The 'Americans Getting Shot' Thread

[harrybarracuda]

Onto the continuing tragedy of American gun violence are now piled many kinds of grotesquerie, not least the e-mails, sure to come to any parent with kids still in school anywhere in the country, offering “tips on talking to children about violence” and promising that your child’s school “has been performing lockdown drill protocols that our security team and consultants have recommended to ensure that we are prepared in the unlikely event that an incident occurs.” We have normalized gun killings to the point that we must now be reassured that, when the person with the AR-15 comes to your kid’s school, there’s a plan to cope with him. (That the planning is almost worthless is proved by the killings in Florida, where the murderer may have taken advantage of his knowledge of the lockdown protocols in order to kill more students.) Here, though, are four simple truths worth saying again, in the aftermath of the Florida massacre, about gun control and gun violence.


1. The gun lobby, and the Republican Party it controls, have accepted as a matter of necessity the ongoing deaths of hundreds of children as the price that they are prepared to pay for the fetishization of weapons. The claim of this lobby’s complicity in murder is not exaggerated or hysterical but, by now, quite simple and precise: when you refuse to act to stop a social catastrophe from happening, you are responsible for the consequences of the social catastrophe. If you refuse to immunize your children and a measles epidemic breaks out, you are implicated in the measles. If you refuse to pay money for sewers and cholera breaks out, you are complicit in the cholera. Acts have consequences. This complicity includes all of the hand-wringers and the tut-tutters and the “nothing to be done”-ers as much as the N.R.A. hardcore. Many people have predicted, repeatedly, that one gun massacre would lead to the next—and that more gun massacres would probably take place in one year in America than in the rest of the civilized world combined—and they have been proved right, and then right again. Since everyone knew that this would happen again, those who did nothing to stop it happening again—and everything they did to see that no one else could do anything to stop it happening again—are complicit when it happens, again.


2. The claim that gun massacres are mysterious or difficult or bewildering or resistant to legislation is a lie. When people say that nothing can be done because this law wouldn’t stop this one, or that law that one, they are acting in ignorance of the most significant and obvious fact: that no other modernized society experiences remotely the frequency or the horror of American gun killings. There is no mystery at all to stopping this, if there is a minimal will to stop it. A huge, repeated body of social science shows that gun control controls gun violence, and largely eliminates gun massacres, within the normal limits of human action. (People still die of infections; that is no argument against the efficacy of antibiotics. Crimes continue on our streets; that is no argument against the thousand small sanities that have so dramatically reduced violent crime in our cities.) If we had gun laws like the gun laws in Canada or in Britain, we would have gun violence at the level that it exists in Canada and Britain. There is no special American quiddity that would alter this—to insist otherwise is as irrational as insisting that American kids shouldn’t be immunized because American kids have a different kind of immunity than other kids. They don’t. Building small barriers to gun violence reduces all gun violence. The lesson of contemporary social science is that small difficulties have great effects; make crime harder and you have much less crime. Make getting guns harder and you will have fewer people using them. Merely make gun ownership as demanding as, say, car ownership, with a license to obtain and insurance to buy, and you will see a drastic reduction in gun violence and perhaps a near-end to the mass killings of children.


3. The Second Amendment is not a barrier to gun sanity. The reading, from left to right, of the amendment was—until the day before yesterday, historically speaking—that it provided no guarantee to the individual ownership of guns. The notion that it does is novel, radical, and wrong.


4. The attempt to turn the question of gun violence into a question of mental health is obscene. Of course, people who kill children en masse are crazy. That’s the given. Saying this says nothing; every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them. When Donald Trump, who last year signed a bill to end a mild Obama-era rule designed to keep mass-killing weapons out of the hands of people with certain mental illnesses, talks about reporting people who are “mentally disturbed” to the proper authorities—well, irony piles upon irony, and the only adequate tribute is contempt and silence.


https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/four-truths-about-the-florida-school-shooting

[Neo]

[uncle junior]

Trump's floating the idea of banning bump stocks. Whattaguy.

[Norton]

Trump's floating the idea of banning bump stocks. Whattaguy.

That's nice. Trump is trying to appease the protesting kids. Not gonna work 45. They are mad as hell. Side note the high school shooter did not use a bump stock.

Trump urges ban on 'bump stocks,' other gun modifiers | Fox News

[harrybarracuda]

That's nice. Trump is trying to appease the protesting kids. Not gonna work 45. They are mad as hell. Side note the high school shooter did not use a bump stock.

Trump urges ban on 'bump stocks,' other gun modifiers | Fox News

One hopes the kids are fucking his twatter feed right up.

[Grampa]

That's nice. Trump is trying to appease the protesting kids. Not gonna work 45. They are mad as hell. Side note the high school shooter did not use a bump stock.

Trump urges ban on 'bump stocks,' other gun modifiers | Fox News

At 18 they can vote.

It's a demographic worth considering (like all of the other ones).

[harrybarracuda]

[uncle junior]

The Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday considering several issues. These included a motion to debate a bill banning the sale of assault weapons in the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk.

The House chose not to consider the gun-control bill.

It later passed the resolution claiming that porn is dangerous.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.08c56671e945

[Maanaam]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.08c56671e945

I just don't know what to say. The elected representatives of the people refuse to even debate an issue that currently most of the people want not just debated but dealt with soundly, and choose instead to debate and pass a law, (on the grounds of public health!) that porn is dangerous.
Guns aren't dangerous, apparently. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

[Grampa]

The Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday considering several issues. These included a motion to debate a bill banning the sale of assault weapons in the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and a resolution declaring pornography a public health risk.

The House chose not to consider the gun-control bill.

It later passed the resolution claiming that porn is dangerous.

Yes, p*rn is dangerous - not AR 15s - and the vast majority of the politicians watch p*rn.. Their kids also go to expensive private schools - not their problem.

[bobo746]

I Hope someone is listening.

Teenagers Demand 'Never Again' in an Age of Mass Shootings

[tomcat]

...^Billy Graham might have suggested that thoughts and prayers would eventually reach critical mass and resurrect the dead...however, he died before anyone could shoot him...

[AntRobertson]

Donald Trump's school shooting solution: Give teachers guns - NZ Herald

Well there you go.

The solution was so simple, it was staring everyone in the face all along.

The solution to gun violence is more guns.

[uncle junior]

Speaks volumes about who's being represented in the legislature.

[tomcat]

[AntRobertson]

The sliming of Douglas High students can't be ignored - it's too disgusting for that - NZ Herald

The above article is about professional cock wombles like Dinesh D'Souza and the usual online trolls disparaging the students protesting.

The usual cast of right-wing fuckwits like Alex Jones et. al. have also come out of their slimy worm holes to start peddling the usual 'False Flag'-tinfoil-hat-crisis-actors' shit as well.

Cnuts.

[tomcat]

et al.

...ftfy to avoid trollish comments from alt-right grammarians...

[AntRobertson]

Thanks but given the intellect of the average alt-righter I think I would've been safe.

[thailazer]

I spend a bit of time in Idaho which is an open-carry state. Every time I see some dude packing, I look at him and try to convince myself they are more emotionally stable than I am. It never works. They obviously have something to prove like... "I'm a bigger, more powerful redneck than you are because I have a gun on my belt." The NRA has taken over the USA with its "guns are good" propaganda.

[AntRobertson]

Florida House refuses to debate guns, but declares porn dangerous - NZ Herald

Florida House of Reps refused a motion to consider a bill banning the sale of assault weapons in the aftermath of the mass shooting that killed 17...







...passed a resolution calling porn a "public health risk".

[thailazer]

On CNN's town hall today, Rubio said he would still take NRA donations in the future. Proof that politicians have absolutely no conscience.

[Norton]

On CNN's town hall today, Rubio said he would still take NRA donations in the future. Proof that politicians have absolutely no conscience.

Lil Marco took a bit of a beating but at least he showed up. Credit the the kids. Articulate, focused and clearly dedicated to their cause. Skeptical they will be any great progress on gun control but so far looking more promising than any movements following past school shootings.

[Grampa]

On CNN's town hall today, Rubio said he would still take NRA donations in the future. Proof that politicians have absolutely no conscience.

Beholden to $$$$ like the MIC, Big Pharma and other special interests.

Students where I grew up walked out of schools today. One of them said he thinks of the best escape route if there was a mass shooting. Many, most, or almost all students have thought about this at least once.

[cyrille]

I'm many, most, or almost all students have thought about this at least once.

Could they type a sentence that makes sense about it, do you think?

[harrybarracuda]