To be clear, I meant flying between any two European cities works basically how it would if American cities connected mass transit to their airports in a meaningful way. Passenger rail in Europe is usually more expensive and slower than flying except, obviously, over distances too short to fly.

Having lived in both the Bay Area and LA and commuted between them frequently, it was almost always less hassle to drive than to fly. Sure the flight itself was short, but the traffic getting to/from the airports, parking, car rental, standing in long lines, being fondled by a stranger in a uniform, etc. was no match for the tedium of sitting behind the wheel for five hours or so. Making air travel anything less than the dehumanizing punishment that it is now may be impossible, given the inertia of the entrenched interests, but I-5 isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

Traveling between pretty much any two European cities (of reasonable size), where you have efficient mass-transit on both ends and no TSA, is basically what you propose for California, and it would be truly amazing... but as you point out, it would require building a mass transit system and linking it to the airport. And if BART and the LA Subway are any indication, that is a pipe dream for a fantasy world where politicians aren't corrupt assholes.

Much like Africa sort of skipped over landlines and went right to mobile, maybe California can pioneer a new form of medium-distance travel that is--and I think this is the most compelling argument Musk makes--sustainable. If this thing can really be powered entirely by solar panels on the tubes, then it could be a nice alternative to (medium-distance) air travel, which is currently the most carbon-intensive mode of transportation.

Due to the nature of my job, I spend most of my time abroad and frequently communicate with "suspect" countries. I also engage in international communications involving the US on a regular basis. Given that Obama blows unidentified people up for a "pattern of behaviors" in so-called signature strikes, I say go ahead and laugh at my tinfoil hat. I will never know how my years of paranoia--using proxies, encryption, etc., on a regular basis--have influenced what data the NSA have been able to pin to whatever unique hash represents me in their secret databases, but I hesitate to call it paranoia now... more like prescience.

Well, you say that, but do have any evidence to back up that claim? (And editorials from Fox News or Cato do not count as evidence.) Also, why does it matter how someone dies from a gun? They're still dead. And it's a hell of a lot harder to kill someone accidentally with a knife than a gun.

Defensive homicides? You mean like when family members accidentally shoot each other because the think someone is breaking into the house? Those are still homicides, right? Defensive homicides are also a crime, by they way, except in extraordinary circumstances or in places with incredibly well thought out "stand your ground" laws. Or is there a rash of people staving off murders by shooting the would-be murder that I just didn't encounter living in the US for 30 years?

Sure, here you go. (Hint: its still a factor of four or five higher, depending on if you include Eastern Europe.) And yes, in fact, it's impossible to have gun violence without guns, which is why they should be licensed and registered and people should have to have background checks and pass competency tests to own them.

I completely agree. And the homicide rate is still higher in the US by a factor of four than Northern, Southern, and Western Europe. All those "Europe is super-violent" statistics include Eastern Europe. If we lump Central America in with the US, the homicide rates jumps to five times that of all of Europe combined.

The US also has a much larger homicide rate by guns than almost the enture rest of the world. Are you arguing that if guns were regulated rationally in the US that all of the gun homicides would be replaced by non-gun homicides? Or that they would somehow increase? (No one is arguing for total prohibition here--just sensible regulations.)

Misguided is putting it mildly.

Recidivism is a problem the world over. However, the high statistic in the US is largely an artifact of the ridiculous drug laws; i.e., someone gets busted for possession, serves jail time, and then later robs a 7/11, poof--recidivism. (Thus wonderful policies like the California Three Strikes Law that lead to the Supreme Court ruling their prisons cruel and unusual punishment.)

I see, your basic argument is that it matters how people are killed with guns (that link actually breaks it out into intentional, suicide, accidental, and unknown BTW). The biggest difference between gun deaths and other forms of death is that the former is incredibly simple to prevent. Sure, you can tell people not to drive cars--that way they will never die in a traffic accident--but cars are much more useful to many more people than guns.

And I hope you realize that "gun control people" aren't a monolithic group of gun prohibitionists. I'm a hunter who owns many guns, has been shooting all my life (even competitively when I was younger). I just don't agree that any idiot that wants any kind of gun should be able to go out and buy as many as they want. Like cars--which are also lethal weapons when used improperly--I think guns should be licensed and registered and that gun owners should have to prove competency. Stupid people, the mentally ill, violent criminals, and children are good examples of people who should not be allowed to own firearms of any sort.

Nope. Although I am trolling in the sense that I'm curious to see how people rationalize their fervent belief that the world will come to end if any gun regulations are passed, I was shot at on several occasions. As I said, usually by idiots shooting downhill or without a clear field of view, sometimes by the crazy guy that shot at everything that crossed his property line, and on occasion by drunk rednecks. I should qualify by saying that lived in the middle of nowhere. No local police or city utilities (other than power) or paved roads or anything like that. Our neighbor used to train his dogs by shooting skeet off his back porch and we could barely hear it. I used to practice by shooting small tree branches and G.I Joe action figures with my scoped Ruger .22 semi-auto and walking cans with a .44 mag revolver (but that was an occasional treat because the cartridges were so expensive) which is insanely fun. My uncle was actually shot by his own uncle while out deer hunting, but they were bow hunting, so it "only" left a silver-dollar-sized hole in his calf.

Interestingly, I live in Europe and have yet to be killed by the roaming death-squads that are apparently rampant here. However, when I lived in the US I was shot at multiple times. Usually because some idiot was shooting downhill or mistook me getting off the school bus for a dear and only occasionally by our local lunatic that sat on his back porch shooting at anything that moved. Oh, and once or twice because I was "a damn hippie," but fortunately they were too drunk to hit the broad side of a barn.

But my point was about the lose definition of the word "fact." As in, according to Slashdot it is a well-known fact that Europe is a violent anarchist paradise and that the lack of guns here just breeds more tire iron and cricket bat assaults... usually against the elderly, who cower in fear, wishing they had the liberty to own a gun with which they could keep the kids off of their lawn.

I run into this problem frequently. Windows is a zombie where I work because no one knows that there are alternatives. There is no official policy, yet the whole place has turned into a Microsoft shop for no reason. Apple seems completely uninterested in competing in the business world and so it goes, Microsoft claiming huge "market share" simply because it is familiar and fairly well supported/integrated at many places of employment. I chose to use OS X and Linux at work because I do a lot of work with command-line tools and Mac-only vector drawing programs. (And let's face it, farting around on Slashdot.)

What kills me is that, when I refuse to use our stupid Oracle calendar system because the native OS X client is several years out of date and buggy, and syncing it with my phone is harder than a shuttle launch, the zombies all chant "switch to a PC." (Where PC means our in-house Windows XP installation.) Their argument isn't that it is better, but that it has "more market share for a reason" and that it is "the industry standard" and "why do you have to be different anyway?" Arrrrgh.

I'm not going to touch the baseless assertion that somehow we are on the precipice of complete gun prohibition despite there being more guns in circulation now than ever before. However, the Number One argument against any and all forms of gun regulation is that people may need to take up arms against their own government. What does it matter if gun enthusiasts relate to plastic or metal or ceramic guns--isn't the point supposed to be about protecting the unfettered access to firearms by the public? It makes no sense to me that high-capacity magazines and assault weapons (which I will define as weapons designed for use against humans) are sacred cows, but that banning any guns manufactured using certain materials or in certain shapes is just ducky.

I'm not sure to whom you are referring, but I know of no one that likes seeing assault weapons anywhere but on TV and the firing range. Nor do I know of anyone who specifically wants air marshals armed with automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines (or who even goes into that level of detail.) Train stations and airports in France are full of soldiers walking around with automatic weapons--supposedly to "send a message to would-be terrorists"--and it makes me feel nervous and oppressed. And what kind of message does that send to my son? Ditto for the militarized police at the airports in Chile. "Excuse me officer, nice machine gun, do you know where the cab stand is?" Also, why draw a distinction between private vehicles and private movie theaters? I constantly hear the argument that, if only more people had been armed, <insert mass murder> could have been avoided. What else is exempt from that argument besides air travel? Sporting events perhaps, like the 1996 Olympics? What about marathons?

How does arming allied forces with cheap handguns in the 1940's have anything to do with the modern military/police? You are barking mad if you think that any citizens group could stand up to either. Just look at the asymmetry in civilian and military deaths in Iraq and Afganistan. Hell, if you want to talk about the 40's, look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I disagree. The country that I grew up in died in the Fall of 2001 when we tossed the Bill of Rights out the window, quite literally sacrificing liberty in the name of security. From naked body scanners to universal wire taps to indefinite detention without a trial, anyone who doesn't feel those liberties being threatened is either an idiot or living in a cave. Yet people get their underwear in a knot over the mildest whiff of gun control, even when it doesn't affect them--e.g., people in the flyover states getting worked up over laws in California and New York.

Then why were they banned? I'm pretty sure that plenty of people would be interested in owning those James Bond-esque one-shot guns concealed in an umbrella or whatever. That nobody owns them is a directly result of making them illegal to manufacture (at least for civilians), which they started doing in the late 80's when the technology was made available. They still do make plastic/ceramic guns, but they have to put a hunk of iron in them and make them look like guns on an X-Ray to comply with the law.

I'm not trying to be snarky, I am really trying to understand why something like universal background checks or limits on magazine capacity elicit howls of tyranny, while categorically banning any firearm made of a certain material flies right under the radar.

Nope. I used quantifiable phenomena--i.e., facts--rather than other peoples' opinions and avoided making arbitrary comparisons.

Good for you for digging up some numbers about murder rates, but good luck convincing anyone that the threat of roving gangs is so severe that arming the elderly is a moral imperative. I suppose you could threaten them with a gun, but that might backfire... literally and figuratively.

Hey, maybe we can transplant the brains of pensioners into armored cyborgs and they can carry giant, automatic pistols where their quadriceps used to be: "Citizen, get off of my lawn. You have ten seconds to comply! Ten... Nine..." Unfortunately for me throngs of tire-iron wielding maniacs aren't a problem where I live, so I only point guns at ducks, skeet, and targets.

While that may be true, you cited the Cato institution, Fox News, something called "gunssavelives.net," the WJS opinion page, opinion pieces in the Boston Globe, The Telegraph, and The Washington Examiner, something called "americanthinker.com," a weasel-worded gallop poll, and an article from the Hill that is quoting the the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee pointing out that a couple of democrats in Montana and South Dakota aren't toeing the gun-control line. These articles all make the argument that we need more guns and less regulation because guns make us safer. Lastly, you pulled out that old canard that the UK has a higher crime rate than the US to really drive the point home. But you cleverly avoid delving into the type of crime.

Now, watch this: The rate of firearm-related deaths per capita is 10.23 in the US and 0.25 in the UK. The only countries (of the 75 listed) with higher rates than the US are: Panama, Mexico, Columbia, South Africa, Brazil, Swaziland, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Jamaica. Interestingly, the country with the lowest rate, Japan, has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world. Of course, I'm not suggesting a causal relationship, but I will point out that the presence of a gun is a prerequisite to any form of gun violence.

Do you see the difference?