Not to incidentally glorify a bunch of aristocratic slave owners, but I think that’s exactly the sort of shortcut that the founders of the USA didn’t want us to be making, and I do agree with them on that matter. I’d rather have long, hard, good-faith conversations over how to safely and responsibly have as much freedom and individual autonomy as possible without infringing on the same for others, than give up access to specific objects and actions piecemeal in an ostensible attempt to curtail our lowest common denominators.

In terms of outcomes, there are about 400 million guns in the US and about 283 million cars. Yet gun deaths and car deaths have kept pace with one another for about a decade with roughly 45K annually for each, with guns recently edging out cars during covid. Statistically speaking, a gun kills at a rate of 11.25⁻⁵ Americans per year, while a car kills at a rate of 15.79⁻⁵ Americans per year.

However, I hope you’ll agree with me that we shouldn’t ban cars simply because they are capable of violence.

Well go on, show me the violent crime stats by country so that we can compare to semiauto long gun regs. It would also be nice if we could see before and after stats but I know that’s a tall ask and I’m not trying to be a sealion. Let’s just see violent crime stats, maybe just homicides per 1 million or similar. It sounds like you have access to this data.

Don’t show me only the mass shooting stats. We’re not trying to reduce mass shootings, we’re trying to reduce violence. We’re not trying to avoid having to see guns, we’re trying to avoid having to see bloodshed. I know, I know. You want to point out that mass shootings are a vector of violence that can be remedied by removing guns. This is true, taking away rights does mute a lot of issues related to irresponsible management of those rights. But you’ve been brushing off my suggestions that there are more just and fair ways to address that vector for this entire conversation. So let’s table that specific response of yours for now, and let’s just see the violence stats before moving on.

And all the countries that allow guns suffer from frequent mass shootings, right? Because access to guns is the cause of social violence.

Have you ever driven a car?

Shame on you if you have. Some of those have been designed and used to kill people.

How dare you. Go live in the woods!

Overview of gun laws by nation

Even I am surprised by how many nations have a legal pathway to semiauto ownership. Also for the record, I think that firearm licensing programs are generally a good idea, and driver licensing programs provide a good model for them to follow. But few US states have them.

I think you misunderstand. I’m not trying to stan the 2A. I’m trying to point out that the US is not at all unique when it comes to private access to the sort of gun that Maryland has banned.

They issue “convertible notes”, which this coindesk article explains far better than I could because I am not a finance head and honestly do not fully understand them.

There are literally dozens of countries that allow private ownership of semi-auto long guns with a permit (Canada is one of them - I see your home instance is .ca), many of them don’t even require a stated reason. The legal difference in the US is that one of our founding documents specifies access as a right. Access to guns is not why we’re a violent county. We’re a violent country because we’re a genocidal settler-colonialist racial slaver society with no health care and piss-poor education. If all of our guns were to poof vanish tonight we’d just have more euro-style mass knifings in our schools and department stores. This shit is like water pressure, you can put your thumb on the hose with piecemeal measures but it’s going to burst out somewhere else so long as it’s still flowing.

Ruining the fun? That seems to be an incredibly weak argument for gun proliferation.

Why, you have an issue with fun? You have an issue with a society where everyone can pursue their hobbies to the fullest extent, and find enjoyment in them? Do you not think it’s possible to provide responsible restrictions on firearms in a way that doesn’t prevent one from going out into the woods on a weekend with friends to merely enjoy nerding out on the intersection of machining and marksmanship? More importantly, do you not find it justified to argue for rights from the goal of having a good time? Fun isn’t covered in the constitution per se but I think this falls under the old “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution”.

I’m not saying don’t try to stop mass murders. I’m saying do it in a way that makes fucking sense. This part bans make no fucking sense, especially when they don’t grandfather in for existing owners. I wish we would put all the effort spent on supporting these piecemeal measures into pressuring legislators to provide access to a good education and medical / mental health services for everyone as I’m convinced lack of those things are the source of the violence, but all this stupid system can do is take from people and it bothers me to see people jump on that train so willingly when it happens.

Especially at a time where government agencies are committing acts of escalating terror against the population, like we’re seeing with ICE. It’s just so tone deaf.

That doesn’t follow logically at all unless you think a society with frequent mass murders is a foregone conclusion.

That seems like an awfully fringe and roundabout improvement for a law that ruins the fun for everyone else. But I guess this is the flip side of the same leadership that’s engineered a society in which so many people decide to be mass murderers in the first place.

Yeah, but the law you linked only says what it’s modifying. Did the previous law define the term “assault weapon” in Maryland, too?

Your parenthetical kind of says it all…

Well, it defines assault weapons rather than redefines. As that wasn’t previously any kind of classification of gun. Just a scare term that politicians liked to use similar to “super predator”.

You’d think that if someone was about to slaughter as many people as possible they wouldn’t really be to worried about a 10-round mag law.

Mass shootings are rarely gunfights.

Several northeast states passed kneejerk legislation of this type in the wake of Sandy Hook. Common sense gun legislation that provides a pathway to purchase for those without red flags without violating the privacy of owners would be nice, but neither Democrats or Republicans are capable of passing any such legislation. Republicans want no regulation at all while Democrats want to score points in a punitive culture war.

Alright, well in the spirit of you not thinking it’s a scam and merely listing why others may think it is, I guess I’ll respond to your compiled list.

the proof of work aspect encourages miners to keep adding more hash rate to the network so long as it is profitable to do so and not whether the network actually needs it. It takes crazy amounts of energy for simple transactions.

TL;DR I think this is a valid argument. But let’s break it down to really know what we’re saying. If you take the estimated global mining power of 175 TWh at an average 3,000 transactions per block, it works out to 1.1 MW/transaction. Which is a ton, easily arguable as far too much. The problem with this argument are IMO threefold, although they do amount to mere caveats:

1. It ignores sidechains like lightning, a federated network that handles the majority of small bitcoin transactions. Anecdotally speaking, most purchases of goods and services that I’ve ever made in bitcoin (Mostly software and game passes, a few coffees) have been via lightning. Potentially billions of lightning TXs can tether behind a single on-chain transaction. I do not believe lightning processes this level of volume today, but as it’s an immeasurable federated network it casts heavy doubt all power estimates. I would not be surprised if the ratio of side-chain to on-chain BTC transactions is already 100:1. Which is still too much power per tx but…
2. …The power argument gives a free pass to even more expensive proof of works that already exist, which are normalized enough to us that we do not think of them as the proof of works that they are. What is the single largest consumer of energy on the planet but an energetic protection of the value of the USD? There is a reason that the US military is several times larger than the next 9 world militaries combined, and it is not territorial expansion or defense. I’m not naive enough to think that a deflationary currency can stop a nation state from committing military violence on a mass scale so long as it wants to, but every time I hear that “proof of work is a waste” I get frustrated at what I see as misdirection.
3. Mining intensity plateaus over the long term due to several factors. Decreasing block rewards, regulatory catchup, and industry crowding put a cap on participation. The one and only force pushing back against these weights is increasing bitcoin value, which itself plateaus over time or at least S-curves off. When the price spikes, you are right that miners respond to the profit incentive by growing. But these spikes become less pronounced year over year, and with them the industry has already begun to level off. It’s growth is not exponential like some believe, and certainly not runaway.

Proof of stake algorithms (like Ether) is just a plot for the rich to get richer and favor early adopters who have more coins.

I agree with this. I feel that PoS breaks the holistic system that bitcoin’s whitepaper outlines. But Etherium is not Bitcoin, and I would not bother arguing for it’s sake.

It’s controlled by technology and not laws and can’t be fixed.

Just plain wrong. We have plenty of very strict laws that control software use. We can and should have laws surrounding bitcoin use, especially ones that pertain to steering the mining industry and taxation.

Someone stealing it is more likely to get away with it because it’s not like a company can just revert fraud.

Conditionally true. If the thief is in Russia or one of a handful of other nations that stand contrary to global financial regulation, then yes it would be relatively easy for them to get away with it. But outside of those jurisdictions it would be a matter of time before a motivated law enforcement agency tracked them down, as just about all on/off ramps are now regulated and value movement can be tracked along a chain of wallets - Including tumblers / mixers! - On the public ledger. Still conditional though, because the funds could be spent long before the thief is caught. This is one of the main reasons why I think multi-sig wallets are going to become the norm over the next decade.

it doesn’t hold value. Stocks do hold value because you own a portion of that company and if they don’t reinvest their profits you get dividends. Money does hold value because even in the absence of a gold standard we’ve been using it long enough that it’s so ingrained in everything and everyone agrees it has value. Money has value in that the massive amount of financial regulations surrounding it creates a more stable value. Not everyone agrees crypto has value. Crypto is hardly regulated. Crypto wildly fluctuates in price.

IMO this argument is completely vapid, and illustrative of my main gripe about the way that people criticize bitcoin. Bitcoin is money, all of the arguments made for “money” that you relay here can be made for bitcoin, and the fact that bitcoin is money is not a strength, it is the one single ACTUAL heavyweight criticism that can and should be leveled against bitcoin. But when it’s time to argue against bitcoin, all the leftists suddenly transform into liberals. Arguing against bitcoin from the position of defending money, rather than arguing against money, including bitcoin, on the basis that not only is bitcoin money but that it is accelerated, hyper-financialized, straight-into-your-veins money that intensifies all the typical immiseration of workers under capitalism! I can’t believe that people actually argue that “bitcoin isn’t money and that’s why it’s bad” instead of “bitcoin is the most money that ever did money and THAT is why it’s bad”! It eclipses any and all other criticisms, rational or otherwise, yet we fail to make that one argument.

it is often used in scams and makes it easier for scammers to be anonymous and lock down funds they steal.

Merh, I don’t find this argument compelling. I really don’t think that most scammers are anonymous or need to be. Most of the scams I see in the world are right out there in the open. The scammers successfully pushing their scams with their real faces. Crypto as a whole does attract scammers. But again, most of them have known names and addresses.

Anyway, since these aren’t necessarily all your arguments I’d be interested to see how your own opinions of them compare to mine. My fingers are sore, that was a lot of typing.