The Thread Where We Discuss Guns and Gun Control

[Lexicus]

the worst America has to offer.

If that were true we'd be sitting pretty, wouldn't we?

 

[Farm Boy]

Who do you think you're railing against with all that talk of oligarchs and capital rents trickling down their ills through enforcing their basic form on society as a whole?

Certainly not inside trading financiers with spouses that are powerful in government, right? I remember what San Fransisco looked like when I was young. I know what it looks like now.

 

[Lexicus]

Who do you think you're railing against with all that talk of oligarchs and capital rents trickling down their ills through enforcing their basic form on society as a whole?

A system; I'm less concerned with the individuals in the system, they come and go but the system remains

That's why we need policy change and not bash the rich with a hammer one at a time change

Anyway if you want to judge individuals then we have many, many worse people than Pelosi and her husband. They're lizards, sure, but they haven't given their souls to the Enemy.

 

[Farm Boy]

And you are expecting this policy change from...

 

[Lexicus]

And you are expecting this policy change from...

"Expecting" is the wrong word. I hope for policy change from a broad coalition of voters whose first task would be taking control of the Democratic Party away from people like Pelosi.

I will say your take on Pelosi is somewhat interesting; I'd have thought you'd be more grateful to folks like her for serving as your first line of defense against the AOC types you seem to really loathe.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Outspoken, vaguely progressive women?

 

[Farm Boy]

I didn't call her the worst, did I?

She's merely close to it.

San Francisco still gentrified as hell. Seriously, super rich people surrounded by folks who can't afford to commute to work there. It's like it goes straight from strong holders to homeless peasant serfs. They can't leave, because the benefits in the brutal hickdoms they could emigrate to are violence... it's like, waaaay to close to be coincidence. Right? Maybe that's my hyperbole. But yeah, peasants had to make pokey things out of farm tools for a reason, then, too. "Swords into ploughshares" I think the saying goes.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Yes truly AOC is amongst the worst politicians in America, many of whom include advocates for pedophilia, rape, lynchings and a return to jim crow.

Very sane take

 

[Farm Boy]

I called Mr. Pelosi the worst.

Lex is talking about AOC. Who just happens to be a person powerful in government, who are now the people you are talking about. AOC is not as powerful as Mrs. Pelosi, true, by quite a measure.

 

[Lexicus]

Pelosi is now out of the government, in case we had forgotten.

I know what San Francisco looks like, incidentally...(morpheus.jpg) what if I told you the problem in San Francisco is capitalism?

 

[Farm Boy]

Capitalism does have ills it falls to, yes. Carnegie* built beautiful libraries. Very noble.

The GI Bill came later. It was a work of the hands.

*That was a 1955(performance) of a 1946(written) song. What were "the elders" warning about with their fading messages in '55(when it hit top billboards charts)?

 

[Samson]

Pelosi is now out of the government, in case we had forgotten.

I know what San Francisco looks like, incidentally...(morpheus.jpg) what if I told you the problem in San Francisco is capitalism?

I know what San Francisco looks like, but I cannot work out how it works. My brother used to live there, on a healthy six figure tech salary and only just afforded a small bedsit because it was rent controlled, he could not afford to have a child there. It is impossible to get to without a car, and you cannot park anywhere. Yet it is full of apparently low wage service staff. How do they live?

 

[Farm Boy]

How do they live?

I don't even think I'm kidding. Am I?

 

[Lexicus]

I know what San Francisco looks like, but I cannot work out how it works. My brother used to live there, on a healthy six figure tech salary and only just afforded a small bedsit because it was rent controlled, he could not afford to have a child there. It is impossible to get to without a car, and you cannot park anywhere. Yet it is full of apparently low wage service staff. How do they live?

They have 3-hour round-trip commutes on the BART, is my understanding

 

[Gorbles]

I'm thinking to a conversation I remember watching between Lex and El_Mac and some other people after Captain Hammer Underpants cracked Mr. Pelosi on the noggin for being the worst America has to offer. The conversation was about expressions of sympathy or care as opposed to the people who rolled their eyes. The eye-rollers were getting this sort of reflected shame that this post I'm quoting now contains. "Oh, you don't even care." El_Mac actually had a pretty astute observation - the people offering more care in that situation were generally the people who saw that as costing essentially nothing. There would be no personal action to follow up on it. The "uncaring" were more likely to be the people who saw "caring" as an action of the hands not of the heart. And those actions are finite. Sommer, up above, lays out the line that gun control advocates need to hit if they want all these guns gone. It's a political threshold. It's an action of the hands, not of the heart. And everyone's time and attention are indeed limited. Society actually only can handle so much at any given time. The problem is upstream of the symptom. Spending the effort at the symptom treats what makes the gentry uncomfortable - in the hopes that they can go back to quietly enjoying the society that advantages them, with all the costs nicely out of sight. It might even be worse, in some ways, than not treating the symptom. When you can't ignore the festering wounds, you might actually invest some real effort into the diseases themselves.

I said "we", not "you". This is a problem at scale, and I was treating it as such. Personal shame might pop up along the way.

But again, this is pretty apocryphal. What diseases, specifically? Yes, mass shootings are the most prolific of events that tend to get people to move. Yes, the act of the shooting itself is downstream from the owning of many, many guns. The fact that popular discourse is at "ban guns" not "regulate guns" is because we're downstream of history itself. The NRA has been playing their song for a long, long time now. Many other countries have had this issue, sans-2A, and have gone on their merry way and made changes that in no way make all guns illegal.

It's hard to know what the sticking point is if the sticking point is never actually stated plainly. And that gets frustrating (not for me, just generally), because that only favours one side of the discourse.

 

[E.man]

US women arrested in Sydney with golden gun in luggage​

A US woman has been arrested in Australia after a 24-carat gold-plated gun was found in her luggage.
The woman, who has not been identified, arrived in Sydney from Los Angeles and did not have a permit for the firearm, the Australian Border Force (ABF) said.
She could face up to 10 years in jail.
Photos released by the ABF showed an airport scan of the woman's luggage, revealing the firearm inside her bag. A second photo showed the handgun after the bag was opened.

In a statement, an ABF official said that sophisticated detection technology had helped stop a dangerous weapon from entering the country.
"Time and time again, we have seen just how good ABF officers are at targeting and stopping illegal, and highly dangerous, goods from crossing Australia's border," ABF Commander Justin Bathurst said.

Officials said the 28-year-old woman was charged and appeared before the Downing Centre Local Court on Monday, where she received bail.
She could also face the cancellation of her visa and removal from Australia, pending the outcome of the court proceedings.
Airline passengers on domestic flights in the US can travel with firearms in a checked bag when they are unloaded and locked in a hard-sided case. Travellers must also tell airline representatives that they intend to travel with the weapon during check-in.
But in 2022, record number of firearms was confiscated from US airport passengers. A total of 6,301 guns were taken at checkpoints as of mid-December, the transportation Security Administration (TSA) said.
By contrast, Australia has some of the most comprehensive firearm laws in the world. They were enacted after 35 people were killed in 1996 by a gunman in Tasmania.
In the wake of the attack, all automatic and semi-automatic weapons were outlawed, and some 600,000 weapons were surrendered as part of a mandatory government buyback scheme.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-65389727

I watch some 'Border Control USA ' type thing on TV. So often yanks are driving into Canada with undeclared guns "because we can at home ". One was a retired judge ! Don't seem to understand it's a different country that might have different laws !

 

[Farm Boy]

What diseases, specifically?

Social diseases? What are the social ills of our times? Inequality is pretty massive there, isn't it? Isolation, food deserts, class ossification, depression, the things that drive, what Lex put as, what people are looking for guns to fix. I'm adding what suicides are looking to fix, too, to the costs of that, and I'm including the cost of all the years of misery in lives lived, and we're going to have to include all the sub-suicidal(as Kyr put it, it's hard to kill yourself) years of misery we aren't even bothering to record in this conversation because it doesn't "number well."

 

[Birdjaguar]

Moderator Action: The topic is guns!

 

[Sommerswerd]

You are there, right? As posted above, there have been 202 this year, are they all on the news? The fact that they have to be as horrific as this to get attention says it all.

Well that's certainly a legitimate question, but I would say that we aren't quite to the point where no mass shooting is deemed as newsworthy... some of them still get significant coverage.

So the "there" of your question is a matter of perspective, a spectrum/range. If I'm going to Disney World and the kids say "Are we there yet?" when you cross into the (place formerly known as the) "Reedy Creek Improvement District"... technically you are "there", but you aren't within view of Spaceship Earth or Cinderella's Castle. As a related, but tangential aside... the first time I took my kids to Disney World, we were "there" for hours before my kids actually realized they were at Disney World... it wasn't until my oldest (6 years old at the time) actually looked up and stared at Cinderella's Castle which was across the walkway/courtyard from where we were standing, that he asked if it was, in-fact, Cinderella's Castle, and only when I confirmed that it was, did it dawn on them that they were actually at Disney World and had in-fact been there all day.

But yes, your question is essentially the concern I was expressing... that this is where we are headed and that new norm, where mass shootings are no longer newsworthy at all... is in the process of manifesting in real time right in front of our eyes, with each passing day. Whether we are "there" as in the general vicinity of "there", the parking lot of "there", or actually riding Space Mountain, careening through oblivion, screaming for our lives... is up for debate.

I guess in Dallas they were never going to list "write to their representative" or "Join an anti-gun protest organisation" there.

"Thoughts and prayers"... beautifully (tragically) illustrated.

But yeah, peasants had to make pokey things out of farm tools for a reason, then, too. "Swords into ploughshares" I think the saying goes.

I think you have that one backwards... its about the warriors turning the pointy things into farm tools to become farmers... not the other way around, right?

 

[Birdjaguar]

2A folks want gun violence to be an everyday event in America. They want shooting people normalized for regular folks. The best way to avert that is , well.... best not be spelled out.