Comment on Rock Eagle Flag
GiveMemes@jlai.lu 5 months agoSorry what context were we talking about? Oh yeah, school shootings. Also that’s still the point; it being a clear relationship. I don’t understand what your point is. You posed a whataboutism. They’re two different arguments.
If you want to talk about gun crime and reform broadly we can. First, in the case of things like mental health checks, how do we decide what makes someone fit to get a firearm? How do we decide who gets to make that decision? How are we going to regulate firearm sales? How do we make it possible for private sales to exist while enforcing background checks and without causing undue burden. Btw you know you already need to get a backhround check to get a firearm except in a few circumstances, right?The American pseudo-left is often frothing at the mouth for reform on this issue and has poorly formed (if any) ideas about what should actually go into place. It doesn’t help that most people are controlled by fear mongering more effectively than facts, especially those that don’t know much about guns.
Another pr9blem people have with gun control regulation is that it allows an authoritarian government to more easily defeat the populace. In every modern war, guerrillas, especially in urban areas, have the upper hand against modern militaries due to the need to project soft power and retain international support. If you think it’s never gonna happen here then you clearly haven’t been paying attention and if you’re gonna be one of those people that goes “bubut the military had bombs and jets” don’t even bother replying as you clearly haven’t been paying attention modern history and the successes across the world of resistance movements.
And it’s all great to say that the 20,000 people a year that die from guns (mostly suicide followed by active gang members engaged in gang violence, both activities prone to causing deaths regardless of accessibility to guns, but likely reduced) are a price that’s worth it to pay but there’s no realistic way that you’re disarming the American populace, only preventing new sales. This means that there will still be a huge amount of guns available for criminals, and as we’ve seen with drugs, banning something that people desire just causes a crime-ridden black market. Not to mention the immeasurable good that they could do against a tyrannical government.
On top of that, you can literally 3d print firearms now. It at least used to take some knowhow but now any scmuck can get into it with just a little bit of searching and a very minor investment. In that way, the cat’s out of the bag, and if the US gun market fails to supply criminals, especially organized crime, we know exactly what they’re going to do.
The key is building up social services in impoverished areas and removing the factors that push people towards crime. Improving our mental health infrastructure and social safety nets such that we have a violent crime rate that resembles other developed nations. Reducing the needless/baseless criminalization and overpolicing of poor and minority communities to reduce the trauma of communities growing up without fathers. Getting a handle on race relations, even between different poc groups, such that gangs become an unnecessary method of association. Not just zeroing in on the scary but useful tool that is the firearm, especially as it is the only true equalizer in society. “God created man but Samuel Colt made them equal”.
Not to mention how they allow women especially to stand up to violence they would otherwise have no chance against. Don’t give me the pepper spray and stun gun bs btw, I pity the person that thinks that will stop a large, angry man. If you’re truly interested in nonlethal means of self defense however, I believe the foaming/gel bear sprays would definitely stop an attacker, but they tend to be quite large and annoying to carry. Also, if you think armed self defense is unnecessary it’s only because you’ve never been in a situation where you wanted or tried to defend yourself but couldn’t. I don’t carry a weapon, but I’ve experienced things that make me feel like maybe I should’ve been and things would’ve gone differently.
Sorry for the long flow of consciousness style comment and I apologize if I attacked you at all I can sometimes get heated abt this subject.
School shootings are a miniscule issue though by the statistics. The problem is that we spectalize them with the 24 hour news cycle because it makes people angry and upset. This spectacle is also exactly the reward these murderers are seeking out. If the news was required to spend a proportionate amount of time on different subjects by how much they negatively impact your health on average (let’s say by how much they reduce the life expectancy of the average person), we should be banning cigarettes, alcohol, and added sugars long before guns. Why are we so focused on the guns? Why aren’t we focusing on reducing our ridiculous overweight and obesity rates? Because school shootings make you sad, like the WWF panda or the aspca commercial. Don’t get me wrong, they get me sad too, but our deeply damaged society is to blame, not guns.
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 5 months ago
To go point by point,
I disagree that they should be considered as separated statistics, while school and mass shootings are an especially violent expression of gun violence, they are still acts of gun violence. As for how we decide, let’s start with “not on the domestic violence frequent fliers list” and work our way out from there. Ironically, by refusing so vehemently to participate in good faith, gun owners raise the odds that the discussion of what else should disqualify someone, it raises the odds of it becoming an overreach problem. Most gun owners agree not everyone should have a gun, talk to the rest of society about what makes you guys snatch a rifle out of someone’s hand at the gun shop or on the firing range.
You’re vastly overestimating the ability of the average American gun owner to participate in a guerilla war meaningfully, the vast majority of firearms are owned by super buyers that have made guns their entire identity the same way they’d probably insist queer americans do when you ask them why they’d need that many. Not to mention how even those people have the guerilla discipline of a daddy’s money safari shooting club that hasn’t noticed the hippo stalking them yet.
You talk about the effectiveness of guerilla warfare against the US military but let’s look more closely at those efforts, the Vietcong were a superpower funded and supplied professionally trained military specializing in guerrilla tactics specifically because that was what was most available to them, and they fought the US voluntarily tying a hand behind its back because trying for actual millitary objectives would mean invading the north, which would mean risking a repeat of the Korean war. This resulted in a strategy of killing vietcong faster than more could be born, raised, trained and armed, something the US realized it was failing to do after nearly 20 years of involvement in the conflict. As for the Taliban, again we have confirmation of conspicuous funding and training (no not the war against the Soviet Union, the US trained Mujihideen went on to become the Northern Alliance that the US proceeded to ally themselves with when they came a knocking themselves), first by Pakistan, a nuclear power all its own, then by fanatical Wahab oil billionaires and their failson kids (hiya Obama bin Got’his’ass), and finally by Russia, who turned out to have been paying bounties for American heads like fucking game wardens. On top of that, again, the US wouldn’t attack the actual problem, that being Pakistan being allowed to exist despite being the singular worst ally ever in all of human history, ancient countries got the Genghis treatment for far fewer transgressions than the US has tried to ignore for Pakistan’s benefit.
Why do I highlight the professionalism, the adversarial funding and training, and the inability and/or unwillingness to strike where the problem is by the US? Because none of those advantages would be present in a gun owner’s insurrection.
Professionalism, inside the sum total of the guys who’d want to be taking up arms and “fightin’ da tyrants!” right now, we could generously estimate that half have any degree of professional military training, and they got that training almost certainly either from that millitary they’ll be taking up arms against, or from someone who did, or even worse, from the police, which, yeah American police have all the actual military competence of that guy who executed the mongol trade ambassadors. You can bring out as many videos of white dudes in tacticool doing drill as you want, doesn’t change that the second they take up arms for serious for serious they will not have the training collectively to put a fight up.
Adversarial funding, the only reason I won’t discount this one entirely is because Putin genuinely seems like he’s dumb enough to believe he can get the same results by funding the proud boys in a second civil war that the US is getting by providing the actual military of Ukraine requested arms and funds. Also China might toss some spare yen in just for the amusement of poking the US with their own citizens, and also they actually have money they could hypothetically burn on being silly.
Inability/Unwillingness to strike, brother, the problem isn’t going to be the US soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, coastguardsmen, and the countless more specialized auxiliaries they can call on getting bogged down and unwilling to strike at the heart of the enemy, the problem is going to be stopping all those folks from war criming the shit out of the rebels because whatever cause they might say they’re for those dudes necessarily started this fight by opening fire in even a tangential direction to the family and loved ones these people swore an oath to protect before shipping out overseas. These military personnel are going to be motivated, trained, and only held back from black flagging any insurrectionist cell that starts shit by higher officers not wanting to answer to a tribunal.
Disarming the American public: The only people who are arguing for that are grieving families who just saw their loved ones die because of this problem, and the most Dutchess Satine tier pie in the sky pacifists in American politics who despise firearms as a matter of principle, anyone with a brain is proposing opt in disarmament for legacy owners via a rolling buyback and subsidized display rendering program. This isn’t about taking anyone’s guns, it’s almost entirely about making ownership safer for everyone in the proximity of the gun, including the owners themselves, subsidized lockers are pretty good at stopping little timmy from finding out whoever had the gun last forgot to remove the still shelled rounds before putting it away.
3D printed firearms are to gun ownership what NFTs are for title ownership. Plastic made guns are a bomb that the user happens to spray shrapnel in the direction of where they were pointing before it finishes coating their entire front half in 3rd degree burns and shrapnel wounds if they got lucky. Ghost guns are another example of how the situation at hand doesn’t protect gun owners, it makes them feel secure in being unsafe.
I agree whole heartedly that poor social services lead to increased social strife, but other countries with better laws have those problems too, and one mass shooting is usually regarded as an unprecedented national tragedy in those places, rather than a weekly stat/yearly news media red meat event like they’ve become in the US.
I hate to burst the bubble here but procuring a firearm is actually one of the single most dangerous things a woman in harm’s way can do most of the time. Most victims already know the person who will be attacking them, that person knows the gun is there and decided to go through with it anyways. Women who buy a gun for self defense more often end up specifically being killed by that gun specifically than successfully defending themselves against an attacker. Also, in a street ambush scenario pulling a firearm is one of the worst moves you can make, it instantly raises the situation to life and death, and humans tend to choose the other person needs to die before they choose to back off. It’s the blowback effect only now that thug you were worried about is fearing for their life wrestling you for that gun to kill you before you get the chance to kill them. Guns are not a personal defense equalizer, they are a “now you die” tool that should only come out when you are dead certain all other options are exhausted and are ready to immediately pull that trigger on whoever you’re pointing at. Any hesitation at all and you have failed the purpose of trying to defend yourself with a gun. You are either dead, traumatized for life having just killed someone in cold blood, or you just proved that you overreacted to the situation because nobody’s dead yet and de-escalation is now a REMOTE option for you to get out of this situation.
Look getting heated about this subject is natural, what’s important is you were concerned enough about it to call it out for yourself, and I’ll do the same here too, sorry if this is at all perceived as an attack. The fact that we can trade at least the intent to have a productive exchange means we’re on a good pathway to actually getting to do it.
I disagree with the sentiment intended by sating that the statistics say this is a small issue. The odds you’d get rat anus in your sausage were probably pretty low before Teddy started up the food and drug admin, but having the peace of mind that you will 100% not be dining on rat anus at this year’s independence day festivities is probably something you’re thankful to Upton Sinclair for making such a stink to help achieve anyways.
My point is that a problem doesn’t have to be statistically significant for it to be absolutely disgusting and worth addressing on those grounds alone. Just because it’s one tiny past good hard boiled egg that’s stinking up the joint doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to toss the egg, and that’s what this problem is, a very stinky egg that has done a good job of convincing people that tossing it will destroy the fabric of our home, when really addressing it would involve about as change to the fabric of the home as someone having to push their chair out from the table to get up and toss the egg in the trash.