Cite: 12 minutes prior to this, 3 posts previous (#185), longing for “the 50s and 60s” again, a theme so persistent in all your posts that it’s downright comical. Precisely the world of Father Knows Best (1954-1960), some cultural examples of which I cited. If you try to claim that this isn’t exactly the world you long for in all your whining, then you’re a transparent fucking liar. QED.
Strange. I read and listen to media, and there seems to be an awful lot of news there.
I may have an anti-gun bias, but protesting against a uniquely American gun environment where they are vulnerable to getting shot is clearly and incontrovertibly what the kids were marching for. It’s hard to imagine them marching for the opposite. The phrase “uniquely American” should be interpreted to mean “preventable, as evidenced by everywhere else in the world”.
Your car analogy is an epic fail. First of all none of the protests have ever been about “banning” anything, so we’ve got right-wing scaremongering hyperbole right off the bat. And not only do cars have a vital utility in every single day of everyday life, and not only would the entire economy collapse without them, but cars and drivers are all licensed, registered, and tracked, and subject to safety and competency regulation. We can only hope that the same may someday happen with guns. And on top of all that, cars and guns represent a vastly different risk/utility ratio.
As for drugs, it’s not clear what the kids would be marching in favor of. If they were marching in favor of “stricter enforcement of drug laws”, they ought to be appropriately ridiculed since those policies do not and have never fucking worked, and worse, are largely responsible for America’s world-record incarceration rate – disproportionately among minorities – and indirectly responsible for high crime rates.
I’m guessing that what Starving Artist may have meant to imply is that you couldn’t back up your claims that those were actual Father Knows Best episodes. After all, he seems to have already more or less acknowledged the facts about the timing of lead environmental impacts and the post-1960s crime wave, which was what the rest of your post was about.
In case that was in fact what Starving Artist was getting at, here are cites to the Father Knows Best episodes “Sentenced to Happiness” (one of several about the childishly irresponsible and slow-on-the-uptake but good-natured Hispanic gardener “Fronk”), and “Betty, Girl Engineer”.
The “Girl Engineer” episode sounds like a real doozy, according to this description:
And no, AFAICT there was never a black character appearing on FKB.
HAHAHAHA! London’s mayor is instating a ‘war on knives’ to combat the murders they’re experiencing in their decades old [del]liberal[/del] lead-laden society. To quote His Honor (or whatever mayors are called over there):
“There is never a reason to carry a knife!”
:smack:
That’s news to me.
So what’s next? Ball bats? Crowbars? Lengths of rope? Rocks-in-a-sock?
People who grow up in predominately liberal societies with few values and scant punishment either at home or in court will be prone to criminal behavior. Take away one weapon and they’ll use another.
Guns, btw, make a great defense against these types. The people in Brittain have been deprived of this ability by the very people responsible for the crime its population is victimized by now. You know…the end game of what’s being attempted here.
You need to smoke better weed dude, and quit drinking the bong water.
I will disagree with Mr Khan to the extent that it is my birthright as a Hominid to always have a sharp, pokey object in my possession, and has been for millions of years. :rolleyes:
Oh, damn, I misremembered – the engineer brought Betty chocolates – I thought he had brought her flowers! But yes, that’s the episode. It was kind of adorable if a little disturbing how Betty thought she could be a real person, but she learned her lesson and matured to become a future brainless wife. She’ll probably marry Doyle, the professional jerk, who’ll slap her around a bit when she needs smartening up.
And Frank (pronounced “Fronk”) is indeed the gardener. He actually has a native Mexican name but he doesn’t give a shit about it, or his heritage, because what he desperately wants is to be perceived as a real (i.e.- white Anglo-Saxon) American, so he just called himself Frank. The Andersons think he’s adorable. They might even throw him a dog biscuit.
Thanks for digging those up. There’s another episode where Betty meets an Air Force pilot and of course instantly falls in love. Then the pilot gets orders to redeploy to Alaska. As a sign that the orders have come through, he flies over the Anderson house and dips his wings to indicate that he is gone forever. Betty sheds a tear or two and then shrugs it off. We learn that military service is far more important than some stupid girl. This must be the new, improved Betty, the one who’s already been through the “Engineer” episode and has learned to be brainless and subservient to the inexplicable world of the men-folk.
And, once again, of course, not a black in sight.
I hope I don’t send Starving Artist (“Make America Great Again”) into convulsions of longing nostalgia with these accounts of life in the 50s.
In the sense that both crime rates and household gun ownership rates rose after the 1960s, peaked around 1990, and have been declining in the quarter-century since, sure. Of course, correlation is not causation, but the overall trends are qualitatively consistent with the hypothesis that American households (and individuals) tend to be more likely to have guns when crime rates are high and less likely to have guns when crime rates are low.(There are other factors involved such as the steady decline of hunting, but AFAICT they don’t invalidate the overall trend.)
However, the per capita gun ownership rates in the US, unlike the household gun ownership rates, aren’t being driven by crime rates at all. Even as US crime rates have dropped over the past 25 years, the number of guns per American has continued to increase.
What is happening is not that more and more Americans are choosing to own guns because they’re worried about crime, but rather that fewer and fewer Americans are choosing to own guns as crime rates drop.
Simultaneously, however, a subset of seriously dedicated gun owners are choosing to own **increasing numbers of guns, thus driving up the per capita gun ownership rate irrespective of actual crime rates. To the extent that, as I cited somewhere else a while back, just 3% of American adults now own approximately half of all the civilian guns in the US.
What is driving the gun-accumulation trend among that seriously gun-dedicated subset, I couldn’t say. Maybe a steady diet of eyeball-pulling “crime alarmism” from sensationalist media unrelated to actual crime rates? Or constant hype from conservative media about imminent gun confiscations? Or just hobbyist collector’s zeal? Could be motivated by a mixture of any number of things, but what it’s definitely not motivated by is any realistic assessment of current levels of crime.
I find it surprising that you read Starving Artist’s reply and concluded that he had the intellectual capacity to have a “real discussion”, regardless of his desires.
The British people as a whole don’t seem to agree with you. As one survey respondent commented,
It’s not just Britain. The vast majority of citizens in civilized countries all over the world reject the American conservative mantra that everyone has the inalienable right to get shot, but no fundamental right to health care. Strangely enough, most sane people think it should be the other way around.
[QUOTE=wolfpup;20896446 The vast majority of citizens in civilized countries all over the world reject the American conservative mantra that everyone has the inalienable right to get shot, but no fundamental right to health care.[/QUOTE]
Ha! I love this.
At least he bothers to post cites – you never do.
Sure. Real patriotic. Patriotism is why those three Republican diaper stains in South Carolina are getting their inbred cousins all fired up about some “We gonna secede if the libruls grab our guns” bullshit.
or maybe START.
The next time some right-winger accuses liberals of “gloating” about some tragedy or another, I’m going to point them at this post. SA is actually laughing about people being murdered. I guess it’s one of those conservative “values” we keep hearing about.
And he’s fallen into the trap of claiming that “if decent people had guns they’d be able to defend themselves against knives”, whereas if he’d engaged the few braincells he has he’d realize that if guns are more readily available to everyone then all the criminals will have them too. As it is at the moment, the UK have now moved the focus from guns, which can kill lots of people very quickly from a distance, to knives, which can only kill one person at a time from close up and are much easier to defend against. That’s already a pretty good “endgame”, unlike the one which would result from SA’s approach where the UK gets hundreds of mass shootings a year.
At the moment most of the relatively few shootings in the UK are gang-on-gang related (and the occasional unfortunate innocent bystander) which is rather telling - thanks to the difficulty in obtaining guns and the draconian possession laws, even criminals only use guns to defend themselves against other criminals with guns. And as a result I can walk the streets of London without worrying that some insane person is going to shoot me or my family. I mean, I walk the streets of the US the same way because I’m not a mewling coward, but at least in London I’m highly unlikely to actually be shot.
And no, nobody really needs to carry around a knife (unless you’re a chef, I suppose). As for the surge in knife crimes, if SA weren’t so fundamentally dishonest and bothered to do even the slightest bit of actual bit of research rather than automatically manufacturing a false narrative (another “value” he shares with many of his right-wing compatriots) he’d have found out that the likely cause was severe cutbacks in police numbers (although the Government are rather dubiously claiming that it’s just improved reporting). If he wants to blame anyone, he should blame the Conservatives, not liberals.
Here’s the funny thing, three of these items, if you’re found just carrying them around with no reasonable purpose in the case of ball bats and crowbars, are ALREADY illegal . . . in AMERICA!
CMC fnord!
A kid in my high school (in America) was arrested for having a baseball bat in the back seat of his car. This was in a neighborhood in a city in a state that all reliably vote Republican.
Forgot the second half of the story: A (different kid, different year), left his rifle in the rifle rack in the back window of his pickup in the school parking lot. He was called out of class and told to lock it away until class was over.
Soccer has eaten away at our countries values.