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Old May 17, 2019, 07:36 PM   #1
Bartholomew Roberts
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Join Date: June 12, 2000
Location: Texas and Oklahoma area
Posts: 8,462
Losing the Search Engine Wars?

Recently, I was in a social media discussion regarding NICS checks. The person I was conversing with was completely unfamiliar with gun legislation in general, let alone its history.

Having been here since 2000, I’ve had a few conversations on those topics. I wanted to reference the 2007 NICS Improvement Act; but couldn’t remember the exact title of the legislation. Using DuckDuckGo as a search engine with cookies turned off and maximum privacy enabled, I tried to search for the bill. All I could get was “NRA lies about background checks” in the search results and that was in relation to the recent Fix NICS bill rather than the older legislation. I ended up using a super specific search from what I remembered from a previous argument about the 2007 legislation in order to get the information to actually find what I was looking for.

I feel like I can hardly find articles and references I know well know via the Internet. If it weren’t for forums like this, I simply couldn’t find it at all and I’ve been engaged on 2A issues for awhile now. If you don’t have any of the personal knowledge or experiences that I have, and don’t know how to narrow your search to find the relevant information, how could you not think of the Second Amendment as an obsolete, harmful relic?

I always thought the distributed nature of the Internet would prevent authoritarian control; but I regret to say it looks like I am being proved wrong.

ETA: Another example is trying to find the old Don Kates article on “Of Holocausts and Gun Control.” Circa 2002, I could find that article without issue... now even when I can find a website that references it, the link is dead.
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