I don’t view it as a false premise.
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.