I guess we’ve reached the part of your performance where you confuse me with some other poster.

I am aware that most people feel insulted by accurate descriptions. Some take that as a means to improve themselves, and some use it as a reason to double down and ensure those descriptions are as accurate as possible.
Which doesn’t describe our back and forth–ours involves you intentionally distorting much of what I’ve said for your own purposes–and then posting a silly ad hominem attack.

You know, this is a very reasoned analysis, and one I happen to agree with. But your credibility pretty much gets annihilated when you pull a boner like “why aren’t you worried about all those other deaths?” This changes the conversation from advocating for a certain political strategy, to shitting on people for the offense of reacting to today’s current events instead of yesterday’s current events. And it suggests that the deaths of children don’t bother you nearly as much as the hurt feelings of your gun collection.
So I guess congratulations on defeating yourself at whatever you were trying to do here.
That’s a reasonable opinion, I’m certainly not perfect at expressing myself. From my personal perspective, I am largely “numb” to school shootings. While they are terrible, I don’t react to them emotionally. I did when Columbine happened, I did when Newtown happened, I even did when Marjory Stoneman Douglas happened, but I don’t really think I have that in me anymore.
There’s actually been a historically bad run in American public discourse and public events, at least since 2016 and maybe a little earlier. I genuinely have done some some self-assessment, and I think after the double whammy of four years of Trump, covid, the 1/6 insurrection–and a thousand cuts beyond that, I’ve found it somewhat insightful the commentators out there that suggest wallowing in all of this can be mentally harmful. I actually felt that way myself.
I still believe we have responsibilities as citizens and part of society, so I don’t think we can just put our fingers in our ears and say “la la la”, but I think emotionally internalizing all of these bad things, for me at least, is not healthy–and I’ve chosen to quite deliberately stop doing that.
When you take the emotion out of it, what I find myself left with are the policy questions, and I frankly think the emotions related to these events have proven to be unhelpful. I think they might seem to be a powerful motivator for change, but because of how our country has developed, they develop equally, and maybe stronger, counter-reactions because they are now seen as incidents that the “gun grabbing left”, will seek to “weaponize” against gun owners to enable mass gun confiscation.
Despite what another poster said, I don’t think I’m the smarter person in the world or even on these forums, I don’t have magic political answers, I have opinions–which is largely what any other poster on these forums shares in political threads–political opinions. I don’t know how to beat the GOP, but my opinion is the emotion laden approach on guns has not worked and will not work, so I want to shift the dialogue to systems based, not event based, thinking, various process changes and regulation changes, not confiscation. [I also am genuinely not supportive of any kind of large scale confiscation, I don’t want to be accused of trying to hide that.]
I’ll say this though–I posted a political opinion in a political thread, I made sure it was the politics thread. There is a breaking news thread in MPSIMS that I have not posted in, there are multiple threads where people can just be recreationally mad. I don’t view it as a threadshit or dishonest to try to generate a political discussion in a political thread. Frankly, I think you guys were primed and ready to attack anyone who had any political opinion in that thread other than “OH MY GOD THEY ARE ALL SO EVIL”, and that’s simply what happened. Maybe I’m off base on that, but frankly this forum is fairly predictable, and the evidence I’ve seen suggests I’ve got the right of it.