimum.

If teachers had been armed? It might–might–have ended sooner with fewer innocent victims. At least the teachers had some skin in the game, and teachers usually care about the kids in schools.

Create a multi-part archive (…probably about 250 parts…) with a strong password, upload each part to whatever the current equivalent to Megaupload is, and let them download it at their leisure.

With no accounts on either end, should only take about three months for each to be complete.

Alternatively, you could put it on a thumb drive and drive it over if they live fairly close.

The cost of entering the market is so high that it’s functionally impossible for any new carriers to enter the market without having major investor backing. The only way to make the cost reasonable for most people is to have a very large risk pool; you can’t get a large risk pool without having a lot of people signing up, which means already having the infrastructure in place to handle that kind of numbers.

If you insure, say, 1000 people, and 999 of them are incredibly safe drives, and one of them drives drunk and kills a busload of school children–costing the insurer a “mere” $1,000,000 because that was the limit of their liability–that means that every person in that risk pool needs to pay $1000 annually for that single accident, and that’s just to break completely even, without accounting for any of the overhead involved in running an insurance company.

It is, yes. They do a ton of really small updates all the fucking time now, sometimes breaking critical shit, sometimes fixing things. (I don’t remember which version it was that ended support for PANTONE; now you have to pay for a subscription to PANTONE also, and the plug-in is trash and buggy as hell.) Since it wants to be always connected to the internet now, it’s more of a pain in the ass to pirate, although it’s likely still possible.

I have to use it for my job, so my company pays for it. But TBH, if you’re an industry professional, there’s really not any viable options on the market. Half the stuff clients send to me are in proprietary formats.

Can’t really expect anything else from a person that’s on a pro-tankie instance. Almost every time someone starts this both sides nonsense, it’s lemygrad, lemmy.ml, or hexbear.

Sure, absolutely.

As I said in another comment, one of the defining characteristics of the autism spectrum is a blunted sense of empathy. As you say, that blunted empathy can mean that the autistic person doesn’t hear the emotional content, reacts to it inappropriately, or is not able to effectively communicate emotional content themselves.

Come to think of it, if people on the spectrum aren’t communicating emotional content, or are doing it very poorly, that might explain part of why some autistic people think they’re communicating precisely with carefully chosen words, but their intent and meaning is still being misunderstood.

It’s a little more complicated with autism though, because one of the hallmarks of autism is blunted empathy (and no, I’m not saying that we’re all sociopaths-lite).

An example I heard from a psychologist–and I’m going to try not to butcher this–is that if you show an autistic child a cookie tin and ask them what they think is in the tin, they’ll say cookies. Then you show them what’s in the tin, and it’s actually toy cars. But if, after showing them toy cars in a cookie tin, you ask them what another person is going to think is in the cookie tin, the autistic child is likely to say “toy cars”.

Obvs. most people on the spectrum get better about this as they get older and learn from experience, but I strongly suspect that this sort of thing is what’s going on when autistic people ‘explain’ things. My guess is that this difficulty with affective and cognitive empathy is also what leads to people on the spectrum over-explaining things; since they’re not able to make an accurate guess about what other people know or can infer, they give too much information about a thing.

I’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s.

I’m constantly astounded that people on the spectrum assume that they’re absolutely, 100% right, and that the problem is always everyone else. If I’m saying something, and no one around me is understanding what I’m saying, then the problem is clearly not everyone else. The very clear, and obvious problem is that I’m not communicating clearly -or- effectively.

More often than not, I find that I’ve omitted something that seems blindingly, patently obvious to me, but no one else was aware of because I entirely failed to communicate it.

This is a hallmark of being on the spectrum; people think that because they see things one way, everyone else must be able to see the same thing.

Where are you from, exactly?

There’s no classes of licenses like that in the US. If you are 18 and meet the minimal legal requirements, you can buy a long gun of any type in most states. (Some states are trying to move that age to 21.) That means a single shot, break action, lever action, bolt action, pump, or yes, semi-automatic. Once you hit 21, you can buy handguns. Again: that includes break action, revolvers, and normal semi-automatics.

The only real restriction in all of this is machine guns; to get those, you need to come up with the $20,000+ that a legal one will cost, and file a transfer application with the BATF, pay a $250 fee, and wait to see if your application is approved or denied. There are some states that prevent individual ownership of machine guns entirely.

tbh my take is alot of people would like an option between paying $2 for a garment they know involved exploitation/slavery vs an accessible1 independent option that doesn’t cost $500/garment.

I would have wanted to believe that too, but then you see things like Temu that promise clothing and consumer goods at impossibly low prices, prices that simply aren’t possibly without forced labor somewhere, and people eat that shit up. I think that most people have an out of sight, out of mind approach to it, and as long as they can’t directly see the exploitation, they’ll accept it.

1 Quick note on accessibility, there are ofc some scant options between $2-500, but what isn’t clear (ie. readily accessible) to the consumer is which of those options isn’t just some greedy bastard buying a $2 option and selling it on for $15.

I strongly suspect that this obscurity is by intent.

And, taking this whole thing a bit farther, as a designer that was paying myself $20/hr, I still can’t guarantee anything about being free of forced labor, because I have no way of realistically tracking everything in my supply chain. This is why there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, so the best you can do is pick your battles.

You need to be 21 to purchase a handgun from a dealer.

This was not a handgun.

Look, no one decides that they want to work in the mines because it’s good for society as a whole to have consumer goods made from what they mine. Everyone expects to be paid in some way.

If I’m making jeans as an independent designer–which I tried doing, briefly–and I decide that my time is worth $20/hr, then I’m going to have to charge around $500 for a single pair of jeans after you figure in all the time needed to make a single pair that’s been customized to fit a single, specific person. (Maybe more; I haven’t done the math in a decade or so.) Almost no one is going to want to, or be able to afford to pay that. Am I skimming off the top? No, I’m charging a fair–and actually very low–rate for custom work. But just like when I tried to do that a decade ago, no one can or will pay for that.

Even if we capped profits of investors, and capped salaries of executives, and had most of the profits going to the workers, people would tend to prefer less expensive goods over more expensive goods. That’s how competition in the market works. In a sufficiently competitive environment, without legal constraints, prices have to drop. (Monopolies raise prices by reducing competition; a sufficiently competitive environment assumes that there is no single company dominating the market.)

when people google that they want immediate relief, not fucking oh go for a walk every day,

The problem is that there is no immediate relief that isn’t either a) suicide, or b) won’t make things worse in the long run. Even something like ECT doesn’t work instantly; it takes several treatments. Transcranial magnetic stimulation seems promising, but it’s not a frontline treatment. The generic shit is the stuff that actually works in the long run, things like getting therapy, exercising, going outside more, interacting with people in a positive way, and so on. “Self care”–isolating and doing easy, comfortable things–will make things worse in the long run.

It is in part a consumer issue. Consumers want things as cheaply as possible, and companies that produce as cheaply as possible sell more product. We’ve seen the same issue with apparel; America wants cheap clothing, and so the mills in the US have largely closed, and most production has been moved overseas in order to make the final products cheap enough.

And while it’s partly a consumer issue, the fact that wages haven’t kept up with productivity–that is, more and more money is being skimmed out of the system by investors and executives rather than going to the workers–has been the driver towards making consumer goods more and more cheaply, simply because people have less purchasing power.

Clothes were hung up in the late afternoon. Fast-moving storms came in after dark. Things that were polyester or nylon were dry before the storms came in, cotton and cotton blends were not.

I should add - the place where we hang laundry is under cover, so there’s no direct sunlight (plus, we live in a fully wooded area). But even covered, the change in ambient humidity was enough to prevent drying.

I do this. Unfortunately, you have to be able to time your laundry to sunny weather. We put laundry out yesterday when it was sunny and blue skies, and it poured overnight. So now we have to do laundry again.

Works great when the weather cooperates though.

It also seems like you don’t understand that it being banned 50 years ago is not the same as it being banned for 50 years.

Dude, it is literally illegal at the federal level at this very moment. If you use marijuana, and you buy a firearm, you are a felon. The ban may not be fully enforced in some states right now, but the feds can, at any moment, and on a whim, go into California and Colorado and arrest every single person working at a dispensary and charge them under federal drug trafficking laws, and send every single one of them to prison for life.

I would ask what you’re on, but I’m pretty sure I can guess.