The main problem is not the cops. It’s Republicans blocking gun control.
To be sure, the behavior of cops are a terrible problem but don’t let Republicans change or confuse the subject. Republican inaction and greed is the main problem here.
Mocking gun activists, Stonekettle (Jim Wright) tweets, “Laws against drunk driving don’t work. The only thing that stops a drunk driver is more good people willing to drive drunk.
Like masks that way. Masks don’t work, said people ideologically opposed to mask mandates.
Ever get the impression that conservatives who have accused the left of moral relativism since Bill Buckley (before “projection” became a comeback) would rather enforce laws on a case-by-case basis against out-groups not of their tribe? Me too.
And yet they persist in running for office for the chance to pass and enforce laws:
Matt Taibbi wrote of two Americas in “Griftopia,”one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land … the government is something to be avoided.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money.”
Equal justice for all or resign.
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Children of the Enlightenment (COE) cannot resist standing up for facts and logic. Any more than children of fundamentalist Christianity can resist countering data that suggests things that you’re liable to read in the Bible ain’t necessarily so. It’s a reflex.
And it’s confounding. The conundrum is, when People of the Lie (POL) utter things that are monumentally stupid, people of the Age of Reason feel obligated to correct the record or at least to document the absurdities. But it’s difficult to know how many POL believe their own bullshit or are just trolling, knowing full well their logic-obsessed antagonists cannot reisist taking the bait.
Time after time, that ploy works to divert public attention from what should be the public’s and news media’s laser focus onto the lunatics’ unlogic instead.
The pointlessness of it is this. COE need to reassure themselves that reality is still governed by reason, not by tribal superstition, not by the stuff of evil spirits, bodily humors, and witch burning. Meaning, of course, in issuing correctives COE are talking to themselves. Facts no longer carry weight with the POL regardless of whether their absurdities are spoken cynically or seriously.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, of course, pivots effortlessly from condemning Democrats for trying to “politicize” mass murder to recommending policy. Your default assumption should be that he is cynical.
Congressman Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) concurs.
“Inside the Austin Fun House” legislatin’ is still the domain of evil spirits and witch burning.
I plead guilty to taking the bait.
Hillary Clinton (and others) point out for Abbott what’s changed.
We are all spitting into the wind.
UPDATE: One more loogie.
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If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.
I can only give you some cute to make you feel better tonight. And it’s not enough.
They can’t be serious:
Jeet Heer is right. At this point they’re just trolling us. They know this is monumentally stupid but they also know it doesn’t matter what they say about it, they have the full support of the gun zealot faction as long as they toe the party line. That’s all they need to maintain power as long as the rest of the Republicans go along with it. Which they will.
As John Amato quipped: “poor pouty baby”
Here’s what Kellyanne wrote in her book:
“Despite the mountains of money Trump had raised, his team simply failed to get the job done. A job that was doable and had a clear path, if followed. Rather than accepting responsibility for the loss, they played along and lent full-throated encouragement (privately, not on TV) when Trump kept insisting he won.”
“The team had failed on November 3, and they failed again afterward. By not confronting the candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied him the evidence he sought and the respect he was due. Instead supplicant after sycophant after showman genuflected in front of the Resolute Desk and promised the president goods they could not deliver.”
As I wrote before, some of this is sour grapes because she wasn’t hired to be his campaign manager again. (She always took credit for his tepid victory in 2016 even though that campaign was a dumpster fire too.) Still, she’s not wrong about this except that Trump was the one leading the “stop the steal” charge and clearly refused to listen to anyone. They were just sticking with their Dear Leader.
American exceptionalism
The United States comprises 4% of the world’s population
✓ 16% of the world’s Covid confirmed deaths
✓ 40% of world’s guns
✓ Only industrialized nation in the world with states making abortion illegalConfirmed Covid deaths, as of today
US 1,004,121
World 6,284,446“The United States has 46 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns “
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-does-u-s-gun-policy-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world
That was as of 2018, and has increased since thenThis
And this
Or this:
Federal assault gun ban expired in 2004
Originally tweeted by Eric Topol (@EricTopol) on May 27, 2022.
This piece in the New York Times says it all:
One of the most extraordinary moments of Donald J. Trump’s presidency was an hourlong meeting with U.S. senators in the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in which he forcefully argued for a litany of gun safety measures that the National Rifle Association had long opposed.
Mr. Trump’s support for gun control measures — which he unrolled on live television from the White House on Feb. 28, 2018 — astonished lawmakers from both parties. But the next day, N.R.A. officials met with Mr. Trump without any cameras or reporters in the room, and he immediately backed down.
That apparent surrender to N.R.A. pressure came to sum up Mr. Trump’s record on gun control in the eyes of his critics.
Unbeknownst to the public, however, Mr. Trump again pushed inside the White House for significant new gun-control measures more than a year later, after a pair of gruesome shooting sprees that unfolded over 13 hours. Those discussions have not previously been reported.
On Aug. 3, 2019, a far-right gunman killed 23 people at a Walmart store in El Paso. Early the next morning, a man shot and killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Both assailants used semiautomatic rifles.
At the White House the next day, Mr. Trump was so shaken by the weekend’s violence that he questioned aides about a specific potential solution and made clear he wanted to take action, according to three people present during the conversation.
“What are we going to do about assault rifles?” Mr. Trump asked.
“Not a damn thing,” Mick Mulvaney, his acting chief of staff, replied.
“Why?” Trump demanded.
“Because,” Mr. Mulvaney told him, “you would lose.”
“Say no more,” said Trump (probably) and he never mentioned it again.
Even Trump knew that the real American carnage was being caused by his followers’ ridiculous addiction to guns. But he, like the whole country, is held hostage by the selfish, brainwashed gun nuts who believe that they are ciphers in this world without a fucking firearm to give them a sense of identity. If they can’t strut sound with AR-15s slung over their shoulders they are nothing. What pathetic creatures they are.
They were afraid of the psychopath with body armor and semi-automatic rifles. Of course they were.
When are the cops going to break with their tribe and come out against assault weapons? Or do they truly believe that allowing people to have these lethal toys is more important than saving the lives of American citizens, kids — even themselves?
n the wake of the horrific mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas this week some people expected the National Rifle Association (NRA) to cancel its annual meeting and extravagant gun show which starts today in Houston. The city, however, has a binding contract that prohibits it from canceling the show unilaterally. But the mayor, Democrat Sylvester Turner, asked the gun group to voluntarily postpone. They declined.
That’s to be expected, of course. The NRA has never let a mass shooting get in the way of gathering for fun and profit. The Washington Post’s Gillian Brockell reminded us this week that they did exactly the same thing after Columbine, the first of the modern school shootings that have plagued America for more than two decades. That mass killing took place in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver where the NRA convention was scheduled to take place just days later. In that case, the Denver mayor told them the city didn’t want them there and even offered to pay them for their trouble if they would cancel. They still refused.
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Last year, NPR correspondent Tim Mak came into possession of some recorded calls between NRA officials right after Columbine which showed that their primary concern at the time was that they would look weak if they canceled the meeting. In the end, after contemplating creating a “victims fund” and deciding it would look like an admission of guilt, their only compromise was to cancel the gun show portion of their convention and shorten their gathering to just one day. According to Brockell, NRA president Charlton Heston went on to give a memorable speech that year “blaming the media for scapegoating NRA members as somehow responsible for the tragedy, while ‘racing’ to ‘drench their microphones with the tears of victims.'” The next year he returned to give one of the most famous culture war speeches in history:
Those are the famous final words of the speech but he said a lot more than that. Heston declared war:
I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. I’m sure you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you, the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is…
As I’ve stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are — are not the only issue. No, it’s much, much bigger than that. I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain accepted thoughts and speech are mandated.
That was almost a quarter century ago so all this recent wailing about “cancel culture” is just a new term for the same culture war that’s been raging for years. And guns have been at the heart of it because the NRA put them there.
I’ve written a lot over the years about Wayne LaPierre and his fantastically successful gun rights movement, for which he can pretty much take total credit. He saw the potential to turn the sporting and hunting organization into a political powerhouse and through his public relations and propaganda skills met his goals in the matter of a few short years. In doing so he made gun ownership a social identity for the American right wing.
In 2008, as Barack Obama was about to take office LaPierre made explicit what Heston had alluded to in his speech eight years before. He embraced the emergent populist right and made it his own, railing against the establishment elite. By 2012, in the wake of the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, he had a full-fledged agenda just waiting to be appropriated by Donald Trump:
Four years later, LaPierre expanded on the threats the elite posed to encompass free speech, religious liberty, even the ability of people to start small businesses or choose for themselves what kind of health care they want. Drug dealing illegal immigrants were being allowed to pour over the Southern border, he railed. Criminals in big cities were free to prey on innocents because judges were so lenient. “Not our issues, some might say.” He paused, and then countered: “Oh, but they are.”
The NRA has been battered by scandal in recent years, with LaPierre at the center of it. While he remains as the head of the organization, the state of New York has filed suit against him and others for what the judge in the case recently said if proven “tell a grim story of greed, self-dealing, and lax financial oversight at the highest levels of the National Rifle Association.” That same judge also ruled that the NY Attorney General did not have the authority as she claimed to dissolve the organization altogether. So the NRA will live on one way or the other.
Most commentators seem to believe the organization has lost its clout, having gone through bankruptcy and then spending far less in the last election cycle than it had in the past. And perhaps it’s past its prime. Politicians are no longer afraid of Wayne LaPierre or the money the NRA might spend against them. But they are afraid of their own voters who have absorbed the NRA’s propaganda so thoroughly that they no longer need prompting from the organization. They believe those words from Charlton Heston in their bones.
The New York Times’ Carl Hulse reported on the GOP’s obstinacy on this issue quoting Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, who often says the quiet part out loud:
Asked Wednesday what the reaction would be from voters back home if he were to support any significant form of gun control, the first-term Republican had a straightforward answer: “Most would probably throw me out of office,” he said.
It’s hard to say what will happen to the NRA. If they do go down, there are other groups out there waiting to fill the void. But the truth is that it’s no longer a matter of money or Washington lobbying. While according to polling there are many GOP voters who would be in favor of common sense gun regulation, the hardcore gun rights absolutists are not. And there are enough of them that Republican leaders don’t believe they can defy them. In fact, they obviously believe it is a big electoral winner for them, according the Times reports:
More than 100 television ads from Republican candidates and supportive groups have used guns as talking points or visual motifs this year. Guns are shown being fired or brandished, or are discussed but not displayed as candidates praise the Second Amendment, vow to block gun-control legislation or simply identify themselves as “pro-gun.”
And it’s not just macho dudes slinging around AR-15s either. Every Republican, no matter how inane it might appear, must show their gun bonafides.
Not one of these people will change their minds on gun reform no matter how many little kids are gunned down in their classrooms. Unfettered gun rights are fundamental to their social and political identity.
I’m sure LaPierre is ready to party with Donald Trump and enjoy the fruits of his labor and the adulation of the faithful at the NRA meeting tonight. His job is done.