I used to sell guns at a previous job, and we usually didn’t get high end stuff unless it was a special order.

I tried to get a job at a gun store. I am a little too... Unusual in my appearance. It would not have pleased the majority of the customers there. Oh well. (Not that it matters much; margins are low enough that discounts wouldn't have been any better than what I can get on gun.deals or ammoseek.)

I have a few neighbors who are definitely going to be ICE targets soon, and they have been invited to start shooting with us in preparation.

Very cool. FWIW, as long as they're legal residents, they should be able to get firearms legally.

I would sincerely hope that any gun owner that saw someone being grabbed off the street by people in street clothes would act to stop the abduction. But I'm afraid that too many people have the bystander virus.

I miss the good old days when target practice was fun and banter was abound

There's still some of that at some matches. But yes, it's getting a lot more grim. The tone is shifting, because everyone is starting to see where we're heading, and wondering what they really would have done in Germany in 1935.

True, but in many cases the product is graded by quality

Well, mostly. Yes, the highest quality product is def. going to go into the name brand stuff. But if everything off the line is high quality for a given production period, then the store-branded and generic stuff is also going to be high quality. So quality on overruns, etc. is going to have more variance than what you'd get from a name brand.

I've never had complaints about Trader Joe's, other than the fact that I really don't buy a lot of prepared foods; I prefer buying fresh ingredients, and making my own whatever when I can. I do remember buying a TJ Islay whiskey once; it was solidly okay. Not great, not as bad as Jack Daniels, just okay.

I enjoy working on engines when it's not urgent, and it's fairly low stakes if things take 5x as long as I plan, or I need more parts than I thought. OTOH, it's incredibly stressful when my motorcycle throws an engine code that tells me there's an electrical fault, and I know that I'm going go end up needing to tear it down, go through the wiring loom, and not be able to ride for a few weeks when the weather is finally getting really nice.

I agree with the older Dems, but not for their reasons.

No, we should not support the candidates that Hogg supports. Because Hogg is very opposed to 2A rights, and ipso facto any candidate that he supports will also be opposed to 2A rights. And if you think that we're gonna just vote our way out of this, I've got some very, very bad news for you.

Primary the old fucks with young leftists (hopefully ones that actually understand economics and tax policy)? Absolutely! Primary them with ones that ideologically aligned with Hogg? No.

Pity that you can't teach cats to use crew-served weapons...

The obvious choice is to buy a multi-piece rifle, full size or pcc is up to you, that breaks into 2+ pieces.

That's pretty much al AR-15s; you can entirely separate the upper and lower receivers. But you're probably thinking more of take-down rifles. I don't think that most take-down rifles would be ideal in a SHTF kind of situation. And, to be very, very clear, I think that a very sudden SHTF situation where you need a rifle is very, very unlikely. I think that suddenly needing to evacuate due to weather or fires is more likely, and the kind of civil unrest that might require a rifle, well, we're already the frog in that pot, and the water keeps getting hotter... Someone is going to throw the first rock at a protest, then it's going to get very, very ugly, very, very fast.

Mostly, yeah. But being part of the community also means having potentially the same bigotry as the community. Again: I'm in a very, very white town in the rural south; most of the residents are low-key racist, and some aren't even low-key about it.

You have no additional powers under the state, just the same rights as everyone else.

This one I would disagree with. I don't think that there should be a general right for citizens to arrest people; the murder of Ahmaud Arbery wasn't too terribly far from me, and that started as citizens trying to arrest a guy for jogging while being black. (Come to think of it, based off police arrests, doing pretty much anything while being black is an arrestable offense.) I think that powers of arrest should be limited to people that have gone through a minimum of two years of training in law enforcement--including law!--and have passed exams to become certified. (So yes, I agree that there needs to be a licensing body that exists outside of the control of the police departments or police unions.)

I absolutely agree that qualified immunity shouldn't exist, or at least, not the way it does now. What is covered should be codified into law, and everything that's outside of that should be not covered. Take, for instance, a high speed chase, where an objectively dangerous person is fleeing police; without qualified immunity, if a police officer lost control of their car and caused harm to a bystander, that officer would be criminally liable. I don't think that's a reasonable outcome, given that the alternative--not pursuing an objectively dangerous person--seems like the worse option. (Yes, yes, they could use a helicopter, but that's not always an option.) But there are a lot of things that do get covered under qualified immunity--like killing someone by tazing them repeatedly while their hogtied in the back of a patrol car--that absolute should not, under any circumstances.

The police problem is genuinely difficult. I think that a lot of it is cultural, with old cops sharing institutional practices with new cops, and perpetuating cycles. I think that kind of culture needs to be broken, so that cops genuinely feel a sense of responsibility, and want to do the right thing in the right way. I don't know what the best way to approach that is though.

Store brands are often made in the same factories and on the same production lines. The differences can be truly negligible.

Point

Warning: I'm autistic--yes, really--and guns are one of my life-long special interests. So, wall of text incoming.

PCCs (pistol caliber carbines) are handy, but I don't know if I'd want to rely on one as a do-all bug out rifle. In my opinion, for most able-bodied people, PCCs have the worst features of both rifles and pistols; they're bulky enough that they can't be concealed easily, and the bullets are less powerful and have significantly shorter ranges than rifles. Some PCCs also have reliability issues, but I don't know which ones specifically. (That said, the Kriss Vector is cool as hell, doubly so if you can get it as an SBR and silenced. Not always super reliable, but still very neat. And expensive. So, maybe not that.) On the other hand, recoil is very minimal. If you really like PCCs, then I've heard good things about the KP-9, which also happens to be produced by a very decent person (e.g., non-chud). PCCs are particularly good for people with some level of disability that prevents them from using a typical pistol effectively.

If you're a normal person with normal person funds, where buying a rifle is a large purchase, I'd get a 14" AR-15 'pistol' with a solid 'wrist brace'. As long as you're buying something nicer than Bear Creek Arsenal or Palmetto State Armory, the brand isn't going to matter a lot. Don't waste your money on Daniel Defense or KAC. A reliable red dot optic that's zeroed at 50y completes the minimalist bug-out 'pistol'. In this case, I would suggest an enclosed red dot, like the Lead & Steel Promethean; enclosed dots are less likely to get gunked up. Get a bunch of magazines, Magpul 30 rounders if your state allows them, and 10 rounders if your state doesn't. A "combat load", IIRC, is 210 rounds, or seven 30-round magazines; if you need that many rounds in a bug-out situation, you are well and truly fucked.

If you've got money to burn, I'd suggest getting a piston rifle like the Sig MCX-Spear LT in 11.5" or an FN-SCAR in 11.5" (both will be SBRs, so you'll need a tax stamp), and then a B&T Print-X VERS36 SS silencer (.30 cal, titanium, modular, full-auto rated--which is unusual for titanium silencers--and yes, you need a tax stamp for it). Both rifles are 5.56x45mm, which means ammo is both cheap and readily available at almost any gun store anywhere. Both rifles are also piston-operated, rather than being direct impingement (DI), so the stock can fold to make it more compact. Yes, piston rifles are slightly less accurate than DI, but at the ranges that a bug-out rifle would be used, that's probably not an issue. I'd probably get a Dead Air KeyMo adapter and mount for the silencer so you could take it off and put it on quickly, since a silencer is going to add 6-8". If you can afford it, holographic sights are slightly nicer than red dots (albeit with shorter battery life; EOTech and the Vortex AMG UH-1 are the only holographic options), and a 4x flip-up magnifier extends your range. (I use an LPVO and an offset red dot on my primary competition rifle, but that's a bit much for a bug-out rifle.) You might want a weapon light; Surefire is the standard choice, but I use a relatively inexpensive Steamlight, and it works well enough for night matches out to about 150y or so. At the ranges that you'd ever be likely to need to use a bug-out rifle, that's likely not a significant issue.

Personally, I don't worry about a bug-out rifle. That's low on my priority list. I have enough cats that bugging out means driving with eight pet carriers, not walking, so a full-sized rifle is fine for me. I'm more worried about having a good carry gun. :)

A coworker that got pissed when things didn't work and threw them across the shop floor was getting fired. He was getting fired mostly because the owner of the company--hereafter referred to as Asshole Boss--was a dick, and the coworker scared him. (Note that the coworker was never violent towards people. Just machines.) Anyway, the Asshole Boss got a bunch of cops there on the day that he was gonna fire him, but the employee heard what was going to happen and just... Didn't show up.

This is the same Asshole Boss that fired me maybe a year, year and a half later. He fired me because I had a 'bad attitude' because my partner of ten years had said that they wanted a divorce two days earlier. I got driven straight to the hospital and checked in after telling my supervisor that I was going home to commit suicide. Yeah, the suicide part didn't work out after all. (The divorce was ugly; they tried to bankrupt me and saddle me with all of their debt.)

...But it all ended well. Asshole Boss fired the management team that was making the whole business work in a fit of pique; the management team got some funds together and started a company that was in direct competition with Asshole Boss. I ended up being their first hire. Asshole Boss ran his business into the ground in less than a year and a half, and the company the management team started is growing and expanding a decade later.

Just put the gin in a cloth bag as you shoot. At that range, it's hard to miss.

most of the gun nuts all agree that the best bugout bag gun is an FN-FAL.

Who, exactly? FALs that make it to the US are notoriously finicky and unreliable. The ones made by Century Arms take a lot of fiddling to make them work at all, and when they do, they're 2MOA at best, and more likely 3MOA. Also, even in carbine configuration, it's big and heavy.

.300BO is based off of the 5.56x45mm cartridge; it's intended as a subsonic round--e.g., extra-quiet when you're shooting with a silencer--and has ballistics on par with a bus. It's big, heavy, slow, and has an incredibly short effective range.

Neither .308 (7.62x51mm NATO) nor .300BO will go through a level IV plate, which is pretty standard at this point for US soldiers.

If you want highly accurate in an AR-15 package, go for 6mm ARC. If you want highly accurate in an AR-10 package, go for 6.5CM or 6.5PRC.

Most countries have moved away from battle rifles. The biggest reason is that ammo is heavier, and heavier ammo means you can carry less. All other things being equal, the side with the most ammunition tends to win. The second reason is that engagements rarely happen at ranges that require a full-powered cartridge; a mid-sized cartridge is quite sufficient for infantry use.

41.1% of land. Not the places where people actually live. Take Marina City (AKA the corncobs); there's a restaurant on the ground floor of one, and I think House of Blues Chicago in the other, and then, I dunno, a few hundred condos above them? Go into Wicker Park, Logan Square, Rogers Park, Lincoln Park, Lincoln Square, Ukrainian Village, Little Village, and on, and on, and almsot every single retail establishment has at least 2-3 stories of apartments and condos above it.

Unless you know how to remap a car and have a car with plenty of power reserve.

Right, that's my point though. With my '84 Chevy Monte Carlo SS, I could drop a new engine in (started with a 305, ended with a 400 short block), do a high-flow dual carb intake, get a couple Edelbrock carbs, buy some headers, straight pipes and a glasspack muffler, and get a ton more power. (And also much, much worse fuel economy.) Now you not only need to understand wrenching, you also have to have the software and knowledge to entirely re-map the fuel, since it's all computerized.

And while you are technically correct that you can get tons more power out of a lot of mostly stock engines, that does sharply reduce your engine lifespan. Of course, that's always been the case, but it used to be that you could fairly easily get your block bored and sleeved to have larger pistons ("there's no replacement for displacement"), but generally engines are running with much less material now. Oh, and they're aluminum rather than iron, so often you're going to have to send your block off to a specialist to get the cylinder bores coated for longevity. (I think my Honda CBR600RR had alusil or nikasil plating in the cylinders? I'm not sure now.)

I'm really, really not nostalgic for those days; yeah, hot rods are kind of neat, and it's fun being able to do your own mechanical work, but cars now are so much more efficient, more powerful, and last 3-4x as long as cars from the 60s through early 80s.

The still kindof affordable houses on the urban fringe are all HOA neighborhoods.

You don't have to live on the fringe; you can make a choice to live farther out. Assuming that it meets building codes for the state you live in, you can build that wizard tower if you want to.

You say that it's a choice that's not a choice, but that's only if you make a lot of other choices first; I want to live in X area, I want Y schools, and so on. I'm in the process of trying to sell a home so that I can make a choice to move to an extremely rural area, where it will be >100 miles to the closest area that you could reasonably call a "city". (There are a few towns closer, but they're all <6000 people.) I'm making that choice, and making the choice to take a pay cut to do it, because I value silence, solitude, and nature more than I value convenience or money.

As far as your idea of voluntarily signing up for an HOA ex post facto... That seems very unreasonable to me. Functionally that means that if 2/3 of your neighbors agree to it, you could suddenly have people all up in your shit when that wasn't the terms you signed up for, and your only recourse is trying to sell and move.

Working people either have to live with an HOA or live in an apartment.

TBH, I think that what would make the most sense for the most people are high-density high rise condos near a city center. The idea of a house on a postage stamp of land with a 1/4 acre lawn that needs to be mowed every week, etc., is a bullshit dream that was sold in the 50s when car culture really started taking off. If your condos are built well--concrete slab walls and floors to deaden noise--you're not really losing anything over moving out to the 'burbs, but you're gaining more time in the form of shorter commutes. Unfortunately, the way taxation and zoning works, it's cheaper to pave over a farmer's field in an unincorporated area and build a lot of low-quality cookie-cutter houses than it is to build condos in the city.

...Which, you must admit, is a singularly effective way of dealing with Nazis moving into your neighborhood.

Gonna take a controversial tack here:

No, they shouldn't be banned.

You have a choice to buy into an HOA or not. You can still buy plots of land, and build to suit; you are not obligated or limited solely to houses that already exist in HOAs. Yes, your up-front costs will be higher, because you're going to have to pay for putting in a well, septic system, and possibly running electric to your place, and if you want gas you'll need propane deliveries, versus hooking in to an existing water/sewer/electric/natural gas system. But that's still your choice.

Some people want HOAs because them come with amenities that people wouldn't have otherwise. In my area, there are two very large HOAs that both offer things like full golf courses, and horse stables with miles of trails for riding; the people buying in those HOAs buy into them because of those things; having enough land on your own to keep and ride horses is, well, good luck finding that much land as a single parcel within reasonable driving distance of any city.

Finally, if you buy a home, most of the time you want to know that your home isn't going to plummet in value. You're dropping a LOT of money on one, and hoping that, if you ever need to move, you'll be able to get the money you put in back out again. When you don't live in an HOA, there's always a risk that the things shitty neighbors will do will end up wrecking your property values. E.g., if the person right next to me starts parking dead cars in their driveway, and has yard dogs that are barking at all hours of the night, not many people are going to willingly move in next to them.

Do I LIKE HOAs? Not really. The best HOAs are the ones that have absolutely minimal interference in your daily life. I live in an HOA; they keep the road functional, specify certain aspects of new construction (minimum size--no tiny homes--colors have to be earth-tones, etc.) and... That's about it. Yeah, I'm supposed to get permission before I put in any yard statues more than 6' tall, and I'm not allowed to clear cut the trees on my property (...not that I ever plan to...), I can't put a pistol range in my yard and practice shooting at home, but that's about all. As long as I stay quiet, and mind my own business, the HOA doesn't give a shit. The most high-handed thing they've done in the last decade was amend the by-laws to ban short-term rentals; one shithead was renting out their place as an AirBnB, which led to loud parties on weekends and a lot of extra traffic.

Griping about not full sovereignty, air space, etc. totally disregards the daily lives of actual Palestinians.

You can't live a 'good life' as a less than full state when your neighbor is Israel. We've got >30 years of history showing us what Israel does when Palestine is less than a full state, e.g., the West Bank, and the illegal Israeli settlers that burn out and kill Palestinians to run them off their land.

How casually you advocate for pointless deaths of Palestinians as inevitable is frankly disgusting.

I'm not advocating for it; I'm stating that pointless deaths of Palestinians are inevitable, unless and until the rest of the world turns Israel into an international pariah. We did it with South Africa; there's no reason we can't do it to Israel.

Encapsulation, yeah. That's usually what they do now, since encapsulation is usually cheaper, and generally less disruptive.

I did in Chicago. And I absolutely would again, because it makes my house much less likely to burn down from e.g. an electrical fire.

I quit smoking a decade ago; my risk of lung cancer was--is--far, far higher from smoking than it ever would have been from living in a house with asbestos insulation in the walls and around pipes.