I was at my first gun show with an older friend who knew guns better than I did who I was following around to keep me from making any stupid decisions.
There’s a table with a sign for “Constitutional Carry,” where they don’t think you should need a special license to concealed carry a handgun.
My friend walks up to these two guys at the table, and says “Hey, just so you know, I hope you guys fail.”
The younger of the two kind of bristles, but the older one, a dude with a long white beard, says “Oh, why?”
My friend says “Because I worked in a gun shop for fifteen years, and I helped fill out more concealed carry applications than I can count and…” at this point she gestures around at the huge room behind us, “I wouldn’t trust 95% of the people in this room with any gun at all.”
And the old dude behind the table smiles and nods his head and says “Yeah, that’s a fair point.”
So anyway, that’s the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.
So anyway, that’s the day I bought a Ruger GP-100 in 357 Magnum.
Or vote or have kids sigh
Yesterday on the way home I thought I was going to be affluenza’d by some crazy kid in a green glittery wrapped Beamer. They were so close to my bumper and making so many jerking, erratic movements that I was too worried to merge lest they did at the same time and sent us all rolling. Traffic was dense enough that I couldn’t speed up and really couldn’t safely merge initially. They ended up driving down the middle of the two lane highway and nearly ran a few people into the ditch. At least my demise would have been on the dash cam I guess.
I don’t want to drive, give me walkable cities and public transportation
Eaaasy, buddy. No matter what did you do, next to normal consequences your driving license goes buh-buy for a year. Hit someone’s car? Fine + License buhbye for a year. Hit a lamp post? Same. Hit a kid? Jail for manslaughter or whatever it’s called…plus licence buhbuye for a year. If they also take your license, then that also qualifies.
Speeding ticket? Guess what. Fine plus license buhbye.
No buy backs, no slippin, fuck your status. Can’t drive? Ride public. Can’t afford to be so poor? Pay someone to drive you. If they hit something tho, you better start walkin’. xD
Ah yes, the right to drive a car.
You have the right to exercise your driving skills, if you have them
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Everyone should have equal rights
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To ride the bus
Boom. Solved.
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Right ≠ permission
Yes, and it’s especially obvious with the example of driving. Driving is a licensed activity where you have to pass a competency test before you’re allowed to drive without supervision.
I’ve had the thought that a lot more things should be licensed with a competency test. Like, for example, I don’t know… This is just off the wall and completely random, but maybe a person who runs for President of the United States should have to pass the same exam that people take as part of the process of becoming citizens. Probably the presidential candidates should take a much harder test, but that would require a lot of oversight to make sure the test isn’t made to eliminate specific candidates.
But Trump took a cognitive test, he is good to be president. /s
My mother has Alzheimer’s and I am always with her when she takes that test, so I end up mentally taking the test alongside her. They actually have two different tests, depending on which doctor she sees, a shorter one and a longer one, and my mother mostly gets the shorter one. There’s one part where they list four (five? let’s go with four) words and have you repeat them back to them. Then, they ask you some other questions, and then they ask you to recall those four words again.
Other than misremembering the exact date, which I’m guessing everybody occasionally has the wrong date in their head, that question remembering the four words after being distracted by a different question is the only part where I could ever have lost points, since I have occasionally forgotten one of the words. It’s the only question that I feel a normal person has a chance of missing. It truly is a test specifically for dementia.
The fact that Trump always says the test is difficult and that he got a perfect score on it, given Trump’s history lying about things like winning golf tournaments, I think is absolute proof that he does extremely poorly on the test. He very likely fails it. He brings it up all the time because he’s as bad at lying as he is at everything else. Good liars know not to bring up the lie a lot. Bad liars keep repeating the lie because they’re afraid you might not believe them.
Equal access also doesn’t mean that abuse and unnecessary risk will be tolerated.
Solid public transport would fix a lot of that but Ford and GM gonna Ford and GM.
People go “ooh, a trolley car!”, when’s the last time you heard anyone go “Ooh, a Lyft”?
Somebody watches CityNerd!
I don’t, I actually got that from my friend who’s son is obsessed with trolleys right now. I’ll have to check them out of that’s a philosophy they jive with
This but chuds with voting.
Driving isn’t a right, it’s a privilege.
Driving is g a right
In a city without public transit, denying someone the right to drive is denying them personal autonomy.
A vehicle is 3000lb bullet. If you’re not competent, or irresponsible with chemicals, then everyone on the road is at risk.
No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle. Or meeting people who should’ve had a norm as l life and are now paralyzed from the neck down. Or, alternatively, a TBI. Broken neuro wiring like someone took an egg beater to sections of their brain, leaving them just save enough to know they’re fucked up.
That isn’t a privilege. Competency should be required with 3000lb bullets.
I don’t disagree that better mass transit is needed in some cities, but that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people.
that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people.
Judging by the way people drive in my city, that’s exactly what it means :(
A vehicle is 3000lb bullet
How fast do you think bullets move?
No one likes picking up body parts on a road or extracting what is basically meat from a vehicle.
You could make the same argument about train derailments or plane crashes.
That’s not what is at issue. Virtually nobody is seriously suggesting we de-industrialize transit.
The problem at hand is profit motive. Personal vehicles force people into debt, both directly through purchase and through secondary demands - parking, gasoline, maintenance. That’s what generates the economic pressure that keeps them in place.
If we were fixated on safety, we could make cars smaller and slower and we could shield pedestrians from them with infrastructure. You’d save far more lives by lowering the speed limit than raising the DMV licensing standards.
that doesn’t mean we hand drivers licenses to incompetent or irresponsible people
People aren’t consistently competent or responsible. So you either install some kind of panopticon for drivers (the private insurance model) and try to price people you suspect are high risk out of your personal risk pool. Or you get people out of cars entirely, knowing anyone can have a day that makes them highly prone to driving mistakes.
So you either install some kind of panopticon for drivers
This is what they’re doing. New cars will use cameras and sensors to determine impairment and then refuse to start.
Synthesis is: no-one should be allowed to drive
The US huge. Unless you live in a metro area and never leave you’re going to need a vehicle.
Moving state to state, generally, it will take you an entire day at a freeway speed to get 2 states over. We have 48 on the drivable side.
You could similarly say that Europe is huge, or that China is huge, or that the whole planet is huge, and therefore the people living there must need a vehicle. Except, most people dont leave their local area all that often, and when they do, theres nothing that inherently requires that the vehicle used to do so much be individually owned. This isnt to say that nobody needs a car, obviously if you live way out in the middle of nowhere, running transit might not be so viable- but that does not describe how and where most people live, even in the US, and for the majority that do live in urban areas, the size of the whole country is irrelevant to if they would need cars if we just built the proper infrastructure.
The Local Group, which includes the Milky Way galaxy, is over 10 million light years, so you can easily see that I have no choice but to own a car to be able to get around.
Intergalactic travel is rough, make sure you get all wheel drive
The problem is that even in my local area the infrastructure is built for cars so much that walking takes 10x longer than it should.
There are many such areas, what I was trying to say was more that that is a solvable problem, if the government of the area was sufficiently motivated to solve it, rather than something like “we’re too big for anything but cars”, which is more of an excuse to not do any of that change to the infrastructure because it implies that nothing can reasonably be done and that cars are simply the natural way of things.
The problem is that making my area pedestrian friendly would involve doing a lot more than just adding sidewalks.
For example, it would make much more sense to link all the cul de sacs with walking/biking paths. But to do that we’d need to bulldoze some houses, get easements from property owners, and then pay for the paths to be put in while hearing construction equipment for months.
And our local government just doesn’t have the power to do that in a reasonable amount of time, or with any guarantees of it even surviving election season.
And that’s not even talking about dealing with improving the main thoroughfare which is a state highway, meaning the local government has no say in how it’s built.
The size isn’t that relevant. Trains are far better than cars for long distance travel. The problem with the US is the many areas of low but non-zero population density.
To accommodate that you need a good rail network and then probably cars to take you the last few hours. This would work best if those cars were self driving, so they can get back to a hub rather than wherever you are in bumfuck nowhere.
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I’m gonna be real with yall, the only person that should ever have even allowed to drive is Dale fucking Earnhardt, I include myself in that but the only time I hate humanity more as a whole than on the road is in a busy Costco
The guy known for aggressive driving and died in a crash is who you think should be allowed to drive? Not sure I follow that one.
Not so fun fact: a friend of mine was trying to get me into watching racing with him. To this day that’s the only NASCAR race I’ve seen and caught it live when I was a kid.
Ain’t 3’s fault no one else was qualified to do it right! Raise hell praise Dale!
