A lot of people in that thread have never seen Looney Tunes. If they did, they would have learned 3 vital facts about physics:
A finger in the barrel of a gun will stop a bullet and cause the gun to explode.
Gravity cannot effect you until you acknowledge that you are not on solid ground.
Being crushed by a heavy object falling from a great height (think and anvil or piano) will cause to to collapse like an accordion until you are re-inflated.
These are basic scientific facts everyone should know in the modern age.
Incredibly, they actually drew their cartoons based on observations in nature. The duck season/rabbit season bit commonly seen in the Bugs and Daffy cartoons, while exaggerated was based on true events.
What's hilarious about this is that obstructed barrels actually can explode into ribbons just like the cartoons. A finger might not do it though, and not sure how many volunteers you'd get for a scientific test.
One person even noted how kids fingers are smaller and most adultβs fingers wouldnβt fit in the barrel.. lol. Thatβs what the pinky is for, itβs smol for a reason, duh.
Obligatory reminder that change.org has literally never accomplished social good, but it has made plenty of profit by selling harvested contact information and social connection information to advertisers.
What about double barreled shotguns? Those are each going to require two fingers. I'm beginning to think the creators of this change.org petition haven't really thought this through.
Part of me is convinced that just putting a flower in the barrel would stop all war. Then I'll make sure to put it in my hair before going to San Francisco, even though I totally forgot the first time.
Another part of me believes that I'm gonna have to solve the problem by getting so high on red agave shrooms that I can't feel the bullet and thus become an invincible berserker. Might sack York too, if there's time.
There's a certain spirit of online debate about trivial or nonsensical things like this that can best be understood as happening purely for the sport of it.
I think the important thing is to convince the person with the gun that the barrel will explode and kill them, not whether it does explode or not. That was what James Gardner did in the movie Support you local Sheriff.
IIRC for a some handguns this could actually work as long as you are actively pushing. Because if the barrel moves back a bit it will be out of battery blocking it from even firing.
Maybe it's less about the need to be the smartest person in the room and more about peddling dangerous disinformation?
This is literally how the Republican party in the USA functions, by purposefully being so brain-dead that we spend all our time explaining why they're wrong and they just happily keep doing stupid fucking shit and expect us to protect them from themselves all the while. The Republicans regularly villainize "smart" people, the educated, academia, and "the ivory tower." They hate facts and evidence. So now being smart enough to try to stop stupid people from being stupid is a bad thing, huh?
It's not funny or clever, it's literally the same attitude behind conservatives trying to upset liberals. They would happily eat a pile of shit if they knew a liberal had to smell their breath. It's fucking insipid and stupid and in no way is funny or cute or what the fuck ever. There's zero ideology behind it except trying to upset other people, because they've got nothing the fuck else in their lives.
I don't care if it's a joke, they're scum. It's a "joke" in the same way "it was just a joke bro" comes from Nazis.
We literally had people eating parasite-killing horse-paste during COVID instead of taking actual fucking vaccines directed at the disease, and that happened because of bullshit exactly the fuck like this.
Sure, but at some point you need to acknowledge that though you can lead a horse to water, you canβt stick their hoof in the barrel of a gun to stop a bullet.
I think it's probably fair to say that suggesting that a finger in the barrel of a gun would stop a bullet is a least 10x, if not 100x, worse than the Nazis.