Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

perhaps the fucking annual increase in total guns in America has something to do with the goddamn rise in mass shooting https://www.atf.gov/file/89561/download

it's really simple and we all know it

Controlling the spread of ideological viruses such as this one would be a decent start as well:

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

*Curbing rather. Control mostly goes the other way, alas.

Either way, limiting guns will not happen in this country, any more than we will get universal healthcare. We know or at least deeply suspect the solutions we need, but it just won't happen because Americans are by and large stupid/uneducated, contrarian, reactionary, self-defeating, hateful, hurtful, intellectually incurious and so on. We've had our shot. Now it's all just part of our slow, tragic decline as a nation.

honestly might as well be taken from the manifesto left by a mass shooter

Fortunately, I am not a psychopath.

I don't think video games make people violent, but they might make violent people more agitated. I don't know. I do know that when people work out they listen to or play music that pumps them up, right? So it has some sort of effect. And when people go to shows, you don't see pits at, I dunno, the 1975, you see them at punk and metal shows. Reducing depictions of smoking in media seems to have had an effect of reduction of smoking. The pervasiveness of porn appears to have a negative effect on the psychology of at least some viewers. These things are all around us, in every country, and while I don't think they have a binary effect, I think they do have a detrimental effect on some people. Which is why, again, the focus should remain on guns and limiting them, and making sure people who need help get treatment. I just heard the FL shooter had been living with his friend's family because his mom died a month or so ago and he had no place to go. That would be rough for most people.

But the NRA and their supporters don't want to help people. And I don't think any progress will be made in my lifetime.

Obviously I am just blathering, because what else can we do at this point? Just talk. If the murder of small children in Connecticut couldn't do anything, if a guy gunning down strangers in a movie theater couldn't do anything, if Columbine couldn't do anything ... the best we've gotten have been active shooter drills in schools, even as the NRA pushes to allow guns in the classroom.

So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2018

so what is he blaming the students here? just STFU and watch your shows

I also watch hella amounts of horror movies and have never chainsawed anyone apart. As have millions of people who do not chainsaw people apart. Entertainment is not the problem.

fyi mr president someone with the same name as the shooter was reported to the fbi as a potential threat and he still managed to murder 17 people

Everything was done that should have been done, except he was given access to fucking guns. Which, like the Newtown shooter, he apparently claimed to have therapeutic effects.

xpost Entertainment is not a problem *for you*. Because you are also not a psychopath.

what else can we do at this point? Just talk.

Join a left-wing org, help push for elected reps who will *actually* work to push back against the gun lobby's influence over politics. Literally nothing short of that will work but there's plenty you can do besides talk.

A coalition to repeal the Second Amendment is a good start too.

I do many of those things and have done many of those things. It really doesn't make a difference, sorry. I live in a historically blue state with two good Senators, in a city that actively tried to restrict guns, and in the case of Chicago (and my local village) they lost in the courts. So now everywhere from the library to the elementary schools have "no guns" signs on the door. Because the legal default is "yes guns." That's just so fucking depressing. There are clear preferences in this country for solutions: for universal health care, for gun control, for DACA, etc. And it just doesn't happen and can't imagine happening any time soon. I feel we've had so, so many chances, and we've thrown them all away. It's inexcusable.

xpost Entertainment is not a problem *for you*. Because you are also not a psychopath.

The whole “but media is where they get the ideas from” argument is as stupid as “the eye is too complicated to happen by chance so there must be a god” argument. I’d go so far as to say it’s simple projection by people too boring to have their own ideas so they just assume that’s how everyone else works too.

I guess Jack the Ripper must have had some kind of fucked up video collection eh?

We have a kid in our neighborhood who was a regular problem, often lashing out in violence at other kids at the park or at school. A few years ago he punched my kid in the face while they were walking home from middle school. We called the police, so that there might be some kind of official record (we knew that a lot of the incidents with him had not been reported to anybody) and intervention or whatever. I also called their principal and talked with her. She couldn't discuss it much for privacy reasons, but she let me know that she was familiar with the kid's behavior and that they had been working with the family to help him. I hope whatever they've got going for him works. I'm fucking terrified that it won't.

those "no guns" signs on my school's doors have faded and now they look like a gun with a faint gray line going through them. i might show my students the frontline doc about the NRA tonight.
worth showing to anyone who will watch
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/gunned-down/

In terms of demands, repealing the Second Amendment would certainly be nice but seems like it might be a hard sell in terms of broad coalition-building (for a variety of reasons). any or all of the five principles outlined in the Emma Caterine piece I linked to before the jump would be an excellent campaign for DSA to take up nationally the way they have with M4A.

I don’t know how many chances you think we’ve had, either. The party that is bankrolled by the firearms industry has had control of the legislature and the highest court for the vast majority of the last four decades.

xxxp, he posted crossly

"You should know the facts of that incident before you run out and prescribe some law that you claim could have prevented it," he told Fox News.

just lmao at any Republican saying this with a straight face

like that Trump tweet...didn't Trump himself roll back a regulation preventing mentally ill people from buying guns?

The tweet is perfectly apropos, in terms of Trump appealing to his true base, cops and bootlickers.

Yeah I am going to show this to my students tonight. It shows how toxic to our society the NRA is and how it started.

from the transcript: (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/gunned-down/transcript/)

NARRATOR:
It formally happened in 1977 at the NRA Convention in Cincinnati. As they got down to business, there was a showdown, hunters and sportsmen versus gun rights activists.

CBS NEWS:
[May 21, 1977] The National Rifle Association convention in Cincinnati went into overtime last night, a stormy all-night session. When it was over, some dissident members had taken control of the 400,000-member organization. What it means is even stricter support for the right to bear arms and against gun control.

i've read quotes from parents at the school itself who said they don't think gun control is the answer, they own guns and don't want anyone taking them away

well sorry guys i owned many packs of tareytons and i felt it was fundamental to my freedoms to be able to own those tareytons and smoke them in restuarants and clubs but that right got taken away and you know what it's way better this way so sometimes you just gotta suck it up and admit you've been a fucknuckle, and if you can't admit that then it doesn't matter cause it's happening anyway with or without you

I'm all for full repeal of the second amendment, but it seems like one constructive tack to take in the interim is to do everything possible to convince gun owners that the NRA is an organization of psychotics.

that assumes gun owners would have a problem with that tho

i mean a lot of them seem happy enough with trump as president

Yeah, I was just thinking of how good a job we've done at convincing them to not vote against their own interests for decades.

If you repeal the second amendment, wouldn’t this become a state issue? I don’t know if that’s the best outcome. Wouldn’t you need to pass a law around possession and enforcement too? I don’t know anything about law. I need a V(il)ox(or) explainer.

well sorry guys i owned many packs of tareytons and i felt it was fundamental to my freedoms to be able to own those tareytons and smoke them in restuarants and clubs but that right got taken away and you know what it's way better this way so sometimes you just gotta suck it up and admit you've been a fucknuckle, and if you can't admit that then it doesn't matter cause it's happening anyway with or without you

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand)

ha - the problem is we have a constitutional right to bear handguns, according to the Heller decision, not to smoke Tareytons.

i mean a lot of them seem happy enough with trump as president

There’s a crazy number of gun owners. I don’t know if it’s possible to say they have any form of unified voice (regardless of what the NRA claims).

Repealing the 2nd Amendment is the best democratic option we have. With the courts packed with Republican judges and the ruling in DC v Heller it’s unlikely that any other gun control laws will stand until the constitution itself is changed.

what about dismantling the NRA?

more xxp. Why do I try to post from my phone on the underground train

more xxp. Why do I try to post from my phone on the underground train

Either way, limiting guns will not happen in this country, any more than we will get universal healthcare. We know or at least deeply suspect the solutions we need, but it just won't happen because Americans are by and large stupid/uneducated, contrarian, reactionary, self-defeating, hateful, hurtful, intellectually incurious and so on.

we need a pvmic-style thread just for posts this lib.

i do think pervasively violent/cruel entertainment is an expression of our malaise but i don't think it contributes any more than 50 other minor phenomena we're also stuck in a feedback loop with.

I don't think many gun owners realize how extreme of an organization the NRA is.

They see the NRA Museum and NRA Freedom Days at Bass Pro Shops, where they buy their shotguns and shells for their annual hunting trips. They see the NRA decal on the back windshields of their neighbors. For most of them, I'd bet they view the NRA as benign as the makers of Yeti coolers. And when they get the startling flyers in the mail and wonder "Why would Elizabeth Warren want to take away my hunting rifle? What next, my fishing pole?"

The Second Amendment is problematic, but it's not the main problem. No one ever says, "They'll take my freedom of speech away only from my dead cold fingers!" No one ever says, "They'll take my freedom of assembly only from my dead cold fingers!" But you've got this massively-funded, well-oiled organization who chant KILL OR BE KILLED, KILL OR BE KILLED at every chance.

What it's going to take to get any progress is to successfully paint the NRA as what it is: A terroristic organization that holds no sanctity of life.

that is why i asked about how about we start by dismantling the power of the NRA?

Absolutely. But I didn't say I knew how!

Yes, as many have said, discrediting and diminishing the NRA is important. But only as a means to an end / “interim milestone” as we say in the bureaucracy

yep

Feel like pushing for the repeal of the Second Amendment is a lot like voting for the Green candidate for president. Your position will be buried underneath opposition from both sides of power.

Here's another apples to oranges comparison: You have about as much chance confiscating 310 million guns as you do deporting 10 million illegal immigrants.

If you live in America and likely to die before the 22nd Century, you may as well try your hardest to get your fellow citizens to keep their guns responsibly. More checks. No more gun shows. Better record keeping. More limits. More taxes. Etc.

Ugh, just ugh.

Simple rules like: people who are domestic abusers prohibited from keeping guns.

Samantha Grady was in her Holocaust class with her best friend Wednesday afternoon when they heard two shots fired outside the door of their classroom in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

there has to be a way to open your heartbreaking human-interest story about a school shooting which doesn't use the startling phrase 'holocaust class'

a big part of the issue is that the NRA is such a unique lobbying organization, in that they are dead set at opposing literally *any* measure of compromise on gun control and are willing to straight up tell their members that a ban on bump stocks is just a few short steps away from door-to-door confiscation of hunting rifles/forced enslavement. so better jam those phone lines now! I can't think of anything like it - imagine tobacco lobbyists demonstrating full-throated opposition to a law making it illegal to blow smoke into a baby's face, arguing that actually if we forced babies to smoke from birth, they wouldn't have such a hard time handling secondhand smoke.

there's no compromise with these people - they still recite the "evil people are evil, they will commit crimes and kill no matter what" line as though it's tattooed on their skull, which is funny because these are the same types who think a 3000-mile border wall is a GREAT idea, and in fact the only thing that can truly make America great again right now. I say give each kid his own nuclear warhead when he or she turns 18 - only the truly evil ones will use them, and if they're evil criminals, who's to stop them from detonating the planet???

"a big part of the issue is that the NRA is such a unique lobbying organization, in that they are dead set at opposing literally *any* measure of compromise on gun control and are willing to straight up tell their members that a ban on bump stocks is just a few short steps away from door-to-door confiscation of hunting rifles/forced enslavement."

not trying to bring up any moral equivalence or whatever but pro-choice activists take such an uncompromising stance too, no?

oh boy
why go there?

Wtf? I don't remember I time when owning a gun was illegal xp

Ugh, just ugh.

― morning wood truancy (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, February 15, 2018 10:03 AM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't even know why i clicked on one of the videos in this link w/ the shooting footage but what the FUCK is nbc doing by adding suspensful music like this is a goddamn thriller?? what the fuck?

tv news is entertainment iirc