Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

the audience for those tactics isn't really the general public, it's elected officials who don't want controversy and are afraid of well-funded and rabid lobbyists and their supporters

and throwing in some bits about winning in the SC and winning in the state legislatures and moving the window of debate for good measure. So basically we need to pull out all the stops AND reduce ourselves to the level of planned parenthood's most incoherent foes. See what sticks!

politics is a bloodsport, you play to win

if you scare the other side they start to compromise

and there is something to be said about moving the framing of the debate, moving the goalposts so that it's not gun rights vs. gun control, it's gun control vs. no guns.

It's so tiring always trying to tailor your views to what the current CW is, it would be amazing to just be like yep, you're convinced we want to take your guns away. You know what? You're absolutely right, we DO want to take your guns away. Every last Ruger and Glock. If you have a hunting license you can keep a rifle and a shotgun and that's it. And hunting licenses will be at least as hard to get as a driver's license. CAN YOU LIVE WITH THAT, WILL THAT BE ENOUGH GUNS FOR YOU

It is obvious that seeing murder constantly every day desensitizes people to it.

http://www.signspecialist.com/decals/beevault/images/Entertainment%20And%20Circus%20033-0151.gif

Honestly it's like cigarettes, people just couldn't conceive that their liberty to light up several cigarettes in a busy restaurant could ever be taken away. And then it was. And it was like, actually I didn't need to do that anyway

Oh there are still people whining loudly about that too.

I was trying to make the point that the strategy/s outlined in the piece isn't/aren't really a strategy, more a rant. As is warranted, of course.

Actually would prefer what (ugh) McAuliffe and the Democratic Governors Association are planning to try and do re: ensuring redistricting in 2020 swings in Dems' favor - that's one pillar, addressing local level bullshit;

coupled with a dedicated press to move the window, addressing the minimizing of control topics by the NRA that even Fred fucking Hiatt's editorial page was able to point out this week;

and I guess my third stool leg would be national elections to ensure the federal courts and the SC are populated by judges who believe the federal government has some fucking business regulating this shit, and that stuff like that Colorado law where anybody who sues a gun company automatically owes the gun company a shitload of money is blatantly unconstitutional, if it even rises to that level (instead of just being fucking nonsense, or whatever the JD jargon is).

what strikes me about these cases is that the victims are basically strangers to the perpetrator. what kind of mindset causes someone to believe the average person is their enemy? the fact that our culture produces individuals who feel victimized by "the public" to the extent that they lash out against them in this nihilistic manner is the thing that bothers me the most (after our gun laws). what's weirder is that the people who lash out aren't really among the most victimized members of our society, but they still feel like outcasts.

is there anything we could do to prevent people from feeling like this? it seems like a sick consequence of individualism... the "messaging" that leads ppl to do this seems more involved than just "the media glorifies shooters," which isn't true anyway

the shooters are the most selfish people in the world so of course they are outliers. but they always remind me that living for oneself alone is not sustainable. people need to feel some sort of responsibility to the social. anything else leads to monomania/misery/insanity

i think one thing most of these guys have in common is an extended adolescence, or at the very least a poor transition to adulthood. take away the guns and the nurturing of violent power fantasies and a lot of them (not all) would grow out of it given enough time. that's why the gun issue is so central to these cases, because you've got to put more barriers between them and the enactment of the fantasy.

That's what makes that case in the Mother Jones story all the more tragic - they were putting a great amount of manpower and social effort to put this guy on the right path, and as soon as he was away from it, he still committed a shooting.

http://theweek.com/speedreads/581824/people-publishes-all-535-congressional-phone-numbers-asks-readers-push-antigun-agenda

interesting move. although that headline is misleading, the People post clearly doesn't advocate for anything specific

That's awesome. People!!

the problem is that it's so inconvenient to call your representative when you're in the dentist's waiting room thumbing through People

its also possible kids with emotional issues detach from their peers, stick around home with mom, read 4chan all day and lose all empathy for other people.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/hillary-clinton-foundation-state-arms-deals

Could be the leaders we look up to are setting a shitty example.

its also possible kids with emotional issues detach from their peers, stick around home with mom, read 4chan all day and lose all empathy for other people.

― panettone for the painfully alone (mayor jingleberries), Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:26 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Before the internet, was it harder to seal oneself off from real human contact? Honest question. What would these ppl have done with their time before the internet? Television gets boring after a while.

People are still going around senselessly murdering kittens, so I don't think people have ever had trouble pursuing psychotic fantasies to fill up their time.

people became weird shut-ins and fully immersed in some complex fantasy life well before the internet but i imagine it was much harder to find a whole ideological justification for your self-exclusion from society. there's a whole fantasized structure of resentment that's already there for them to buy into.

i mean, i was a weird shut-in throughout my early 20s but i just read books and felt sorry for myself, there were no violent urges. i dont think there's even anything unusual about people (usually men) going through that kind of stage, especially if they are introverted, but its the turn to explosive violence that's strange to me and maybe best explained by a combination of a poisonous ideology and some baseline impulsiveness or sociopathy.

you're convinced we want to take your guns away. You know what? You're absolutely right, we DO want to take your guns away.

Small problem. The same people who are convinced that liberals want to confiscate all guns also fervently believe this is a threat to their very existence, so those who are willing to publically come out in favor of repeal of the second amendment and confiscation of guns should be prepared to become the targets of people who are very bit as violent as the Ku Klux Klan. That's a steep hill to climb.

Well it seems the argument finally needs to be had, rather than ducked.

ben carson does not duck, he charges

These people are children

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/08/us/oregon-roseburg-shooting-umpqua-community-college.html

this is a sickness

sometimes i really wonder how it is that so many people in the world can be so stupid

The article makes it sound like 50/50 why because it's intertsing but I firmly believe the people who are like "gotta go git me a gun now!!" are a small, childish, irresistibly quotable minority

The reason I think it actually does have to be about actually taking people's guns away (though voluntarily, through buybacks) is just the sheer number of handguns and assault rifles etc that exist out there. Even if you banned all sales of those weapons tomorrow there are just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them sloshing around, waiting to, you know, just, honorably defend someone against a heinous crime all of a sudden

i believe i recently read that gun sales have significantly increased since obama took office (due to impending fascist takeover). i think it's actually a lot of people.

xpost

yes, there's been a massive increase in gun sales since obama was elected, but that doesn't mean that more people have guns.... it's more that the folks who already had guns have more of them. at least that's the impression i got from the various articles on the subject.

http://gawker.com/woman-with-concealed-carry-license-shoots-at-home-depot-1735284267

this is pretty fucked up.. I wasn't aware the 2nd amendment right extended to the right to summarily execute someone committing a crime..

apparently its legal to this to a felon, but stealing $1000 worth of crap from home depot isnt a god damn felony.

is it really legal? it damn well shouldn't be. wtf. (that's aside from the fact that she could have easily hit somebody else.)

also, people referencing the 2nd amendment here, and even if you think that amendment can be construed to mean that individuals have a right to carry a gun, it damn well doesn't give them any particular right to /use/ it under any circumstances.

ahhhhhh ben carson you are a traet

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/23/tennessee-state-university-three-shot-in-nashville

^ basically the opening scene of The Wire?

A very sad sign that -- even though I live in Tennessee -- my first thought on seeing that headline was "Only three? That's not so many."

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/us/colorado-springs-shooting/index.html

How long before it'll have to be a famous person on one end of the gun or the other for a spree shooting story to make the news. This one already seems to have been relegated to tomorrow's (or even Monday's) "in case you missed it" spots.

Didn't happen, but still chilling IMO
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/03/us/minnesota-foiled-school-massacre-john-ladue/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/us/colorado-springs-shooting/index.html

― nomar, Saturday, October 31, 2015 6:07 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So reports coming out now that someone called 911 to report this guy, saying he was carrying a gun and looked like he was in a bad way, and was told, "Hey, this is an open-carry state, we're not sending cops for that."

Compare and contrast, of course, Tamir Rice and John Crawford, who definitely did have cops sent to check it out in an open carry state, and who shot them on sight.

fuck the USA

Bettis said she recognized the gunman as her neighbor — whom she didn't know by name — and that before the initial slaying she saw him roaming outside with a rifle. She called 911 to report the man, but a dispatcher explained that Colorado has an open carry law that allows public handling of firearms.

i'll hazard a guess that this might have been an overreach on the part of a dispatcher that maybe cares a lil too much about gun rights

like, if someone's calling to report that a guy is walking around with a gun, that means someone is concerned about it enough that it probably merits investigation. i'm not sure something with such a potential for a bad (awful, horrifying) outcome as "guy walking around with a gun" is the sort of thing that a dispatcher typically has the discretion to ignore completely

what's going on in paris?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34814203

https://twitter.com/mathieuvonrohr/status/665275757569163264

Mathieu von Rohr Verified @mathieuvonrohr

#Paris shooting happened at a concert venue named "Le Bataclan" (11ème), eye witness tells @BFMTV "everybody was running"

fuck

yeah calling family to see if fine, 10ième/11ième is their neighborhood