If only there was something we could do...

[Cisco Kid]

But like, if I post to take the bet, does that mean I'm losing the bet?

I have a friend who's parents operated a motel. He spent one spring break during college cleaning up that kind of mess in one of the rooms. Heard him bust out that story in response to someone talking about suicide.

He's a gun owner.

You say he's a gun owner like it means anything. As far as the bet, I'll be on as soon as you say "It's on". Go on a vaca, get some new teeth in Mexico or have a hair implant. Whatever floats yer boat.

anyway, if you call a meal between breakfast and lunch brunch, what do you call a meal between lunch and dinner? Mines a waitn

[MagnificentUnicorn]

Why are you guys arguing with Leroy? He’s like that fucktard congressman from OK, he’ll just obfuscate the conversation with tangential arguments. People’s rights are at stake here! We’re one step away from a totalitarian regime if we take their black toys away! Fuck those people that had their right to live taken away by some whacko with a gun!

Like I posted earlier, nothing will change in the US as long as people like Leroy have a voice

[TBS]

^^^ This. Especially the first sentence

[SumJongGuy]

ITS MUH RAWTS!!!. There it is. No rational defense... bla bla bla muh rawts bla bla. Lots of "rights" can and shall be infringed when too many people abuse them resulting in significant injury to the general public welfare We are clearly in that territory here. Stack the court with people who will roll back pre Hellier to interpret 2nd to REQUIRE STATE MILITIA (AKA National Guard) membership, well regulated.. to be own anything beyond an actual BASIC hunting gun. Full STOP!

[ötzi]

Pence called it a "God-Given Right" yesterday at the convention. Okey doke.

[From_the_NEK]

Pence called it a "God-Given Right" yesterday at the convention. Okey doke.

Pence's God apparently loves a steady stream of innocent kids showing up at the pearly gates.

[Cisco Kid]

[ikonfreewasatch]

Next question?

how does someone who doesn’t ski or do any other outdoor activities get almost 12K posts on a ski forum?

[::: :::]

Opinion: Gun absolutists don’t trust democracy because they know they’re losing
EJ Dionne Jr

Gunned-down children don’t seem to change the political equation on guns. Neither do dead teachers. Are parents petrified to send their sons and daughters to school? Tough. I expect the next new slogan on right-wing T-shirts will be: “Arm the Kids!”

Speaking to the National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis on Friday, former president Donald Trump didn’t go quite that far. But he did suggest that we “arm some of these teachers.” Former vice president Mike Pence similarly pledged to place “armed resource officers in every public and private school in America.” There’s big government for you.

That the Republican Party is now wholly owned by the gun lobby was witnessed not only by the eagerness of Pence, Trump and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson to pander in person at the gathering self-described as “14 acres of guns & gear.” Other would-be 2024 GOP nominees — among them, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) — felt obligated to bow before the gun worshipers by video.

The nonsense floated in Indianapolis — based on the idea that our national addiction to high-powered weaponry has nothing to do with America’s unique mass shooting problem — speaks to a deep ailment in our democracy. It has both partisan and (perverse) philosophical roots.

The GOP’s conversion to gun absolutism is the heart of the problem. But politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It often follows from cultural and moral innovations.

For roughly four decades, American conservatism has identified firearms as a marker of a manly rejection of urban cosmopolitanism and gun ownership as a right more important than any other. As DeSantis said in his video, the right to bear arms is “the foundation on which all our other rights rest” and essential to Americans’ “ability to rule themselves.”

“Why do Joe Biden and the liberals want our guns?” asked Gov. Kristi L. Noem of South Dakota, another speaker. “Because it will make it easier for them to violate all our other rights.”

It comes down to a variant of the old Maoist slogan: All liberty grows out of the barrel of a gun. When Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told a White House rally before the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, “Let’s have trial by combat,” he was speaking for a sentiment that runs deep in the gun rights movement.

A particularly dramatic example of how opposition to gun regulation is increasingly linked to efforts to undermine democracy itself: the Tennessee House Republicans’ recent vote to expel two duly elected legislators for protesting against the body’s inaction on guns after the Nashville school massacre.

It was no accident that the two since-reinstated representatives, Democrats Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, are not only both young and Black but also represent urban areas — Jones is from Nashville, Pearson from Memphis. Republican legislators, in Tennessee as elsewhere, regularly diminish the power of the big metro areas through gerrymandering and state overrides of local control.

Republican legislators may tout states’ rights, but with many cities in red states growing into significant islands of Democratic influence (and support for gun regulation), local control is not part of the GOP’s program.

Undercutting the ability of voters to cast ballots is another habit of those who privilege the Second Amendment over all the others. As Politico’s Kathy Gilsinan reported, Tennessee’s election laws allow gun permits as voter IDs but not college student identifications. There is no waiting time to buy a gun, but citizens have to resister at least 30 days before an election. “It is absolutely easier to get a gun than to vote in Tennessee,” Democratic state Sen. Charlane Oliver told Gilsinan.

Our attitudes toward guns are often ascribed to our frontier past and a veneration of the Old West. But in truth, radical opposition to gun regulation is a relatively recent development, even in the NRA. Founded in 1871 by two Union Civil War veterans and a former New York Times reporter, the organization was initially devoted to improving urban marksmanship.

The group was long open to sensible rules around weapons, and the NRA helped Franklin D. Roosevelt draft the 1934 National Firearms Act and the 1938 Gun Control Act. It was not until 1977 that the NRA was engulfed by extreme ideologues. Our country, including the Supreme Court, thus embarked on a dangerous new path.

The good news in this story is that radical opposition to sensible gun laws is not embedded in the American character. It’s the product of an ideology that overtook a less dogmatic form of conservatism and seized control of a political party.

With Americans increasingly angry over the violence wrought by weapons of war in our schools, our banks, our shopping centers — pretty much everywhere we gather — the era of gun absolutism could finally be over, if the popular will on guns is allowed to prevail. But this depends on defending the democracy that so many, at the Indianapolis gathering and in Tennessee, deeply mistrust.

[SumJongGuy]

how does someone who doesn’t ski or do any other outdoor activities get almost 12K posts on a ski forum?

I skied three times this season, posted about it here, spent 18 + hours driving to do it, and kindly fuck off..

[byates1]

how does someone who doesn’t ski or do any other outdoor activities get almost 12K posts on a ski forum?

Lol. He's really into ski forums maaannn.

[::: :::]

In Alabama, they apparently celebrate teenage birthdays with a mass shooting

https://www.wrbl.com/news/more-than-...tors-on-scene/

If only there was something we could do…

[::: :::]

Dadeville is a small city with a population of approximately 3,000 people. It's located about an hour's drive from the state capital of Montgomery.

At a press conference on Sunday morning, the Dadeville Police Chief, Jonathan Floyd, described the town as a "tightknit community full of wonderful people."

The superintendent of the Tallapoosa County Schools, Raymond Porter, said counselors would be at various campuses tomorrow to offer support to students — adding that kids will suffer the most from the recent tragedy.

"This does not represent our community or our children," Porter added.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/16/11702...rty-in-alabama

The tally is at 20 teens shot at that event.

One day, gun folk are going to wake up and realize, “This firearm does not represent our community or our children.”

[Ted Striker]

Now AC is "willfully ignorant"?! lol

The fucking condescension.

[Core Shot]

I skied three times this season, posted about it here, spent 18 + hours driving to do it, and kindly fuck off..

Fkna!!!

Three whole days?

Or did gwynneth bump one of those to a half day?

[garyfromterrace]

Tennessee’s election laws allow gun permits as voter IDs but not college student identifications. There is no waiting time to buy a gun, but citizens have to resister at least 30 days before an election. “It is absolutely easier to get a gun than to vote in Tennessee,”

JFC.

[leroy jenkins]

There is no utility in lumping them together or separating them out if you have already decided that 45k/yr dead is an acceptable tradeoff.

How many would it take? 100k? 200k? A million? There must be some sort of threshold that eventually would make you say, too many gun deaths. What is it? Because apparently it is above 45k for a large percentage of the population. That's fucked. Don't bother responding with a bunch of bull shit. (We know you will anyway.)

How many dead would it take to justify a population having the right to defend themselves? 10 million? 100 million?

Thats the thing is its not really just get rid of guns and all violence goes away, especially not in the long run. Ask the Uighers how thats working out.

The truth is you guys want to get rid of all guns even if it has negative consequences, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. Its worth it to you.

[leroy jenkins]

Now AC is "willfully ignorant"?! lol

The fucking condescension.

Yea, refusing to admit that while related and relevant to each other, suicide and murder are not the same thing and have overlapping but not identical causal variables seems to be ignoring that reality on purpose.

Its not even an insult. Its an accurate observation.

[leroy jenkins]

Pence called it a "God-Given Right" yesterday at the convention. Okey doke.

All the rights in the bill of rights are recognized as god given. They can be infringed upon, but are inaliable. This has been the meaning of the entire bill of rights since it was written.

You have the right to disagree, but don't act like this is some brand new absurdist take on things. its the traditional one.

[leroy jenkins]

I’d suggest he actually is sensitive to the 45k by the interest in dividing it up somehow

Yea you're right, I absolutely am. If you're interested in reducing these numbers, it doesn't serve anyone to lump them together. They're related but do not have identical causal variables. Neither does murder overall and mass shootings. Most murders are drug related, and the next most common is spousal murder. Wildly different set of causal variables.

People who obscure these differences are more interested in their agenda than they are in compassion or solving or improving problems. At the very least, normalizing and justifying animosity and hatred towards those you perceive as different than you is absolutely not going to reduce suicide rates, quite the opposite seems like commons sense.

The truth is, violence, as a whole, has been on decline in the US and UK for the past 20 years, even though it took a jump during the pandemic and mass shootings are on the rise alarmingly fast. Overall, we are a more peaceful society than we used to be.

Murder and violent crime were both plummeting for 30 years before the pandemic. https://www.macrotrends.net/countrie...-homicide-rate

The powers that be would rather keep us scared, hand wringing, and fighting amongst each other about which parts of the bill of rights we don't think are god given and can be thrown away.

[leroy jenkins]

You say he's a gun owner like it means anything. As far as the bet, I'll be on as soon as you say "It's on". Go on a vaca, get some new teeth in Mexico or have a hair implant. Whatever floats yer boat.

anyway, if you call a meal between breakfast and lunch brunch, what do you call a meal between lunch and dinner? Mines a waitn

OK, I'll let you know. Probably mid next week I'll disappear from this place again for at least a few weeks.

Enjoy your meal.

[schuss]

How many dead would it take to justify a population having the right to defend themselves? 10 million? 100 million?

Thats the thing is its not really just get rid of guns and all violence goes away, especially not in the long run. Ask the Uighers how thats working out.

The truth is you guys want to get rid of all guns even if it has negative consequences, including genocide and ethnic cleansing. Its worth it to you.

Yeah, if we enact things like background checks it's instant genocide. You need professional help.

[::: :::]

Yea, refusing to admit that while related and relevant to each other, suicide and murder are not the same thing and have overlapping but not identical causal variables seems to be ignoring that reality on purpose.

Its not even an insult. Its an accurate observation.

The observation is not accurate.
Refusal to admit suicide/murder are not the same — didn’t happen.
And ignoring the differential — didn’t happen.
Both acknowledged and deemed important to understanding the total gun deaths.

People who obscure these differences are more interested in their agenda than they are in compassion or solving or improving problems. At the very least, normalizing and justifying animosity and hatred towards those you perceive as different than you is absolutely not going to reduce suicide rates, quite the opposite seems like commons sense.

Nice sweeping statement…utterly speculative on your part.
As above: no obscuring differences — that’s your incorrect postulation again.
No justified animosity or hatred exhibited.
Basically, a lot of wild reaches trying to create a bogeyman that miss spectacularly.

The powers that be would rather keep us scared, hand wringing, and fighting amongst each other about which parts of the bill of rights we don't think are god given and can be thrown away.

“The powers that be would rather keep us scared”
?!?! Exactly who are you referring to? What in the actual fuck?!?

None of the bill of rights is God-given. They were written by men. White men from over 200yrs ago when there were less than 3M people in the US. An utterly different nation by any measure.
At least one of the signers expected changes over time per his writings on it.
And changes did occur over time. That’s why we are on 27 amendments to date.
They are only precious as they continue to be relevant to our common culture. If they become outmoded, there is no reason to bang our heads against the wall pretending they are immutable.


I’ve said it many times. Gun proponents should be able to articulate why the 2A is relevant today beyond “because it’s my right” FOR THEIR OWN GOOD. It is important that gun owners figure it out and stop the no compromise bullshit. They have put themselves on an all-or-nothing vector, and it is likely headed for a crash the way things are going.

Making that proactive and positive rationale isn’t difficult for free speech, or right to trial by jury, or abolishing slavery or women voting, etc. Those continue to be fundamentally important to daily life.

[leroy jenkins]

Yeah, if we enact things like background checks it's instant genocide. You need professional help.

Strawman. No one said instant. Get real stop being intellectually dishonest.

[Ted Striker]

Don Quixote lecturing the windmills