"It's Giving Me The Death Giggles"

^ embroidered a net onto the front pocket of these overalls

And when you include blatant falsehoods in your messaging, now nobody believes you when you talk statistics on gun use in domestic violence or other serious issues.

Maybe I'm an outlier in the pro gun control group, because I'm a MechE and I love machines that perform a precise function with clever bits of steel, and i went to a summer camp when i was 11 or 12 where they had a shooting range with dinky little .22 rifles, but like

By which I mean, the kind of toy where if your angry dad said, "You need to respect this, it's not a toy!" he probably had a pretty good reason.

We've never had anybody accidentally discharge a pack of magic cards or a set of golf clubs in front of the valet station, to my knowledge.

I don't have weapons in the house so I put on some steel toed boots for kicking and I put a utility knife in my jacket pocket and kept my hand on it.

Ultimately nothing even remotely dangerous happened.

And you know, the odds of me hospitalizing myself with my behavior there were awfully, awfully low. The odds of my hospitalizing a neighbor or bystander was zero.

If you treat a gun the same way, if you throw a gun in your pocket and keep a hand on it, you are at a far higher risk of killing or injuring not only yourself, but anybody in the vicinity at well.

It's so fucking easy to kill somebody with a gun purely by accident.

We didn't ban guns in the restaurant to prevent assaults or armed robbery, we did it because there's a class of people who are law abiding enough to leave their guns at home if you ask while simultaneously being stupid enough not to secure their firearms properly, and that behavior can get someone injured or killed, particularly once you get alcohol involved.

I feel like right-wingers in the US really tend to minimize this aspect of firearms, and treat it as though it wasn't a big deal.

I think that's why OP kind of rubs me the wrong way even though I agree that guns are both fascinating and cool, and am fairly neutral about how gun control should work.

Also I think this is related to why I find the concern about knives in the UK a little bit off.

In 1822, French physicist Augustin Fresnel ( 1788-1827) published his ideas on glass prismatic lenses and produced a design that concentrated a beam of light in a particular direction. The beam was five times more powerful than the system of silvered reflectors previously used in lighthouses, and if the light was 30m above sea level, it could be seen upt to 32km away. Fresnel lenses, which resembled giant glass beehives, were soon installed in all French lighthouses, and engineer Alan Stevenson (1807-1865) installed them in some Scottish lighthouses after meeting with Fresnel, but the US Lighthouse Board did not adopt the design until the 1850s.

The Fresnel Lens, drawn by Adolphe Ganot 1872 (x)

Lighthouses originally used wood or coal fires to produce light, in the 18th century, John Smeaton (1724-1792) the builder of the third Eddystone Lighthouse used 24 candles in a chandelier as light. Oil lamps became common for a time, mostly from the late 18th- late 19th century.  Bell Rock ( Arbroath, Scottland) for example, used spermaceti oil before switching to paraffin in 1877.

A first-order Fresnel lens, Point Reyes Lighthouse, California, 1860s (x) - Fresnel lens in the Point Bonita Lighthouse, San Francisco Bay (x)

There’s also the part that’s very funny that I have observed from my dad playing golf where it is absolutely just an excuse for straight men to get together and gossip with that gossip being periodically broken up with a socially-acceptable act of briefly Doing a Sport.