Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

very tempted to tell Mr. Plumber exactly HOW he can have his precious guns, but that wouldn't be very productive.

Time to embrace gun-grab extremism. The other side already paints our position that way no matter what, might as well just go there.

xp: who knows, after nine months he might give birth to a beautiful baby butt-gun

Trying to be more nuanced or compromising or whatever has obviously failed. Why concede their rhetorical point about the left having a hidden agenda? Be honest about our agenda, fuck the 2nd amendment, yes I am coming to take your guns away. Lets find out how useless they actually are against our cryptofascist police forces after all, the najority of whom strongly support gun control.

Tons of gun owners going out in death-by-cop infinitely preferable to dead innocent kids imo

I don't think "the second amendment is more important than the lives of our children" is a v persuasive bit of phrasing

no, it's sociopathic and bizarre. the 2nd amendment is a law and there are lots of laws that are stupid and have been repealed. it's not some unalienable right. WTF.

my favorite part of Veep this season was when she told the finnish lady "the 2nd amendment is a problem" which, let's face it, it is.

heaven forbid anyone say that though

i don't advocate confiscating guns. i advocate arming prisoners. after all, we can't take away the right to freedom of speech just because someone's in jail

I have had to explain the whole US gun-culture thing to two foreigners today in the aftermath of the UCSB shootings. which is hard b/c I don't really understand it myself.

frontier culture

I think it goes beyond the Richard Slotkin type of thesis but that's a big part of it.

rugged individualism, fear of black ppl + indigenous population, political mythologies of revolution against tyranny, hunting culture, frontierism... gun fetishism is kinda the most explicable of america's faults!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this,36131/

fear of black ppl

Ironically, it was exactly this that spurred Reagan to sign gun control measures in California in the late 60s:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-history-of-guns/308608/?single_page=true

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

rugged individualism, fear of black ppl + indigenous population, political mythologies of revolution against tyranny, hunting culture, frontierism... gun fetishism is kinda the most explicable of america's faults!

― Mordy, Tuesday, May 27, 2014 3:48 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's a lot to unpack, actually!

ban men

xpost

for a foreigner, I mean.

humankind, especially americans, are the deadliest animals alive

but also... the most dangerous game?

i don't advocate confiscating guns. i advocate arming prisoners. after all, we can't take away the right to freedom of speech just because someone's in jail

Loving this.

the amazing race

I dunno, is this legit?

http://atlasleft.org/tea-party-trolls-ammosexual-misogynistic-tweets-will-piss-you-off-images/

for kincannon that's actually fairly respectful

man

south carolina since its founding has been the most reliable source of toxic politics in america

and they still fly the confederate flag at the capital building

i blame andrew johnson

http://www.policymic.com/articles/89953/elliot-rodger-s-internet-history-reveals-something-more-sinister-than-just-misogyny

wait why is racism more sinister than misogyny.

racism+misogyny is more sinister than misogyny alone

here I was thinking they cancelled each other out.

http://thechrisgethardshow.tumblr.com/post/87041806996/overcome-your-programming-and-be-a-better-man

that is about the closest to otm thing I have read so far

forgive me if this comes off as provincial or whatever but i think malcolm harris has cool stuff to say sometimes and i'm curious for his inevitable al jazeera column on this, for people in the larger-scale press he usually hits intersectional stuff on the nose ime

re: Chris Gethard, apparently he went to my high school, probably just 4 years behind me. Noticed him popping up on friends facebook pages when he started getting known for improv stuff and been seeing him increasingly more and more on tv and whatnot. I think he's gonna get real famous soon, comedy-wise, though this post is getting a lot of attention.

i cannot read any more about this. i'm done.

I don't know who Chris Gerhard is but that is excellent

Wish he'd stop saying 'stick to your guns' tho

lol he quotes the chorus of The The's Lonely Planet almost verbatim

yeah stick to your guns not the greatest choice of words

The Gethard post lost me when he got to "no one was ever out to get me" because, especially for black people, sometimes "they" is a real thing and "they" actually ARE out to get you.

And when he propagated once again the "Columbine killers were lonely, shy kids getting back at their tormentors" myth.

Black kids, whose feelings of persecution are not mostly in their heads, are also not murdering masses like the white boys he is talking to.

Also Phil, I think you are way off.

"Because my fear is that in saying I remember identifying with the Columbine kids, or that Elliot Rodgers said things about his feelings that reflected my feelings at his age, that I’m coming off as sympathetic to them and what they did – that couldn’t be further from the truth." He's talking about identifying with a sense of being treated unfairly despite your superiority, not any of the rest of the mythmaking, and he doesn't let the Columbine dickheads off the hook at all.

Eh, maybe I'm misreading him, TWU. But when he precedes "We were the Columbine kids" with

We were the kids who girls never talked to. We were the kids the popular kids looked down on. We got made fun of. We got laughed at. I remember once entering the locker room of my high school’s gym, where a kid a year older than me named Rick walked up to me and backhand slapped me across the face. I looked up at him and he shrugged and said, “What can you do?” sympathetically. As if even he knew what he did reflecteda way of things that wasn’t fair, even though he was also choosing to do it.

it gets my hackles up.

He follows it with "on many, many levels we were". And then analyzes the similarity and differences in a very sensitive way, I think, with the specific goal of getting young white dudes not to feel like victims owed by an unjust world.

I'm with DJP. Also the statement "the world doesn't owe you anything" -- sans context -- is kind of awful. People aren't owed love or affection or sex but they are all should be treated fairly and decently. The author of the article was owed not being backhanded in the face by that high school bully. Women are owed the right to not be harassed or made to feel unsafe. Humans are owed all sorts of things by virtue of being human. Maybe this is nitpicky because what the author was taking aim at was a particular, odious form of male entitlement but in that case he shouldn't make sloppy, general statements.

yeah, that guy's statement seems a bit off