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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • You misunderstand the dynamic. Most GOP voters are going to vote and are going to vote for the Republican, regardless of how awful that Republican is. Voting is a civic duty and party above all are kinda core ideas for them.

    Dem voters are a lot more flighty in general. Any barrier to voting no matter how small (even having to rise from the couch) impacts Dem voters more than GOP ones.

    There are more Dem voters than GOP ones except maybe in very red states. It’s about turnout - US voter turnout is God awful and it’s worse among Dems than GOP.

    That’s why the debate was so bad for the Dems, because it’s not about whether or not it pulls voters to Trump but about what it does to Dem turnout.












  • If they actually believe in that whole originalism thing they claim (basically that the text of the constitution means what it would have meant at the time it was written, and shifts in the definition of words don’t change that meaning) they still can’t allow it. There’s basically no way to interpret the Constitution that would result in mandating a specific religious affirmation be in public facilities isn’t “promoting an establishment of religion”.

    The best they could hope for without just ignoring the Constitution entirely and making something up (which all their conservatism.aside they generally haven’t done yet) would be arguing that this requires opening the door to any similar list of religious tenets by literally every faith on the planet.





  • All they are a modification to turn a semiautomatic gun into a full automatic weapon.

    They don’t though. And I went into great detail as to what exactly they do and how it works to explain why they don’t do that.

    An automatic weapon fires more than once per operation of the trigger by definition. Any gun that fires once per operation of the trigger is not automatic by definition.

    A bump stock doesn’t change that, it makes it easier and more accurate to bump.fire, which is basically using the recoil to bounce your finger off the trigger and back onto it to pull it faster than you otherwise would.

    With practice you can bump fire with a regular stock, that doesn’t mean all semiautomatic weapons are actually automatic.

    Like the binary trigger thing - eventually that will be challenged in the courts and the argument won’t be over whether or not the words binary trigger are in the law, but whether or not lifting your finger off the trigger counts as a second operation of the trigger or as part of the previous one because that is what would determine if it fires one or two shots per operation of the trigger and thus whether or not it’s legally automatic and whether or not it is controlled as an automatic weapon.

    The law doesn’t say what you wish it said, and it isn’t exactly vague.





  • A bump stock does not function by a single action of the trigger and does not meet the statutory definition as a result. The ATF rule banning them got struck down because Congress hadn’t authorized the ATF to regulate machine guns beyond that specific statutory definition.

    They had several cases along these lines involving several agencies, and I feel like people don’t understand the underlying legal idea - rule making power belongs to Congress. Federal agencies under the executive branch that have rule making powers receive those powers by Congress delegating it to them in a limited fashion through legislation. Those powers extend only so far as the passed legislation delegates them and no further. Even in cases where it seems like it would be useful, or the name of the agency suggests it would be something in their sphere of influence.