The Dunning-Kruger effect for would-be heroes.
(Didn’t make it back here in time for editing)
Were a huge percentage of those people ever faced with a situation where using the gun might actually be warranted, they’d probably curl up in a little ball and pee their pants in fear. :rolleyes:
If they were still alive, anyway. A gunman entering a space is going to aim first at anyone who’s aiming at him.
And with an automatic weapon?? Even Marshall Dillon couldn’t draw his gun fast enough (I watched a Gunsmoke rerun this afternoon…).
“Ammosexuals”-- I haven’t heard that term. Very apt.
Yes. The “good guy with a gun” myth may be sacred to the NRA folks, but it’s no better as a guide to reality than phrenology or spontaneous generation.
At a campaign event in Michigan tonight, Mike Pence set aside some time for a prayer for the victims of the Pittsburgh attack. That was thoughtful and appropriate.
Ha! Really, it wasn’t. Because the guy Pence got to deliver the prayer was a “Messianic Jew”, which is a Christian who adopts some Jewish cultural traditions and tries to convert Jews.
https://newrepublic.com/minutes/151946/mike-pence-got-rabbi-really-christian-pray-synagogue-dead
I’m trying to think of some fitting snark or expression of dismay, but I lack the vocabulary.
It strikes me as very unlikely that most of the Trump-Pence base would know the difference between Jews and “Messianic Jews” or would understand why anybody would care about it. “Come on, he was wearing one of those blue-and-white shawly things which is TV for Jewish-religious-guy! What’s the big deal?”
On the contrary. Messianic Jews are actually evangelical Christians.
A few days removed from the tragedy (and the series of events leading up to it), I wanted to comment on this. Understand I say this respectfully, as I know I often agree with you more than I disagree with you, and I’m not even sure we disagree in this instance.
I know I’ve been driving over the cliff with my comments lately. I admit that I’m pretty full of piss when I type, but I’d just remind everyone that our nation was was founded on outrage. There’s a time when outrage, and just plain rage, is the normal, well-adjusted reaction to what you’re seeing and feeling. If a society can’t look at the last 2 years and be outraged, then we’re in some very deep shit.
Yes, I know that. I was questioning whether most of the Trump-Pence “base” would know that.
It doesn’t have to be a minority in either the American sense or the numerical sense, nor a mob in the numerical sense. Just cops who either are too scared to intervene (which we’ve already seen) or who have orders not to.
The biggest battlefield in America, and in much of the world right now (see: Italian elections) is not a church or a sinagogue or a parking lot. It’s minds and souls. And the question is: what can we do to avoid people moving from “I’m scared because [jobs are scarce / I just got a bad diagnostic / my wife says she’s leaving me / my husband looked at another woman today in the supermarket]” to “it’s all Their fault”, where They are “anybody who’s not me”? I was going to write “and my blood relatives”, but those are a frequent target of mass murder too, and murder which often started with the same fears; they get labeled “domestic violence” but dead is dead.
(cont)
I can tell you that dismissing their fears is not it. You begin by recognizing those fears; by accepting that the fear is valid. While the issue may not look so scary to us, it is scary to that person. “Stop crying” has never gotten anybody to stop crying; “don’t get mad” has never calmed down someone who was already mad. Recognize the fears, then help them work through the fears; help them find solutions which work for them. That’s on the individual level. On the mass level, maybe it’s time to recognize that there is a difference between “people can say anything they want” and “any amount of stupidity must be reported as if it was a gem of wisdom or at least could be”. Now, I only work with people’s fears at the individual level; I’ve got neither training nor experience in working at the mass level. But there are those on the side of good who do, and if any of those reads this, I am telling you: get your head out of your arse! Figure out how to reach those scared people and counteract the flame-fanning, damnit, it’s your calling and your job!
Just a few years ago, this would have had every religious Jew in the world up in arms in rage, but, just like the pro-military types who shrugged their shoulders and smirked at the ‘I prefer the soldiers who weren’t captured’ comments from a draft dodger, this won’t ruffle any feathers, because they think Trump is on their side.
Not so much in the Pittsburgh community. Trump ain’t exactly all that popular here. (At least in Allegheny County).
Pence’s theocrat base would certainly know the difference, as would Pence himself. “Messianic Jews” were already a thing when I became a Christian nearly half a century ago.
JFTR, unless things have changed considerably in recent years, the label only applied to Jews who accepted Christ as their savior. If you were a gentile Christian, you couldn’t just dress up like a Jew and call yourself a ‘messianic Jew’ or ‘completed Jew’ or whatever.
Accordingly, they’ve always been kind of a big deal in evangelical Christianity. When Jews become Christians, it’s kinda like a trophy they can wave around that, to them, is proof that they’re right about everything, especially the Christian belief that the Old Testament foreshadows and witnesses to Jesus.
So Pence’s choosing to have a messianic Jew in rabbi garb give a prayer in observance of Saturday’s massacre isn’t just crapping on Jews by having a bogus rabbi get up and give a prayer on this occasion (because whether or not one regards a completed Jew as a Jew, a completed Jew dressing up as a rabbi is unequivocally a bogus rabbi), but the subtext is “you Jews should all become Christians, and then everything would be fine. We’re right, you’re wrong, get with the program.”
How compassionate. :rolleyes:
That’s awesome! Not a single person in the current administration has a clue. Every time they’re given a chance to show their humanity, they show their incredible lack thereof. Selfish, tone deaf, heartless, and callous–with the last one practically personified–are their only character traits. Is incompetence a character trait? Let’s toss that one in there, also.
That’s not correct: it is no myth. There have been numerous instances of the good guy with the gun saving the day.
Here’s one.
There are many, many others.
Really reaching with that one. The “good guy with a gun” caught the bad guy after the massacre. Even says so in the article:
Try again. :rolleyes:
Looks to me like it’s iffy as to whether he saved anything or anybody. The shooter had already exited the church where he shot all those people before the ‘good guy with a gun’ even showed up. So he didn’t save any lives within the church. Whether the shooter would have tried to harm anyone as he tried to escape the vicinity is completely a matter of conjecture.
Then I’m puzzled as to why you didn’t pick a more clear for-instance.
The bio of ‘Rabbi’ Loren Jacobs:
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I don’t see any mention in his bio of any rabbinical training. AFAICT, he became a ‘rabbi’ by saying he was one.
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This ‘synagogue’ (ETA: a messianic synagogue founded by Jacobs) exists to target Jews to try to convert them. As a born-again Christian, and as someone with Jewish heritage (through my father), I feel quite uncomfortable with the notion of focusing on converting Jews from both those vantage points.
As a Christian who had one kick-ass conversion experience that still reverberates in his life across all the decades since, I believe we Christians have got something very much worth sharing. But the Lord knows whose hearts are ripe for him: he can see into all hearts, and I definitely can’t. He knows who needs to hear what I have to say; I don’t.
Saying, “I’m gonna try to convert these people” shuts God out of the equation. By saying that, I’d be substituting my own desires for God’s deeper understanding. Which would be a mistake.
That wouldn’t be so bad, except that (as I said above) there’s a certain attitude within evangelical Christianity about converting Jews. And trying to convert Jews because they’re Jews rather than because they’re people you happen to know who are open to the possibility of knowing the Lord - in Terry Pratchett’s words, that’s “treating people as things” which is sin. (Pratchett isn’t canon, but if you’re treating your neighbor as a thing, you aren’t loving your neighbor as yourself. And that is canon.) They’re being converted more as trophies than as people. I find that quite abhorrent - and makes me wonder what they’re really being converted to.
And from the Jewish POV, of course, this targeting has been going on for most of the lifetime of the Christian faith, including such notable examples as the Spanish Inquisition. For obvious reasons, Jews regard it as a hostile assault. A more compassionate version of Christianity (and compassion was one of Jesus’ most distinct character traits) would listen to them and hear them, and relate to them as individuals, same as they’d relate to anyone else, rather than targeting them as a group.