Only pitting because I got a warning for a response when I forgot that the ridiculous question being asked was in - as has been noted - the worst-disguised Pit thread in the history of Great Debates.
…not because 20 kids got shot. Because the gun lickers thought it might become marginally harder to buy more guns.
In a discussion of the ‘risk of further gun control measures’, the stinking moral carcass of Kable gives us this little gem:
20 little boys and girls, along with 6 teachers, die in a fucking blaze of bullets, and Kable and his gun lickin’ crew decide that the real tragedy here is someone might try to do something to make it a little less likely that this would happen again.
As if we needed any further evidence that gun nutters like Kable and his ilk don’t give a fuck how many people die due to their gun craze, as long as they can keep their grubby little hands around some hot, hard steel. No doubt they view the 20 little kids in Newton to be American heros, ‘freedom enthusiasts’, even - proud symbols of the right to own guns, and more guns, and even more guns. Just in case, you know. Maybe they can dig six feet down and pin little Purple Hearts on their blown-out little chests.
He’s a fucking joke. I’m convinced he’s a Colbertesque agent hired directly by the Brady Campaign to sell everybody on precisely how fucking loony these gun-nuts are.
He is a joke. You’ll notice that very few other SDMB gun advocates will have anything to do with him - only one or two that I can think of, and they’re not terribly bright themselves. It’s pretty clear that he had to start that pit thread in GD just because nobody in the pit takes any further note of him, and then had to up the ante with trollish comments about Newtown.
I recall it took less than a day for some on the Intertubes to start floating the theory that the Newtown massacre was a government false-flag operation. There were even accusations that a retired teacher living near the school, who gave shelter to some kids fleeing, was in on it.
And we can expect the same thing after the next massacre. The meme has gone metastatic.
I don’t blame you for your outrage, but I want to point out two things. First, this point:
which you made in the GD, and in your OP, is not at all accurate. Stricter background check laws were the least restrictive laws proposed after the Newtown shooting - there were plenty of politicians calling for outright bans, e.g. on all semi-auto weapons, and plenty of bans passed in state legislatures as a result. The issue was certainly not about it merely being “marginally harder” to buy guns, and your repeatedly bringing that up suggests you haven’t actually made any effort to understand the other side’s position.
Second - you are getting outraged by dreaming up ridiculous fantasies of what is going through gun-rights supporters minds. No one thought the Newtown shooting was anything but a terrible tragedy. The concern was that the anti-gun crowd would take advantage of the tragedy to achieve their political goals, and pass mostly ineffective and pointless laws that would disproportionately affect law-abiding citizens and would not be normally be feasible to pass without the temporary benefit of being able to exploit people’s emotional response to 20 kids getting killed just before Christmas.
Embedded in that concern is the realization that the Newtown shooting was horrible and gut-wrenching. You don’t honestly think gun rights supporters are all sociopaths, who weren’t bothered by it? Everyone recognized how horrible it was. Getting outraged because Kable, in a brief post a year after the fact, skipped right to the logical consequence of every sane human being’s emotional reaction to the shooting without actually mentioning it explicitly is unjustified, and makes it look like you’re just looking for an excuse to get outraged.
But I understand. It’s much easier to justify your own positions when you can convince yourself that your opposition is solely comprised of a bunch of lunatics and sociopaths, rather than people who have rational reasons for their own beliefs.
I have no memory of Kable’s positions, and whether they are mostly rational or mostly lunacy, but there is nothing outrageous about that post he made.
No one is claiming Newtown wasn’t a big tragedy. The argument is that it makes no sense to implement a knee jerk reaction which punishes law abiding citizens but does nothing to stop homicidal maniacs.
Your sensationalized ad hominem attack is a great metaphor for the immediate “let’s pass these bills before logic and reason and constitutionality gets in the way!” response you seem to favor.
So people who have been arguing that the gun culture in this country is way too overblown and who have been saying for years that guns need stronger regulation are only acting in a knee-jerk fashion when what they’ve been worrying about all that time actually comes to pass.
Look, when some fucker greases 20 first-graders, there is nothing knee-jerk about saying, “See! What the fuck man?”
You know what is knee-jerk? When some fucker greases 20 first graders and the only thing some random dick will worry about is how much it’s going to cost him to buy another gun.
Wait, you mean the guns don’t fire themselves? I’ll be damned. The way this debate usually goes it’s the evil “assault weapons” that have to be regulated, not “some fucker”.
I’ve got an idea: how about we focus on “some fuckers” so that a) theycan’t purchase a gun, b) they get whatever help they need, and c) we try to prevent things like Newtown from happening again? Crazy, I know. Of course, every time that suggestion comes up it gets shouted down for the possibility of discrimination against people with mental disorders, thus ensuring that it will never happen and giving gun-control advocates the continued opportunity to blame the nefarious inanimate objects that just up and kill people by the numbers, apparently without help from any of the “crazy fuckers” they wouldn’t dream of discriminating against.
Or, perhaps, we can meet somewhere in the middle? How 'bout we try that one for a change? Just an idea.
Wait, that’s really the big other side argument against “some fuckers”-based regulation? That it would discriminate against the mentally ill? I’ve never seen that argument, let alone seen it be the big response to the “some fuckers” point. Not that I doubt your experience of it, but it’s a shitfucking terrible argument. No wonder you’re so scornful.
Usually when I see a response to that it’s that it is sometimes difficult to impossible to categorise “some fuckers” from “the rest of us non-fuckers” until they actually do the thing we’re calling them fuckers for. Certainly there should be attention paid to keeping guns out of the hands who are obviously going to be up to no good with them. I’m all for that - I don’t think there’s anyone who isn’t. But not everyone is Snidely Whiplash in appearance or history. I’d say that’s the most common argument i’ve seen suggesting why a “some fuckers” approach doesn’t address as much of the problem as we’re able to address.
A laudable goal. But how will gun control stop law abiding citizens from becoming homicidal maniacs?
And so is your assumption that that is what anyone is thinking.
No one is claiming these are non-overlapping groups. It’s just that the overlap fraction between law-abiding citizens and homicidal maniacs is so infinitesimally small, it doesn’t justify limiting the rights of all law-abiding citizens in order to try to do something about homicidal maniacs.
Fair enough, but in practice, many politicians simply used the tragedy as an excuse to propose generic anti-gun laws that would not actually have stopped it. That’s pretty knee-jerk to me.
There are of course genuine sociopaths out there who weren’t bothered by it, but in general, this only happened in your imagination.
Getting worked up a year later because someone is discussing only the political consequences of the shooting, and inferring therefrom that they were not bothered by the tragedy of it and that those were their only concerns at the time, is loony.
And once again, this wasn’t merely about cost, and it’s totally ignorant to suggest that’s all that was at stake.
Exactly how long do you propose someone must wait before worrying about how a tragedy can be exploited for political purposes, and exactly how much boilerplate disclaimer must they include recognizing the tragedy in order to stop you complaining that they are not bothered by it?
Ok, I read that thread as there being three people who agreed that your ideas had merit, one person who disagreed with your suggestion but not based on the mental health check, Terr having an objection to that specific part but on the grounds of practical effect rather than discriminatory grounds (that such mental health checks would end result in mentally unwell people trying not to get diagnosed as such and that that is bad), and Hentor being the lone voice shouting down your idea in the way you specify.
Are you counting each post by Hentor as another shout, maybe? Because, in the thread you’re citing at least, by and large people who expressed an opinion thought your ideas were good. And of the three people who disagreed, two of them not only disagreed with you on a different basis but one also appears to be pro-gun ownership in general.
This may come as a surprise to you, but it’s really really hard to kill 20 people with a knife/bat/bowling pin/toaster/whatever random object you care to imagine. They maybe homicidal. They may be maniacs. Remove guns from the equation and they’re going to be fucking failures as homicidal maniacs.
The same day that 20 little kids got blown away in Newton, a crazy man with a knife attacked a bunch of kids at an elementary school in China. Want to take a guess as to how many died?
By and large, those politicians have been spouting those opinions, to deaf ears, forever. Then when something that they’ve been warning about for years come to pass, they get pigeon-holed as knee-jerk.
On the other hand, every goddamned time one of these mass-shootings happens (an average of two a year or so for the last few decades), every fucking gun-nut in the country jumps at the chance to complain about how much they’re going to be burdened in their pursuit of the holy gun, just because a few dead children are dirtying up the airwaves. And I won’t even mention the fact that not one of them has been prevented from buying all the fucking guns and ammo they’d ever want as a result of all this “knee-jerk reaction.”
I know knee-jerk when I see it. And those that argue for gun-control, using precisely the type of situations that Sandy Hook represents as a point to their argument, are not it.
“Wah wah, I may not be able to buy and AR-15 sometime in the next fifty years” … that’s fucking knee-jerk.
Yes, well, that would simply make them less effective homicidal maniacs. By that logic - limiting the rights of all in order to reduce the harm caused by a few - we should ban alcohol in order to stop drunk driving, domestic violence, and rape.
