>In places where guns are difficult to come by, you'll find knife crime in it's place.
By how much and how consequential exactly, and how would we know?
There were 14,650 gun deaths in the US in 2025 apparently. There were 205 homicides by knife in the UK in 2024-2025. [0][1]. Check their populations. US gun deaths per capita seem to exceed UK knife deaths by roughly 15x.
Good question. Canada has twice as many registered firearms as the US (though the number of unregistered firearms is likely greater in the US). It's certainly not difficult to purchase guns in either country. And Canada experiences an order of magnitude fewer gun deaths per capita than the US. The US is somewhat unique among western nations in how it handles mental illness, and crime, and I would suggest those are more fruitful avenues of inquiry.
So I'll stand by the stance that individuals are responsible for their own actions, that tools cannot bear responsibility for how they are used on account of being inanimate objects, and that all tools serve constructive and destructive purposes, sometimes simultaneously.
I mentioned the estimated unregistered firearms, but they are just that, an estimate. I went looking for some references and found the following: household gun ownership is down over the last 50 years, hunting is down, gun ownership among men is down, gun ownership among women remains steady, gun ownership by race has not appreciably changed: https://vpc.org/studies/ownership.pdf Gun ownership declining would be consistent with increased gun control.
> individuals are responsible, but that doesn't mean that the tool is not a significant factor.
Individuals are responsible. No buts. And there is no solving violence on any scale without understanding and addressing the reasons someone might commit it. This is a rabbit hole of difficult and uncomfortable truths we must address as a society.
You're glossing over January 6. There are few things more damning of the American electorate than their willingness to vote for a man who tried to use a coup to stay in power. The rest of the world sees it. And they'd be stupid to trust that Americans wouldn't do something so stupid again.
But he didn’t. Trump didn’t sieze control of the military, there was no column of tanks moving towards Washington, just some angry fans rioting against his wishes (see the BBC lawsuit for manipulating trump’s speech of you think otherwise).
The deck across the board is consistently stacked in Trumps favor in terms of domestic adjudication, often times by people he appointed, the system is hopelessly corrupt.
You could make a case that January 6th was a catastrophe.
But a Trump-led coup? That’s quite a reach. I’m sure Trump got a thrill from the show of support. But I don’t believe even Trump thought those protestors could stage a successful a coup and overthrow the U.S. government. It’s fantasy.
Nobody thinks that the Trump supporters that stormed the capital could have overthrown the government. The coup attempt was much simpler - Trump wanted his supporters to interrupt the certification so the states could use alternative electors to circumvent the results of the election.
Trump tried to get false electors to be used for counting the vote, changing the outcome the election by having states like Georgia and Pennsylvania vote as if Trump had won these states. Because he was too incompetent to organize this quickly he needed to delay the certification on January 6th, which the mob did accomplish.
He just couldn't get a few key people on board with this.
The way Trump thinks the world works, why the hell not? He thinks the government of Norway is the one who decides who gets the Nobel Peace Prize... He thinks he ended 8 wars (ok this might be him talking out of his ass, as usual, but do we know that for sure?)
The only places I see that Trump 'tried to use a coup to stay in power' is far left commentary and online political discourse. Same exact thing as calling him a pedo.
It seems impossible to talk about him without resorting to wild reaching claims because he is the most guilty of doing the same thing.
Please tell me what trying to convince states to send false electors who would vote for Trump even though he lost their states and trying to prevent the certification of the election to either allow the false electors to be used or to throw the election to the state delegations should be called if not a coup.
Assange's lawsuit is kind of silly, but his point about the incorrectness of the award to Machado stands up to scrutiny. She overtly encouraged military intervention by the US in Venezuela. That's a blatant contradiction of everything the Nobel Peace Prize is purported to stand for.
>We don't use IL2CPP because we use many features that are not compatible with it. For example DLC and mods loading at runtime via DLLs, reflection for custom serialization, things like [FieldOffset] for efficient struct packing and for GPU communication, etc.
FieldOffset is supported by IL2CPP at compile time [0]. You can also install new DLLs and force the player to restart if you want downloadable mod support.
It's true that you can't do reflection for serialization, but there are better, more performant alternatives for that use case, in my experience.
> You can also install new DLLs and force the player to restart if you want downloadable mod support.
I am not aware of an easy way to load (managed) mods as DLLs to IL2CPP-compiled game. I am thinking about `Assembly.LoadFrom("Mod.dll")`.
Can you elaborate how this is done?
> there are better, more performant alternatives for that use case, in my experience.
We actually use reflection to emit optimal code for generic serializers that avoid boxing and increase performance.
There may be alternatives, we explored things like FlatBuffers and their variants, but nothing came close to our system in terms of ease of use, versioning support, and performance.
If you have some suggestions, I'd be interested to see what options are out there for C#.
> FieldOffset is supported by IL2CPP at compile time
You are right, I miss-remembered this one, you cannot get it via reflection, but it works.
>I am not aware of an easy way to load (managed) mods as DLLs to IL2CPP-compiled game. I am thinking about `Assembly.LoadFrom("Mod.dll")`.
Ah, I was thinking native DLLs (which is what we're using on a project I'm working on). I think you're right that it's impossible for an IL2CPP-built player to interoperate with a managed (Mono) DLL.
>If you have some suggestions [re: serialization], I'd be interested to see what options are out there for C#.
We wrote a custom, garbage-free JSON serializer/deserializer that uses a fluent API style. We also explored a custom codegen solution (similar to FlatBuffers or protobuf) but abandoned it because the expected perf (and ergonomic) benefits would have been minor. The trickiest part with Unity codegen is generating code that creates little to no garbage.
Re serialization: We have custom binary serialization that essentially dumps the game state into a binary stream. No allocations, no copies, no conversions. Our saves can be big, >100 MB uncompressed, so there is no room for waste.
The big advantage is that it reads data directly from game's classes, so there is no boilerplate needed, no prorobufs, no schema. And it supports versioning, adding or removing members mostly without limitations.
I think it's a cool system, maybe I should write a blog post about it :)
If only they had discovered philosophy. Instead they NIH their own philosophy, falling into the same ditches real philosophers climbed out of centuries ago.
reply