(not my image. I just find these comical and incredibly dangerous)

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    15 hours ago

    In the Saints Row series they’re called kneecappers and I tried and uninstalled them because they caused too much mayhem. They also appear in the Spy Hunter 1983 coin-op video game

    I remember seeing them on Speed Racer used by villains before seeing the chariot race version in Ben Hur.

    IRL they’re obviously a hazard and inappropriate in traffic where people are just trying to collaboratively get home. (And yes, traffic is a collective cooperative effort, and we see that as soon as someone gets antagonistic.)

    But Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists, a component of capitalist propaganda, and like to show they’re rebels with shit like rolling coal and truck nuts.

    This totally looks like a FAFO moment that is going to turn into a regulatory statute.

    Since it’s not a firearm, I doubt courts or officials will be interested at all in pursuing second-amendment liberties over this. They seem not to care about knives or ninja gear, either.

    • FudgyMcTubbs@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      This isn’t a problem with Americans. Every country has idiots. This just happens to be one of ours.

        • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          14 hours ago

          Here in the US, we’ve been cultivating idiocy with a long standing anti-education movement in the Republican party.

          More exactly, there are a multiple intersecting movements:
          ~ No public education / No education for the poors
          ~ Religious (Christian nationalist ideology) education for all
          ~ Charter schools as grift
          ~ Obey authority. Trust the state.

          And these figured into the instant army that rallied to Trump in 2015-2016 from the rest of the Republican party. Principal figures from the party watched their own ideology collapse, and there was nothing they could do about it.