I don't have any discussions with anti-gun folks. I know better than to do this with a few family members in the anti camp and for almost the same reasons I don't engage in discourse with anons on the internet or new folks I might meet who question gun ownership or my politics.

In the future, if I haven't got a route out of the conversation, I might just use the math approach because math is math and most liberal anti-gunners love statistics and risk aversion.

quote:

As gun policy discussions unfold in the wake of mass shooter incidents, they routinely end in three buckets. There’s the “tyranny can never happen here” bucket, which the left has mostly abdicated in the wake of Trump winning after they called (and still call) him a tyrant. There’s the “you can’t fight the army with small arms” bucket, which is increasingly unsound given our ongoing decade-and-a-half war with Afghani tribal goat herders. And there’s the “what the hell do you need an AR-15 for anyway?” bucket, which, by its very language, eschews a fundamental lack of understanding of what those people are thinking.

The Surprisingly Solid Mathematical Case of the Tin Foil Hat Gun Prepper

My route out of useless discussion is simple.

"You do you, I'll do me." Walk away.


While I do have what I believe are good, solid and factual responses to the three buckets. It is only effective and worth the effort to discuss with sane and reasonable people.

As far as "math", I believe in the theory of "chaos" and that while bookies can and will give odds on any game, when it comes to randomness of calamity, you cannot predict.

An "earth killer" (extinction event) asteroid can smack us one one day and kill off all the bug lizzurds, and then not another one for 65 million years, or damn, next day, smacked again. Math be damned, you cannot be certain enough to get me to lay a bet. And I'll bet on a lot of things.

Hurricanes come to mind. Lived in the Florida panhandle (except when Uncle Sam decided I needed another vacation to some shit hole...) for 50 years, and saw my share of hurricanes. Many years with none, then maybe one, big, or small, and some years, like a never ending buffalo heard through a pile of teepees. No rhyme or reason, just nature and randomness of chaos.

Same with "shit happening", lightning strikes, earthquakes, flood, (viruses...) it happens when it happens. Sure, there are places where certain things are centered and more frequent, but things like "what the heck is mankind going to do today?" such as what "preppers" are thinking about, is randomness of "when" and the certainty of "humanity".

We know people gonna do stupid shit and "there will be wars and rumors of wars" as long as there are more than one people. And trying to predict when that will occur next, is like predicting when a young man will have a hard on. The answer is "yep". But even he does not know when that "yep" will occur.


The flip side of the coin, the "anti-gunner" is very predictable, and simply "stuck on stupid". Sure, the arguments they have may be built upon a solid truth, but the Dr. Seuss looking Rube Goldberg contraption they build on that base is always to silliest thing when they top it out, so why bother with trying to occupy the thing? Walk away.

Find the sane and reasonable person to talk with, but then, they are likely to be packing.

It's a nice day. Maybe I'll go outside and look up...

I admire the hydrologist’s patience in creating a mathematically logical sequence and publishing it. I’m not as patient. I’ll just enforce my will. Can’t reason with Leftists anyway.