And in the meantime Canada is soon approaching a time when all healthcare will become for-profit like in the US, and the whole ‘we never could have afforded it in the first place. It was always a bad idea’ by both Libs and Cons will start to be spouted.
And I have said it ten million times before. The current total bans they’re doing is abso-fucking-lutely not going to do squat. You are basically saying ‘we should leave this and that model of rifle or shotgun only’ to somehow say ‘this will eliminate danger to kids’. Nope, because any rifle or shotgun can be technically used to commit a shooting.
In 2010 in the UK a guy went on a rampage with a single-shot .22LR rifle and a double barrelled shotgun, the type of ‘safe’ guns most gun control advocates believe should be the only type of firearm available to civilians, and he STILL killed over 10 people.
I remember reading articles by Heidi, the main gun control advocate in Canada who was present in the 1989 polytechnique shooting (she heard the gun shots, but was very far away from the actual shooter) who had a hatred of that particular model that he used in the shooting like somehow it was THAT model that was only thing that made it fucking possible. It wasn’t
BTW, the model he used? Ruger Mini-14, and at that time (and somehow still believed today) that it was easy to convert a semi-automatic rifle into a fully-automatic rifle. He had a go at it and ended up breaking the mechanism, meaning the shooting that killed 14 young women that day was committed effectively by a jam-prone, manually operated gun. Not even a fast-firing semi-auto rifle.
And I am going to say it again. The bans that have been happening in the past 6 years have been extremely ineffective, have not collected many of the banned guns (next to no owners surrendered their weapons, meaning they are still there), has been unbelievably expensive, have caused massive divisiveness in various governmental agencies, have lead to a huge rift in everything.
And do you have any sense of irony? ‘ooooh think of the children!’ the same damn excuse that the guys on top everywhere in the world have been using to infringe on all of our freedoms? Whether it is the 2010/11 failed ‘protecting children from online predators’ act that only mentioned children and predators in the title and nowhere in the bill? Or the age verification crap going on, the OS outlawing, and a hell of a lot more.
Even the anti-gun shit is getting so damn bad it is pissing off the 3D printing community and privacy advocates, since they want to pass draconian acts that think they will somehow curb 3D printed firearms (which aren’t a problem. If they were, we’d be seeing a fuckload more of them by now, but so far we’re still seeing boring old fashioned factory produced guns), and those laws are so crudely written and so impossible to enforce that they will effectively make it impossible for most people to 3D print anything, and will make 3D printers cost 5 or 10 times more. Same thing with machinist and metal working communities who are under fire because their skill at forging and shaping metal to something that could actually become a decent gun.
Why are you so willing to use and fall for the same Epstein class cry when you aren’t for any other subject?
Watch the fucking video and read the damn linked article. The LLM did more to make the shooting happen than anything else. In both the Canadian Tumbler Ridge shooting and the one in Florida. You have no idea what you are talking about.
We don’t have a lot of mass knife attacks, we don’t have a lot of bombings, we don’t have a lot of poisonings, because as you pointed out they have a much higher skill/knowledge requirement. The thing you intentionally ignored is that the skill/knowledge requirement for pulling a trigger is really low.
And LLMs would absolute reduce that friction to next to nothing, which would make it happen more often and more successfully.
The Nazi incel shooter would NEVER have succeeded in any of his goals without the chat. It doesn’t matter that he had a gun (which was his dad’s gun, not his own), the chats revealed that he knew so little about firearms and the times when people gathered most densely that he if tried to do what he did without chatGPT he would likely failed to kill anyone. Injuries maybe, but not deaths. The guy was so ignorant on how to carry out an attack and without the support of chatGPT he might have gotten over his desire to kill and even suicide with minimal or no intervention.
BTW, for explosives that I mentioned? There is a precedent on how reducing friction can facilitate a massive rise in bombings is the availability of bombing making instruction manuals. As I said, the internet is awash with them, but once upon a time they weren’t available… until BBSes in the late 80s and early 90s started having them And once people were able to get them there was a massive spike in pipe bomb incidents in the US at the time.
Timothy McVeigh used such books in making the bomb he used to blow up the FBI building in Oklahoma city. They are still available.
A bomb making guide reduces friction in making successful bombings, but if it were combined with an LLM who ‘just wanted to help with a fun experiment’ it would reduce whatever friction left to nothing.
If you have been paying attention to the gun control situation in Canada and how people from countless organisations such as Canada Post and the RCMP and tons of others have been reacting to this, you’d be amazed how many Canadians are opposed to it.
And it is all 100% based on ‘I just do not like guns’ which I am going to say is unsufficient anymore than simply me saying ‘I just like guns’. Most people actually believe that somehow Canadians could conceal carry or were able to do so until recently or some other bullshit. Complete ignorance of the actual state of things.
So let’s throw billions more dollars on this scheme that has yet to produce a single tangible result. The long gun registry, the handgun ban, and the tens of thousands of rifle models. Cash in the furnace. Let’s also cut healthcare more to fund that, too.
I am fucking done.
Those rifle bans are dumb, but they’re basically how they’ve always done things. When they were deciding on what was a ‘restricted’ vs ‘prohibited’ rifle in the 90s when the licensing scheme first got into play, it was clear that they looked up a gun digest and simply picked out a lot of stuff at random and it made no sense.
For example AK rifles were prohib, but ARs were not. AR rifles were restricted, but plenty of equally capable rifles were non-restricted. Some bans literally made no sense. The G41 assault rifle, an experimental German rifle that never went beyond the prototype phase, was added to the prohib list anyway. That gun was produced in such limited quantities and uses such unique and highly specialized ammunition (it was an experimental caseless round) that no criminal or criminal organization can get a hold of no matter what.
The whole point is their thinking is ‘I hate guns and I want to destroy any and all shooting sports and hunting’ This even apparently is extending to subsistence hunters who need a rifle to survive. This is why the SKS is not yet banned even though they have been trying to for a very, very long time. If they ban that it will cause a hell of a lot of problems for a lot of people… and they’re still trying anyway!
You should read it some time. The law is dumber than you think and targets the wrong shit.
If you think I believe anyone should be able to walk into a supermarket and buy a handgun and ammunition, then you would be wrong.
So here is the thing. As a licensed Canadian gun owner I have the support for the following laws that are already in existence:
I support the licensing and vetting scheme as it was established, this has been very effective. In Canada you need two references, you need a background check, and you need to take and pass the safety courses for your desired type of firearm. For an PAL alone (Possession and Acquisition License), you need the safety course on rifles and shotguns. For the RPAL (Restricted PAL) you need to take one for handguns, too. I also support safe storage of firearms as it stands now.
I need to mention that most gun owners are OK with the above laws, too.
What I do NOT support.
I do NOT support the banning of over 15,000 (the current amount, there have been more banned previously) of models of rifles solely based on, ‘I do not like this gun, I think it is bad’. They didn’t say ‘we want to ban AR-15s’ alone, they banned every single distinct model of AR-15 ever produced. This is stupid. They also banned rifles that were formerly non-restricted rifles that were nothing more than simple target rifles or hunting guns just because. They even banned rifles that have been out of production since the 1940s simply because they were used during WW2 in some limited capacity (they are not anymore dangerous than any hunting rifle made afterward).
I do not support banning any type of firearm based purely on some ideological idea, saying ‘this is a military gun!’ Dude! Literally every single bolt-action rifle design was military, ditto for lever-guns, break-actions, and muzzle loaders. Flintlock muskets were military… and this brings me to another point.
Did you know that they banned flintlock pistols? I need to mention that flintlock muskets are still on the unregulated firearm list. That means if you want to buy a musket, you don’t need any firearms permit, you can buy one online in Canada right now. But before the 2022 handgun freeze, flintlock pistols were treated the same way as modern pistols. Meaning if you found a flintlock pistol and decided to take it home with you, it would be treated as if it was a Glock if you are discovered with it. I do not know of any other country that has done this. Even the UK still permits single-shot muzzle loaders to be sold and used in ranges. All of continental Europe also has flintlock pistols as fully unregulated firearms, meaning anyone can buy one. But in Canada? You’ll get several years in jail if you have one.
On top of that before the law was amended, they originally tried to ban non-firing replica old west firearms. Are you aware of how stupid that is? Can you imagine someone who likes old west guns, but doesn’t actually want a real gun, so he gets a non-firing replica that cannot be loaded or fired, but still functions similar to the original (the hammer and triggers move, you can open the loading gate, etc) and then one day he is now in possession of a prohibited firearm because of the law? Meaning if discovered with it, he will be treated as if he was in possession of a machine gun.
There are just countless stupid laws that they tried to pass. They inadvertently banned almost all shotguns at one point due to a badly written part, and they wanted to ban the .50BMG (which has never, ever been used in a crime in Canada, and only used once in a crime in the US in the early 80s) but in doing so ended up banning multiple big game hunting cartridges that in no way shape or form are similar to the anti-material round that the .50 BMG is.
Do you get me now? I’m OK with licensing and other basic stuff, those stuff have been very effective. Most everything else is just a war on shooting sports and a massive, MASSIVE, waste of tax payer money. Money that could have been put into countless other uses to save more lives than any of the gun laws ever could.
Caelen Conrad explained it better than I could here
But I will make it a tl;dr (or tl;dw, whatever suits you) for you. Having a gun, or access to a gun, alone is insufficient to make a mass shooting or mass murder at all possible, especially when you have someone who could have been stopped or talked out of it in any number ways at any time, such as the Tumblr ridge shooter, or the Nazi Incel that Conrad talks about. ChatGPT not only did none of that, it greatly removed friction from the psychological process of working up to do it (killing people is not easy. I don’t mean that just in a physical sense of shooting or beating someone to death, it takes a LOT to get one human being to kill another human being) and the actual planning process of the shooting.
Do you know why we don’t see a lot of successful bombings? Or why bombings are fairly rare? The reason for this is the skill and skill set to actually do something like that successfully is difficult to acquire. You could spend a lot of time learning chemistry and electronics and craftsmanship and sourcing the required materials to do it, and that is not easy in and of itself. The internet has been awash with bomb making guides for decades, but even buying the materials needed (and in some places even ASKING about where to find the stuff) to build a bomb often raises alarm bells in many systems that would have the police take you in for questioning. However if an LLM could somehow tell you ‘here’s how to buy what you need to make a big bomb without raising suspicion’ and provides the links, and then gives clear step by step instructions on what to do for your specific purpose, it has removed 90% of all the work.
In short, without the support of chatGPT, the shooting would likely have never happened, or if it did, it would have resulted in far fewer deaths than it did. I mean this for both tumbler ridge and for the Nazi incel shooting.
Edit: Also the fact that chatGPT did not have the ability to report these shooters meant that disclosing their plans to it, even if it didn’t help them as much, would have still facilitated in getting their plans out of their brains and disclosed somewhere. Many shooters are thwarted because they talk about wanting to do what they want to do to another human being, who DID report their asses to the authorities.
Then I will give you a primer. Handguns with a barrel length below 4 inches were prohibited in the 90s, some handgun calibers like those in .25 ACP were also banned with narrow exceptions.
For short barreled rifles and shotguns the law is different in Canada vs. The US. In the US any rifle with a barrel length below 16 inches and any shotgun with a barrel below 18 inches is regulated under the NFA. In Canada there was no such prohibition. Canadian AR-15s were routinely in the 14.5 inch range and pump action shotguns with barrels as short as 9 inches are legal.
What is very illegal, however, is hacking off the barrel. If you bought a double-barrel shotgun with 24 inch barrels but cut them down to 14 inches yourself, you committed a big crime. However if you swap them for factory made barrels that length it would be legal.
Basically you have it be any length you want as long as it is how it is made in the factory or with legally sourced factory components.
I guarantee you, Mark will fuck up more shit for healthcare and housing in the future than you can imagine.
Your mentality is also part of the problem that will continue to fuck things up.
They will pass more and more gun laws before regulating just how fucked this whole situation with LLMs is.
LLMs have facilitated so much murder and suicide now that I really don’t understand why no legislator has even tried yet. Am I missing anything?
The sheer lack of social programs or anything to address the causes of violence is fucking incredible. All they will talk about is harsher penalties and more gun control but never care for anything else.
Ditto the liberals.
Mark is not our friend.
There are no good conservatives or liberals, the NDP needs to exploit this gap and pick up the damn ball.
I noticed it years ago that libs often performatively whined about how bad First Nations/Native Americans had it in the past while also doing jackshit to help now or neglecting them even further.
And also South American natives whose land is being bulldozed by logging companies who are also shooting at them with guns at times get nothing.
They basically say that they will crush them now but ‘take comfort in knowing that decades from now they’ll feel a bit bad about it’.
Not cost effective. Maybe by 2080 or something.