So any polluter who is poor is judgement proof brilliant!
You will lose the ability to pollute because you will lose everything you used to make the pollution.
So I setup a corp to do the polluting that I hire to haul my toxic waste away and never pay enough to stay afloat!
The profits would be traced back to you and you would pay. You keep thinking of using libertarian concepts in our current non-libertarian business environment. You wouldn't be able to pollute, get sued, claim bankruptcy and walk away to start another polluting company. Your creditors (the people you harmed) would be able to follow you. You also completely ignored the possibility of criminal charges for the polluters for what is effectively assault on the persons of others. That won't happen now because the Republicrats like to keep the corporate veil strong to shield their fat cat donors.
No amount of money will make a brownfield into a farm again, nor replace a watershed or another ecosystem.
So nowdays we have a government to fine instead of people to sue. Still money.
Regulations exist not just to punish, but to also prevent things from happening in the first place.
So the real threat of being sued into oblivion for dumping toxic waste into a river is less of a disincentive than having to pay some arbitrary fines that are often less than the cost of regulatory compliance?
Remember, the government that you are hoping will make sane regulations an enforce them effectively against companies is the same one whose legislation is being bought by those very companies.
In this case, we are talking about a business that lends itself to natural monopolies. It's just not practical for several companies to run data lines, power lines, or water or sewage pipes to your home. These are enhanced in most cases with actual legislation and regulation preventing others from even trying to enter the market. There is even sense to this, as obviously a city doesn't want five different overlapping power grids in its infrastructure.
But monopolies that grow due to business acumen don't last forever either. Nothing the government did to Microsoft really did anything to lessen the monopoly, the market did. Standard Oil had already lost most of its monopoly power by the time the government broke it up. One nice thing about the free market, most companies when they become big also become slow and less dynamic. Absent anti-competitive practices by the monopoly (and sometimes even with them), someone else or a change in market dynamics always brings it down.
And then we have to think of whether a monopoly is bad for the consumer anyway. The Standard Oil monopoly introduced extensive efficiencies and reduced waste, drastically lowering the price of kerosene for the consumer. Most of their success was actually earned by being far better at refining petroleum products and getting it to the consumer. Yes, others were the victim of some pretty underhanded anti-competitive tactics. Standard was mainly broken up not to benefit the consumer, but to benefit other businesses.
Wal-Mart also operates through extreme efficiency, careful selection of suppliers and a well-run distribution network. Wal-Mart is estimated to save consumers something like $200+ billion a year. And they're not really in the diaper and milk business in a vertical monopoly because the house brands are just contracted from suppliers, often the same companies that make the advertised brand names.
If you are above 6 years of age, you would most likely have the ability to think from another person's point of view
We understand why they are doing it: because they can. As tech people, we understand network congestion, and can see that the current rate structure has little to do with us paying for the load we put on the the network, and everything to do with squeezing as much from us as possible.
We already have crude congestion-based billing with voice, with your daytime minutes counting and nighttime minutes not. But data counts 24/7. When she is away from WiFi, my daughter with normal use of her 4G phone can easily blow through her 4 GB allotment in two days. But 90% of her use is at night. She's not responsible for much stress on the network at peak hours, but she's charged as if she were.
So if I am too poor to hire a lawyer my injuries are worthless?
Lawyers work on contingency.
Or if the cost to each person is very low, but the total cost is high, no punishment for the violator.
Libertarians believe in the value and effectiveness of class action lawsuits. Everyone in town can sue the polluter as one, huge reward commensurate with the high total cost. This is one of the places where libertarians wildly differ from Republicans, because they don't kiss ass to businesses like you think they do. Republicans don't like class action because they are too effective a tool against misbehaving businesses
And don't forget, the laws preventing us from suing were created by Republicans and Democrats.
I've seen police reports where several trained officers fired dozens of rounds at a criminal during a standoff, and none of them hit. Then take your average person scared for his life, adrenaline pumping, hands shaking, firing down the hall at an intruder.
It's precisely when you don't really need more than three rounds that you could live with three rounds: relaxing on the range, target shooting. But then constantly reloading gets very annoying.
To find out more, just ask how they would deal with a coal burning power plants emissions for example.
Libertarians see air pollution as physical injury upon the person. They are putting toxic particulates into your lungs, injuring you. You should have the right to sue over these injuries to your person. Any company that wantonly pollutes will go bankrupt. Plus libertarians believe that a proper use of police is to stop aggression and injury against another, so the officers of the company who directed the pollution could be arrested. Absent clear injury, libertarians believe in the old concept of nuisance suits. The nuisance of your pollutants made my property less valuable, and interfered with my enjoyment of my property
In a very libertarian manner, farmers used to be able to sue over air pollution blighting their crops. But over the years the courts and legislatures took the position that public policy favored the advance of manufacturing, the "common good" outweighed the damage to private property. And here they are again, claiming their policies relating to pollution are for the common good. Government allowed this mess by removing traditional legal constraints on pollution. Even if it was government protection bought by corporations, you still have the government being the cornerstone of the problem, not the solution.
For water pollution, imagine if you had a property right to that section of river that ran through your land. You could sue anybody upstream who polluted. I'd have my section tested quarterly, and hunt down anyone who caused any pollution. It would be the legal equivalent of being able to go after your neighbor for dumping his motor oil on your lawn. Imagine that, a compoany dumps toxic waste into the river, and gets sued by thousands of land owners downstream. Hello bankruptcy. You don't even need to prove a connection to your health, just the tests that show they polluted your property.
But you can't do that now, because you don't actually own that section of river. The government, as bought-off by corporations, owns that river, so you can do nothing but whine and cry.
The South Carolina plant has nothing to do with the delays or other problems, having only opened last year. Boeing only delivered the first SC-built 787 a couple months ago, and no special problems have been found. Manufacture of components is around the world, final assembly was exclusively in unionized Washington for the first Dreamliners. That's the source of the issues you mentioned, including delays due to a union strike in Washington.
The problem the unions have with the SC plant is that they won't get their member dues and commensurate increased political power.
To be fair, it was only three years from submission to approval and publishing in the register, not bad really. But then Westinghouse submitted several revisions over the succeeding years, triggering more reviews and approvals.
I'm trying to say a lock doesn't need to dissuade a buyer. If you don't like the lock, then don't use it.
My problem would be potential liability. If someone cracks your safe, steals the gun and shoots someone, are you liable for not locking it? Even though someone who can crack a safe can certainly crack that cheap little lock? In this stupid legal environment, maybe. Lots of sleazy John Edwards shysters out there who can make something that's not your fault look like your fault to a jury. He got a verdict against a pool drain maker when a pool owner didn't install their drain properly.
It's an old anti-gun lobby tactic, and has been used in nuisance suits designed to bankrupt gun manufacturers. They try to equate reliable operation with being defective when misuse of the weapon results in deaths.
That's like saying my SUV is defective because I ran a bunch of people over with it on purpose. But they still spout this absurdity, and it gets believed and repeated. There are too many dumb people in this country.
The question is, would YOU want to be responsible for the additional deaths that may occur due to the change that you mandated? Would you like to visit that little girl and explain why daddy's dead?
With a stolen gun without ID tech the answer could be "Bad guy stole a gun and shot daddy." But in this case you get to say "Because I forced a device onto your daddy's gun that got him killed." You get to look into her eyes and say "My fault."
Of course, this won't stop the use of stolen guns for crimes anyway. At some point that electronic tech has to move a physical part, effectively disengaging another safety. That can be done manually, bypassing the ID check. What, we're going to be making bypassing ID checks illegal? I'm sure the convicted felon who just stole a gun and is planning a murder with it will be real scared of that little extra charge on his indictment if he gets caught.
I still don't understand how malicious shooters can get into gun-free zones. I mean, don't they understand the concept of gun-free zones? Doesn't entering a gun-free zone magically make all guns disappear?
Libertarians operate on the concept of freedom and responsibility, nothing more.
Unfortunately, you are right about fantasy. With all the authoritarians around here on the left and right, the possibility of such freedom is a fantasy.
Are you being purposely obtuse? We're talking about what we the consumers have to gain from changing the status quo that only benefits the near-monopoly ISPs at our expense.
Of course the ISPs won't like a system as I described because it actually has the purpose of keeping the consumer happy while leveling traffic instead of just gouging the consumer for every penny.
The basic problem is error rates for any of this smart gun technology. For your car analogy, imagine you were told that when you hit the brakes, they may not work 1% of the time, and when you have to hit them in a panic the technology has a 5% failure rate since you may not apply your foot in the same way as you do normally when you were matched up.
Basically, would you trust for this ID technology to be embedded into your brake pedal, confirming your identity each time you want to put your foot on it?
The reason why Glock and Sig are so popular is because they work pretty much always. The military requirement for the Glock was maximum 1 error in 500 through 10,000 rounds, but discerning gun buyers want to see stats like 20,000 shots fired straight without error, even under harsh conditions. Reliability is paramount because lack of it can cost the shooter his life. Anything that decreases reliability is just flat-out unacceptable.
Whenever government regulation causes a death, I always wish we could hold those government officials responsible. So I say go ahead, require smart gun ID technology. When a person dies because his gun didn't recognize him, those who passed the regulation get charged with manslaughter because he would be alive if not for their actions.
Historically, a repeater has been any gun capable of holding multiple rounds, and capable of reloading from them by some mechanism.
This repeating mechanism can be manual, such as a pump, bolt, revolver or lever. Or it can be automatic such as gas, recoil or blowback. I'm not sure how to classify the Girandoni air rifle of the 1700s since the repeating mechanism was gravity-fed, but you did have to tilt the rifle up so the ball would drop into the breach (I guess a manual repeater when shooting horizontaly, an automatic when shooting vertically).
So in the context, where automatic and repeating means you don't have to remember cocking it, he is correct. This would be as opposed to a single-action revolver, where you have to manually cock it each time. OTOH, you don't have to remember whether you've cocked a double-action-only revolver either. The difference between that an a DAO semi is what provided the force for the repeating, not conceptual of whether you have to do anythig but pull the trigger to fire the next round. This is getting a big fuzzy, isn't it?
But these days when we're talking in the context of semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull) vs. fully-automatic (multiple shots per trigger pull), we're just talking about the sear mechanism, not the overall design of the way the gun reloads. Both require some type of automatic repeating mechanism anyway, and it can be the exact same mechanism (even the exact same gun but with a different sear).
Definitions would be helpful. A "pro-corporate" libertarian wouldn't really be libertarian if he promoted the rights of corporations over people. Libertarians operate on the concept of direct harm to others. Within libertarian philosophy, if a corporation's pollution is making people sick, then it must be stopped.
Plus, the term "corporate" is not restricted to for-profit corporations. Unions are corporations too. While a libertarian would be for the free association that comprises the concept of a union, he would be against the socialist and anti-rights agendas of most of the current corporate unions.
I do like the training idea. But I am very wary of the government establishing what is essentially a poll tax on a right again like they did with voting. How to do it without making it a burden to the poor would be an interesting discussion.
Just inserting the bolt and loading it would take three seconds at most.
No bolt on a 1911. Just a slide. Still quick to take apart. But open safe #1, get lower part, open safe #2, get slide, assemble, open safe #3, get ammo, load gun, ah forget it, you're dead already.
If a gun is constructed in a way that it's not possible to render it harmless or bring it back to operational quickly, it is a flaw with the gun
So most revolvers are flawed? That's absurd critera for determining flaws.
Many quality manufacturers aren't in the US: Glock as noted, Sig Sauer, Heckler & Koch and Beretta come to mind. They are all in competition to try to make the best, safest pistol possible. Their reputation for making safe pistols is very important to them. They would do nothing to jeopardize it, and if a new safety feature were feasible you bet they'd want to use it to get a leg up on the competition.
The author is either an idiot or dishonest in trying to hide an anti-gun agenda behind a concern for safety. Or both, that's common.
Your Sig has three safeties. There is a lever moved by the trigger, and it pushes a spring-loaded pin in the slide. That pin normally blocks the firing pin from going forward, and pushing it up puts a notch in the pin in line with the firing pin, allowing the firing pin to move forward. This is your first safety. Your gun simply cannot fire unless that pin is moved, and depressing the trigger is the only thing that moves it.
The second is the slide safety which results from the first. If the slide is not locked fully forward due to dirt, damage, or bad ammo not causing a full cycle, the lever won't line up with the pin, so the gun won't fire even if the trigger is pulled.
The third safety is that the hammer won't connect with the firing pin unless the trigger is depressed.
Since these safeties rely on the trigger not being pulled, you also get a decocking lever so you never have to pull the trigger unless you actually want to fire the weapon.
All-in-all, it's a well-engineered, extremely reliable gun with redundant mechanical safety interlocks. I think that's about as safe as a gun can be. Someone promoting anything more is probably trying to backdoor an anti-gun agenda.
Target shooting is one of the safest sports a school-age kid can participate in. There are millions of injuries in school sports every year, hundreds of thousands requiring doctors, tens of thousands requiring hospital care, permenent disabling injuries and even deaths. Sports are a major cause of traumatic brain injury in kids. Shoulders and knees are being permanently damaged daily. Among the major sports players, something like 15-30% of kids will be injured at some point.
But serious injuries involving shooting sports are extremely rare. When there are injuries, it's generally of the type a Band-Aid will fix.
Plus, it's not likely a malicious shooter will get very far in his rampage on the range.
This is window dressing by the gun lobby to try and head off sorely-needed firearms regulations.
Unlike many lobbies in this country, the gun lobby doesn't represent an industry. It represents millions of Americans. It is their collective voice trying to tell the government to not trample on their rights. And this isn't just the NRA, but groups like Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and the Pink Pistols ("Armed gays don't get bashed").
Gun company lobby money on the rights issue is a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the people donate. Gun companies, like any other, do lobby to try to get government contracts, and most of their lobby money goes there.
The key issue is that people not responsible enough to get guns are getting them.
True, and we already have a ton of laws about that.
Positive change isn't likely while the US (and the far Right in particular) persist with their fetish with the US Constitution
Yeah, there's no reason we should follow the most basic law of our country. Remember this sentiment next time someone complains about US citizens being detained without trial, or the government spies on its own people without a warrant, or copyright being effectively forever. Our Constitution is supposed to prohibit all that too, and only fetishists would get mad when it happens.
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You will lose the ability to pollute because you will lose everything you used to make the pollution.
The profits would be traced back to you and you would pay. You keep thinking of using libertarian concepts in our current non-libertarian business environment. You wouldn't be able to pollute, get sued, claim bankruptcy and walk away to start another polluting company. Your creditors (the people you harmed) would be able to follow you. You also completely ignored the possibility of criminal charges for the polluters for what is effectively assault on the persons of others. That won't happen now because the Republicrats like to keep the corporate veil strong to shield their fat cat donors.
So nowdays we have a government to fine instead of people to sue. Still money.
So the real threat of being sued into oblivion for dumping toxic waste into a river is less of a disincentive than having to pay some arbitrary fines that are often less than the cost of regulatory compliance?
Remember, the government that you are hoping will make sane regulations an enforce them effectively against companies is the same one whose legislation is being bought by those very companies.
In this case, we are talking about a business that lends itself to natural monopolies. It's just not practical for several companies to run data lines, power lines, or water or sewage pipes to your home. These are enhanced in most cases with actual legislation and regulation preventing others from even trying to enter the market. There is even sense to this, as obviously a city doesn't want five different overlapping power grids in its infrastructure.
But monopolies that grow due to business acumen don't last forever either. Nothing the government did to Microsoft really did anything to lessen the monopoly, the market did. Standard Oil had already lost most of its monopoly power by the time the government broke it up. One nice thing about the free market, most companies when they become big also become slow and less dynamic. Absent anti-competitive practices by the monopoly (and sometimes even with them), someone else or a change in market dynamics always brings it down.
And then we have to think of whether a monopoly is bad for the consumer anyway. The Standard Oil monopoly introduced extensive efficiencies and reduced waste, drastically lowering the price of kerosene for the consumer. Most of their success was actually earned by being far better at refining petroleum products and getting it to the consumer. Yes, others were the victim of some pretty underhanded anti-competitive tactics. Standard was mainly broken up not to benefit the consumer, but to benefit other businesses.
Wal-Mart also operates through extreme efficiency, careful selection of suppliers and a well-run distribution network. Wal-Mart is estimated to save consumers something like $200+ billion a year. And they're not really in the diaper and milk business in a vertical monopoly because the house brands are just contracted from suppliers, often the same companies that make the advertised brand names.
We understand why they are doing it: because they can. As tech people, we understand network congestion, and can see that the current rate structure has little to do with us paying for the load we put on the the network, and everything to do with squeezing as much from us as possible.
We already have crude congestion-based billing with voice, with your daytime minutes counting and nighttime minutes not. But data counts 24/7. When she is away from WiFi, my daughter with normal use of her 4G phone can easily blow through her 4 GB allotment in two days. But 90% of her use is at night. She's not responsible for much stress on the network at peak hours, but she's charged as if she were.
You thought I was serious? I figured if you sealed up the Legos really well on Earth, they might just burst in space due to the pressure differential.
Cool info anyway.
Lawyers work on contingency.
Libertarians believe in the value and effectiveness of class action lawsuits. Everyone in town can sue the polluter as one, huge reward commensurate with the high total cost. This is one of the places where libertarians wildly differ from Republicans, because they don't kiss ass to businesses like you think they do. Republicans don't like class action because they are too effective a tool against misbehaving businesses
And don't forget, the laws preventing us from suing were created by Republicans and Democrats.
I've seen police reports where several trained officers fired dozens of rounds at a criminal during a standoff, and none of them hit. Then take your average person scared for his life, adrenaline pumping, hands shaking, firing down the hall at an intruder.
It's precisely when you don't really need more than three rounds that you could live with three rounds: relaxing on the range, target shooting. But then constantly reloading gets very annoying.
Libertarians see air pollution as physical injury upon the person. They are putting toxic particulates into your lungs, injuring you. You should have the right to sue over these injuries to your person. Any company that wantonly pollutes will go bankrupt. Plus libertarians believe that a proper use of police is to stop aggression and injury against another, so the officers of the company who directed the pollution could be arrested. Absent clear injury, libertarians believe in the old concept of nuisance suits. The nuisance of your pollutants made my property less valuable, and interfered with my enjoyment of my property
In a very libertarian manner, farmers used to be able to sue over air pollution blighting their crops. But over the years the courts and legislatures took the position that public policy favored the advance of manufacturing, the "common good" outweighed the damage to private property. And here they are again, claiming their policies relating to pollution are for the common good. Government allowed this mess by removing traditional legal constraints on pollution. Even if it was government protection bought by corporations, you still have the government being the cornerstone of the problem, not the solution.
For water pollution, imagine if you had a property right to that section of river that ran through your land. You could sue anybody upstream who polluted. I'd have my section tested quarterly, and hunt down anyone who caused any pollution. It would be the legal equivalent of being able to go after your neighbor for dumping his motor oil on your lawn. Imagine that, a compoany dumps toxic waste into the river, and gets sued by thousands of land owners downstream. Hello bankruptcy. You don't even need to prove a connection to your health, just the tests that show they polluted your property.
But you can't do that now, because you don't actually own that section of river. The government, as bought-off by corporations, owns that river, so you can do nothing but whine and cry.
The South Carolina plant has nothing to do with the delays or other problems, having only opened last year. Boeing only delivered the first SC-built 787 a couple months ago, and no special problems have been found. Manufacture of components is around the world, final assembly was exclusively in unionized Washington for the first Dreamliners. That's the source of the issues you mentioned, including delays due to a union strike in Washington.
The problem the unions have with the SC plant is that they won't get their member dues and commensurate increased political power.
To be fair, it was only three years from submission to approval and publishing in the register, not bad really. But then Westinghouse submitted several revisions over the succeeding years, triggering more reviews and approvals.
I'm trying to say a lock doesn't need to dissuade a buyer. If you don't like the lock, then don't use it.
My problem would be potential liability. If someone cracks your safe, steals the gun and shoots someone, are you liable for not locking it? Even though someone who can crack a safe can certainly crack that cheap little lock? In this stupid legal environment, maybe. Lots of sleazy John Edwards shysters out there who can make something that's not your fault look like your fault to a jury. He got a verdict against a pool drain maker when a pool owner didn't install their drain properly.
It's an old anti-gun lobby tactic, and has been used in nuisance suits designed to bankrupt gun manufacturers. They try to equate reliable operation with being defective when misuse of the weapon results in deaths.
That's like saying my SUV is defective because I ran a bunch of people over with it on purpose. But they still spout this absurdity, and it gets believed and repeated. There are too many dumb people in this country.
The question is, would YOU want to be responsible for the additional deaths that may occur due to the change that you mandated? Would you like to visit that little girl and explain why daddy's dead?
With a stolen gun without ID tech the answer could be "Bad guy stole a gun and shot daddy." But in this case you get to say "Because I forced a device onto your daddy's gun that got him killed." You get to look into her eyes and say "My fault."
Of course, this won't stop the use of stolen guns for crimes anyway. At some point that electronic tech has to move a physical part, effectively disengaging another safety. That can be done manually, bypassing the ID check. What, we're going to be making bypassing ID checks illegal? I'm sure the convicted felon who just stole a gun and is planning a murder with it will be real scared of that little extra charge on his indictment if he gets caught.
Of course not, he'll choose a "gun-free zone."
I still don't understand how malicious shooters can get into gun-free zones. I mean, don't they understand the concept of gun-free zones? Doesn't entering a gun-free zone magically make all guns disappear?
Libertarians operate on the concept of freedom and responsibility, nothing more.
Unfortunately, you are right about fantasy. With all the authoritarians around here on the left and right, the possibility of such freedom is a fantasy.
Are you being purposely obtuse? We're talking about what we the consumers have to gain from changing the status quo that only benefits the near-monopoly ISPs at our expense.
Of course the ISPs won't like a system as I described because it actually has the purpose of keeping the consumer happy while leveling traffic instead of just gouging the consumer for every penny.
The basic problem is error rates for any of this smart gun technology. For your car analogy, imagine you were told that when you hit the brakes, they may not work 1% of the time, and when you have to hit them in a panic the technology has a 5% failure rate since you may not apply your foot in the same way as you do normally when you were matched up.
Basically, would you trust for this ID technology to be embedded into your brake pedal, confirming your identity each time you want to put your foot on it?
The reason why Glock and Sig are so popular is because they work pretty much always. The military requirement for the Glock was maximum 1 error in 500 through 10,000 rounds, but discerning gun buyers want to see stats like 20,000 shots fired straight without error, even under harsh conditions. Reliability is paramount because lack of it can cost the shooter his life. Anything that decreases reliability is just flat-out unacceptable.
Whenever government regulation causes a death, I always wish we could hold those government officials responsible. So I say go ahead, require smart gun ID technology. When a person dies because his gun didn't recognize him, those who passed the regulation get charged with manslaughter because he would be alive if not for their actions.
Historically, a repeater has been any gun capable of holding multiple rounds, and capable of reloading from them by some mechanism.
This repeating mechanism can be manual, such as a pump, bolt, revolver or lever. Or it can be automatic such as gas, recoil or blowback. I'm not sure how to classify the Girandoni air rifle of the 1700s since the repeating mechanism was gravity-fed, but you did have to tilt the rifle up so the ball would drop into the breach (I guess a manual repeater when shooting horizontaly, an automatic when shooting vertically).
So in the context, where automatic and repeating means you don't have to remember cocking it, he is correct. This would be as opposed to a single-action revolver, where you have to manually cock it each time. OTOH, you don't have to remember whether you've cocked a double-action-only revolver either. The difference between that an a DAO semi is what provided the force for the repeating, not conceptual of whether you have to do anythig but pull the trigger to fire the next round. This is getting a big fuzzy, isn't it?
But these days when we're talking in the context of semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull) vs. fully-automatic (multiple shots per trigger pull), we're just talking about the sear mechanism, not the overall design of the way the gun reloads. Both require some type of automatic repeating mechanism anyway, and it can be the exact same mechanism (even the exact same gun but with a different sear).
Definitions would be helpful. A "pro-corporate" libertarian wouldn't really be libertarian if he promoted the rights of corporations over people. Libertarians operate on the concept of direct harm to others. Within libertarian philosophy, if a corporation's pollution is making people sick, then it must be stopped.
Plus, the term "corporate" is not restricted to for-profit corporations. Unions are corporations too. While a libertarian would be for the free association that comprises the concept of a union, he would be against the socialist and anti-rights agendas of most of the current corporate unions.
I do like the training idea. But I am very wary of the government establishing what is essentially a poll tax on a right again like they did with voting. How to do it without making it a burden to the poor would be an interesting discussion.
Many quality manufacturers aren't in the US: Glock as noted, Sig Sauer, Heckler & Koch and Beretta come to mind. They are all in competition to try to make the best, safest pistol possible. Their reputation for making safe pistols is very important to them. They would do nothing to jeopardize it, and if a new safety feature were feasible you bet they'd want to use it to get a leg up on the competition.
The author is either an idiot or dishonest in trying to hide an anti-gun agenda behind a concern for safety. Or both, that's common.
Your Sig has three safeties. There is a lever moved by the trigger, and it pushes a spring-loaded pin in the slide. That pin normally blocks the firing pin from going forward, and pushing it up puts a notch in the pin in line with the firing pin, allowing the firing pin to move forward. This is your first safety. Your gun simply cannot fire unless that pin is moved, and depressing the trigger is the only thing that moves it.
The second is the slide safety which results from the first. If the slide is not locked fully forward due to dirt, damage, or bad ammo not causing a full cycle, the lever won't line up with the pin, so the gun won't fire even if the trigger is pulled.
The third safety is that the hammer won't connect with the firing pin unless the trigger is depressed.
Since these safeties rely on the trigger not being pulled, you also get a decocking lever so you never have to pull the trigger unless you actually want to fire the weapon.
All-in-all, it's a well-engineered, extremely reliable gun with redundant mechanical safety interlocks. I think that's about as safe as a gun can be. Someone promoting anything more is probably trying to backdoor an anti-gun agenda.
Target shooting is one of the safest sports a school-age kid can participate in. There are millions of injuries in school sports every year, hundreds of thousands requiring doctors, tens of thousands requiring hospital care, permenent disabling injuries and even deaths. Sports are a major cause of traumatic brain injury in kids. Shoulders and knees are being permanently damaged daily. Among the major sports players, something like 15-30% of kids will be injured at some point.
But serious injuries involving shooting sports are extremely rare. When there are injuries, it's generally of the type a Band-Aid will fix.
Plus, it's not likely a malicious shooter will get very far in his rampage on the range.
I have a pistol with a key lock, but it's never locked. It's in a quick-access safe instead.
Unlike many lobbies in this country, the gun lobby doesn't represent an industry. It represents millions of Americans. It is their collective voice trying to tell the government to not trample on their rights. And this isn't just the NRA, but groups like Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and the Pink Pistols ("Armed gays don't get bashed").
Gun company lobby money on the rights issue is a drop in the bucket in comparison to what the people donate. Gun companies, like any other, do lobby to try to get government contracts, and most of their lobby money goes there.
True, and we already have a ton of laws about that.
Yeah, there's no reason we should follow the most basic law of our country. Remember this sentiment next time someone complains about US citizens being detained without trial, or the government spies on its own people without a warrant, or copyright being effectively forever. Our Constitution is supposed to prohibit all that too, and only fetishists would get mad when it happens.