Assuming you're being honest (not sarcastic or trolling), your original intuition made a lot of sense. There's nothing wrong with having a moral compass that runs contrary to the popular mindset. Occasions often arise when that is the actually "right" thing.

Not to go too much into politics, but perhaps time is better spent by helping humanity heal and become more mutually caring rather than more authoritarian and flex on each other. It doesn't sound like you missed an opportunity at all, but rather dodged a bullet.

This same thing happened to me, except I was in the USAF and I performed conventional munitions (non-nuclear weapons) maintenance.

As part of this work, detailed manuals were provided with maintenance routines, service intervals and all kinds of top secret detailed information, and they were maintained (by me) with updates regularly. These were absolutely fascinating reading, and on a slow week I found myself reading several of the "Theory of Operation" sections for various weapons.

A great deal of thought goes into killing people. Far more than your imagination would lead you to believe. Now you're imagining a lot more. It's WAY more than that.

I couldn't really stomach the work after that and I started getting heavily depressed.

> bent on revenge and eager to kill.

Could you clarify? Upon whom? My understanding is that neither the Afghans nor the Iraqi civillians that ended up being the majority of the victims of our subsequent actions were the perpetrators of the acts on 9/11 or even from the societies that nurtured them. If I recall correctly, 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia and the remaining 4 were from the UAE, Egypt and Lebanon. Even Osama bin Laden was Saudi, and nurtured in Switzerland, funded by the US Army and subsequently protected by the Pakistani Army which was itself directly funded by the US taxpayer.

Speaking as someone from the NYC area at the time of the event, the anger was directed at Osama Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There was a lot of anger, fear and the need to do _something_. That need was directed at Afghanistan very quickly, even though none of the perpetrators were Afghanistani. If I remember correctly, the link was that Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan and the government there tried to protect him instead of handing him over.

>Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan and the government there tried to protect him instead of handing him over.

They asked for evidence and when the US said no they said they wouldn't hand him over.

Unlike his previous attacks, Bin Laden initially denied being behind 9/11.

> the link was that Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan and the government there tried to protect him instead of handing him over.

Describing the faction of the Taliban that for a brief period gave Bin Laden sanctuary as a "government" seems like an unusual way to interpret the term government. It is the equivalent for us of having some bandit hiding within some cult in Maine or Kentucky and us describing that cult as the government of Maine. Also, as others in this thread have pointed out, those Taliban offered to handover Bin Laden if evidence was provided convicting him of the crime. It is interesting to compare our level of "conviction" of blame for some sets of people and willingness to accept collateral damage to civilians who happen to be around them, but when it comes to our own, even despite blowback and high levels of culpability, we deny the equivalence and block judgements even from UN courts.

Wait ... what? You now believe that (more efficient) self destruction is a good thing?

Almost all people do, deep down. The Vikings, the Mongols, the Romans, the Aztecs, cannibals, headhunters, human sacrificers, they are us, and are not that far removed in time. To be human, really, is to be breathtakingly kind, selfless, and noble, but it's also to be cruel, bloody, and vicious. Christians call that bloody side of us the "natural man," a creature in direct opposition to the "spiritual man," who values life and goodness. Gandhi called this dichotomy the "animal" and "human" lives. Hobbes called the lust for physical power over others a, "perpetual and restless desire". If you want to create a safe and good society, you can't ignore either half of human nature.

If people are going to go to fight until one side is wiped out, minimizing attrition and ending the war more quickly and convincingly may be seen as a measure to minimize casualty.

This is not necessarily my personal view, but one way logic could be applied to this statement.

The problem is that if both sides are really good at wiping out the other quickly, they might wipe each other out before they realize the other side has the same capability.

If you believe in hegemony, it's reasonable to want one entity to have a better (more efficient) weapon.

There are evil people in the world. People willing to commit genocide and enslave other peoples. People who will operate extermination camps, walk into a concert strapped with a suicide west to deliberately kill children, etc.

Yes, I want a more efficient way to kill these people, and I want the US to have that. Not because the US is perfect, not because I am a fan of the Iraq war, but despite all the real difference, the US tries pretty hard not to hit civilians, and the others deliberately targets them.

Maybe some day we won't have to kill each other anymore. That would be awesome, but tit-for-tat is the best strategy.

I am wondering what efficient way you can think of to kill suicide bombers?

They’re pretty much 100% effective at killing themselves.

It would be much more relevant if we could find a way to keep them alive.

Maybe it's the argument that we can't avoid wars, so it's best to make them as quick as possible? One way to do that is to make sure you can eradicate the other side's military might with overwhelming force.

I think this is the kind of question where it is good to ask what the alternative to the terrible reality we're creating would realistically be.

That is what he said.

I always wondered what people think who produce weapons and such and how they go about their lives knowing what things they are making are doing. Now I have some idea.

Weapons are just tools. The CDC did a study that showed guns are used 360% more often to protect than they are used by criminals. I would be proud of making a military weapon used to actually defend our country. The problem is our military isn't used defensively.

This is actually what the study you are referencing said:

"Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field"

Page 15 of https://www.monticellocollege.org/sites/default/files/blog/G...

So a woman in a car with a gun in her glovebox sees a group of young boisterous men approaching her. She gets the gun out of the glove box and brandishes it at them. They go away. Was this a "defensive gun use"? She will certainly report it as a defensive gun use. But we don't really know what those guys were doing.

I'm really trying to find where I saw 360%, it has been a while, I might have to update if I find it. The 2001 Kleck study was 4 years newer and gave the range 166% to 1000%. And it says in the context of 300k firearm crimes in 2008 so I'm not sure how that works and whether an adjustment gets made for a reduced 200k firearm crimes in 2017.

The CDC doesn’t study gun violence anymore as that has been prevented by the Dickey Amendment, championed by the NRA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

And yet the defensive gun use survey was conducted during the Obama administration.

Obama commissioned it. The report is linked below and cites CDC.

I’m assuming you’re American then. I don’t think it’s the offensive vs defensive nature of your army. I think it’s the arming smaller groups and letting them descend into chaos that is the problem. Arming a group to fight another group that they also armed while occasionally intervening. It’s like modern day cockfighting at a higher level. Except when one group loses the guns and weapons remain for next batch of fighters.

Their intentions are to help end the conflict but they fail to remove the weapons from the society afterwards. I realize this is implying the next batch carry the same views as the previous but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say your parents influence your outcome.

Well said. Those efficient killing tools patriotic people like GP want to invent end up in the hands of Taliban or Colombian drug lords or on both sides of a civil war between African warlords making the lives of ordinary civilians in such places incomparably worse. A few will also end up on the streets in America or in the hands of mass shooters, though this is more tightly controlled and less of a problem.

So, you’re saying that about 1 out of every 5 times a gun is used, it is used for a criminal act? And... you think that’s a good statistic?

I’d also question how the determined how often criminals use guns.

Out of every time one is used against a person. That is a huge distinction. Guns are used tremendously beyond that.

That's fair. Still, I suspect the use cases are very different. People who use guns for hunting and defense against large animals don't need concealed carry permits, nor do they need to carry their guns in the city. People who use guns for sport don't need their guns anywhere except at the firing range.

They're often the same guns, though.

I hunt with the AR-15 that I have set up for home defense, and I shoot competitively with the pistols I carry for personal defense on a daily basis.

Be careful with that depending how you do it. It is highly recommended to not modify your carry gun in any way. A trigger job will be spun by a prosecutor as blood lust.

Mas Ayoob is of that opinion, but I’m not. I’m aware of exactly one example of that happening.

To use to protect you need an agression.

Or is the stat consider mere display a use case ? In that cas it should include display for intimidation. The stat feels off.

The CDC is non exactly an unbiased organization. They ultimately report to the president, and there has not been a president in recent history who did not push for a fat 'defense budget'. Got a link to this study you are referring to?

homocidal maniac = good decent people that are "serving society"

This is absurd and deeply disturbing. The only ones that such bloodthirsty individuals are serving are the ruling classes. I definitely do not feel well served by any of you and would much prefer it if you did not sell yourselves for such a cause.

I think you ought to question how you were led to this worldview by your greater "perspective in life" or how that perspective really reflects what society as a whole values. There are a lot more people in places like say Yemen right now that I think would be more inclined to disagree with you and would wish that the US war machine were not so effective.