It's a lazy assumption that the motivation for war is profit, but in this case ...

Close: the main factor in weapon costs is development. The main factor in prices depends on how many are manufactured, what sort of maintenance there will be (huge business), how much profit the defense contracting corporation wants to make, etc.

For example, now that the Patriot missile is already developed, each new one made and sold for millions will have a gross profit. If you can say "material prices increased (unsaid: "by 20%, etc") so we need to double the price", and the buyer is motivated (started a war and exhausted their previous supply), and also they are already locked into your ecosystem, then that is a win for you in even more ways.

If you are money-friends with the head of the military, and they are infamous for corruption, violating laws and regulations, not caring about the cost of things they spend government money on, and gifting government favors to their money-friends, then you are golden.

No American revolution would succeed without a significant chunk of US military support. Either from above ("autogolpe"), or entire units defecting en masse.

> much less complicated than say something like trying to juggle a dentistry practice while driving the 2 kids to school events and then going home to patch drywall on the house

There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.

I have some sympathy for people who can't adapt to peace. When I was a kid one of my neighbours was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Calvert ; I knew him as an old man who drank too much and never talked about the war. This is not an excuse to restart the war.

I couldn't tell you. YPG was dominantly left-wing and looked up to the former communist 'Apo'. I imagine the phenomenon is fairly politically universal.

>There is genuinely a group of people who'd rather fantasize about mass murder than do chores. Every now and again one of them actually picks up a gun. Then some school kids never have to go to events, or anywhere, ever again.

Yes there are people like that. Although most of the Kurds I met started fantasizing about fighting ISIS only after Islamic theocrats starting murdering and raping their population. I doubt many of them who gained a taste for combat were doing chores one day and started fantasizing they could live under a tyrannical regime so they'd have an "excuse" to "restart" the war.

Personally I don't think soldiers in need of a war have to fantasize too hard to come up with a morally acceptable outlet. I wouldn't look down on those who fought against the Russians in Ukraine or against ISIS in Mali because they need an outlet for their escape from civil life.

I am arguing there will still be a significant number mass shootings/casualty events, political assassinations using a firearm, etc, and that the only way to effectively prevent them is to roll back most of the bill of rights.

The gun is a very old piece of technology and you do not need a sophisticated one to kill people effectively. Shinzo Abe was assassinated with a gun that could be described as primitive at best. Mangione used a 3dp firearm to kill the United Health CEO. Rebels in Myanmar are fighting the military junta with 3d printed small arms.

I am fundamentally arguing that the capacity of any one person has dramatically (100,000x) increased since the bill of rights was written, for better and for worse.

To be clear, I fully support the bill of rights and want to see it expanded. However, I reject the idea that simply eliminating the 2nd amendment and removing guns from civilian ownership can fix the underlying issues. I think you will see "casual" shootings and hopefully even mass shootings go down, but they will not go away and I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world.

These are extremely rare in other countries? It's very hard to achieve true zero, yes, but the UK has about 30 gun deaths per year, almost all of which are crime-related rather than mass casualty events. Those tend to be rare, and tend to be bombs. The Shinzo Abe assassination was also such a "black swan".

> I expect they will still be higher than anywhere else in the world

Why do you think that would be, given (important!) your premise "the public is broadly supportive of this effort"?

To answer the point, there is no technical limitation keeping people in the UK from building, creating and shooting homemade or otherwise improvised guns that I am aware of.

What the UK does have is universal healthcare, a 3-4x lower incarceration rate and dramatically improved social safety services.

I think you can group the majority of shooters into three buckets -- ideologically driven (think white supremacists, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, etc), the mentally ill, and the criminally motivated (gang shootings mostly). The US has only amplifying factors for all three groups.

For idealgoues, there is no wider span of acceptable discourse than in the US. Commonly espoused views in the US legislative and executive branches are criminal offenses in a number of peer countries, e.g hate speech is still constitutionally protected speech in the US. The rhetoric is insane, accusations of nazism, faciscm from the left and similar accusations from the right, and generally a very high degree of polarization.

For the mentally ill, the support system in the US is abysmal, with cracks big enough to drive a truck through. There are multiple books written about the failures of America's mental health system, I will not belabor the point.

For the criminally motivated, gun crime is concentrated in young, mostly black men in decaying post-industrial cities in the midwest and (south)east. They have almost zero political capital, low social mobility and very little pubic support. Other countries certainly have their ghettos, but take a trip to Gary, IN or Jackson, MS. You would be hard pressed think you are in the richest, most powerful country in the world.

Fundamentally, the point still stands. There is not a feasible technical path to keep firearm technology out of a massive number of hands. The skills needed to produce a functional firearm have never been lower, and they will keep declining until almost zero. The only technical (preventative) measures run squarely into the bill of rights -- think a lowered bar for a warrant or infringements on the 1st amendment limiting the sharing of technical knowledge. Changing the culture -- around mental health, around poverty, and around power is very difficult, so we will see an attempted erosion of civil liberties, just like 9/11 was used to erode civil liberties with the introduction of the Patriot Act and similar legislation.

With that said - almost nobody goes through the trouble of manufacturing anything. Making it difficult to access firearms means that most people who might think about getting a gun will just get something else. Your opponents not having a gun also makes you less likely to feel like you need one.

I won't argue that it's possible to deter a sufficiently motivated person, but most people are not that motivated. Making undesirable things 'uphill' is pretty effective.

People did fly two planes into the World Trade Center. That was a thing that happened. Along with all the regular mass shootings, all the way up to Vegas.

> That in and of itself is a symptom of a larger grave political crisis in America: the decay of the state's political legitimacy.

Well, only because people are actively chiselling away at it because they think they will be able to loot the ruins.

(AI will probably make this worse as well, having a bloat tendency all of its own)

What's a good codebase that is very large but without either OO or pseudo-OO?

I work on large (but private, so I cannot share, sadly) FP-style codebases. The code style is stateless functions grouped in modules that operate on data-only structs in a factory line manner. Typed boundaries for correctness, short and maintainable functions for clarity. No member functions, so no vtables.

I've never seen such code need or use OOP design patterns. I'm just very gently pushing back against the idea all code devolves into OOP spaghetti in due course. It doesn't! There are better ways. :)