You totally missed his point.
I think the way to consider the size of our nation’s gun problem is to realize the mass shooting in Gilroy, California occurred a week ago but it’s already been driven from public awareness by two more recent mass shootings.
The way to go, IMO, is to accept that it may take a longer time to change attitudes of people living in rural and suburban white America than we hope, and we therefore need a sustained grassroots outreach to educate people and change their positions. The Democrats are probably all going to talk about all kinds of restrictions in the next debate and it’s just going to be interpreted as America’s diverse urban centers using their sheer size advantage to overpower the less populated areas.
There has to be outreach. Yes, the NRA and Republicans are defending shitty ideals but they’re successful at it because they’ve helped reinforce this idea that “their” America is not the same as everyone else’s America. I wish I had answers on what, specifically, to say to convince these people that it’s not in their interests to have these instruments of mass murder floating around in the population, but I probably don’t. I’m not sure there really are magic words; it’s likely a matter of getting more face time and contact in these communities, and a matter of building relationships and trust.
That’s one thing I think that both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren seem to understand, and one thing that Hillary Clinton clearly did not. You can’t just be a face that people see on TV; you have to be live and in the flesh, and you sometimes have to venture into territory where you’re less liked and less appreciated.
Take the example of Gilroy and connect it to shootings in larger cities. These examples show they can happen anywhere, not just in crowded shopping centers or office buildings but in rural churches or at local festivals.
Could I get a moderator to fix the title of this thread. I was too shaken and upset when I wrote it. Thank you.
That’s not how I interpreted his post.
Some of the discussions we’ve had about this have been nothing short of surreal – like “let’s discuss how to fix this problem without actually doing anything” – i.e.- without any significant changes to gun laws. This is where we get idiot suggestions like it’s all the media’s fault for “glorifying” the killers – which overlooks two things: (1) all other civilized countries have media, too, and cover the killings in exactly the same way, yet are almost completely free of mass shootings, and (2) all those other thousands of gun homicides every year, which are so common that they barely get any media attention at all, and whose off-the-chart high numbers are also unique to America.
But the reality is that nothing is going to be done without a culture change so significant that it reflects the realization that the Second Amendment – and particularly the lunatic interpretation of it in the Heller ruling – has become the biggest threat to public safety in the history of modern America. Until this fact is well and truly understood, the future will continue to be a spinning of wheels under the delusional attitude of “let’s see what can be done without actually doing anything”.
The gun culture and the political power of the NRA are certainly a big part of the problem, but it occurs to me that what we call “gun culture” is probably a subset of a larger American culture, the culture of individualism, where the word “freedom” is taken to mean the primacy of individualism over a collective sense of social responsibility. It means the perspective that if you, personally, own a gun, and you see it (wrongly, as it turns out) as a source of personal protection – and of course, would never do anything bad with it – then what could possibly be the problem? The perspective that this also means that everybody and his dog has exactly the same right – and that the consequence is rampant gun proliferation and the gun violence we see in America today – seems completely lost on the proponents of individualism.
We have fomented such a culture of anger and hatred that it gives the severely unstable license to commit these awful acts. In accepting a culture of anger and hate we have justified their rage. And we have given them easy access to mass killing weapons. This has to change now or it will keep happening again and again and again and again.
Yeah but… America.
and Exceptionalism
Shining City on a Hill
That means something, doesn’t it? It HAS to mean something. I’ve got a lot invested in this Ideal… someones gotta pay. And if that means innocent men, women, and children gots to die horrible deaths then so be it.
Everything has its price. It’s sad that folks gotta get cancelled but… we’re talking about something a whole lot bigger than just a few fat Wal-Mart shoppers and their fat TV dinner lives.
Keep your Eyes on the Prize. As long as there are black folk and brown folk in the world you ain’t getting my guns from me.
Race traitors.
One of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen on this board was a post about the Sandy Hook massacre by a now-banned poster, in which he stated that he was fine with 20 kids being murdered if that was the price of him getting to keep his guns. (No cite: I did not bookmark the post and trying to find it through either the SDMB search or Google has, so far, turned up nothing.)
That attitude is why this country will never solve this problem. Too many people don’t want to. They don’t think it is a problem. They’ve bought into the mythos that guns solve problems and that they’re the good guys to do the job.
I think it’s more effective with the typo, for the reason you just stated.
Nine dead in Ohio (not counting the shooter), 26 injured, less than a minute. Tell me this fairy tale again about how a ‘good guy with a gun’ can prevent mass shootings, when in fact a uniformed ‘good guy with a gun’ shot the killer in under a minute, yet the carnage during that minute was massive.
But you know, those nine, and the twenty in El Paso yesterday, and the three at the Gilroy festival, and so forth and so on…they’re the Second Amendment heroes, right? Giving their lives that the gun nuts may enjoy their lethal toys without restriction.
Frankly, allowing everyone to own (and in Texas and Ohio, carry in plain view) such lethal toys is nothing short of barbaric. We are all perpetually hostage to the gun people, and any time one of them has a bad day, they can go on a rampage and kill a bunch of random people just because.
A civilized society would ensure that this was not possible. We’ve still got a long way to go.
And the next time some wingnut asshole goes off about how libruls denied someone his free speech rights, I’ll ask him about the twenty dead in El Paso or the nine dead in Dayton, who’ve been denied their free speech rights forever, not just in one particular venue on one particular occasion, but everywhere and always.
Tin soldiers and Trump is coming
we’re finally on our own
this summer I hear the mourning
nine dead in Ohio
Gotta get down to it, gun nuts are gunning us down
something should’ve been done long ago
what if you knew them and found them dead on the ground
how could you run when you know
But it’s white supremacist white guys (at least 2 out of 3, don’t know about Dayton yet) so thoughts and prayers. :mad:
“And if three people do it…they may think it’s an organization.”-Arlo Guthrie.
“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”-Ian Fleming
A list should be made of the victims of every mass shooting and read aloud at the NRA convention. After all, these people are martyrs to your holy Second Amendment. The least you can do is acknowledge them.
Throw this query into Google - “fox news blames isis on gun shootings”.
They are blaming everyone else.
But that doesn’t address the very real decision Americans must make, and the national discussion that must be had at this point. We can’t politicize these crimes obviously, but that doesn’t mean immediate practical considerations shouldn’t be on the table. That is to say, how best should the thoughts and prayers be divided among those shooting victims ? Should turns be taken so that the full nation prays for Dayton on even days and El Paso on odd ones ; or should the thoughts be permanent but districted ?
Obvioulsy we can’t socialize the prayers, that’d be tantamount to slavery.
Thanks, Trump!
Don’t know the motivations of the Ohio shooter yet, but the Texas shooter was obviously inspired by the anti-immigrant racist rhetoric coming from the usurper in the White House. Those dead in Texas were murdered because of The Donald. Their blood is on his orange hands.
Yeah, sure things can be fixed. Sensible gun controls. What’s going to be done? Republicans saying: “Thoughts and prayers for Texas. Thoughts and prayers for Ohio. There, I’ve done my part.”