Chapter 47 – Page 41
WELL THAT’S THAT! Another chapter closes, and we move on to Chapter 48 on Monday with the avatar rotations and you know the whole drill!
It’s extremely last minute notice of us but we’ve added a few shows to our schedule! Most notably, this weekend we’ll be at blerDCon this weekend in Crystal City, VA! It’s a first year show, so we’re hoping we can help these guys make a huge impact on their debut while we’re on our way out! Come say hey, buy our stuff, and ask our contrasting opinions on a posthumous view of Joss Whedon’s body of work!
Was that not supposed to be clear last page?
There’s what was supposed (as intended by Xan) to be clear, and then there’s what actually was clear (to Shanna).
Guns don’t accomplish things.
People accomplish things.
They can have my tool for accomplishing things when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
I mean, it’s a tool alright. Just a shitty one.
At that point you may as well just break a window or bring a sledgehammer or some other manner of tool to punch out the lock of an office door.
Well, the main use for a firearm has not changed much since the first muskets. Aim it at something you intend to destroy and do not particularly care about the general state of afterwards.
I think there was a Mythbuster episode that showed that this wouldn’t work.
It’s probably still a terrible idea simply because of ricochet.
Guns are really good at fucking up shit made of soft tissues that need the soft tissues to survive, with only a few exceptions.
Also:
If you’re going to make that much noise breaking-and-entering, then you may as well bring a tool that won’t communicate the intent to assault a person.
Are we still talking about penises?
No but there’s a certain amount of spray and pray involved.
Looks like we have a flirtin’ n’ enterin’ in progress.
I thought there already was something between him and Chrissie?
I know it’s foreign to most people on the internet but it seems like this is more of a friendship thing.
Hey! First comment on this comic gravatar check ( do i need another reason to post a comment really? )
Shanna, sorry to break it to you, but that outfit do make you look fat. XD
That’s not the outfit. That is a result of living on the run and eating fast food all the time.
Damn, that actually makes her twice as wide as Xan, but maybe that’s just perspective.
Bring the right tool for the job. A gun is not what you want to covertly open a door. Did no one think to pack a crowbar for the off chance they found a door with a lock not designed by an idiot?
Yeah, none of them really have any real clue what they doing if ‘action movie logic’ is their plan B.
Too bad those walls can’t talk, they’d have all sorts of interesting things to tell people after tonight.
Like the door was unlocked the whole time? Cause it’s a game studio and not a national bank.
You would be surprised at how tight security is for game development companies. They don’t want their secrets stolen. Even the game testers are required to use key cards to enter a controlled environment to find and report issues. I know because I used to work at such a facility for the Xbox 360 a few years ago. I worked through a temp agency so the work wasn’t steady otherwise I would be still doing it.
It would make sense to have it locked. After all you want to protect your livelihood, plus all the at best sketchy stuff with the tube crew that they have to make sure is secure
“Guns are tools.”
Careful, you’ll have a large group of insane people start saying extremely hateful (and often quite slanderous) things about you for having the temerity to actually notice reality. They “know” the real truth, that guns are vicious, evil things that take control of any nearby human and use them to commit deadly atrocities, and anyone who says otherwise is clearly a murderous tool of the guns and deserves whatever happens to them.
I’m trying to exaggerate, but I’m not sure I actually succeeded.
Also, his face is panel 1 is so, SO good.
I am a liberal who is a advocate of gun control but even I recognize their simply tools. Tools of murder, tools for hunting, tools etc. You don’t convict a gun of a homicide you commit the person using the gun. Is it so hard to imagine gun control as anything other than tyrannical? Is it so wrong to want guns to be held by responsible gun owners who are unlikely to commit mass murder? That they would treat their guns respecting how deadly they can be and putting them into proper containment outside the reach of children or mentally deranged individuals?
It’s a laudable goal, but the hard part is finding someone you can trust to determine who is “responsible”. Governments in general have a pretty poor record in that regard. The biggest instances of mass murder in history aren’t ones committed by deranged individuals, they’re ones committed by government sponsored groups of sociopaths, and they happen most often in situations where the government has succeeded in disarming whatever social groups it’s decided it doesn’t like. (Or first-world countries using expensive weapons on third-world countries who can’t afford the equipment to fight back.) The fact that your government doesn’t dislike any social groups enough to commit genocide right now (that you know of, just about everybody is causing lots of “collateral damage” in the middle east right now…) is no guarantee of the future. A big deal is often made about Hitler using gun control to disarm the Jews; what gets glossed over is the fact that the gun control laws and enforcement framework were already there before he took over, and weren’t much more stringent that what’s touted as “common sense gun control” these days — all he really did was prioritize enforcement and then make use of the already collected registration data to disarm his political enemies.
In the realm of individual psychotics who go on killing sprees, you’ll find that we actually probably want them using guns. I know, it seems counter-intuitive, but consider the cases where they decided to use other things… The highest body count in recent history was racked up by a guy with a truck… And if he’d been just a little smarter he could have passed it off as an accident and gone and done it again. The deadliest nightclub killing spree of which I am aware isn’t the recent one, it’s the one where the perpetrator used a can of gasoline and a lighter. The cases involving swords, machetes or knives seem to have an injury and death rate only slightly less than shootings. Guns are tools for delivering a large, but well controlled amount of energy in a precise manner. You use things every day which are manipulating far larger amounts of energy though, and if you don’t care about “collateral damage” they make far more effective weapons. Heck, a cup of flour has roughly the same explosive potential as half a stick of dynamite if you get it well aerated. Flour was actually used to destroy entire buildings during the sack of Atlanta.
Then you get to the fact that guns aren’t as complicated as everyone likes to think. Anyone with a highschool shop class level of metalworking education has all the skills they need to build an AK-47 if they’re willing to devote the time to it. Gang members have been known to make simple but effective ones out of water pipe or old car antennas. And that’s just firearms. You should see some of the things people build that use compressed air or hairspray as a power source. Keeping weapons out of the hands of people who would misuse them is practically impossible. Even in places with strict gun control and strict border security, criminals still seem to have them whenever they’re doing something that requires them.
So what’s left then? Well, we’re back to the time-tested method of balance of power. A teenage male thug has no trouble beating up granny to steal her purse… unless granny has a gun, in which case it’s pretty close to an even fight (even if the thug also has a gun.) Criminals don’t like even fights. They tend to avoid them. Governments have a hard time convincing their pet psychopaths to go wipe out some social or ethnic group when there’s a good chance that that group can fight back effectively. And everyone being armed isn’t as dangerous to the common man as you might think. Hollywood has exaggerated because it makes a better story. If you look at the actual statistics from Old West frontier towns, you find that the rate of violent death was about the same as modern cities of equivalent size. The difference is that it was mostly duels, not drive-bys. The only people involved were generally the willing participants, and the danger to bystanders was minimal. Not that it isn’t still sad, but if two people really want to try to kill each other I’d rather they do it with a minimum of collateral damage.
So yeah, whenever you hear a politician talking about gun control, remember: Throughout pretty much our entire history the social group with all the political power just happens to be exactly the same as the social group that commands all the force of arms. In societies where weapons are spread evenly through the society you get more democratic governments with more rights for the individual. In societies with centralized control of weapons and their use, things tend more toward dictatorship and oligarchy. Sure, when someone proves themselves a menace we need to take their weapons and/or lock them up, but give the bureaucrats the ability to disqualify people on more nebulous grounds and you can sit back and watch them slowly pick off the rights of people who disagree with them. You can see it already if you look around. There are places with license requirements that then proceed to not issue licenses to anyone except police and the bodyguards of VIPs. There are states which have decided that people who own guns are not eligible to adopt or to be foster parents, and some of them have attempted to criminalize teaching children the proper use of weapons and how to be safe with them. Be very wary of anyone who seeks to disarm you “for your own good”. If you think I’m paranoid, ask an American Indian.
I disagree and think the saying that guns are just tools is a disingenuous oversimplification.
They aren’t just tools. They’re artifacts and don’t exist in isolation of the wider culture that created them. Everybody innately recognizes that guns are not just weapons, but *superlative* weapons. That’s the entire appeal and fascination with collecting and shooting them. And I seriously challenge any gun owner that hasn’t had the fantasy of shooting the bad guy and saving the day at least once.
They create the false equivocation that guns are just the same as knives and cars, but given a choice of weapon, people want the gun because they know it’s the better tool for it. You can barricade a door against knives. A car can’t go past traffic barriers and isn’t portable. Not to mention that a car is rather easy to break and rather expensive to repair if you want to actually use the car for its intended purpose afterwards.
That’s the thing. I can hit some random person in the parking lot of the grocery store. But if I really want do damage, I can bring a handgun into the grocery store instead. If I have a knife, I can’t stab the burly veteran that’s barricading the door through it. But I can shoot him through the door with a gun. (This actually happened at Umpqua community college and the veteran was hailed as a hero. Of course, he wouldn’t have been in a hospital bed if no gun was involved.)
Just because guns aren’t responsible moral agents doesn’t mean they aren’t causative agents nor that the people who made them available with the intention of making them EFFECTIVE weapons aren’t also responsible.
Tools for making small holes in things from a distance so as to disrupt their function.
Depending on where one draws the line between not-gun and gun here, there is also the matter that the original things in questions that motivated the creation of the device to make holes in them… were people.
Just so we’re totally clear here. In the grand scheme of things, guns as tools aren’t good for much besides breaking things (inclusive of people) and leveraging the threat of breaking things. Options are kinda limited. At least with a knife you can sometimes use it as a screwdriver or a toothpick if the situation demands it.
Having been raised around guns (I had a bolt action, single shot .22 cal. Rifle when I was 14),this irrational fear of guns by some people puzzles me. Guns have been demonized by the Anti-Gun Crusaders in a mistaken belief that by depriving American citizens of their Second Amendment rights will reduce gun violence. Criminals and terrorists have no qualms about breaking gun laws, so it makes zero sense to disarm honest people. If you don’t like guns, don’t own one. But don’t challenge my Constitutional right to own one. A disarmed citizen becomes a subject and a victim.
…Sorry, I just can’t ship Shanna with anyone who isn’t Will Erixon.
She could use Big Bear right now.
“Oh good. For a minute there I thought we were in trouble.”
I think this moment is really touching because Shanna has multiple times shown herself ready to put her life in danger for the others, not necessarily for the mission but because she genuinely wants to save lives (when she threatened JJ the first time) or because she blames herself for involving them (offering to give herself up, killing JJ). But she looks so surprised when she realizes that Xan has the same level of regard and loyalty for her, like she’s never considered herself worthy of a sacrifice. I like this page a lot.
Not that it actually interferes with the story or anything, but if that was a security door with an industrial grade lock on it, they’d have no real chance of shooting it open with a handgun. But it’s not unrealistic for him to think that might work as a backup plan, so no complaints.
This has been your moment of security pedantry.
So anti-violence Shanna first thought is shooting people and Xan couldn’t think of anything any better ‘tool’ than a gun? How about buying a freak’n crowbar genius!? Wow, it’s going to be a freak’n train wreck if they actually reach the basement, “quick, unplug the life support!”
…unless you loaded it with something other than full metal jacket bullets that is.
Guns may be tools, but you have to use the RIGHT tools.