Just as a side note - having visited the eBay PayPal campus, it's actually a very colorful location full of cheerful people.

I tried that, but it ended with a lot of yelling at 3 AM about how I must have intentionally dropped her into the poison water by removing the bridge.

You're saying the gun nuts survived and the government went away?

But not all of America's gun owners will feel the need to participate in a civil war. They also lack the training and leadership of law enforcement and are spread out.

The star gate handles the transmission and reconstruction of the human atoms within its buffer so people don't spray out. Now exiting the worm hole without the star gate is a bad idea (unless you're just sending some sort of raw material).

Then at least you know they're a criminal before they start killing people.

Sounds like it already has some crazies

Switzerland also has very strict gun laws that restrict people from carrying guns around and all males go through basic military training.

The problem isn't with responsible gun owners that take the training seriously and don't end up murdering people, it's the ones that go on rampages or think they need to defend their property from the kid getting his ball or hunt down the minorities in the neighborhood.

You might also note that mass murders happen more often in areas where there are lots of people, Alaska doesn't quite fit that criteria.

It's more that we might as well take out the low hanging fruit before we move to the more reasonable weapons. Rifles don't really have a use in civilian hands and we still have hundreds of murders caused by them. We've forced car companies into recalls over fewer deaths.

There's now http://mbeta.slashdot.org/ which looks pretty spiffy on mobile devices and even validates (except for some code strangely there to handle IE)

Interestingly, any study that contradicts the NRA's "guns are perfect" theology tends to be buried and discredited no matter how accurate it is. When the (I think) FDA department of injuries found that households with guns were less safe, the NRA lobbied to have the department defunded because they didn't think they should be doing research like that.

If the government wants to kill/imprison you or take your gun away, they're going to do it. You can't fight off the government, just look at what's happened to the nut jobs that have tried. There was the waco seige where the government overpowered the fanatics in the 90s, even recently there was a guy that burned down his house and hid in a bunker in the wood he had built until a swat team essentially blew it up.

That's why the good version controls have an "ignore whitespace" option when comparing versions.

We're not talking about serial killers here - the people doing these mass shootings aren't the type to plan through their actions and figure out the correct brands of cleaning components, they went to grab a gun from their local gun show and pop in a magazine with as many bullets as possible.

If there are a few people around hiding behind walls or barricades, 1.5 seconds could be enough time to rush a shooter and interrupt his reloading.