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I guess I don't get it.
I mean, it's obviously a parody, and it seems to be poking fun at the competitive nature of American academia... but it's just not funny to me.
Maybe it's because of my background? I'm a huge gun nut, so most of those conversations seem at least to hint at something that's meaningful to me.
For instance - the US military used a slower-burning, dirty powder than specified by the manufacturer when rolling out the M-16 and variants in Vietnam. As a result they got dirty very fast and jammed far more often that is acceptable. The first "example" is referring to this.
The biggest thing I came away with is that Olin Shivers knew a ton about gun culture in 1987. Considering that there was no Internet and therefore no gun forums to waste hours every night on in 1987, he must have actually be a firearms enthusiast himself or have consulted with someone extremely knowledgeable to write this.
All that said, there is one line that made me smile:
"Poor Felton. Published, and published, and perished just the same."
> Considering that there was no Internet and therefore no gun forums
It seems you missed the signature of FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard
> moderator of rec.guns
or maybe that this is a reference to a news group[1] which was the internet of 1987?
My apologies, I was mostly being hyperbolic by saying there was "no Internet". My experience with BBSs and newsgroups is quite limited, considering I was three years old when this was published :)
Do you have any idea of the membership of rec.guns in 1987? My favorite forum shows 6,188 users logged in right now, and 6.7m unique visitors in April of the year.
BBS aside, you'd think a subscription to Guns & Ammo would suffice for that kind of stuff.
Not even close, at the level of detail in the post.
Gun magazines are notoriously bad, and pretty much rewrite the same handful of articles over and over.
He might also be mocking a group of people pushing to ban weapons from campus, the surrounding city, or some other place where the incidence of gun violence is already so low that such a ban would have little or no effect other than to aggravate law-abiding gun enthusiasts such as himself. By imagining a world in which law-abiding gun owners were regularly mowing each other down for sport (i.e. a world in which the proposed bans would be directly effective) he hopes to demonstrate just how ridiculous some of the claims coming out of the anti-gun camp were.
That's just a guess and there are more sophisticated arguments on both sides of the debate but it would be a crime to ignore such a wonderfully amusing piece of fiction on that basis alone. FWIW I was born into and consider myself sympathetic with gun culture.
I hadn't considered that; it seems plausible.
It seems like he was just trolling more than anything else. I'd love to read the replies he references in his email!
it seems to be poking fun at the competitive nature of American academia
I honestly can't tell what it's trying to satirize.
See also, the famous "Acknowledgements" section in the scsh manual: http://scsh.net/docu/html/man.html (Also by Olin Shivers)
Holy crap.
If someone wrote that today, I have no doubt they'd be facing criminal charges.
It's dated 10 days before the Assault Weapons Ban went into effect, so it's not like it was before political correctness hit the scene. Gun control was the topic for the left at that moment in history.
Now I have to go figure out what happened to this guy.
I assume this is him:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/shivers/
(Notice that is just the parent folder to the HN link. I don't point it out to be snarky, it's just a pretty strong association...)
Yeah, I quickly figured out where he is and what's he's doing today - but with no public presence apparent on any of the major sites, I'm going to assume that he's just a private person and doesn't want me snooping around.
At least I know he's not rotting under a jail somewhere :)
Not sure if the firearm he mentioned qualifies under the restrictions of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
In any event, you are severely underestimating the federal government's general tolerance for "obscenity" and speech that is potentially objectionable. Honestly, if John Waters can get by fine, so can this.
Loved the jab at the left, as well. Such a descriptive term.
> Not sure if the firearm he mentioned qualifies under the restrictions of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
No, pistols were generally unaffected, with the exception of the 10-round magazine limit. Sigs are generally double-stack pistols, so ten days after that was published he'd have only been able to buy used magazines.
> In any event, you are severely underestimating the federal government's general tolerance for "obscenity" and speech that is potentially objectionable. Honestly, if John Waters can get by fine, so can this.
It seems to depends on the particular speech and the administration in office at the time, no? I'm quite aware of the theoretical and practical protections offered by the First Amendment, but publishing an implied, detailed threat toward a small group of people you work with today is unwise to say the least.
> Loved the jab at the left, as well. Such a descriptive term.
I actually meant no offense by it. In 1994, gun control was a core issue for the Democratic Party.
It seems readily apparent that "the left" and "the Democratic Party" are nearly synonymous when speaking about elections at the national level.
> In any event, you are severely underestimating the federal government's general tolerance for "obscenity" and speech that is potentially objectionable.
Given that California passed a law allowing for confiscation of firearms as a result of anonymous tips in response to a diatribe not too dissimilar from the one posted, I'd say that's debatable.
That said, I agree that Lyndsy overstated the case that the person would _surely_ be in jail, but it isn't terribly implausible either, depending on the locality.
I find it weird how different US is to EU sometimes. Guns have literally never came up in any of the conversations I had with friends, and the only "gun" I have ever held was an air rifle during my scouts training. Yet this article is fascinating and I would not have even though this would be such an important thing at US universities(or at least was - 27 years ago). Entirely different culture.
I'm an American and it flew over my head at first too. Until I got to the latter parts and it got progressively more ridiculous. It definitely starts out subtly- in fact I'm not actually sure the beginning is a parody!
FYI: There are a lot of people who own guns in America, but they are a minority. By a large margin, most homes (about 2/3 of homes) do not have any gun owners. The popularly of guns varies by region... it is a big country and there are lots of cultural differences from state to state.
I've never considered gun owners a minority, but it appears that you're correct.
That said, approximately 40% of households self-report as having a gun according to the recent stats I've been able to find. It's important to note that from 2010 or so to today, firearms and ammunition sales have been substantially elevated. Until this year, it's been basically impossible to find inexpensive .22 ammo. A couple of weeks ago I needed a couple of boxes for a range visit (introducing a new friend to guns), and I had to visit seven different stores before I finally found some. A year ago, I wouldn't have been able to find it locally at all.
I grew up in Arkansas and lived there until mid-2013. I'd guess that 70% or more of households there have at least one gun, and most of those would have multiples. A centerfire hunting rifle and a shotgun would probably be most popular, followed by a centerfire handgun. Maybe 20% of households have 5 or more.
Obviously my estimates above are based on my own perception, but I believe them to be conservative.
After moving to central Virginia, I can definitely tell that fewer people here are comfortable around firearms. I suspect that's mostly accounted for through population density - I now live in a small city instead of a rural area.
Living in Philadelphia's suburbs my whole life, hardly anybody I know (or have known) has owned guns. Maybe 10% or less if I had to guess.
I'm sure that some people I know have guns and simply don't talk about them, of course. But the gun owners I do know aren't stigmatized in my social circles or anything, so I wouldn't say there's much incentive to be secretive about it in my social circles.
This is all highly anecdotal of course but it just shows how regional the gun ownership thing is in America, along with pretty much everything else as well...
> I'd guess that 70% or more of households there have at least one gun, and most of those would have multiples.
There are apparently about 300 million firearms in America and that number, due to controls on manufacturing and importing, is inexact but probably more trustworthy than self-reported ownership numbers.
So you figure... there's about one gun for each American... but most gun owners have multiples... so it makes rough ballpark mathematical sense to me that the majority of Americans don't have guns. Unless we think that there are more like a billion guns out there instead of 300 million.
I too have found the claim that only 1/3 of homes have a firearm to be dubious, especially as it's all self-reporting, and I have a very hard time imagining too many gun owners answering 'yes', even to an anonymous survey.
> I too have found the claim that only 1/3 of homes have a firearm to be dubious
Really? Why? I'd have thought that was a bit high, off the top of my head.
Most people don't have any reason to own a gun. Hunting is very popular as hobbies go, but it's a lot of work and isn't practical for a lot of people. As for self/home defense, a reasonable person isn't going to go to the trouble and expense of acquiring a handgun unless they feel genuinely threatened, which I can't imagine is hugely common. Own must of course account for the NRA-driven fetishist attitude that you ought to own a gun as a matter of principle even if it's completely worthless to you, but again I can't really see that stretching beyond 33%.
Anecdata, I suppose, but while I never cared for guns myself (until somewhat recently, I've become a convert), until I moved to Hawai'i, I honestly don't believe I'd been in a single home that didn't have a firearm in it. To be fair, I grew up in the South, Virginia and Tennessee, but never rural south, and, to be even fairer, my father was military, so a lot of the homes I'm speaking of were Marines.
That said, even outside of military homes, everybody I knew had a firearm of some sort.
Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms. I never had any experience with them or opinion of them whatsoever, and always believed that, hey, this is America, if I ever need a firearm, I'll go get one. It wasn't until my current home state attempted to ban a variety of firearms that I got interested in the history of the second amendment, and came to the conclusion that the bans they were enacting were unconstitutional.
Since then, in addition to the protests for marriage equality, against NSA surveillance, etc., I've begun attending firearms rallies. In my experience there, I've met many gun owners, many of whom have been asked to self identify as to whether or not they own firearms over the years, and overwhelmingly, the response is 'Nope.'
So, the long and short of it is that while I believe the 33% number is too low, I don't have any idea how low it is. Of course, having seen outright, provably false statistics in use by gun control advocates (and again, to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful), and provably wrong exaggerations (e.g., 40% of firearms were purchased without going through a background check), that leads me to believe that the variance is higher than just a couple of points.
Admittedly, I can't prove (nor am I trying to) that it's 50% or greater, but while the census puts 'urban' populations as comprising ~80% of America, most of those urban centers aren't big cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and outside of areas with heavy gun control, gun ownership rates skyrocket.
> Beyond that, as I said, I've always been a staunch civil rights advocate, but I'm a recent convert to firearms.
I always like to see this. I've always viewed arms possession as a civil right, and I sense that there is something of a paradigm shift in that direction happening.
> to be fair, the gun rights advocates aren't always forthcoming with statistics, but I have found their side to be more truthful
Part of the problem is that data is extremely hard to come by anything resembling unbiased data on the topic.
One of my personal pet peeves is when someone writes about "10,000 kids are murdered in gun violence every year", only to find upon further investigation that for the dataset they used, "kids" refers to all persons age 25 and under and "murdered" really meant "killed by". Counting a 24-year-old gang member who is shot by police as a "child murdered by gun violence" is absurd.
I'm not familiar with any similar criticisms going the other direction. The closest thing I've seen would be a handful of academics dismissing the work of John Lott out-of-hand without giving a specific reason for doing so. Asserting that a peer-reviewed paper is "widely discredited" has no meaning when one cannot point to a single published criticism of the work.
Either I'm missing your joke, or you are missing Olin's. American universities, 30 years ago or otherwise, do not actually have the sort of gun culture that Olin is describing. For example, Olin was not actually going to mount an M60 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M60_machine_gun) on the roof of his car.
It's a parody.
oooooohhh, alright then. It flew right past me - I was completely ready to believe that it was being serious.
Even the part about concluding an academic presentation by shooting a colleague in the face?
Exactly what kind of ridiculous caricature of the US does your local media give you?
I assume he skimmed, and missed that particular part.
I did, I read the beginning which was kind of cool, then middle and then the last paragraph - all looked completely genuine. I didn't read all of it because it looked quite technical and I don't know crap about guns.
It's almost unheard of for civilians to actually have automatic weapons, and it was in the 80's too. I think this is at least partially satire.
Undergrads having recreational firefights on Main Street while their elders sip tea and look on approvingly is also relatively uncommon.
To be fair, there were likely a lot more fully automatic firearms on the market in 1987 than there are today.
The law passed in 1986 basically prohibited civilian ownership of automatic firearms manufactured after that date, so almost exclusively, legally owned fully automatic firearms owned today were manufactured before 1986.
Right. I doubt it was "A lot more" though.
Knowing that the Registry for automatic weapons was closing, some manufacturers registered as many as they could before the deadline. To this day you can get "new" Sten SMGs if you're willing to pay enough (~$5-6k last I looked). There are piles of metal pipes with serial numbers stamped on them in a couple of warehouses that are legally considered automatic weapons.
Your point is undoubtedly solid. Since the tax stamps in 1936, I don't think that there's ever been a large percentage of full auto owners, ignoring how costly and pointless they are in the first place.
It's the rare bird that is willing to endure the months of waiting and background checks for the pleasure of spending their money as quickly as possible.
Poe's law.
I thought this post would be about automating weapons. Like with beagle boards/arduino + servos and computer vision auto targeting and a smartphone. Which would be kind of scary, but at least technically interesting.
Wow, water guns to shoot squirrels. The technical stuff is super interesting. Thank you!
Given the "(1987)" tag, I was expecting something vaguely prescient about drone warfare. I was delighted to be wrong.
I didn't have the (1987) tag when I left my comment.
Ugh, posts like this make me sick.
JUST BUY AK47! It was made exact for dirty hands and bad gunpowder. You think you can improve on design? You think your M16Z8Vblahglahblahs better?
YOU KNOW NOTHING JOHN SMITH!
This...this is glorious.
Far more interesting and helpful than autotools debates.
Reading your comment before the article completely threw me. At the time it was the only comment, and so I thought the whole thing was a parody of how using autotools is overkill or something. (Or, knowing nothing like I did, maybe about some sort of AutoCAD software suite, which can also be likened to some forms of violence.)
Confoundation ensued until I came back and other posters noted it's actually satire about actual gun use.
Though it was a bit fun attempting to misinterpret the whole piece that way. Turns out it's funny from every angle.