Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down A stray bullet cut through a Spectrum fiber line on Friday, knocking an undisclosed number of Texans offline. ISP Spectrum told customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that services were down in a post on X, which judging from the comments from customers isn't an unusual occurrence. Charter, which owns Spectrum, has confirmed …
Except nope. There are a LOT of things that would be hit, on average, before fiber lines.
Seriously, gun culture is not nearly as irresponsible as hoplophobics imagine. Even some idiot shooting at a line is only going to take the shot if he's sure that he can hit it. Hitting the cable will take enough energy out the bullet that serious harm to anyone is a lot less likely.
And gun nuts tend to be much better shots that outsiders would guess. Bob Bullock (ex Lt Gov of Texas) used to shoot cockroaches drunk. When a drunk Davy Crocket needed three tries to shoot a candle (blow it out without hitting it), his friend asked him what was bothering him.
If I decide to commit a crime, I'm not being irresponsible, I'm being criminal. I shouldn't have my tool (car, gun, baseball bat, kitchen knife, fist) confiscated, I should be locked up. And if we're talking attempted murder, more than just that. We generally don't allow felons to vote, own guns, hold certain jobs, or various other things for a decade after they complete their term.
"Boeing ships 737 fuselages by train from Wichita, Kansas to their final assembly in Seattle."
It's not a good thing for people to be taking shots at train cars, but it's also odd to be making something really large and shipping it a couple of thousand miles to the assembly plant. Manufacturing was set up during WWII so that there weren't lots of related manufacturing plants all in the same place and maybe this is why some big companies are still stuck in this mode. Today, it doesn't make sense. Boeing would be a big enough target that if a war broke out, they'd get some personal treatment. Being close to the Pacific Coast also makes them easier to hit without the need to traverse to the middle of the US, say, Wichita, KS. It would be easier to move engines shipped into a Pacific port to Kansas than to ship a fuselage across country the other way.
It would also be useful if district attorneys and judges took shooting at trains a bit more seriously instead of dropping charges when somebody is caught. If the charges were left in place, it would make a sentence of a few years being Bubba's new special friend rather than 30 days in the county lockup and 80 hours of "community service".
Airbus makes parts at factories which have specialised in those parts for decades as standalone manufacturers before joining the consortium, Wings are made at the plant which does wings best, tails in a tail specialist
Boeing's assembly lines have mostly been setup with inexperienced staff in union-hostile states and the factories of absorbed competitors generally sold off or bulldiozed along with their engineering experise
Aluminium parts are usually produced where cheap energy is to be found. That is somewhere you can run your own hydroelectric plant. Manudfactoring like end assembly is usually positioned where you've got lots of space, good transportation facilities and not as many resources. These facilities aren'r just positioned willy-nilly or for strictly political reasons. Not everything is a conspiration or caused by stupidity.
If that was true, Boeing would be doing most of the work in Canada
Aluminium may be refined from bauxite in energy-rich locatuibs, but alminium parts are made entirely elsewhere. It only takes 5% of the refining energy to melt the resulting metal
The driving factor of where Boeing's facilities are located is union hostility on the part of the MBA management that's been in charge since the mid 1990s. Other than Washington they're almost all in "right to work" states - and it turns out that workers who are faced with overbearing line managers plus the risk of being fired at the drop of a hat simply DGAF, working accordingly
Yeah, they obviously should be building the airplanes right at the aluminum mine...
I would argue that with shipping as relatively cheap as it is, it makes more sense today than ever to have manufacturing spread across the country. It's not a big deal to book space on a train that's running between two cities anyway; there is so much more involved in running a business and a factory to be worried about, including workers' skillsets and housing, energy costs, etc...
It was fibre, not some shielded copper cable line (coax shielding is an absolute pain to fix too).
Thousand pair POTS lines no longer seem to exist anymore in backbones in the USA - that amount of copper has been torn out and sold for scrap and replaced with fibre long ago.
Current in-use copper lines are at most a few dozen pairs in the last km going to houses and if those break and are a pain to fix - those end up getting torn out and replaced with fibre (simply because then there is an unavoidable cost of having to replace the wires and wiring up what can be a single fibre line with a few terminators is cheaper than dozens of copper pairs).
In my neighborhood AT&T had a cunning plan. They stopped maintaining the lines, which need to be pressurized to keep out moister and limit crosstalk. I have a fitting for that on one of the poles in the corners of my backyard. At the beginning the line normally failed only after it rained, unfortunately it rains a lot in Texas during the spring. Eventually it just stopped working most of the time and calls to have it fixed permanently were ignored. So I finally broke down and bought a wireless phone and service, but not from AT&T. I must admit that I'm glad I went wireless mainly because it allows me to call for help when I'm mobile.
That's right! Automated turrets on every electricity pylon. AI powered, of course. If anyone pulls a gun and starts aiming at any of the cables on the powerlines, the Turret is licensed to fire a "warning shot" in defence of said cables.
Pylons are almost human, they stand as tall any american (well, taller actually), they have their arms out wide embracing all of America, and they work every day -rain, hail or shine, for the betterment of America. They're living the American dream! So why shouldnt they also get to bear Arms?
> "If anyone pulls a gun and starts aiming at any of the cables on the powerlines, the Turret is licensed to fire a "warning shot" in defence of said cables."
Couldn't it just tell them to put down the gun and say "you have twenty seconds to comply" before it blows them to smithereens?
Let me correct what that Company statement SHOULD have said:
"Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We hope the idiot that shot the cable apologizes for the inconvenience."
For once, I dont see this as a case for the firm needing to apologise...
Legally blind people and mentally challenged people can get a gun in the US. Aiming is optional in the first instance and negated by the ability to spray vast numbers of bullets in a short time for most other instances using the recently legalized bump stock. You could get bump stocks before that, see Las Vegas mass shooting Oct. 1 2017, the legality was just in the all encompassing gray area.
That might have been an instance of very good aim.
Anecdote: Back in my power company days, a service lineman came back from a call. Seems that the fire department needed the power cut to fight a rural house fire. Not willing to wait to wait for one of our employees to make the long drive out, a police officer on scene just shot out the transformer fuse (so it was reported). The lineman dispatched envisioned shattered porcelain and other hardware. But when he arrived, he found that the cop had made a perfect shot, cutting the 1/4 inch thick fuse link in half from about 25 yards, hitting nothing else. With a handgun.
Our lineman was surprised in part at the cop's knowing exactly what to cut.
Except, only mostly. Yes, the National Guard, along with the Naval Militia are the organized militia. The unorganized militia is every able-bodied male from seventeen to forty-four. Except that the NG is also a reserve force for the regular military. Although, when I was in during Desert Storm, there were tank units that required their "reserve" NG to deploy with them as logistics support.
Also, there was a lot of guard-exclusive work done to interdict illegal drug shipments.
The wikipedia article implies that the State Guards would fall under congressional jurisdiction. This is false. The States retain their right to form militaries. To my understanding, three (Texas, Michigan, Washington) have. There was talk in Florida.
I was offered a job in Texas (Houston to be precise) some years ago. A visit to the offices and a few weeks holiday in the area convinced me to get back to the UK asap. Alabama is even worse as the usual redneck Friday night seemed to be:
Drive to bar in nearby town.
Drink lots of alcohol.
Get in pickup truck.
Drive home.
Use rifle mounted in rear window of pickup truck to shoot at random objects such as road signs, local wildlife and postboxes.
Hell man, it's just a bit of collateral damage.
[/Sarcasm off]
"The majority of gun owners in the Land of the Free are responsible shooters who recognize it's a tool, not a toy."
Bad copy-editing. I'm sure the writer intended:
The majority of gun owners in the Land of the Free are irresponsible tools who recognize it's a shooter, not a toy.
"Sadly, antisocial Americans who don't care that what goes up must come down"
The sort of States which seem to have the biggest problems of gun nuts nutters with guns seems to mostly intersect with the places where science is mostly seen as either magic or devils work. Which makes one wonder if they believe in "what goes up must come down".
Texas will be Texas *sigh*
Though, tbf, this is entirely plausible in every state and even DC. However, to the "citation needed, hur hur!" crowd, the statistics are pretty plain. The majority of firearms owners, thankfully, are sane people who treat them as the tools they are, and have varying uses for them (some, few, people literally provide their food with them, for example). Unfortunately, and I say this as someone who owns firearms, in Texas, the requirements are laughable. Unless you're not white, of course.
Sorry, but the steady stream of "gun events" in the news from the U Ass of A demonstrates that there are an incredibly large number of irresponsible owners south of Canada.
BTW, kindly stop paying for pro-gun ads here in Canada every time our federal government bans more American-made toys,,,
