The Great ILX Gun Control Debate

that phrase makes me want to both kill and die, appropriately enough

It's hard not to conclude that YouTube has no real problem with this kind of stuff as I believe they could afford to hire a couple people whose sole job is to watch the trending videos

Heck of a moment. pic.twitter.com/H89wXsvdeM

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) February 22, 2018

they're degenerating in their conspiracy theories. voter fraud, rarely happens. crisis actors, never happens. next theory will the violate the arrow of time or some shit. oh wait that already happened with birtherism huh.

if Trump dies they'll ask "where's the death certificate??!!"

Friend has a warehouse job with a firearms distributor, they had a panic run on high capacity magazines today - even with a GOP Congress, President and Trump taking the weakest possible stance on bump stocks, the industry can still prime the paranoia pump.

fwiw i went out to my hometown in rural GA yesterday to visit my brother (he lives in Auburn, i went to school in Dacula). i was pretty sad to notice a gun store literally right across the street from the high school, with a led sign advertising ".22 ammo unlimited". thankfully my school experience was incident free although we did have a kid suspended for bringing in a toy Star Trek phaser and flashing it off in class. don't be shocked but there is a giant yellow billboard down the road that says "JESUS: COMING SOON" and has been up for at least 25 years.

also i went to elementary school down the road (on "High Hope Road" to be exact) and my school was right across the street from a prison. several times we had lockdowns due to escapes. this was late 80s though...

https://i.imgur.com/sHTTE04.jpg

something i read earlier today (in a review of andreas malm's book on global warming/capitalism) seems appropriate here:

...He takes his title from Walter Benjamin's essay "On the Concept of History" - the angel of history watches catastrophe pile wreckage upon wreckage, longing to "make whole what has been smashed" but powerless before the storm we call "progress." In the section before this, Benjamin writes:

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism."

Benjamin's disdain for a conception of history that allows its adherents to be astonished that barbarism is "still" possible in our clearly enlightened present suffuses Malm's book, as does Adorno's recognition that real progress, in such a world, means "simply the prevention and avoidance of total catastrophe." This progress will not be secured without a struggle.

America is like a bizarro world (everything that's absurd is made to seem reasonable) collapsing into the real world. One would expect emigration numbers to soar, but I don't know if that's true?

Walter Benjamin always otm

Huh. TIL that that Laurie Anderson lyric came from Walter Benjamin.

She said: What is history?
And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
He said: History is a pile of debris
And the angel wants to go back and fix things
To repair the things that have been broken
But there is a storm blowing from Paradise
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future
And this storm, this storm is called Progress

it's in a Mekons song as well, a vivid and timely image

https://img0.etsystatic.com/215/0/5307484/il_570xN.1382626868_ke9l.jpg

benjamin was inspired by this paul klee painting fwiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U11SE9eqfSU

the abyss is close to home...

my only tattoo

(the klee drawing)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/the-nra-lobbyist-behind-floridas-pro-gun-policies

interesting profile of marion hammer, an unquestionable shit stain of a human being but the driving force (and de facto author) behind so many of florida's controversial gun laws

speaking of shit stain

“If you take out New York and California, 8 percent of Americans have concealed carry permits"

- Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), on Meet the Press earlier today

wtf is this logic

yet, if republicans/NRA get their way, the concealed carry permits that are obtained in states that grant them will allow people to conceal carry in states that don't (like the minor states that don't really count, New York and California)

xp amazing how they always want to remove the two states where nearly 1/5 of Americans live.

Not remove them, take them out.

i imagine hes including the populations of states where youre allowed to put a gun in yr pocket if you want in those numbers too

Let’s take a look at the national tax revenue without those two states while we’re at it

Top trending article on the NRA’s site currently:
https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2016/7/1/10-reasons-to-own-an-ar-15/

just folks

just finishing cv wedgwood's excellent little biography of cardinal richelieu, in whose life as a statesman she argues the first really famous exercise of monarchic power against recalcitrant nobles was his decision to finally take duelling seriously

it was apparently a scourge of the time, with literally thousands of young men (and occasionally women) (of usually noble familes) dying in them. often it wasn't what you imagine, i.e. two fops facing off with sabres or epees, but weird little small-scale gang battles, where the two duellists would bring along two or three "seconds" and each side would go at it. until one side was dead. various edicts had been tried in the past, each was met with contempt and flagrantly ignored, but richelieu was like "this time it's serious" and when a powerful count (who was also duke of luxembourg) flouted flouted it, richelieu had him put to death. the king, louis xiii, didn't want to kill him iirc but richelieu convinced him that if they let this go, nobody would take the king's word seriously in the future.

probably exactly the sort of thing nra members imagine in their fever dreams, left-wing message board posters summoning the memory of a french monarchist to support the idea of taking guns away, but i couldn't help being struck by the parallels, and how swift, authoritative, uncompromising leadership from the top was effective (though it would take decades to finally end duelling altogether)

continuing the parallels: duels were totemic of noble freedoms against top-down control from the king

here's the sacrifical lamb btw - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_de_Montmorency-Bouteville

real talk, i do think the high school students are better with messaging than people who responded to past massacres. for real a couple years back the top anti-gun group around was called "Moms Demand Action" which i don't know i feel like their messaging is a bit questionable, i'm starting to feel that there may be some potential upsides to democratizing discourse control

gun control is wildly popular and liberals are all *extremely nerd voice* um excuse me im not going to take your gun i just want to implement some common sense solutions like allowing 17 instead of 18 bullets in a clip oh no thats not gonna work ok sorry ill go now

Meanwhile the NRA is like “we should reinstate duels; mandatory gun duels”

At the insistence of Louis XIII, a dinner of reconciliation was arranged in Brussels, but failed

i want to see this episode of the tv show btw

I need to read more Wedgwood.

This should go well.

The Lt. Governor of Georgia is threatening to use the state to punish private actors for political expression he finds distasteful pic.twitter.com/kxNwMV7Fgf

— T'Challah 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) February 26, 2018

man, he must really want to use his NRA card to get group discounts on Delta

such a blow to all the NRA card holders, their group discounts are disappearing left and right, it's a hard time for them

Cagle is the leading candidate to succeed the current governor. I'd love to see this stunt blow back on him. It will play well in the rural counties but maybe not as well as he imagines.

Based on the number and type of corporate ties being severed, the NRA had turned itself into AARP for gun owners, but with added anti-government paranoia.

LOL

https://waynelapierre.com/

I remember when I was a kid, my dad registered his name as a domain - he never intended to use it, but he said to me "you might as well, you don't want anyone else to get it"...I thought that was really stupid, but it turns out he was right and I was wrong

lol - however if someone else purchases a domain with your intellectual property or name somewhere in the URL and it is purchased purely for the purposes of turning a profit by selling it back to you at a greatly marked-up price, that's actually illegal in many cases.

(doesn't apply here, just warning anybody who is thinking of picking up www.tayordayne.com when it expires).

I owned www.fuckmichelebachmann.com for a year tho. oh what I'd give for the days when those were our enemies.

was thinking today that so much of the toxicity in american gun culture seems linked to the cult of the soldier-warrior, and wondered if something like compulsory military service would, in time, actually serve to undermine that mythos

like, if everyone had had a stint in the army or w/e, then they'd realize that The Troops aren't all heroic superpatriots who have mastered the way of the gun, but normal schmoes like anyone else.

not proposing this as a solution, btw, it just seems like america's infatuation with war and militarization is supported by the fact that very few people actually have any first-hand experience with it

gbx, I do think that the draftee armies of the past - by being a more representative cross-section - fostered a greater sense of commonality between the people fighting and the people at home. I don't know if compulsory service is the answer, but I agree that it isn't especially healthy for the armed forces and the general public to regard each other as fundamentally different kinds of people.

I've heard Max Brooks bring that up in a few interviews. Concerns about the creation of a warrior caste.

posted in the other thread, but I'm increasingly infuriated by the left's capacity for defeatism just as a powerful grassroots campaign gets rolling.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/27/politics/gun-bill-analysis/index.html

not proposing this as a solution, btw, it just seems like america's infatuation with war and militarization is supported by the fact that very few people actually have any first-hand experience with it

― gbx, Tuesday, February 27, 2018 1:38 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont think its really abt the military, theyd just find another shiny object to project their gun lust upon, as evidenced by their opinion of the fbi dropping from esteemed law enforcement heroes to incompetent conspiracy schemers as soon as one thing upset them

lag∞n is right; this is tribal culture war shit again/still.

If there were no guns it would be the National Spear Association or whatever; just gotta underscore that there is an "us" and a "them" somehow to get the tasty libtears flowing.

not saying it's the ~only~ reason we're so crazy about guns/warriors, just that it's a lot easier to sell the image (in media, CoD, etc) when most ppl don't really understand that much of being in the military is profound boredom and doesn't involve gun kata and stuff. harder for that small segment of vets (and those that venerate them) to pull off that ludicrous oath keeper nonsense if literally everyone else, male and female, has had some exposure to what "being a soldier" entails

like i'm sure those guys exist in norway or israel or wherever else, but it's probably more acceptable to clown them in public because there isn't the shibboleth that We Must Respect The Troops

could also be totally wrong, never been to norway tbh