You are correct.
No, you can not purchase a SMG legally in the USA.
Ah I was just trying to switch terms from “AR” but “SMG” was the wrong term to use.
It’s not quite as simple as all SMGs being illegal (e.g. you can buy an old gun), but it’s also not so relevant to the point I was making.
One of the things that has changed is the dwindling of the middle class in the US. It used to be that on average, the middle class in the US was the best off in the world (yes, I know there are a lot of subjectivities there, starting with “middle class”).
However, the US middle class has been dwindling and on average income levels in other countries have been increasing. Similarly, poorer Americans make less than the poor in other countries.
One could speculate that a loss of economic power could trigger increasing anger and despair.
Here’s a couple of NYT articles on it:
From 2014:
And from 2019
I’ve been wondering why there doesn’t seem to be a ‘gun culture’ of respect, discipline, and compassion around the use of guns, similar to the cultures around other martial arts. Obviously, there is training on the use of the weapon, but are there martial art schools and philosophies for guns like there are for karate, tai chi, etc?
When I was a kid, the NRA, of all freaking folks, were associated with courses that taught people how to be responsible gun owners. This is how you clean your gun. Never, ever, EVER, leave a shell in your gun. Don’t hunt while intoxicated. This is not a toy, don’t use it to impress people. Don’t threaten people with a gun in your possession, that’s a crime. Don’t shoot if there’s any possibility of hitting another hunter or farm animal or anything else living that’s not what you’re aiming at. This is how you align your scope with precision. Etc.
It’s too bad they turned into this almost unparodyable “we’ll do whatever it takes to sell as many guns to as many people as possible with no constraints on any gun-related behavior” lobby. No one has stepped into their previous niche.
…I found out that John Hinkley Jr was on Twitter the other day. He has over 26,000 followers. And a Youtube account. Where he plays guitar. And sings songs. His last twitter message a few days ago was:
I’m reading this thread and it seems like a quaint throwback to debates in the early 2000’s. It’s like, everything everyone is saying is pretty much correct.
But we have appeared to have crossed the Rubicon.
This here isn’t a parody video.
Millions of Americans agree with the message “I’ll do whatever I want with my guns.” Millions of Americans would have watched that video and nodded with approval. This complete and utter bit of madness captured on video is a real person elected to represent the people of their district. And this person isn’t even the most extreme of extremists.
Kyle Rittenhouse said on Twitter the other day that “I am alive today because I was able to protect myself.” That tweet got over 100,000 likes.
People now exist in competing realities. Millions are like the people here in this thread, where mass shootings and death are horrific and we should be doing everything we can to stop it.
And there are millions of other people who. Just. Don’t. Care.
Everybody is locked into their own ecosystems now. The algorithms will show you only the things that you agree with. And they hide everything else.
And everything is escalating, and those with power are doing nothing about it, so now we are in the position where many people genuinely believe that mass shooting can be solved by arming teachers, banning doors, where companies have started to develop non-lethal, remotely-operated TASER drones as part of a long-term plan to stop mass shootings.
We have entered the Idiocracy phase of human existence. Where the solution to police incompetence, corruption and ongoing malice is to give them billions more dollars. Where conspiracy theories are now official political party platforms. Where the Supreme Court is lost for a generation.
Murderers are celebrities and you can reach out and chat to them if you like, right now, from your home. Trials can be influenced by TikTok.
This isn’t an American only thing. Everything is breaking in different ways all around the world.
What is different about America is the slavish devotion to a document put together by a bunch of dead white dudes a few centuries ago. We can see it with the flags. With the jingoism. With the pledge of allegiance happening daily, in schools. With the exceptionalism. Freedom. The Right to Bear Arms. These aren’t just values to uphold. They are your identity. Take them away and you aren’t American any more.
Americans have been bombarded with propaganda all of their lives. Things accelerated with the advent of the “24-hour-news cycle.” And they accelerated again with things like Goobergate, which taught the people in power how easy it was to weaponise the masses.
What is different now (to what it might have been even ten years ago) is that everything is in chaos. Everything has become destabilised. Disinformation is happening at the industrial level. The bad guys are in charge and the good guys don’t know what to do about it.
Those “frustrated young men” are following Rittenhouse on Twitter. They are buying tickets to Jordan Peterson seminars. They are listening to Ben Shapiro podcast. They are true believers in the Great Replacement Theory. Nobody here can relate to them. Nobody here listens to the same things that they do. They exist in an alternate reality.
AHunter3’s reply is illuminating, but I’ll add: the package the right has been selling for decades now (principally via Fox News but even before Fox News, from Republican political messaging) is:
What is being sold is the flattery that Your Birthright is Dominance. That flattery cannot include any message to the effect that effort is part of exercising that birthright—no, if you’re born with it, why do you need to bother learning? Discipline yourself?–that’s completely unnecessary! This is your birthright!
It’s a message completely divorced from the principles of martial arts (to say the least).
Heck, anyone trying to fill the previous niche would be derided and ridiculed as “Fudds”.
And not even your own Dominance, but the notion that you are part of the annointed Dominant group. Individual-you may be a mere peon having a miserable time of it (so let no one tell you you have “privilege”!) but you are still one of the Real Americans by and for whom the country was founded and your ways are the right ways.
Not that I’m a fan of them, but that stuff is real vanilla normie-Republican shit compared to the content that the future shooters are consuming. These guys are spending their existence in much more sinister online spaces, and I’m not going to name anything specifically but there are many rabbit holes. It’s not frustrated young men listening to Jordan Peterson, it’s deeply disturbed young men egging each other on directly in an environment where NO remotely civil or productive discourse takes place, only an endless stream of “black-pilled” nihilism.
This is what passes for a “community” for these guys. They’re not playing in a band, they’re not working on cars, they’re not playing cards or D&D with other human beings in real life. They’re just soaking up pure unadulterated insanity.
I agree with most of what you posted, except I just think it’s even WORSE than you imagine.
I think that’s downplaying it too much @Lamoral . Sure, many of these people radicalize on 8chan or whatever, sharing memes about african “savages” and CTs about Jews. But a lot of these mass shooters also quote arguments and positions espoused by Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson et al (though I loathe Jordan Peterson, he’s on the lighter end of all this).
A lot of the discourse by such commentators is a lot more extreme than it used to be, and is no longer merely “dog whistles” to the white supramist lunatics.
Absolutely. Though most of those being flattered about their “birthright” must realize that they, themselves, will never be Pharaoh/ Fuhrer, they probably do fantasize (at the least) about sitting at the Fuhrer’s right hand. (While fully enjoying their “victimhood” as poor white men, unjustly held down by the _____ and the ______, of course.)
The almost-certain reality that in a fascist America most of them will be mere serfs, bullied and exploited by the oligarchs and their enforcers, never occurs to them.
Of course there will be the small compensation of a return to the Good Old Days as described by Lyndon Johnson:
…I can assure you, with the fullness of my heart, that I’m fully aware of what is happening in those “sinister online spaces.” It isn’t “worse than I can imagine.” Because I’ve seen it.