[worry]

Update on America sorting its shit out: Bump stock ban also overturned in a federal appeals court this week.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

worry, on 07 January 2023 - 10:49 PM, said:

Update on America sorting its shit out: Bump stock ban also overturned in a federal appeals court this week.

Don't worry, the Supreme Court is coming to the rescue:

'The majority’s decision in Bruen, taken at face value, is one of the most radical rulings in American history—a threat to thousands of state and federal laws that have stemmed gun violence for decades or centuries. It raised the question: Did the court really intend to give virtually every adult the right to carry a concealed firearm into almost any place they choose?

We won’t have to wait long for an answer. Right now, gun advocates are asking SCOTUS to block most of New York’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act—which the state legislature passed in the wake of Bruen—on the court’s infamous shadow docket. [...] And so, in the coming days, we will discover how aggressively the conservative majority wants to dismantle all remnants of the nation’s gun safety regime.

[...] Every restriction [...] is unconstitutional unless it has “historical analogues” from 1791[...] These analogues must demonstrate a “consensus view” that the gun restriction was lawful. But how many analogues make up a “consensus”? Two? Three? Ten? And how closely must a modern gun law align with its historical analogue? Today’s firearm codes address problems that were inconceivable in 1791. Are states forbidden from banning guns on subways because subways didn’t exist'

Supreme Court gun challenge: A New York case could turbocharge the Second Amendment

... the rescue of the guns that is.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

'News coverage of mass shootings, in recent years, has been stuck in a loop. [...] Now, with the recent increase in stories about bystanders who stop shooters, we have a new, and much more satisfying, cap to this cycle.

[...] growing belief that participating in everyday life requires tactical knowledge, that inside every suburban father of toddlers lurks a seasoned operator ready to strike. Tacticool diaper bags and overbuilt trucks are a joke, but these stories about bystanders seem to suggest that maybe these people have a point. Bystander Elisjsha Dicken killed a shooter with a handgun he had concealed-carried into an Indiana mall [...] "He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun, he was very proficient in that, very tactically sound," admired the local police chief in a news conference. Brandon Tsay said he had to make a split-second evaluation of the shooter last weekend, sizing up his weapon like a born gamer: "How it was built and customized, I knew it wasn't for robbing money … From his body language, his facial expression, his eyes, he was looking for people." In some bystander stories, the military experience of the hero in question strengthens the narrative: "The sudden flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub and instincts forged during four combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan instantly kicked in," [...]

Our use of the hero-bystander as narrative leavening for the horror of the American mass shooting shares DNA with our reliance on GoFundMe as the solution to healthcare gaps, or our cheerful pitching-in for teachers crowd-funding school supplies. "Hero" is a great narrative, but it's also an individualist nation's favorite solution to a difficult problem. "I feel like people are starting to come to the realization that the only one who's going to protect you is you," [...]

We didn't[...] sign up to live in a combat zone. And while bystanders save people, sometimes they die'

California shootings: We have a new routine after mass gun violence, and it won't save us

Obviously if the shooter hadn't been in his seventies (and he hadn't been much younger) Tsay may have had a much harder time getting the gun away without getting shot. Likewise, despite his military background, Fierro probably would have found it much more difficult to stop a shooter who'd come prepared with body armor if Fierro only had his handgun. So clearly we should all be carrying assault rifles everywhere in order stop gun violence? Ah freedom.... Though in all seriousness, as I've said before, wearing effective body armor everywhere would almost certainly help. The type that can stop rifles is pretty heavy though... and afaik can't protect the eyes without blocking vision (and even if it did---with slits or some sort of see-through mesh---the force would be enough to concuss you... though I guess some sort of person-sized mini-tank or robotic heavy armor (or mech) might work, if there's an effective way to see without risk of sensors getting taken out by rifle shots at close range... might be a boon for the metaverse and AR---after all AR senses are potentially much more varied and more accurate than human senses #SolvableProblems).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 27 January 2023 - 01:26 PM

[worry]

[Primateus]

After Sandy Hook, there has been this idea that Republicans basically think that dead children are a small price to pay for the right to bear arms. This video basically just confirms that is the truth.

[Tsundoku]

It's true though.
Most Republicans couldn't give a shit if certain children die, but it's just not happening enough in certain neighbourhoods, and gosh darn it, they just can't for the life of them figure out why?

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 04 March 2023 - 04:44 PM

[Tsundoku]

Add another child to the toll, and another child who will be wrecked for life. How many is enough, 'Murica?

https://www.news.com...a107a5859fa4854

Girl, 3, shoots dead her sister, 4, in Texas
The girls were left in a bedroom by themselves at one point during the night because one parent believed the other was watching them.

Landon Mion - Fox News

March 13, 2023 - 7:23PM

A three-year-old girl has accidentally shot and killed her four-year-old sister at an apartment in Houston, Texas.

The incident was reported shortly before 8pm on Sunday night, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said at a news conference.

The two girls and five adults, all of whom were family and friends, were spending time at an apartment on Bammel North Houston Road near Tomball Parkway when the shooting occurred, Fox News reported.

According to Gonzalez, the girls and their parents lived at the apartment.

The girls were left in a bedroom by themselves at one point during the night because one parent believed the other was watching them. The three-year-old then found a loaded pistol and shot once, striking her sister, Gonzalez said.

The four-year-old girl was pronounced dead at the scene.

Family members heard the shot fired and rushed to the bedroom, secured the firearm and reported the incident to authorities.

It is unclear at this time if any charges will be filed in connection with the shooting.

The incident remains under investigation.

[Cause]

America's problem is they cant differentiate between gun safety and Gun control. I guess because at the end of the day American culture sees the goverment as the enemy more often than not. Legislation requiring gun safes for example requires a mechanism to track gun owners and check if they are in compliance. It doesnt necesarily restrict gun ownership anymore than requiring a script for certain medications prevents me from buying them.

However American culture (at least for some people in some places) which sees owning guns as a means to resist goverment opressiont than thinks that the goverment having a gun registry just means they know whose guns to take away when it becomes times.

As a non-american I cant wrap my head aroudn why so many americans fear/hate their goverment so much. I think its uniquely american, at least in countries not activley ruled by dictators and despots. I think its a priamry reason for so many issues that america suffers. The opposition to so much basic gun safety laws. The reason america has no mandatory picture ID and instead your entire identity is tracked through your social security number which is an eight digit number easily stolen and which was never intended for this purpose. A number with no ID to tie it to you specifically and which you can be required to write down on forms alongside your name and address. Heaven forbid the goverment somehow knew your name, address and likeness when the FEMA death camps start. As if they dont have access to all this inforamtion in some sense regardless.

[QuickTidal]

Cause, on 13 March 2023 - 03:27 PM, said:

America's problem is they cant differentiate between gun safety and Gun control. I guess because at the end of the day American culture sees the goverment as the enemy more often than not. Legislation requiring gun safes for example requires a mechanism to track gun owners and check if they are in compliance. It doesnt necesarily restrict gun ownership anymore than requiring a script for certain medications prevents me from buying them.

However American culture (at least for some people in some places) which sees owning guns as a means to resist goverment opressiont than thinks that the goverment having a gun registry just means they know whose guns to take away when it becomes times.

As a non-american I cant wrap my head aroudn why so many americans fear/hate their goverment so much. I think its uniquely american, at least in countries not activley ruled by dictators and despots. I think its a priamry reason for so many issues that america suffers. The opposition to so much basic gun safety laws. The reason america has no mandatory picture ID and instead your entire identity is tracked through your social security number which is an eight digit number easily stolen and which was never intended for this purpose. A number with no ID to tie it to you specifically and which you can be required to write down on forms alongside your name and address. Heaven forbid the goverment somehow knew your name, address and likeness when the FEMA death camps start. As if they dont have access to all this inforamtion in some sense regardless.

I feel like SO much of this is wrapped up in a two-fold historical thing.

1. America was founded on rebellion against a government (or really the King of England). "Freedom" as it were, became deeply rooted in the nation identity.
2. That "freedom" therefore tied itself FOREVERmore to the weapons and mechanisms used to reject that supposedly tyrannical foreign king/govt.

So for a whole country of people who have been (and continue to be) raised to understand that their individual freedom is PARAMOUNT, and is the "greatest thing" about America as a nation...you can see the easy link between said sacrosanct freedom and those "mechanisms of rejection", which in modern day means "Gun" to the individual.

If the fervour for that nationalism was not so insanely high that you could get all sorts of like American Flag paraphernalia in like....a fucking gas station, or the tiniest bodega...then the attachment to the guns themselves would not exist as it does.

The thing that seems to keep this all going is the pennant for parents in the USA to (more often than not) foment the lie to their children that the US is the MOST free, and amazing country on the planet...and that no one has it as good as them, and by gods they better be ready to defend that freedom....

It's asinine. I've literally had conversations with Americans about guns and told them we simply don't have them on most of our households...and they are usually incredulous and say dumb shit like "What are you going to do if someone breaks in your house?!".....like there seems to be this perpetual and all-encompassing fear amongst many Americans that SOMEONE at some point is going to break into your house, or come and try to take your land and so the gun is necessary to prevent this....which is wild AF to me as a Canadian. I have lived in no such fear for my 46 years of life so far...

Funnier still, the US military is a well-fed hoarding dragon of a thing....and if the govt ever DID decide to take anything away from those citizens arming themselves...it's not even a little bit of a contest....the citizens lose. We in other countries are at similar mercies, but we don't fear it like the US does, we juts accept it and live our lives.

The elements of the US govt that ARE taking things away from Americans are not doing so by physical force, they are doing it through legislation and the erosion of rights...and the very people who clutch those guns to tightly are the ones CHEERING that on....

Wild.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 13 March 2023 - 05:23 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

QT don't forget that the earliest bunch were fleeing religious persecution and that they kept this state of mind "we're being oppressed!" throughout the rest of their history including whenever they oppressed others.

Tie that to all the bits you were saying about freedom etc and it's a fun old melting pot.

[worry]

Reminder that even in the U.S. 'gun control' is wildly popular. Political polarization is a fake concern, asymmetry of power is the real problem.

From Pew Research (2021):

This chart contrasts "bipartisan" ideas with "wide partisan differences" in others -- which is true, as represented by the blue and red dots. But the grey dots are what tell you actual overall opinion. And what do they show about majority -- sometimes overwhelming majority, but in every case majority -- opinions on gun control ideas?

And if that's the indication, and still nothing changes, what does that tell you about the asymmetry of political power in the U.S., as opposed to mere "partisan differences"?

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

QuickTidal, on 13 March 2023 - 05:20 PM, said:

Cause, on 13 March 2023 - 03:27 PM, said:

America's problem is they cant differentiate between gun safety and Gun control. I guess because at the end of the day American culture sees the goverment as the enemy more often than not. Legislation requiring gun safes for example requires a mechanism to track gun owners and check if they are in compliance. It doesnt necesarily restrict gun ownership anymore than requiring a script for certain medications prevents me from buying them.

However American culture (at least for some people in some places) which sees owning guns as a means to resist goverment opressiont than thinks that the goverment having a gun registry just means they know whose guns to take away when it becomes times.

As a non-american I cant wrap my head aroudn why so many americans fear/hate their goverment so much. I think its uniquely american, at least in countries not activley ruled by dictators and despots. I think its a priamry reason for so many issues that america suffers. The opposition to so much basic gun safety laws. The reason america has no mandatory picture ID and instead your entire identity is tracked through your social security number which is an eight digit number easily stolen and which was never intended for this purpose. A number with no ID to tie it to you specifically and which you can be required to write down on forms alongside your name and address. Heaven forbid the goverment somehow knew your name, address and likeness when the FEMA death camps start. As if they dont have access to all this inforamtion in some sense regardless.

I feel like SO much of this is wrapped up in a two-fold historical thing.

1. America was founded on rebellion against a government (or really the King of England). "Freedom" as it were, became deeply rooted in the nation identity.
2. That "freedom" therefore tied itself FOREVERmore to the weapons and mechanisms used to reject that supposedly tyrannical foreign king/govt.

So for a whole country of people who have been (and continue to be) raised to understand that their individual freedom is PARAMOUNT, and is the "greatest thing" about America as a nation...you can see the easy link between said sacrosanct freedom and those "mechanisms of rejection", which in modern day means "Gun" to the individual.

If the fervour for that nationalism was not so insanely high that you could get all sorts of like American Flag paraphernalia in like....a fucking gas station, or the tiniest bodega...then the attachment to the guns themselves would not exist as it does.

The thing that seems to keep this all going is the pennant for parents in the USA to (more often than not) foment the lie to their children that the US is the MOST free, and amazing country on the planet...and that no one has it as good as them, and by gods they better be ready to defend that freedom....

It's asinine. I've literally had conversations with Americans about guns and told them we simply don't have them on most of our households...and they are usually incredulous and say dumb shit like "What are you going to do if someone breaks in your house?!".....like there seems to be this perpetual and all-encompassing fear amongst many Americans that SOMEONE at some point is going to break into your house, or come and try to take your land and so the gun is necessary to prevent this....which is wild AF to me as a Canadian. I have lived in no such fear for my 46 years of life so far...

Funnier still, the US military is a well-fed hoarding dragon of a thing....and if the govt ever DID decide to take anything away from those citizens arming themselves...it's not even a little bit of a contest....the citizens lose. We in other countries are at similar mercies, but we don't fear it like the US does, we juts accept it and live our lives.

The elements of the US govt that ARE taking things away from Americans are not doing so by physical force, they are doing it through legislation and the erosion of rights...and the very people who clutch those guns to tightly are the ones CHEERING that on....

Wild.

A large part of it can be traced to racism (backlash against government intervention, going back to the Civil War) and capitalist exploitation (aided by the Cold War).

John Wilkes Booth shouting 'Sic temper tyrannis' ('thus always to tyrants') after shooting Lincoln. Desegregation. (It would be interesting to compare the attitudes of white South Africans towards government after the end of apartheid.) Opposition to welfare because it's perceived as benefiting Black, Latino, and Indigenous people at the expense of whites. Fear mongering about Black and Latino crime (superpredators, MI6 is at your door...).

Quote

'Our analysis of eight ANES surveys (1992–2020) shows that racial prejudice, measured in terms of anti-Black stereotypes, informs white Americans' beliefs about the trustworthiness of the federal government.

[...] many white Americans of the era believed that these new programs unfairly benefited African–Americans (Gilens, 1999). Scholars argued that these negative policy perceptions contributed to the decline in public trust among whites in the 1970s and 1980s, with significant consequences for the federal government's ability to address economic inequality (Hetherington, 1998, 2005; Hetherington & Globetti, 2002).


[...] Studies in psychology suggest that human memory organizes thoughts in interrelated networks that are linked by affective ties (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Race-related beliefs are organized in well-developed and affectively-laden groups which are highly accessible and easy to recall unconsciously (Tesler & Sears, 2010; Winter, 2008). We argue that whites' beliefs and attitudes about racial policies have become integrated into their broader racial attitudes toward Black people. As a result of this integration process, perceptions about the government's trustworthiness have become associated in memory with negative attitudes about African–Americans. Thus attitudes about government have become "racialized," that is people have developed a durable unconscious association between racial prejudice and public trust.
Beyond Performance: Racial Prejudice and Whites' Mistrust of Government - PMC (nih.gov)

[Edit: of course I meant MS-13 not MI-6, lol...]

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 14 March 2023 - 12:25 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Anecdotal experience is, of course, not necessarily statistically accurate. Most people I've known in the United States don't care about the founding at all. Despite being one of the main tourist destinations for founding-era shit, in my experience next to no one who lives in Philadelphia gives a rat's ass about any of that.

Quote

'Attitudes toward public institutions in South Africa have become more negative since the early 1990s, following the country’s first democratic elections. These attitudes were captured in a Pew Research Center survey conducted in summer of 2018 and in World Values Survey results from 1990 and 2013, periods before and after apartheid.'


Before 2019 elections, South Africans divided by race, pessimistic over democracy | Pew Research Center

But many in the US are (or claim to be) ideologically opposed to 'government' in general... with many of those same people being very in favor of the police and the military.


The Tea Party movement was using their fetishization of the founding as an excuse for their racist backlash against Obama. The military uses it to get people to enlist. Capitalist ideology exploits it.

Quote

The top 9 most terrifying words in the English Language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.


- Ronald Reagan (who never stopped being an actor...)

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Another cultural factor promoted by capitalist ideology:

Quote

'Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream [...] challenges our nation's obsession with self-reliance. [...] the fiction that anyone who works hard can have a better life increases inequality and promotes policies that hurt us. Meanwhile, blaming people for their supposedly bad choices is "a kind of nationwide bullying" that the poor internalize.

[...] how our culture began to idolize the so-called self-made man. In 1834, the magazine Working Man's Advocate mocked a local inventor by suggesting that a contraption he'd fashioned would allow him to "hand himself over the Cumberland river … by the straps of his boots"—a laughable impossibility, of course, because you can't lift your whole body by your shoes. But the term stuck, and over time became synonymous with self-reliance. [...] then points out a number of cracks in our collective myth of self-sufficiency. While Henry David Thoreau stayed at Walden Pond—for many, the mecca of American individualism—his mother did his laundry. Ayn Rand, patron saint of libertarians, collected Social Security near the end of her life. Even Horatio Alger's novels aren't tales of genuine independence: In most, a wealthy benefactor steps in to sponsor a handsome teenage protagonist. [...]

[...] for many people who insist that modern America is a meritocracy, the onus is on those who need help to prove that they need it. [...] administrative burdens force disadvantaged people to repeatedly prove their worthiness. For example, Medicaid requires participants to frequently recertify themselves [...] to receive benefits. In recent years, more than 220,000 children in Tennessee alone lost coverage because of clerical errors. [...] DeSantis has said that the unemployment-insurance system was designed to "put as many kind-of-pointless roadblocks along the way" as possible, so that the jobless gave up. Some of these hurdles—such as some states' Medicaid work requirements, which have been shown to insignificantly affect employment rates—are simply punishment for poverty.

[...] also shows how widespread the tendency is to overemphasize individual responsibility.'

America's Most Insidious Myth

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 14 March 2023 - 06:48 PM

[Tsundoku]

Both funny and very, very sad at the same time. Infuriating. America the Sick.

https://www.news.com...aadf0de475c36f2

Bullet proof classrooms to be introduced at Alabama high school
In the absence of meaningful gun reform in the US, some schools are taking matters into their own hands. But will it work?

[QuickTidal]

Tsundoku, on 16 March 2023 - 01:07 PM, said:

Both funny and very, very sad at the same time. Infuriating. America the Sick.

https://www.news.com...aadf0de475c36f2

Bullet proof classrooms to be introduced at Alabama high school
In the absence of meaningful gun reform in the US, some schools are taking matters into their own hands. But will it work?

The drop ceilings made me laugh...

But yeah, the fact that Americans will do EVERYTHING including inventing wild shit just to avoid dealing with the actual problem.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Tsundoku, on 16 March 2023 - 01:07 PM, said:

Both funny and very, very sad at the same time. Infuriating. America the Sick.

https://www.news.com...aadf0de475c36f2

Bullet proof classrooms to be introduced at Alabama high school
In the absence of meaningful gun reform in the US, some schools are taking matters into their own hands. But will it work?

It's a good start. My main concerns:

- No toilet inside. It could get bad....

- No offensive capabilities. If compact gargoyles that turn into flying killer robots are still a few years away from being very affordable (economies of scale, obviously), at least add some guns to the outside.

- Kidding aside, it may take too long to set up. Better to bulletproof the entire classroom---especially the door. Though being trapped in a small area isn't necessarily the greatest idea: IDK about the availability of poisonous gasses or explosives, but starting a fire should be easy enough... so they'd need to figure out a way to prevent the safe space from burning and prevent smoke from getting inside (or oxygen getting all used up...).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 16 March 2023 - 03:49 PM

[Tsundoku]

How about we just ... give up?

https://www.news.com...d15b15b6b61d506

After another school shooting, US contemplates one last response to its gun crisis: giving up
After years and years of refusing to budge, America’s gun nuts finally said something new this week. Somehow it was even worse than usual.

Samuel Clench

April 1, 2023 - 6:14PM

Protesters flooded Tennessee's statehouse on Thursday to demand stricter gun laws after the school shooting in Nashville that left six people dead.

All these years, we assumed the gun nuts of America were immovable. Wrongly, it transpires. This week’s mass shooting at a primary school in Tennessee inspired something so many past horrors could not: at last, a shift in stance.

Sadly, that shift was in the wrong direction.

Having failed to stem the flow of needless death with their thoughts and prayers, the foes of gun control are out of ideas. Every conceivable solution has been tried. The only option now is to give up.

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation. And we’re not going to fix it,” Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett concluded in the wake of Monday’s attack at Covenant Church School, which left six victims dead, three of them children.

“Criminals are going to be criminals. My daddy fought in the Second World War in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, ‘Buddy, if somebody wants to take you out and doesn’t mind losing their life, there’s not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.’”

Put aside the comparison of children sitting in classrooms, learning what verbs are and memorising their times tables, to soldiers under fire in history’s deadliest war. A sentiment so unfathomably perverse defies analysis.

So, disregarding that, part of you wants to give Mr Burchett credit. Just a teensy smidgen of it. For his honesty.

Here is a rare exception to the rule that politicians overpromise and underdeliver. “We’re not going to fix it” might not inspire as a campaign slogan, nor look great on a T-shirt, but you can at least trust the man to keep his word.

Still, there are follow-up questions. Criminals are going to be criminals, yes. Do they need to be heavily armed criminals? Should the criminals who are going to be criminals be allowed to buy seven guns, legally, without arousing suspicion? Might America set stricter limits on the arsenal of military killing machines available to its citizens?

The spokesman for defeatism sees only futility in such measures.

“We pass laws, and then they really have no effect,” Mr Burchett said.

“You have got to deal with what’s at the heart of this. It’s evil. Some people would say demon possession.”

We heard a similar line from Tennessee’s Governor, Bill Lee, who refrained from blaming demons but described the struggle to suppress gun violence as one “against evil itself”.

Of course, every society has people who are evil, or unhinged, or so wayward as to turn violent. Yet the American experience, of a dozen school shootings and 417 dead kids since the turn of the year, remains peculiar.

The gun lovers have always been careful to avoid contemplating this discrepancy and its causes too deeply. Hence the counterintuitive solutions they’ve offered: armed guards at every school, armed teachers, that sort of thing. Always arming, never disarming. Guns as the cause of, and solution to, all the nation’s problems.

We can say one thing for dumb ideas though: they are still ideas. They’re an attempt to address the problem. Even thoughts and prayers, useless though they’ve proven to be, at least contain some hope for improvement. This new strain of defeatism is worse.

In the politicians’ case, it is also a monstrous abdication of duty. They are employed by the public to enact laws, many of which are supposed to keep said public safe. That’s what their job is. It is why they receive generous salaries and pensions at public expense, to be supplemented by exorbitant speaking fees in retirement.

A politician who says nothing can be done about the daily murder of children is simply refusing to do his job. It’s like calling a plumber to your house and being told no, he won’t fix your broken washing machine because washing machines are going to be washing machines, but yes he will still take your money.

Heck, even if we accept the diagnosis of the biblical literalists, and say pesky demons are behind all this evil, Mr Burchett should be hard at work recruiting an army of exorcists. There is no scenario, no theory of the case that makes inaction defensible.

And yet, a repulsive thought has been burrowing its way through my brain: maybe he’s right. Maybe this problem genuinely cannot be fixed.

Americans bought 16.5 million guns in 2022 – a decline from the previous year, if you can believe it. Our best estimate is that civilians own about 400 million firearms. There are more guns than people.

Perhaps, whatever the US government does, the scale of the problem is too great. Gun ownership has snowballed to such an extent that it can no longer be restrained.

Something like our own mandatory gun buyback scheme, which involved the confiscation of just 650,000 weapons (just!), would probably be logistically impossible even without cultural resistance. And that resistance runs so, so deep.

There’s an alternate history where America never reached this point. Its relationship with guns only morphed into the current twisted obsession quite late in the 20th century.

One of the clips that always does the rounds in the wake of a mass shooting is an interview with Warren Burger, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Justice Burger, a conservative, was appointed by Republican president Richard Nixon. After retiring he spoke out publicly against the gun lobby’s brazen, shameless, and wildly successful “distortion” of the Second Amendment.

That amendment, which underpins US gun rights, reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

“If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment,” Justice Burger told PBS in 1991.

“(It) has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud – I repeat the word ‘fraud’ – on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

“‘A well regulated militia.’ If the militia, which was going to be the state army, was going to be well regulated, why shouldn’t 16 and 17 and 18 or any other aged persons be regulated in the use of arms, the way an automobile is regulated?”

If we accept it was fraudulent to reinterpret an amendment written in the 1700s, when “arms” meant muskets, to let civilians own recreational assault rifles, then the fraud worked. Millions of Americans still believe it now, and use it to justify an obscene tolerance for atrocity.

“Your dead kids don’t trump my constitutional rights,” Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, a fleeting political celebrity better known as Joe the Plumber, said after one shooting in 2014. Blunt, horrendously immoral, and very much a mainstream view.

So perhaps the war over guns has already been fought, and irrevocably lost. America will keep wounding itself, and its politicians will feebly staunch the bleeding. If they can even be bothered to try.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Well, criminals are just going to be criminals, how about we just give up?
Drink drivers gonna drink drive, let's just give up.
Drug addicts ... well there's no fixing that.
Corruption in politics - what can you do?
War and especially war crimes - shit happens. Too bad, so sad.
Disease? Well people die and that's sad but what are you going to do?
Natural disasters - well, we can't control nature, so might as well just not bother when things get fucked up.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 01 April 2023 - 08:04 AM

[worry]

Tsundoku, on 01 April 2023 - 07:24 AM, said:

Well, criminals are just going to be criminals, how about we just give up?
Drink drivers gonna drink drive, let's just give up.
Drug addicts ... well there's no fixing that.
Corruption in politics - what can you do?
War and especially war crimes - shit happens. Too bad, so sad.
Disease? Well people die and that's sad but what are you going to do?
Natural disasters - well, we can't control nature, so might as well just not bother when things get fucked up.

You should run for office!

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

As far as schools go---not just 'giving up'....

Quote

[...] when Rep. Tim Burchett was asked after the shooting how Congress ought to respond to the American carnage, he said both quiet parts out loud: [...] "[...] we're not gonna fix it." Then, when asked what could be done to protect his own little girl, he added, with a fatalistic shrug, "Well, we home-school her." [...] "increasingly powerful force in American politics [...] pushing home-schooling as the cure to any and all school problems: the parental rights movement." Meanwhile, "government schools," as they were rebranded [...] after the Uvalde shooting [...] are not to be trusted by that same parental rights movement. [...] "The same institutions that punish students for 'misgendering' people and hide curriculum from parents are simply not equipped to safeguard your children from harm." You see, to the right-wing movement, it's the schools that have failed across the board, and not the politicians. [...]

But there's another more pernicious layer [...] "In case you haven't completely guessed the Republican game, their school shooting solution is women. At home. In the private sphere. And charters but mostly women at home. [...]" The more you think about the response of social conservatives to mass shootings in school, the more you come to realize that the creeping vibe here is that young women of childbearing age don't really belong in public schools in the first place, and that to the extent that they are there, they're only really welcome until it's time to be re-confined to the home.

The third aspect of the social conservatives' education agenda is the most frightening of all. [...] It is to incorporate the right's wider embrace of vigilantism directly into every aspect of American life, especially schools.

[...] The parents who say their parental rights allow them to censor and even veto what every child learns in the classroom are the very same folks who make arguments about putting more guns into classrooms, into the hands of teachers, and indeed into the hands of children themselves. These arguments are not in tension with one another. They are perfectly consistent: Government cannot keep your children safe from inevitable "woke" ideologies, and "government schools" cannot keep your children safe from inevitable gun violence. If this is true, then only parent vigilantism is the cure.

Nashville shooting: The GOP embraces the Kyle Rittenhouse approach to kindergarten.

OTOH the Nashville shooting was at a religious school, and many Republicans are still pushing religious schools in addition to homeschooling. Perhaps the principal rushed towards the shooter (and promptly got shot to death) because she fervently believed she was going to Heaven (so death is actually a good thing---everybody gets what they deserve, Go*'s perfect justice! the more martyrs the merrier!).

Wonder what % want homeschooling only.

OTOHOH of course they're blaming the Nashville shooting on trans people:

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Republican Senator JD Vance tweeted that the left needed to do some "soul searching" over the Nashville shooting because the shooter was trans and targeted a Christian school. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, his fellow Republican, blamed the "hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness" the shooter may have been on for the violence, adding that "everyone can stop blaming guns now." (Ms Greene's Twitter account was later restricted after another post where she made unfounded claims about the shooting being linked to "Antifa" and "trans-terrorism".) Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, called transgender people the "natural enemy" of Christianity in a hateful tirade on his Fox News show.

Voices: We must reject the transphobic narrative around Nashville

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 01 April 2023 - 12:05 PM