hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

Wal-Mart just stopped selling assault rifles, purportedly because of declining sales

and the current popular reading of the 2nd amendment is very new and in no way written in stone

Well...that's true but I think it would take a while before SCOTUS reverses itself on something like that. Probably you'd need to see a lot of turnover on the bench first.

yeah def

kill scalia w a gun imo

or wayne 1apierre

how would you use Wayne to kill someone?

my right to bear waynes shall not be infringed

I like this discussion but wish it was on one of the other threads.

i wish it were on another world

man come on im sure you are aware that your children are currently growing up in an extremely less violent country than we did

well, but a country with a whole lot more mass shooting than I remember. maybe I remember childhood through rose-colored glasses and there were tons of mass shootings before Huberty and Spencer? depending on how you look at the data, they have or haven't increased since 1980, but I'm not sure what your criteria for "less violent" is. I don't think there's going to be any gun control or decrease in this stuff, I think it's gonna get worse, you think it's gonna get better, that is rad and I hope you're right, our behaviors are going to look roughly the same (vote / donate / show up at the rally), I just think none of it's going to do anything at all.

more mass shootings but way fewer shootings

ok if you say so, glad to learn that the rise is mass shootings including classrooms full of children, in the wake of which no meaningful legislation gets passed, isn't actually a giant red flag

it may be a giant red flag of something (deep societal desperation and alienation?) but that thing is not an overall rise in violent crime

yes violent crime has def dropped in general in the developed world, while at the same time fear of crime has risen.

tonight my guests are lagoon and a happy days joke. we'll be debating whether people should have posi-vibes.

That fear despite the trend toward less violence is also a hallmark of conservatives' worldview (gotta be armed 24/7, support for police militarization, etc., batshit insane belief that urban areas are all populated by the cast of The Warriors).

i know this doesnt exactly square w some of the data out there but my feeling is ppl r less fearful

not that theres no evidence in support tho, for instance the widespread migration back to cities is a p clear indicator that ppl are not scared to live there anymore

best news of all tho is prob that terrified white supremacist gun nuts are a shrinking % of the overall population

a p clear indicator that ppl are not scared to live there anymore

or, that they know the people who scare them are being or have already been forced out

clearly neither possibility is 100 percent correct but i dunno, i lean toward a dim view of humans

your dim view of humans may be obscuring your ability to comprehend the necessarily linear progression of like time

tonight my guests are lagoon and a happy days joke. we'll be debating whether people should have posi-vibes.

― da croupier, Friday, August 28, 2015 4:10 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its not particularly positive or negative more just keeping up with our constantly shifting societal/political landscape

i lived in a neighbourhood that had gone full gentrified but with pockets of original inhabitants/bordering still really poor neigbourhood and people were super, super concerned about crime. e.g. private security patrolled at night, the police got called on me or smoking weed in my apartment (i actually wasn't), overheard disgusting middle-age kinfolkers in the coffee shop ranting about drug addicts etc.

then i renovicted lol

*got

xps goon wait isnt time not actually linear i thought thats why einstein was famous and stuff

idk if gentrification is actively indicative of "less fear" on its face, but its friday and i dont feel like doing hardcore research, if someone has data explicitly saying it is indicative of less fear, alright

Here is my perception:

I live in a country that has historically targeted people who look like me to be enslaved, first literally, then by reshaping laws to make the existence of people like me illegal so they could be funneled into chain gangs, then by segregation and discrimination to segment people like me from society and to attempt to limit our ability to become wealthy, and now by voter disenfranchisement, unfair bail, expensive fines that lead to jail time if they aren't paid, and literal murder. While I fully recognize that I live in a social class that allows me to be insulated from most if not all of this, large chunks of my family are not and all it takes for me is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and any of this stuff could roar directly into my life, either directly towards me or towards a close family member. This has been borne out time and again by black Americans more powerful than me running into situations where they are threatened and humiliated for the crime of existing as black people (Forest Whitaker and Henry Louis Gates come immediately to mind) and situations where black people like me or less powerful than me have been killed (Christian Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Renisha McBride, John Crawford III, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Darrien Hunt, Jordan Davis, Prince Jones Jr, and more).

I will think America is "safer" when I turn on the news or go online and don't see Yet Another Story like this every week.

yeah this country is all kinds of fucked up and cruel while also being generally safer than it was not very long ago

i mean our levels of violent crime, government oppression, and so forth are still way higher than any other country that approaches having our wealth, and is much higher than many countries that dont approach having our wealth, idk if u guys think im naive abt this or what lol

lagoon otm

I guess the rub is in our perception vis a vis the reality of these stats. I mean how much can it really matter that things are better if most people don't believe that to be true? And why does that discrepancy exist in the first place?

bc "the media" iirc

how much can it really matter that things are better if most people don't believe that to be true?

matters for the people not getting shot mostly

I think lagoon otm but offtm at once

Which is to say that he is betraying an optimism that I don't share mainly as relates to what DJP said

Ppl might be becoming less fearful / more aware of criminal justice as a problem but it's a systemic one based around the notion of a "criminal" class descended from slavery that keeps the same number behind bars as were enslaved in the 19th century. and I'm not sure a problem like that is solved by "reform"

I've read arguments suggesting the entire idea of "western man" is structurally based upon the existence of a "slave class" .... That basically society's self definition relies upon the command "don't be black" ... Idk how you undo the definition of police as protecting white ppl...like if whites are less fearful it's a temporary state related to a drop in crime but as soon as a situation arises where the white person feels they need to rely on the police to protect themselves ....that dynamic returns. It's ever present

Sorry if that's rushed or poorly articulated i wrote it with a hangover from my phone

I guess the rub is in our perception vis a vis the reality of these stats. I mean how much can it really matter that things are better if most people don't believe that to be true? And why does that discrepancy exist in the first place?

― tsrobodo, Saturday, August 29, 2015 11:39 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah to a certain extent it can seem callous to talk abt these things that so profoundly effect ppls lives in an analytical manner but there needs to be room for it i think, and i certainly wldnt want to discount ppls experience, and stats are imperfect, i just am personally extremely interested in the national decline in violence and its repercussions, imo its quite underappreciated and has already had a profound impact on our culture and thats prob just the beginning

as to why ppls perceptions dont exactly align w the numbers idk ppl are complicated and we ask a lot of them, i mean for most of human existence we were just hanging out in a village w like 50 ppl and there wasnt any such thing as statistics lol, we mostly move through our lives operating on crude heuristics just trying to survive and maybe enjoy a joke with a friend occasionally

Ppl might be becoming less fearful / more aware of criminal justice as a problem but it's a systemic one based around the notion of a "criminal" class descended from slavery that keeps the same number behind bars as were enslaved in the 19th century. and I'm not sure a problem like that is solved by "reform"

― mods = chickenshit idiots (D-40), Saturday, August 29, 2015 11:47 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i mean obvs there are levels to this conversation but imo there is more openness to relating to what is one of our fundamental national sins than there has been before

as to whether thats "reform" or whatever ill leave the leftist bickering re tactics to those who enjoy that sort of thing

matters for the people not getting shot mostly

― flopson, Saturday, August 29, 2015 3:45 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd wager that a fearful voting majority acting like more people are getting shot, results in policy that causes even more people to get shot.

how

With idiots like my dad feeling the need to CCW when my folks visit downtown Knoxville in the evening

better watch out at the Regal Riviera you never know what hoodlums might be "chilling" outside

Chaki's not wrong about bringing kids into a more horrible and violent world, but that's not because of current trends in crime and violence, it's because we're going to be some kind of Mad Max dystopia where western states go to war with each other for drinking water and the eastern seaboard is pounded into rubble by monthly hurricanes and the lucky among us will get to subsist on vat grown algae.

yeah i mean obvs there are levels to this conversation but imo there is more openness to relating to what is one of our fundamental national sins than there has been before

― lag∞n, Saturday, August 29, 2015 10:53 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm not interested in a revolution v reform question i just mean, like, i don't think stats changing is going to alter the fundamental paradigm where identity is so closely tied up in criminality and incarceration

other challenges:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/21/us/politics/obama-downsize-prisons-mass-incarceration.html

oops that's not the link i wanted to send ... lemme see if i can find it. .. basically said that even freeing all the nonviolent offenders doesn't really put a dent in our numbers vs. the rest of the world's...at some pt we have to have a real conversation about clemency for violent offenses

here it is http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/upshot/how-to-cut-the-prison-population-see-for-yourself.html

Old media this year has proven it can be fearmongering, alienating, and exploitative in the face of very public injustice, even in 2015. It values property over human life and can only view the populace through those terms. How does it affect election funding? How does it affect the corporate retailers that have exploited cities into urban decay?

It's so deep in the national fabric that it is in the language. If you care about the environment you are a "tree hugger". If you care about civil rights you are a "bleeding heart". Every time a national issue comes up that would cost us money the conversation is shifted to "What about the jobs"? Fuck the jobs, they aren't living, breathing people. How come nobody asks politicians why they are so emotional about their bank accounts?

If people really wanted the United States government to get serious about creating jobs they'd OK deficit spending at this time of stubbornly high unemployment and historically low lending rates

meanwhile
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/01/us/murder-rates-rising-sharply-in-many-us-cities.html