> Specific restrictions exist in Maryland, where flamethrowers require a Federal Firearms License to own, and California, where the range of flamethrowers cannot exceed 10 feet.
As a Californian I knew I was going to be disappointed before I even opened the link.
I like the weather and the governance but we’re really not allowed to own anything fun. Can’t even own a ferret or a hedgehog.
Considering California's history with wildfires, having a law like this is essential. In 2020, a major wildfire was triggered by a pyrotechnics device for a baby gender reveal party.
Communities should not be put at risk because some Americans want to cosplay as action movie heroes. What makes you think that flamethrowers of all things are going to be used responsibly?
> Communities should not be put at risk because some Americans want to cosplay as action movie heroes. What makes you think that flamethrowers of all things are going to be used responsibly?
What makes you think I want to cosplay as a hero? :-)
I was erring on the side of charitableness. America makes great films and characters, but the audience tends to have a hard time deciphering whether some of those are cautionary tales or instructional videos.
you should slightly rethink/reword your argument because it is not right to say no riak for communities in a cost benefit analysis. The benefit maximizing outcome will hve some non zero risk to the community because the benefit from [insert some individual action] is non zero. Zero anything is almost always wrong.
It's funny because most of the firearm laws aren't even that enforceable. For example: magazine size limits. It isn't federally prohibited to ship large magazines into California, so unless a cop catches you with one then you can easily own a magazine larger than 10 rounds.
Almost any company selling magazines in the US is enforcing state laws as well. Reference: I used to work in this industry and encoded local legislation enforcements in our order processing software.
I mean, there is good reason for this, ferrets are very hostile to the many ground nesting birds in California. Our state bird, the California quail, is exceedingly terrestrial, and that's before we even get started on the endangered shore birds, which are the real issue as I understand it.
Marketing materials for the standalone flamethrower product from the same company, https://throwflame.com/arc/ , includes a photo carousel of mounting it on various military rifles in civilian contexts.
Gun manufacturers somehow don't get sued into oblivion for how their products are used. I suspect that product teams found to be reckless in other categories don't have the same protections.
(Is a lawyer going to try to argue that the US Founding Fathers envisioned a well-regulated militia of robot dogs with flamethrowers on their backs?)
> Gun manufacturers somehow don't get sued into oblivion for how their products are used.
Intentional liability shields have been legally enshrined for arms manufacturers (and for good reason.)
> well-regulated militia
Can you please never repeat this line of reasoning again? This is well-settled jurisprudence, the most anti-2A SCOTUS Justices over the last 30 years unanimously agree individual arms ownership is a right (Caetano v Massachusetts), this fact is not in dispute: "well-regulated" means "in good working order," not "restricted."
Constitutionally-enshrined rights don't change because the English language happens to evolve in 200 years.
For many originalists "well-regulated" can mean "uniformed", as in the British "regulars" or regular army as opposed to local militia who were not provided uniforms. Remember that until very recently a soldier's given coat was normally worth more than his weapon. So much context has been lost to history.
Edit: I just did some googling. A decent British army redcoat costume still costs more today than a brand new AR-15.
The Court was clear in Heller that "no right is unlimited," but that still does not mean that reinterpreting this specific, independent 200-year-old clause is what would legally enable regulation of the right to bear arms.
The "well-regulated militia" argument was quickly defused by the Court because these people are actual legal scholars with extensive, relevant English and history educations.
I think what I wrote sounded much like an anti-gun argument, and many people are highly sensitized to that, so it wasn't a good choice on my part.
My intended point was that, although this brand seems to be marketing adjacent to civilian "tactical" firearms enthusiasm, and maybe emboldened by conventions in that product category, I suspect it doesn't have the same protections.
In hindsight, I should've asked that as a question.
Is there any Founding-era historical legal precedent (Bruen) regulating or banning this type of arm that one carries on his person for offensive or defensive action?
Even if this document is intended to be a "living document," it should be changed through that amendment process, not executive edicts or regular statutes. Good luck.
> I don't hear people lamenting about the need for "Founding-era" precedent when it comes to suffrage rights
Perhaps because this was increasing liberty (rather than restricting it) and actually happened via Constitutional amendment?
I don't believe they did constrain themselves in that manner. As the quote below seems to indicate, they allowed their research to go beyond the "Founding era"
"First, we reviewed “[t]hree important founding-era legal scholars [who] interpreted the Second Amendment in published writings.” Ibid. Second, we looked to “19th-century cases that interpreted the Second Amendment...”"
>it should be changed through that amendment process
I think we agree here. Not saying you hold this position, but there does often seem to be a bias for favored causes, though. E.g., constrained to using the amendment process when it comes to limiting gun rights, but no such argument when it comes to edicts that limit voting rights. I would just like to see consistency in thought/principle (again, not claiming you take a biased view).
>Perhaps because this was adding additional liberty
So just to stress test this idea, you would be in favor of any additional liberty that went through the amendment process? E.g., would you think it beneficial to allow citizens rights to nuclear procurement as long as it went through an amendment process? Or reducing the voting age to 10 years old? I.e., do you tend to think more liberty is always better?
The Constitution does very little to regulate voting or define the election process: substantial responsibilities are placed upon the States and Congress to establish the parameters around the exercise of this specific right.
"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." is highly explicit and unambiguous. (without delving into the legal shitshow that is "shall"..)
> So just to stress test this idea
This sounds dangerously like the setup to a strawman generalization: I was postulating specifically on suffrage and why people might not be presently "lamenting" a widely-accepted-as-positive increase to liberty.
> you would be in favor of any additional liberty that went through the amendment process?
Generally, yes! I trust our 50 state legislatures to make the right choices. All of these hypotheticals probably would never survive the process: whether I alone think it's "beneficial" isn't relevant.
This is applying a hindsight bias. Do you think it was widely-accepted-as-a-positive when first implemented? Similarly, I don’t know that we can pretend to know a-priori whether changes to the status quo on gun rights may be seen as a “widely” accepted positive or negative.
I think your personal opinion is relevant because it gives context. Forums aren’t the greatest when it comes to nuanced discussion, and understanding someones thought process helps to understand if they take an appropriately nuanced view. When it’s clear they do not, there’s not much interest in further discussion because they lose some credibility.
> Do you think it was widely-accepted-as-a-positive when first implemented?
No, but again we were talking about the present.
> we can pretend to know a-priori whether changes to the status quo on gun rights
We don't need to pretend, thankfully: we have mountains of historical data on arms regulation we can cite - many of these regulations currently exist or existed for some substantial amount of time (and possibly ran/run afoul of current liberty-preserving SCOTUS 2A interpretation.)
The typical argument is: "Well, if we just banned them all it would work! We didn't go far enough, that's why!"
If this were a widely accepted idea, we would have ratified an amendment repealing the Second already.
The first is probably more debatable, but I agree with the second. And liability for self-driving is a contentious matter that I would not say is legally settled.
The alternative is special interest groups suing arms manufacturers out of existence as a backdoor means to deprive people of their Second Amendment rights.
One can still sue an arms manufacturer if a faulty product explodes in their face.. they just can't cry foul about what other people do with these lawful products.
>they just can't cry foul about what other people do with these lawful products.
I think it's a bit more nuanced. This statement is mainly related to manufacturing defects, but there are other avenues to liability more related to "reasonableness". It's also important to note this has changed over time, from former negligence liabilities to the current form of strict liability. (Point being: how society defines liability changes)
Could this possibly be because these regulations might be generally unpopular amongst the majority of States and/or run afoul of Constitutional protections absent an amendment?
That may be an ungenerous reading. It depends on how you define "majority". There are certainly some aspects that appear to be democratically in the majority and constitutional, yet they still don't get passed.
I think what the OP was referring to was the case where lobbying impacts the alignment between representatives and their constituents.
If you have ever used an actual flamethrower, you will appreciate this robot. Flamethrowers are hella dangerous for the people using/handling/loading them.
It has to throw burning liquid. Point musk's "flamethrower" at someone for a second and you will burn their clothes and hair. Throw burning gasoline or napalm at them for a second and they will need head-to-toe skin grafts.
It was a little jarring to watch the promotional video. I am struggling to explain exactly how I feel, but I will try:
I think the more real impact of this will be an increase in the number wildfires, and the domino effect that causes - like gobbling up entire forests or burning up homes. I guess you can argue it's not any different compared to a flamethrower gun.
BUT..when you are remote controlling the thing that shoots fire, it could lead to a sense of dissociation or desensitization. It may feel like a game, than reality. I hope that makes sense.
Unlike the Tesla "flamethrower" referenced in the article which is just a propane torch rather than a liquid flamethrower, this appears to be much more like the actual weapon of war?
Yes, this actually uses liquid-state fuel which is substantially more sticky, spreads more, can actually "wet" things, and doesn't instantly burn up upon atomization like LP.
Depends on what you mean by "machine gun"[1]. By the most common military definition, no. The recoil force would probably throw it to the ground, and even if it did not, the accuracy would be so laughable that it'd be more efficient to just load cyberdog with the same weight in high explosive fragmentation.
A SMG or autopistol . . maybe. Something like the Skorpion, firing .32 ACP, might be low recoil enough for aimed fire.
[1] There's a few categories here, and popular/legal categories differ from military ones. Legal "machine guns" include firearm capable of automatic fire, but this includes: 1) Autopistols and submachine guns (SMGs) fire pistol calibers, from .22LR (American 180) to .45 ACP (Thompson); 2) Assault Rifles, firing intermediate power cartridges like .223 and 7.62x39mm; 3) Battle Rifles are firing full power rifle cartridges - .308 Winchester and 7.62x54mm- from a box or drum magazine and can fire in full auto[a]; 4) General Purpose Machine Guns (GPMGs) capable of sustained belt-fed rapid fire with full-power rifle cartridges; 5) Here we're entering the realm of support weapons[b], firing Heavy Machine Gun rounds like .50 BMG, 12.7mm, 14mm, and other weapons like the Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher or the M134 Minigun (which fires .308 but a whole lot of them).
[1.a] Lots and LOTS of Internet Tough Guys will insist that the M14 or FAL on full auto is totally controllable by Real Men - i.e., it's only the sissification of our cucked armed forces that have brought on the curse of the Intermediate Cartridge. I'll leave judgement to the reader. Incidentally, the Venn Diagram of "Battle Rifle" and the older 1900s-1930s term "Light Machine Gun" is, functionally, a single large circle - it's just the advancement in materials and machining that make them any different. So why didn't LMGs take off back when men were Manly Men and could handle the POWER? Heh heh heh heh yeah. Physics wins again.
[1.b] Needless to say, a whole other category of internet moron insists that .50 BMG on autofire is controllable by a "man enough" infantryman operating singly. I'm sorry that this opinion exists, like, as a human being, but make your own judgement, as always.
Please do not do this. Use a propane torch. A flamethrower literally throws burning fluids. It will melt the ice, then a ribbon of fire will flow down your driveway. It may then melt or even ignite your asphalt.
Yes and no. To melt/dry an entire driveway would be silly. But if you need to melt/dry a crack to make a repair then a propane torch will work. We have all seen them used by road crews. Million-btu torches are available on amazon for about fifty bucks.
It's not just the heat capacity of water, but also the energy required for phase-change from solid (ice) to liquid (water). That's why throwing salt on ice will melt it but also lower the temperature.
In combat, flamethrowers were rarely used to kill. They are meant to terrify. Point a flamethrower at a bunker and those protected inside will surrender.
People are reasonably confused as to why this is being viewed as a potential value add for firefighting. This is generally within my area of expertise as a former wildland guy and dev. I personally think this could be a game changer within reason in 8-12 years. There are two situations where this could be useful, either on an active fire or as part of a prophylactic approach.
On an active fire, traditional approaches on the ground involve figuring out where the fire is going, and squeezing it on the sides until it becomes manageable at the point. Backburns are sometimes used (under very specific conditions) to create areas of black (black meaning burned). Black is safe - removes flashy fuels at the front, and can corral the fire's ability to run. However, you do not want to be downwind of a fire, so backburns are used sparingly, and rarely in front of really dangerous fires. If you lay a backburn right with drip torches, you can actually encourage your fire to run backwards (back in backburn) into the active fire by burning the area closest to you, then burning closer and closer to the active fire, even against the wind. This robot could potentially allow us to set deeper backburns, so more effective counterfires. I am skeptical of my own argument because of price point (not sure how you can thermal shield to avoid sacrificing a bot, though to be fair, backburns don't generally get that hot immediately). That's the active side.
On the passive side, we have incredibly unhealthy forests on the west coast. We have changed our approaches but are toughing through the tail end of the consequences not allowing the natural cycle to cleanse ladder fuels from forests. We also live closer to the urban wildland interface nowadays. On the climate change side, we are getting more lightning strikes, which are the primary cause of western wildfires, and you can make an argument that wind patterns are changing. Bark beetles, surprisingly enough, are probably not causative (I will avoid this rabbithole but it's intuitively quite offputting), though they are spreading northward to novel biomes by the day. To get to the point, we have a ton of biomass that is dangerous to have in forests, and it's several orders of magnitude larger than our current work capacity within the USFS/BLM, even just waving off Alaska as a lost cause. Planned burns are increasingly socially accepted, and robots like these may offer an increased level of fire control, multiply work capacity, and minimize person risk. This is a much stickier argument (a lot of coordination, training, predicting demand increase for planned burns) but I'll wait to see.
I'd say bear case for using these things on fire is survivability, but also fuel load capacity, air possibly being a better resource vector (e.g. napalm bomblets), and departmental adoption, not to even address the standard swathe of hard problems (movement planning, battery capacity, dist syst for hell machines) that we all recognize here. I'm not optimistic, but I'm extremely curious to see how things go.
FTA: "The company lists possible applications of the new robot as "wildfire control and prevention," "agricultural management," "ecological conservation," "snow and ice removal," and "entertainment and SFX." But most of all, it sets things on fire in a variety of real-world scenarios."
Fire is tool. Sometimes you need to burn invasive species. Sometimes you need to start a small forest fire to prevent a bigger one (controlled burning). Sometimes you need to melt ice off a metal structure that you don't want to touch (HV electrical lines). This is just a safer way to deploy an already-used tool.
Not sure what "ordinary citizen" means, but all sorts of people are involved in forest management. There must be volunteer firefighters out there with the authority to conduct such burns when needed. And I have personally seen crews conduct burns in the pacific northwest, although only of brush rather than a full forest fire. Certainly some civilians can make legitimate use of this robot.
Wildfire control. The biggest killer with wildfires, or any fire, is the smoke inhalation, and I guess this robot would be immune to that, which is pretty cool.
(I got caught in a small house fire as a child. All I remember is not being able to breathe or see anything. I had to basically feel my way out of the house.)
> What concrete needs can there be for a flamethrower?
I think that this would be obvious: "Gee, I'd sure like to set something on fire over there, but I'm way too far way to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame..."
As a Californian I knew I was going to be disappointed before I even opened the link.
I like the weather and the governance but we’re really not allowed to own anything fun. Can’t even own a ferret or a hedgehog.