DutyBard @DutyBard@qoto.org

@freemo @rrb @pj An interesting discussion. As someone who works in policing in canada I have been exposed to a lot of information about gun use in crime and the pros/cons of gun ownership and use in general. One of the aspects I think that you overlook when arguing that people would be safer if everyone carried around guns is that the vast majority of altercations, whether physical or otherwise, come about when otherwise reasonable individuals become emotionally disturbed or incensed (drugs and alcohol often contribute to this), then they make decisions they otherwise would not. A huge percentage of assaults/suicides by guns occur in residences where they are not safely stored, because individuals in the midst of an emotional episode can grab them and use them without a chance for a second thought. Suicide is also a huge one, you are *far* more likely to successfully commit suicide if there is a gun in your home and seeing as how the rate of suicidality in most developed countries keeps on increasing, probably the best reason to not own a gun is to protect you from yourself! And I think the argument for America being a naturally more violent country than other developed nations is not adequately supported by evidence, people in canada get into altercations all the time, but so few of them involve firearms that they are less likely to turn deadly, in fact, the communities within Canada that have the most fatal altercations are the very ones with the highest prevalence of gun ownership! Not having easy access to guns is certainly helping to prevent a ton of needless gun deaths. While it is true that a dedicated individual can acquire the necessary firepower to commit an atrocity, like what happened a few years ago in Nova Scotia, that event took years of planning and preparation; what gun control helps to prevent are the deaths that occur from more temporary insanities.

NEW | A short, sharp tribute to Paul O'Grady/a warning about obits erasing his politics...

SAVAGED

The media tributes to Paul O'Grady (and his alter-ego Lily Savage) strip him of his politics and smooth away the sharp edges that enhanced his greatness

https://brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/savaged

In Medicine, many supposedly incurable diseases offer, on the occasion, spontaneous remissions.
Conspiratorial thinking (à la Fox News) is an exception; it is deemed to be truly incurable as it has no documented cases of remission. There is nothing you can do to cure the patient.

"Hello world" in a single C Syscall

https://sgibala.com/01-05-single-syscall-hello-world-part-1/

What athletes and academics have in common: they take a felicitous, enjoyable, and playful activity and transform it into a source of pain.

Hancock always struck me as a naïf trying to run with the wolves. He wanted to be as corrupt as his peers but he was always going to be eaten by them.

So I submitted some evidence for a parliamentary committee today.

That will be interesting.

It is a first.

The call for evidence was relating to the #EnergyPriceGuarantee

I will try to explain why it matters, because it tells us very much about what kind of society the UK is and how politics has handled the #EnergyCrisis #ClimateCrisis

Its all related obviously.

Please bear with me.