Over in P&E right now, Martin is schooling us all on how we REALLY don’t care about solving gun violence, we are just caught up in the national frenzy. The rest of the time, we ignore it.
I wonder why there is a big contingent of people who are mostly concerned about solving the ~450 (c. 2020) gun homicides that occur in “fantastical and media frenzy inspiring” mass shootings but seem oblivious or uninterested in the 13,000 other gun homicides that occur.
I have opinions on this idiotic point of view, certainly, but I really, really, really wanted to call Martin fucknugget, an asshat, a blithering bawbag. Join me, if you like.
Martin_Hyde you’re a hateful little toad of a person. Fuck all the way off.
How about, fuck you @Martin_Hyde for voting R for decades when the rest of us here could clearly see it was a garbage party filled with garbage people. Congrats on finally realizing this but your concern for how the Democrats conduct themselves isn’t a virtue.
The person who started this thread is one of the forum’s infamously lowest quality posters, there is limited reason you should seek to associate yourself with behavior of that nature.
Yep. I stopped replying to his “whataboutism look over there you hypocrites” BS when I saw where it was going. Why do we care about this 15 dead little children when there are many other dead people? Fuck him.
Sorry I thought the thread in question was a political thread. If it had been labeled “let’s cry about this topic” I would have stayed away, maybe that was the intent of the thread–if so I think we should get it edited so no one like me opens it accidentally.
In your experience is talking like that an effective way to communicate? How old are you?
I’m done with this guy. I should stay away from gun posts. USA is fucking stupid when it comes to guns. We’ll just keep going on accepting tens of thousands of gun murders every year for our “freedumbs”.
This isn’t true–I was actually intentionally opening the floor to the politics inherent to incidents like this, which I think frankly most of the regular suspects I see posting in these threads are in a grave delusion about.
I think Martin was giving a mixture of bullshit and truth.
Bullshit: There is a big contingent of people that only care about mass shootings. Unless that “big contingent” is describing media outlets crafting stories, this seems like something pulled out of his ass.
Truth: Democrats are bad at messaging. Well, yeah, they are.
FWIW I’m an antagonistic person, when I want to fight, I typically make it very, very obvious. You can take that how you will–but my intent was not to spread bullshit. I don’t do Paul_in_Saudi style passive aggression, if I’m seeking to piss you off, I generally am not going to do it in a subtle way. It was literally me being very, very tired of this forum’s response to situations like this. And not just this forum, but most of the country. It should go without saying I’m more than tired of the Republican response. This is a community in which I am active, and so I made a choice to try and stand in front of the train.
My initial post in that thread was an attempt to throw up a red flag and say “Hey, you’re doing it again, buying into a crazy hype story and settling in to spend 400 posts with a mixture of righteous outrage, condemnation of dummy gun owners, righteous outrage at Republican politicians tweet out thoughts and prayers while previously tweeting out celebrations of anti-gun control votes in the Congress etc etc.” Meanwhile, I genuinely believe the Democrats net very few real votes off this issue–there aren’t that many first order gun control voters, the ones who do exist probably already were culturally aligned to the Democrats as is. Meanwhile, I genuinely think the Democrats have lost tons of votes on this issue since 1998, or arguably since 1994. I grew up in rural Virginia, spent tons of time in West Virginia.
Anti-gun rhetoric is probably the single biggest thing that gutted the rural Democratic base in the Virginias, bar none. The choice of rhetoric has serious political consequences. I also think it has serious practical consequences.
On top of that, it just doesn’t work, I think I “get it”, and maybe I’m wrong–but you guys really think that just like Charley Brown going to kick the football, some day there will be a mass shooting so egregious, so disgusting, so unimaginable, that it will finally cause significant numbers of gun control skeptical politicians and voters to agree with your position.
That day will never come, ever, ever, ever.
Meanwhile, the GOP and NRA correctly realized that they could turn mass shootings, which were at one point seen as a “risk” for their agenda, into wins–and I think they have largely succeeded in doing that. Look at how gun sales often spike after highly publicized mass shootings, the gun lobby literally makes money off these shootings. The coup de grace comes in the days that follow, when the GOP gets to juxtapose how you only care about crime when it involves a scary gun, because if that wasn’t true, why are you talking about banning long guns again? Why are you against police in the very big cities that are “overrun with crime?” Why are you indifferent to illegal border crossings?
I think this is a product of a combination of savvy GOP messaging, and a generational failure of Democratic messaging. Believe me or don’t believe me, that was what I wanted to point out in that thread, and given that the thread is literally about the politics of a mass shooting, I believed it to be entirely on topic–a moderator later responded that it was.
