Guns (Yawn)

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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:39 pm

Karmamatterz wrote: If guns were eliminated a person who is hell bent on killing others is going to find a way to do it.


Not true. This young man would not have murdered 17 other kids if he did not have access to a tool meant for killing lots of people.
Maybe he would have picked up a knife, and the outcome would still have sucked, but he would not have been able to kill 17 others.

Think about crimes of passion. Combine that with immediate access to weapons. In the rage you pick up the gun and kill.
Without access to weapons the passion can fade.

Think about suicide. If there is a gun in the house you are going to use it. Rates are much higher in homes with guns.

Yes of course we must address mental illness. That includes restricting access to firearms for mentally ill people.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:58 pm

I’m beginning to think there’s something deeply unknowable and potentially cosmically paranormal about what’s happening. Sure, it’s the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, that we live in a nation founded in fear and built with the bones of non-white bodies whose surviving descendants are soon to become the majority, climate collapse, late capitalism and all its symptoms like heroin-dealing physicians, the fact that we only have a handful of decades’ left of tillable soil, the fact that millennials will be the first generation to be less comfortable than their parents, poisoned food, pain, loneliness, the looming threats of proto-fascist police and Boston Dynamics, a psychic divorce from nature, competition over cooperation, “leadership retreats”, masturbation over sports, the hopelessness many feel, drones. But it’s also something that combines these factors and more and still exists outside of them.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:19 pm

Right? That full speed malaise is palpable.
Very Marshall Mcluhany Terrence McKennaish and Ray Kurtweillian, with Luciferian undertones. Hopefully from before the fall.

Luther Blissett wrote:I’m beginning to think there’s something deeply unknowable and potentially cosmically paranormal about what’s happening. Sure, it’s the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, that we live in a nation founded in fear and built with the bones of non-white bodies whose surviving descendants are soon to become the majority, climate collapse, late capitalism and all its symptoms like heroin-dealing physicians, the fact that we only have a handful of decades’ left of tillable soil, the fact that millennials will be the first generation to be less comfortable than their parents, poisoned food, pain, loneliness, the looming threats of proto-fascist police and Boston Dynamics, a psychic divorce from nature, competition over cooperation, “leadership retreats”, masturbation over sports, the hopelessness many feel, drones. But it’s also something that combines these factors and more and still exists outside of them.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Jerky » Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:44 pm

Maybe it's the existential challenges with which you have front-loaded your eloquent jeremiad that will lead to a solution to the horrors that you enumerate towards its end? There won't be too many drones patrolling the skies once we run out of rare earth minerals, molybdenum and easily accessible petroleum!

J.

Luther Blissett » 17 Feb 2018 00:58 wrote:I’m beginning to think there’s something deeply unknowable and potentially cosmically paranormal about what’s happening. Sure, it’s the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, that we live in a nation founded in fear and built with the bones of non-white bodies whose surviving descendants are soon to become the majority, climate collapse, late capitalism and all its symptoms like heroin-dealing physicians, the fact that we only have a handful of decades’ left of tillable soil, the fact that millennials will be the first generation to be less comfortable than their parents, poisoned food, pain, loneliness, the looming threats of proto-fascist police and Boston Dynamics, a psychic divorce from nature, competition over cooperation, “leadership retreats”, masturbation over sports, the hopelessness many feel, drones. But it’s also something that combines these factors and more and still exists outside of them.
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Postby Burnt Hill » Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:51 pm

Hopefully this is the cosmically abnormal that is happening and the paranormal is the adjustment.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Jerky » Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:06 am

Ick... hadn't noticed that you'd chosen to bunch up McKenna and McLuhan with Kurtzweil. I think the first two don't have all THAT much in common with the third.

J.

Burnt Hill » 17 Feb 2018 01:19 wrote:Right? That full speed malaise is palpable.
Very Marshall Mcluhany Terrence McKennaish and Ray Kurtweillian, with Luciferian undertones. Hopefully from before the fall.

Luther Blissett wrote:I’m beginning to think there’s something deeply unknowable and potentially cosmically paranormal about what’s happening. Sure, it’s the patriarchy and toxic masculinity, that we live in a nation founded in fear and built with the bones of non-white bodies whose surviving descendants are soon to become the majority, climate collapse, late capitalism and all its symptoms like heroin-dealing physicians, the fact that we only have a handful of decades’ left of tillable soil, the fact that millennials will be the first generation to be less comfortable than their parents, poisoned food, pain, loneliness, the looming threats of proto-fascist police and Boston Dynamics, a psychic divorce from nature, competition over cooperation, “leadership retreats”, masturbation over sports, the hopelessness many feel, drones. But it’s also something that combines these factors and more and still exists outside of them.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Burnt Hill » Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:34 am

Oh sure, Lucifer is fine , but Kurtzweil...

I don't know various aspects of each came to mind quickly when considering Luthers lament.

Plus I'm stoned.

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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Karmamatterz » Sat Feb 17, 2018 10:41 am

@Luther,

You hit on so many things there, really overwhelming if you allow that fill your thoughts. I couldn't function in my life if those things were always present in my conscious thoughts. Some of what you wrote I agree with but not the toxic masculinity. There is nothing masculine about murder, rape, torture or anti-social behavior. Unfortunately the word masculinity as become ridiculously maligned. Masculinity is no better or worse than femininity. A masculine man seeks to live a life filled with positive outcomes for himself and those around him. They don't seek to harm others, they value life.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:32 pm

That’s exactly what the toxic qualifier is. Women don’t commit mass shootings.

It’s like what Jeff posted: we might be witnessing a culture reacting to strange gods that punish us in insane ways by entering the ritual sacrifice phase of collapse.

I’m optimistic, though. This is why a good deal of my avocation involves constructive and positive community organizing. My practical reaction to mass shootings, if I ever figure it out, will probably be something like “car free cities” or “self-directed pedagogy.”
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Karmamatterz » Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:47 pm

That’s exactly what the toxic qualifier is. Women don’t commit mass shootings.


Quite right.

But my point still stands, and is correct. These males that are mass murderers are not masculine. They are damaged and exhibit no positive traits. The left has done such a marvelous job at redefining what it means to be masculine in their terms they seem to forget there are men out there that are quite happy and secure in their masculinity. That masculinity that has absolutely nothing to do with murder or harming other humans.

Just because the popular meme bantered about is claiming the problem is toxic masculinity doesn't mean that is something that makes a damn bit of sense, or is even remotely true. One has to be deprogrammed from popular memes/media to even come close to understanding what it means to be masculine.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:59 pm

That's just the term by which we can boil your two paragraphs of definition down to one term.

Let's make a folk hero. It's been a long time since we've had a good modern one. Real heroes are for the birds but folk heroes are cool.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby 82_28 » Sat Feb 17, 2018 1:00 pm

I watched the old host of The Man Show on TV the other night. The old host of The Man Show choked up and began to cry as he was addressing gun violence and innocent lives ended, much like he did appealing to those who would deny children health care last summer. I checked breitbart the next morning and sure enough, they were ridiculing him. Real men feel nothing. The fine people at breitbart know how a man should correctly react to senseless slaughter.

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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby 82_28 » Sat Feb 17, 2018 1:35 pm

Want to See Gun Control Enacted? Support a Movement to Arm Black Folks En Masse

The only greater certainty than another mass shooting in this country is the likelihood that it will be met with inaction. Since the 2012 massacre of 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been a staggering 1,607 mass shootings across the U.S., nearly 240 in schools. Each has been met with useless thoughts and prayers from craven conservative politicians, all of whom insist there’s never a right time to discuss gun control. The fatigue incurred from the whole circular spectacle makes it feel like it might just be easier to start labeling lawmakers either “pro-child murder” or “anti-child murder.”

It’s impossible to reason with the disingenuous logic that mass slaughter is just the cost of freedom, and not a consequence of NRA-owned politicians, which is why even the mildest gun reform seems impossible. Sandy Hook proved the GOP is willing to take donor dollars to look away from dead American children. The correlation between levels of gun ownership and gun deaths has similarly failed to rouse GOP political will, as have arguments that military-style killing machines should be kept off U.S. streets. While the “mental health problems” of white “lone wolf” shooters bring Republicans to crocodile tears, Trump signed a bill making it easier for mentally ill people to buy guns just a year ago. The knowledge that toddlers accidentally shoot more Americans annually than foreign terrorists do didn't stop Iowa Republicans from proposing a bill to let “1-year-olds, 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds [and] 4-year-olds...operate handguns,” leading one Democratic lawmaker to observe, “We do not need a militia of toddlers.” Perhaps relatedly, studies find the reflexive GOP tendency following mass killings is to make gun laws more, not less permissive, as evidenced by Florida Republicans’ attempts to loosen state gun restrictions just 24 hours after the Parkland massacre.

Ending mass shootings might seem like a hopeless cause in light of all this, but that kind of thinking ignores the historic infallibility of racism to move American political mountains. The shift in the public face of poverty from white to black helped take us from the New Deal to the destruction of the welfare state; conversely, as drug addiction has gone from being an "inner city" (read: black) to a "suburban" (read: white) problem, the state has transformed from carceral to compassionate. A movement—both visible and vocal—to arm black Americans en masse would fire up GOP political will toward gun control, and probably at speeds currently unimaginable. Second Amendment hardliners often engage in bad-faith references to America’s racist gun control history at convenient moments, namely when trying convince wary black folks, who statistically are overwhelmingly pro-gun control, to join the chorus calling for unfettered gun access. There are too many reasons to question their sudden commitment to anti-racism in those moments. That said, there is historic precedence for the mere idea of black gun possession leading directly to white American efforts at gun control. . .


continues:

https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/wan ... s-en-masse
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Feb 18, 2018 12:31 am

Those who understood always knew by this thread title I meant, this Gun talk always runs the same way no matter how horrible the outcome and how many innocents die from it, and I'm soooooo bored of it and not even capable of annoyance anymore at the gaping stupidity of all the murder-machine fetishists who want to explain to me that it's not an automatic or military style, since no language applies and anyway everyone should love their very own murder-machine and learn how to use it, cos it's self-defense against home invasions and Clint always shoots faster, see? Or the more R.I. idiots who subscribe to the awesomely ahistorical and off-planet theory of the gun overthrows or prevents tyranny, contrary to about 90% of the available evidence from the last 700 or so years, etc. etc.

But for the first time I think a threshold has been crossed. At least politically, if not yet legislatively, on the question of controlling on the national level. The Parkland event has legs.
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Re: Guns (Yawn)

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Feb 18, 2018 1:13 am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMxG0reODQY




http://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florid ... index.html

Florida student to NRA and Trump: 'We call BS' 11:40

(CNN)Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, addressed a gun control rally on Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, days after a gunman entered her school in nearby Parkland and killed 17 people.

Below is a full transcript of her speech:

We haven't already had a moment of silence in the House of Representatives, so I would like to have another one. Thank you.

Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.

We certainly do not understand why it should be harder to make plans with friends on weekends than to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon. In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are watertight.
The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past four years alone.

I found out today there's a website shootingtracker.com. Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA's shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn't had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.

I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go through other school shooter drills. When we've had our say with the government -- and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying 'it is what it is,' but if us students have learned anything, it's that if you don't study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it's time to start doing something.

We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we're going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That's going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it's going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities again and again. We did, time and time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn't know this kid. OK, we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.

And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the student's fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn't take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking about the FBI. I'm talking about the people he lived with. I'm talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.

If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.

You want to know something? It doesn't matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.

To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.
Crowd chants, shame on you.

If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not act like it. In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don't really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don't need a psychologist and I don't need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he's stating for the record, 'Well, it's a shame the FBI isn't doing background checks on these mentally ill people.' Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS.

They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.

If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.

(Crowd chants) Throw them out.
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