So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.

It’s actually somewhat worse- a great many DGUs go unreported. After all, someone comes at you threateningly, you pull up your shirt and put your hand on your gun, they suddenly change direction. That’s in a sense a DGU. But most people wouldn’t report it because there’s nothing to report.

Thus most DGU stats come from statistical analysis of phone surveys. That’s why it’s inaccurate as hell, with one smart guy saying it’s 60k and another smart guy saying it’s 4 million. It’s all in how you crunch the data.

But it’s important to note that Hemenway is SOLIDLY anti-gun, if there was a way to make the number lower he’d do it. So I take that as a minimum agreed count.

I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.

Perhaps not, but it does correlate with OFFENSIVENESS of use.
The person who owns an illegal gun is more likely to be a criminal in a gang.

And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.

Correct. Each year about 30-35k people die from gunshot wounds, about 2/3 of those are suicides.
I’ll even give you that increased gun ownership may slightly increase the overall suicide rate- a gun to the head is an easy, painless, instant way to become dead. Instant is the key there, lots of people who choose slower means of suicide change their minds mid-suicide. IE, the guy who jumps off the bridge changes his mind while driving there, the person who takes a bunch of pills changes their mind and pukes / calls 911, etc. If you shoot yourself in the head, you’re dead instantly.

With that all said though, I don’t think this is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership. Suicide is absolutely tragic. But it’s also a decision that a person makes for themself, it’s not something forced upon them. And I don’t believe ‘you might INTENTIONALLY hurt yourself with this tool’ is a valid reason to deny someone from having it. I believe that’s part of having a free country- that if you decide to kill yourself that’s tragic, but it’s ultimately your own responsibility. Just the same- social media and shitty websites can drive a person to suicide, but we don’t shred the 1st Amendment to stop that.

LOL

The other countries can simply not oblige (and thus kill NATO). That’s the more realistic option.

I don’t see it.

Sure, the various NATO countries who aren’t Denmark can simply say ‘sorry man we’re out’ and dissolve NATO. Or just refuse to comply, damn the consequences.
They won’t though, because in many cases the threat of NATO is the only thing protecting them.
Look at Eastern Europe on the Russian border- Finland, Estonia, Latvia. Belarus is a RU puppet and Ukraine might lose their war so we can include Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania too. Russia has Navy assets in the Black Sea so you can also consider Bulgaria and Turkey.
If NATO went away tomorrow, do you really think Russia wouldn’t try to gobble one or two of them up? You really think they wouldn’t succeed in at least one or two cases?

And what about Canada? They’re a NATO member and they have real military force. Same with UK, Norway, Sweden, Germany.

Do any of them WANT to go up against USA? Of course not.
If the US truly went rogue and invaded a sovereign nation, would they do it? Probably, because if they didn’t, there’s no guarantee they wouldn’t be next.

Lol no they wouldn’t. Neither would they care about who owns Greenland (except probably Russia), neither would they waste immense amounts of money and manpower to fight the biggest military and economy in the world for no real gain, and neither would 2/3 of the listed countries (Ru, NK) be able to do anything serious against US anyway (outside of suicidally throwing nukes at it).

They DGAF about Greenland. Greenland isn’t worth shit.
But for any of them to reduce the US’s role in the world economy or worldwide diplomacy, that’s a golden opportunity.
Thing is they needn’t commit huge resources to the war. Just a small force that would be able to make it hurt for the US, and the real war is fought in the media. It gives them a chance to be the heroes and paint US as the villain.

Sounds like a fantastic deal to me.

I’ll add to that- within a year’s time, less than 50% of the affected devices will even have a patch available.

Determining the exact count is difficult. If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported, the only way to get any sort of number is with phone surveys and statistical analysis. That leaves a lot of opening to interpretation of the data.

Thus you have anti-gun researchers like Hemenway who put it at ~60,000 incidents/year and pro-gun researchers like Lott who put it at 2-4 million incidents/year. (I say anti/pro gun because Hemenway’s other writings advocate for gun control, while Lott’s other writings advocate against gun control). Obviously the number is somewhere in the middle.

But the firearm homicide rate (excluding suicides) is around 10k-15k/year, which means even if you only go with worst case data it means there’s 4x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.

I’ll give you that’s a slightly apples to oranges comparison, as many firearm assaults don’t end in death.
But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.

I’d argue that the lion’s share of those 10-15k homicides per year are committed with illegal guns / prohibited owners, they are gang and drug related. The problem is that’s often hard to prove and it doesn’t show up in data sets. For example, you have incidents in sites like ‘mass shooting tracker’ like:
‘On friday at 11pm, victim1 and victim2 were leaving a house party in the 12,000 block of Nowhere St. Two unknown males opened fire from a moving vehicle. Victim1 and victim2 were wounded, along with bystander1 and bystander2 who were injured non-critically.’
Now that’s a ‘mass shooting’ because 4 people got shot. Read between the lines and it’s ‘gangland drive-by’. But you can’t prove that as the victims won’t admit to being in a gang and the perps weren’t caught. But you can bet those guns were illegal and the car was stolen.

American here (not a Trump fan).

There’s three things we should be looking at IMHO.

First- Trump is a publicity man, an actor. He understands the camera.

Think of a magic show. You have the magician and the cute assistant in a swimsuit. So when they set up the trick the assistant is flourishing her hands and dancing over the stage to distract you from noticing that the magician palmed your card instead of shuffling it back into the deck.

Trump understands this. And he knows how to play both the magician and the assistant.

So if he says something wild like this, understand he WANTS attention on that statement, which probably means he DOESN’T want attention on something else. Like Epstein. If those files have any kind of actual proof he partook in Epstein’s services, there’s a good chance that an impeachment might actually succeed to conviction. Because it’s easy to ‘stand with your party leader’, it’s a lot harder to say ‘yes I stand by my vote that the guy in the picture with his dick in a 14yo girl should stay President’.

Point being- whenever Trump says something outrageous like this, your first question should be 'what DOESN’T he want me paying attention to?

Second- understand that USA literally cannot annex Greenland by force. Greenland is a territory of Denmark, and Denmark is a member of NATO. If the US invades Denmark, all other NATO companies are OBLIGATED to provide military support. So that would basically kick USA out of NATO, and you can bet your bottom dollar that not only NATO but also Russia, China, North Korea, etc would all fall over themselves to ‘help respect and defend the sovereign territory of Denmark from illegal invasion’. That very quickly becomes a ‘US vs Rest Of World’ war and even with our giant military there’s NO chance we win against the entire rest of the planet combined. Plus militarily we would be isolated, ostracized from the world economy.

Americans understand this. Our government understands this. Congress understands this. Even if Trump does not, Congress would not authorize such a war.

As for tariffs- Congress is much more hesitant to curtail Trump’s tariff powers, but their tolerance has a limit (somewhere). It’s one thing to enact tariffs ‘to protect American manufacturing’, they’ll generally tolerate a ‘good faith’ effort like that. But when the tariff becomes punitive to countries that aren’t supporting an annexation that obviously isn’t going to happen, I think Congress might step in.

Third- While this all may well be a distraction or a strategy, it is doing actual harm to our international relations. If I was a citizen of EU, AU, Asia, etc, I would be saying 'the US can no longer be trusted to lead the world economy, the rest of the world needs to find a solution where the US is ‘one among many’ not calling the shots. And a big part of that would likely be a different worldwide reserve currency. Because right now this is like being on a bus where every few minutes the driver jokes about swerving in front of an oncoming semi truck- even if he won’t do it, you still don’t want to be on that bus.

What this also means is that the next Presidential election is important not just for American internal politics but for determining what our place in the world will be going forward. While Trump is ineligible to be re-elected, I think it’s important that the US send a clear message this isn’t the sort of statesmanship that we want representing us. That DOESN’T mean blindly vote blue. It means vote in primaries, vote for candidates who act like statesmen.

As a gun owner, and someone who has studied many use of force situations, I know all of this.

However someone who takes 10 rounds and keeps coming is extremely rare. And that will generally only happen when none of those rounds hit critical areas.

Part of responsible gun ownership is understanding that you are responsible for every bullet you fire, and it will keep going until something stops it.

However I would challenge your position really with two core concepts:

1. The overwhelming majority, 90+%, of defensive gun uses end with no shots fired. The criminal sees the gun and runs away. In those situations, the gun did not kill, it protected.

2. Look up the Wikipedia page on defensive gun uses. Depending on which researcher you go with, there are somewhere between 60,000 and several million defensive gun incidents each year. If what you are saying is true, even if you assume that 90% of them have no shots fired, there would still be tens of hundreds of thousands at minimum incidents where the gun killed rather than protected. Because it didn’t stop the assailant, because an innocent bystander was hit, etc. Why is this not major news? Why are the anti-gun lobbyists not showing up to Congress with a stack full of news articles?

I would argue that is simply because it does not happen the way you say.

That’s a legal. Metered utilities can be either included in the rent, or metered on a per unit basis. In this setup, if your neighbor uses a lot of utilities your bill will go up. That’s why this is illegal.

Look up the stats on defensive gun uses. Just Google it.

The vast majority (90+%) end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.

If someone threatens me and my family I want a better option than ‘hope the violent criminal decides to let us live’.

If you have an emergency you want the tool that protects against that emergency.

If there’s a fire you want a tool to put the fire out. That could be a bucket, but a fire extinguisher works better.

If you are threatened with a violent person who wants to do you harm, can you name a more effective tool than a gun?

I’ve never set my house on fire, but I still feel better having a fire extinguisher.

You think I am actually advocating for this nonsense?

As an American I certainly hope not

Pro succession movement in Greenland? I very much doubt it. They can influence all they want, and if they are that only shows imho that they fundamentally misunderstand how other countries work.

I doubt it very much also. But I am saying in concept, if the vast majority of the people in one place don’t want to be a part of the country they are part of, in general they should be allowed to leave.

You’re looking in the wrong direction.

Let’s say you get an electric heater of that size. How would you control it on a thermostat? I promise you in a warehouse where that would be used it wouldn’t just be a circuit breaker you turn on and off.

The answer is a relay, AKA a contactor. A small amount of power, either 24 volt or 120 volt at low amperage energizes the coil, which then pulls the contactor and engages a much larger power flow. With such a thing you could use any any thermostat such as a Z-Wave Honeywell T6 Pro or a Smart switch to control the big load.

That said, such an electric heater will use an awful lot of power. You should really consider a mini split.
Electric heaters are about 100% efficient. 5000 w of power input equals 5000 w of heat output. Heat pumps depending on the conditions can be 250% to 400% efficient. That’s because they aren’t turning electricity into heat, they are using electricity to move already existing heat in from the outside. Thus 5000 w of power input could mean 15,000 w of heat output.

A lot of mini splits work with an external thermostat, but you don’t want to use them that way. Mini splits are modulated output, which means the compressor can run at almost any speed from 1% to 100%. They get maximum efficiency when working at about half output. So you want to be able to enable that savings. That means using the mini splits internal thermostat rather than an external thermostat that just switches it on and off.
A great many of them use infrared, so you could just rig up an IR emitter that would send it commands. Then don’t use the remote control that comes with it and it will still have whatever state you just broadcast it via infrared.
Alternatively there are some that have online connections and can be controlled via the cloud. For certain ones there is a replacement connection board you can get that replaces the Wi-Fi cloud connector with an ESP device enabling local control via home assistant. Do some research on this before you purchase.

Given that it is a part of our mainland continent, I would be less enthusiastic than if, say, Hawaii or Alaska wanted to secede.

Nonetheless, self-determination is a solidly American value. If an overwhelming majority of Californians wanted to leave the union, then in general I believe the rest of the country should let them. Otherwise we are forcing them to be subject to a national government they don’t want.

American here. I’m sure annexing Greenland would be very useful to us for all kinds of reasons. I don’t want to do it.

Unless the people in Greenland want to become part of the United States, I don’t believe we have any more right to declare Greenland ours than Hitler had a right to declare France his, or Russia has a right to declare Ukraine theirs.

If the people of Greenland want to become part of the United States, verified with an election monitored by multiple disinterested third parties, then by all means welcome to the party guys.

However given the timing of this ridiculous idea, I can’t help but think the whole thing is just a distraction from the Epstein files.

You can put the time server in your DHCP offer. No idea if the printer will use that, but it’s worth a shot.