Speaking of that fraud, here is Altar #1 -- Daniel Defense, the manufacturer of the rifle used in Texas -- preaching at Altar #2 in no uncertain terms in a meme I understand the maniac retweeted or something. Is real religion Altar #3?
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Maybe Corwin can correct me, but I believe that quote is from Proverbs. Did you see Trump and Cruz at the NRA convention, repeating slogans like mystical incantations? …Spiritu sanctum….the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun….ohhhmmmm…..and they looked particularly mechanical this time, I thought. Didn't look much like they believed it, less than usual.

Trump called that slogan age-old wisdom. If memory serves, I believe that is a slogan coined by NRA con man La Pierre, who, as we saw in the old Trump thread, doesn't even know how to hold a rifle correctly. He coined that phrase to mitigate some other mass shooting, and it was sometime in the last couple decades. Real wisdom there, the kind normally reserved for the hallowed spaces of cars' bumpers.

Logic has nothing to do with any of this. It's pure emotion. It's religion.

Edit:
Since you rightly checked out my sketchy-looking meme, let's not rely upon my memory, which is like a steel fishing net. Here is PBS' explanation, and this from NPR was the earliest reference I found during a cursory Google search. That age-old wisdom dates all the way back to Sandy Hook in 2012.
 
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And while we're busting myths about the home of the brave, those 19 cops who stood out in the hall while those 19 kids were salughtered like lambs knew full well those kids were in there, unlike the bullshit stories told by the cops and politicians.

My guess, based upon how shit usually flies, particularly with a shitheel like Abbott, the lie starts with Gov. Fuckface, who concocts his myth because….well, that's what he does….that's all the Republican Party does because they believe in nothing, quite literally. Their official national platform is "what Trump says." Look it up. Myths are all the GOP has. Branding. That's been their only goal for decades. Well, money and power, nearly synonymous in America, are the real goal. Branding is just the means with which to secure them.

So, Abbott and the cops spin a tale to save the boss' ass and to preserve the all-important myths. When the story starts to unravel, the cowardly Abbott blames the cops -- That's what they told me! -- and the cops blame the dispatchers -- They didn't tell us the kids were in there!

Shit rolls downhill. It takes the press, in all their glorious ineptitude, to bail out the poor working stiffs in dispatch. Hopefully, shit will start defying gravity now and roll uphill, as it should. Hope a bit reaches Abbott, as it should, but I doubt it.

The home of the brave, where 19 cops in the hall claim to know nothing of the 19 children inside. Dispatch didn't tell us… Even before this evidence of the lie, were you telling me you heard those 19 shots from an AR-style weapon, at least 19 shots, and there were no other accompanying noises, such as the screams of dying children or of those still alive next to them? Just shots and silence?

Home of the brave? No. No longer, anyway. Never, that I've seen during my life. Sure, there are examples. I've seen them. I've seen quite a few. There are always examples of just about anything. But it's not been a guiding principle that I have seen in action, outside of mythology. Mythology is the guiding principle, certainly for the GOP. The real guiding principle for the home of the brave, though, is the unprincipled pursuit of The Almighty Dollar and personal gain in whatever happens to be your preferred poison.

No, this is much more of what we're home to, a cop who, at the least, did his part in preserving the mythology by remaining silent about what actually happened in that hall, his own mistakes. No, this brave man behind a badge, an ostensibly good guy with a gun sworn to stop a bad guy with a gun, has declined any further official investigative interviews after the initial one when no one knew what was going on. Instead, he chose to, behind closed doors, accept his political laurels, won by 300 votes 3 weeks ago, for whatever personal gain or mythology he imagines for himself, while, at the very same moment, regardless of whatever may have happened in that hallway, he continues to shirk his professional duty by not providing the required interviews.

Yeah, we've got a lot of guys like this one. How many good men, with or without guns, do we have?
 
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Ripper said:
I do wonder what effect it's having on the little kids. I read that one child thought to daub herself with blood, to feign death more convincingly. When I was that age, the only danger we were told about was that if a stranger pulled up in a van and offered to show you his puppies - leg it.

In the summer we had all the door and windows open, and sometimes even did lessons out on the grass. I can't really imagine school being a windowless structure, resistant to armed assault, with regular drills on how to take down a shooter with a pencil.

I think having a school properly fenced, with one control point for entry is generally sensible. But I don't see that stopping someone suicidal and determined to wreak carnage with firearms. TBH, although I think banning the military-style weapons would be something, even that seems a bit like a sticking plaster on a sucking chest wound. When we had the Dunblane massacre (and changed the gun laws) that was a disgruntled pedophile armed with four handguns, and he did almost the same amount of mass murder.
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With regards to fences, I'd say they mostly keep kids inside, not bad guys outside. I remember reading a report of spending time in nature, and among that, how much freedom kids of today are allowed, compared to about a hundred years ago. If I remember correctly, the average 6 year old village kid about a hundred years ago, were allowed to walk on their own, or with friends, in a radius of a few miles from their home. Today most kids aren't even allowed to go outside and play on the playground outside their own house without supervision.

Parts of this is due to actual dangers, like traffic, but I'm pretty certain a lot of the fears parents have are not reasonable.

I'm wondering what this does to kids when it comes to learning to deal with problems on their own, and in general to deal with fear, as well as trusting other people. If you grow up learning that everyone and everything unknown is dangerous, what does that do to you?
 
The truth of the matter it is not feasible to protect every school, every church, every store, every mall, every park, every play ground, every every everywhere from gun violence; and the most viable path is to simply remove the guns in some fashion. This won't totally prevent gun violence but it will reduce it.

Given the Republicans has become the party of opposition I often wonder if Democrats would embrace guns at least in a public fashion if that would motivate the republicans to ban guns. After all their embracing of guns has more to do with political points (which includes $$$$) than any actual belief of fundamental right.
 
I have never understood the fascination with equating "The right to keep and bear arms" with military assault rifles. Why stop at an AR and not lobby for RPGs?
 
Yes, I think that's right - I don't see how a sane person thinks the right to bear arms must be an absolute principle, and not be subject to reasonable limits.

"What's that guy doing up on the roof?"

"Oh, that's Mr. Jenkins at number 37. He likes to sit up there with his surface-to-air rocket launcher, in case 'The Enemy' enters his airspace. His right to bear arms shall not be infringed."

I think the effects of lobbyist money and PR over the years has succeeded in shifting the attitudes of what's acceptable into ever crazier territory. You wouldn't have to go too far back in time to a point when a regular American conservative would have looked at that photo of the toddler with the assault rifle, and reacted with shock and horror. But now the industry knows the mentality it's marketing to.
 
That's because the brainiacs who constantly quote the Second Amendment in defense of guns tend to forget that it was written with muskets and flintlock pistols in mind not modern weapons.
 
Way too many doors on that hospital.
 
Channel 5 - NRA Conference

 
How do you use a firearm in the toilet? It would seem to be rather extreme to me!!!! :)
 
Guys, I don't know why you're so focused on the guns, Fox news has dozens of brilliant solutions to mass shootings:
 
Fox News, like its Republican masters, is only interested in their myths. It's all they have. Reality is counterproductive to building mythology. And mythology is Fox's business. It's official: Fox is purely propaganda now, covering for the criminals who attempted a coup once already and continue their efforts to topple our government, to offhandedly, yet violently if needed, dismiss the most-funademntal principle this country was founded upon simply because it stands in the way of all the shitty and illegal things they'd prefer to do.

I heard some explanation by Fox somewhere acknowledging they cater to their audience in bumping the airing of the Jan. 6 hearings to its financial network no one watches. Maybe that's what your people want, but it's definitely not news by anyone's definition but your own disingenuous one.

Perhaps this isn't strictly about gun policy, but all these things are pieces of a whole. These are all tributaries of the same mythology, and it's the same assholes working the locks and dams.

Edit:
Even DHS, our newest institution that hardly seems worthy of the term and was the quickest and most enthusiastic to embrace Trump's authoritarianism and should be dissolved altogether, sees the connection between our politics and gun violence. Thanks for pointing that out, DHS. Fuck you and disband already.

2nd Edit:
You know, in looking at this post again, it bothers me. I don't like the tone. I don't like the pang of guilt that apparently prompted me to try to justify mentioning Fox News in this thread about gun violence and policy, as though it weren't important or relevant enough.

I just heard some woman testifying before Congress or something. I'm not entirely sure, I was primarily just listening. It could've been the near past or present. She was a black woman, so maybe it was about Buffalo. Does it matter?

She was talking about tending the wounds caused by bullet fragments still under the skin of her young son, Zaire. Why do you think she named her son Zaire? Because she's desperately seeking a connection to something, her ancestry, that she can't find here. But this kind of alienation is not exclusive to minorities. It touches us all, but the cruel grip of bigotry makes it all the more painful.

There is little that binds us as a country. Our checkered history is not long. We are constantly tearing down what little history we have and starting anew, which isn't necessarily a bad thing and seems to me can carry its own advantages, but it comes at a cost. As an open democracy that has historically, by and large, welcomed all comers, we have plenty of differing views and cultures and all the tumult and strife that brings. We used to have the idea of democracy to unite us, but now it seems neither side has much passion for it these days. Money and power are all that are truly important; every man for himself. That's our only culture, a corrosive corporate culture. We have little that binds us.

I'm sad to say, but television binds us, or it once did. Just as the Web has magnified the effects of media exponentially, so did television. In the beginning, you could find a show here or there with a differing perspective, just as with newspapers, but everyone agreed what the news was. No one was lying to you about what the news was.

But then came cable TV, and folks now had far more choices than ever before. In the name of The Almighty Dollar, cable TV began to lie, to tell people in this socially conservative nation -- because that's what rose to power, that's what people tuned in to watch, and you can just look at today's television ratings to see that -- they began to tell the people what they wanted to hear to make their channel stand out, to make themselves more marketable, to make more money -- all that grumbling Archie Bunker bullshit people tell themselves to mitigate, in their own minds, their own shortcomings, all that which is so central, regrettably, to human nature. Regardless, that shit's like crack. People love being told they're right. Fox News knows this, and the corporate Web knows this. The left does, too, but, like so many examples in this country, the left doesn't bother to focus its vague efforts and gets steamrolled by the right, though I could live without all of it, myself, so fine by me….except that leaves a power vacuum for the right.

People don't know what to believe these days, and I don't blame them. They're lied to plenty, from every corner, every corporation they have an account with, even in the so-called news. We have little that binds us beyond suspicion and fear. Fox News, in particular and by far the most popular, spends most of its day scaring people into arming themselves against each other to the profit, be it financial or political, of their employers and the people who bankroll them.

A divided populace is easy to conquer. Don't look at the hearings about the coup against your government, look over here at the brown horde crossing the border, even though we could use the workers, which only an AR will mow down properly for your safety (I'm tellin' ya, that's true.) and my profit.

And make no mistake, the same people propping up Fox News are the same corporate fucks who propped up Trump and his coup. They'll gladly take your country from you, your vote, your power, as they prey upon your need for a daddy figure they're glad to provide because they're the ones who scared you in the first place. But I don't want or need a daddy, and I'll thank you to keep this hairy motherfucker, and your personal hang-ups, the hell off me. Brown people don't scare me, but living in a country where I have no say scares the hell out of me. Living in a Russian-style fake democracy with a dash of South African apartheid makes me soil myself a little.

So, yes, I think Fox News is far more important than I wish it were, by a country mile, and they're as relevant as the day is long. They're driving us down that country mile.

I'm not sure I like that line either, so maybe I'll just y'all the favor of stopping the rant and not looking at this post anymore.
 
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