Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

You are here: Home / Gun Issues / Gun nuts / Late Night Nothing-But-Horrorshows Open Thread

Late Night Nothing-But-Horrorshows Open Thread

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Trigger warning: Extreme ammosexual posturing below the fold:

That poor cat. I hope this is just staged, primate drum-clanging for an audience of fellow gunhumpers…

ETA: Thank you, commentor Manxome Bromide, for this explainer from Vice:

… [P]ointing a gun at your penis has nothing to do with owning the libs and everything to do with ironically mocking basic safety in gun culture. The trend is about a year old and it was born in the fires of Facebook’s gun groups. On one side are responsible gun owners, on the other is a group of men aiming a deadly weapon at their dicks to prove a point that they can only vaguely explain.

Gun enthusiasts love taking pictures of their guns. It’s common practice. America has a gun culture as robust, diverse, and complicated as comic book fans, fantasy nerds, PC gamers, or any other subculture. Like those communities, gun nerds have their own memetic language and fight among themselves. Unlike pop culture enthusiasts, the hobby of a gun nerd is based on a tool designed to kill. It’s distressing then, to the responsible gun owner, when fringe elements in their community post pictures online of them pointing guns at their dicks…

Like with any other fandom, there’s levels to gun culture. In the online gun community there are “normies” and “fudds.” Normies cover a range of people, anyone from a basic handgun owner to the completely uninitiated. Fudds—as in Bugs Bunny hunter Elmer Fudd—are the old heads, weirdos, and dedicated gun nuts. Some fudds hate normies and the way normies talk about guns. Even the normies who know their way around a firearm.

A chief complaint among fudds is the normie’s devotion to safety, typically manifested as knee-jerk praise of trigger discipline. For the uninitiated, watching trigger discipline refers to the act of keeping your finger off the trigger of a firearm until you’re ready to fire the weapon. It’s a safety basic, along with never pointing a gun at anyone or anything you don’t intend to harm, and always assuming a gun is loaded. Trigger and muzzle discipline will tell you a lot about a person holding a firearm. Typically, if they keep the muzzle away from the camera and their finger off the trigger—even while holding the grip—they know their way around a weapon.

Inevitably, when some idiot posts a picture of themselves with a firearm, another idiot will jump into the comments to praise or chide the idiot for their trigger discipline. Some fudds hate this…

To combat this apparent scourge of responsible gun ownership, some fudds have taken to posting pictures of themselves pointing allegedly loaded weapons at their own dicks, with their finger on the trigger. If this doesn’t make sense to you, you’re not alone. The trend is around a year old, and it’s an issue gun groups—especially those on Facebook—have been dealing with for a while…

And yet, people make fun of birdwatchers.

Reader Interactions

70Comments

  9. 9.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    Here’s what a random twitterer says on that Gun tweet:

    That’s cause it’s not about owning the libs. Op is just adding his own preconceptions. I have no clue where he’s getting his “facts” from

    So so why is this still being forwarded as a MAGA thing or about Liberals. A lot of the people in that group are liberals or leftist.

    Seriously, what is the context, here? Where is the OP’s proof?

  10. 10.

    JaySinWA

    @Gravenstone: Darwin award candidates.@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):  i haven’t followed the OP tweet, but one source I followed indicates it is shit posting. To call out normies who try to point out failure to adhere to normal gun safety

    ETA fuck your rules I know how to handle my piece

    It’s my dick and I’ll shoot if I want to.

  11. 11.

    Anne Laurie

    @Manxome Bromide: Thank you!

    It’s actually kind of a… relief?… to know this is something between two warring branches of a ‘clan’, and not a new, general MAGAt escalation in response to recent events.

  12. 12.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @JaySinWA:

    i haven’t followed the OP tweet, but one source I followed indicates it is shit posting. To call out normies who try to point out failure to adhere to normal gun safety

    ETA fuck your rules I know how to handle my piece

    It’s my dick and I’ll shoot if I want to.

    Well, if that’s true fuck those idiots

  13. 13.

    Ukai

    Watching a live feed of tonight’s unrest in Minneapolis, curfew notwithstanding.

    The activity continues to accumulate around the 5th precinct, which is a mile away from me (the 3rd precinct is 3 miles away in the other direction). A temporary staffing office is on fire, as is the post office in that vicinity. Caveats about the accuracy of social media apply, but I saw reports of out-of-town agitators rolling into town for tonight.

    Personally, I’m bummed about the vandalized post office, because they certainly don’t deserve any of this. Mail has already been temporarily halted to my zip code; wrecking a post office isn’t going to resume that any quicker.

  14. 14.

    Shalimar

    The problem is with “responsible” gun owners.  Your fellow Americans are complete morons.  It’s time for you to recognize the only responsible way to deal with guns is to restrict them to shooting ranges and hunting clubs.

  17. 17.

    Doug R

    So they’re treating real guns like prop guns? I have a stage-type dagger with a spring from Halloween that I pretend to stab myself with, I don’t use a real knife for that.

  18. 18.

    mrmoshpotato

    These idiots shooting themselves in the dick is something I would fully support.

  19. 19.

    prostratedragon

    @Amir Khalid:
    Don’t personally know at all about hunting, but I’ve heard it said that handguns on the one hand and assault-type rifles on the other are not useful for that, so just regulating them would be a good start on the problem without affecting hunters.

     

    Edit: Of course, you then have what mrmoshpotato said just above. Costs and benefits, costs and benefits …

  20. 20.

    Ukai

    Some looters tried to break into an apartment complex, but the rest of the crowd quickly deterred them. For now.

    Just heard that the Pentagon has military police on standby to go to Minneapolis. Wunderbar.

  21. 21.

    HumboldtBlue

    @HumboldtBlue: 

    This feed features some slanted coverage, straight up authoritarian nonsense.

    The concern for burning buildings is so maudlin.

  22. 22.

    Matt McIrvin

    Is the gun thing kind of like how the “OK” gesture wasn’t a white-supremacist sign at all, it was just a sign that white supremacists decided one day to start using all the time to TRICK us into thinking it was a white-supremacist sign, which is somehow totally different?

  24. 24.

    Aleta

    1– KTSP in MN live feed:

    2– from http://www.twincities.com:

    What (Maya Santamaria, former owner of El Nuevo Rodeo club) is certain of is how aggressive Officer Derek Chauvin became when the club hosted events that drew a mainly black clientele, responding to fights by taking out his mace and spraying the crowd, a tactic she told him was unjustified “overkill.”
    “He would mace everyone instead of apprehending the people who were fighting,” said Maya Santamaria, former owner of El Nuevo Rodeo club on East Lake Street in Minneapolis. “He would call backup. The next thing you would know, there would five or six squad cars.”

    While Chauvin’s off-duty job at the El Nuevo Rodeo club stretched over 17 years until a few months ago, Floyd only started working there recently as a bouncer and only worked about a dozen events put on by “African American promoters.”

    Santamaria … said Chauvin got along well with the club’s Latino regulars, but his tactics toward unruly customers on what she referred to as “African American” nights led her to speak to him about it.

    “I told him I thought this is unnecessary to be pepper-sprayed. The knee-jerk reaction of being afraid, it seemed overkill,” Santamaria said. “It was a concern and I did voice my opinion, but police officers have a way of justifying what they do.”
    …
    “I thought he would have more of a conscience,” she said. “Even if he is a bit of racist, he’s a human being. … At what point does your humanity overpower your racial bias?”
    …
    Both Chauvin and his wife have registered to vote (in Oakdale, Florida), rather than in Minnesota, records show. Chauvin last cast a ballot in Florida in November 2018. His wife’s registration is listed as inactive. Both are Republicans.

  28. 28.

    HumboldtBlue

    These people are actively asking for Trump (the Pentagon) to send troops immediately and they are staging to do so.

    @Aleta:

    Yup, I saw that this morning, this is just calling for violence, the silly muppet just said that protestors are being bussed in to cause trouble.

  33. 33.

    Citizen Alan

    My prediction for the 2020 Season Finale: The Scooby Gang infiltrates the White House to rip off Trump’s mask and reveal that he’s actually Charlie Manson, who faked his own death and replaced Trump as part of a scheme to finally start that Race War he’s been trying to start since the 1960’s.

  34. 34.

    James E Powell

    @HumboldtBlue:

    I’ve been bouncing around, looking at coverage of Washington DC, Atlanta, San Jose, Portland, Oakland, and a few others place, but I’ve mostly been watching local TV coverage of events in Los Angeles.

    One thing I learned is that the reporter in the News Chopper is not very familiar with downtown Los Angeles.

    The better coverage is this guy – he’s showing the local TV video, but the sound is the LAPD radio. He’s kind of clown-ish, but not too intrusive.

    I’m really surprised at how widespread and passionate these protests are. I asked in the thread below, why is it different this time? Is it because it’s the Time of Coronavirus? Is it because a lot of people are home and watching and not as distracted as they normally would be by work, social life, etc?

  35. 35.

    Gretchen

    @Amir Khalid: I have a relative who lives out in the country and likes to go out his back door and hunt.  When asked what he would do with a squirrel he killed, he responded with a squirrel crock pot recipe.  I’m fine with him having a shotgun.  He doesn’t need an automatic weapon to hunt squirrels for his crock pot.

  37. 37.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    You know, I’ll admit it. I’m a bit phobic in gun handling. I have a .357 revolver that can be safely dry fired; I still need to know I’m pointing it in a safe direction before I’ll do a dry fire.

    And you can mock me if you want to, but I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, so I know how a person can be, on their worst day. For other people, it’s “I had the flu, and, I just couldn’t sleep”; for me, it’s “oh, yeah, I know what that’s like; it’s just, it was last Tuesday for me.”

    And I know you only need to be stupid *once*, and, all too often, “*once*” is the time you’re sure everything is going to work out fine.

    If I wanted to, for some idiotic reason, yes, I could safely photograph myself with  my revolver, pointed at my penis, and my finger on the trigger (I’d draw the line at having the hammer cocked, no pun; I’m always surprised at how much lighter the draw is, even when I’m sure compensating for “always being surprised”). But I wouldn’t; nor would I snap a photograph of me about to use a circular saw to cut off my hand. Because first, it’s misusing a tool, for an idiotic reason.

    Second, you *never* use a gun to make any statement (other than, possibly, “you can see I’m armed, so keep that in mind”). I mean, seriously, think about it: it would be just plain *weird* to use a claw hammer to make a statement (other than, possibly, “whoo, I’d like to NAIL that!” – sorry, couldn’t resist), right? Tools are used when they are needed for specific tasks; that goes double when the tool in question is intended to cause harm.

    I mean, there’s a tiny part of me that understands how a person might want to say “guns aren’t mystical items that do things spontaneously”. But what harm does it do to treat gun safety rules as absolutes, even where they’re not? Why should a person feel they *can* point a verified-empty weapon at another person? What is lost if they say “no, I won’t do that, because there’s no flippin’ point”? (IIRC, I’ve heard that there’s never a point – not even in TV/movies; I’d heard it said that actors are told not to actually point the gun directly at someone, because no one can read the trajectory visually, so it’s a needless risk – and even blanks can cause harm!)

    So, you know, if you want to mock me, and have some good laughs at me, for being paranoid, hey, I’m a man, I can live with that, and even agree with you. But there’s funnier jokes you can make, that don’t involve guns and penises, which, come to think of it, is the exact opposite of surprising.

  38. 38.

    minachica

    Is anyone else watching Gov Walz talking at this middle of the night press conference

    ETA: He seems a bit unhinged to me, but I’m in a bad mood so I’m wondering what other people think.

    He just finally walked away and it’s over

  41. 41.

    Viva BrisVegas

    How do we know if they are loaded?

    Yes, I mean both the guns and the dicks.

    Obviously they are only risking a vestigial organ.

  42. 42.

    Ruckus

    @Gretchen:

    You don’t hunt squirrels with a shotgun. OK maybe a 410 but probably not even then. But you hit a squirrel with a 12 gauge and there’s no squirrel left. Normally you’d use a 22 for squirrel. Or better yet, a trap. It’s like any automatic weapon, it’s not really for hunting except when you really, really want to kill animals but don’t care for the meat whatsoever. Like in warfare. It’s why all the gun humpers are idiots trying to act tough or morons thinking there is going to be a war in their back yard. Of course now…….

  43. 43.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @Gretchen: (wince) Automatic is a tricky word for gun folks.

    Semi-automatic guns fire one shot per pull of the trigger. Automatic guns fire continuously while the trigger is held down.

    Of course, with bump stocks, semi-automatic rifles can fire much like fully automatic ones – and I’ve been told that it’s not difficult for a qualified gun smith to turn many semi-automatic guns into full automatic.

    There’s nothing all that bad about semi-automatic rifles. A kind-of problem is that there’s a big push to make and sell rifles that are on a par with the M16 rifle in semi-auto mode.

    The M16 fires an extremely high velocity projectile, with amazing accuracy, and very low recoil. It was designed to be able to penetrate the helmets of its day, and I doubt helmet technology has improved *that* much.

    It’s an amazing piece of machinery; I kind-of understand wanting to be able to “play” (shoot paper targets) with one. But I saw one idiot speaking about how “… and it might even save your life!”

    I can’t imagine a circumstance in which the average person, in average circumstances, would be better served by a high velocity, over-penetrating, rifle round, over a handgun or shotgun (or a rifle that’s not as likely to hit something 400 meters away)

    That said, I wouldn’t be worried just about a person having a “semi-automatic rifle”, especially not one for hunting squirrels. I suspect if you used one of the M16-semi-autos to shoot a squirrel, though, you’d want the squirrel to be above, and about 7 meters in front of, the crock pot, so that a reasonable amount of meat actually makes it *into* the crock pot!

  44. 44.

    Martin

    @James E Powell: Riots generally require a pretty big backlog of outrages. They pop off on a catalyzing event, but the outrage is cops shooting people, Covid killing people of color, people losing jobs, general lawlessness in the WH, and on and on.

    Riots are a pot boiling over that’s been simmering for a while. In that sense, they’re avoidable if you’re willing to take the pot off the heat before it boils over, or you can ignore it, wait for it to boil over, and then blame the rioters for being savages.

  47. 47.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @prostratedragon: there are handguns to use for hunting (for example, the .44 magnum – though it’s often used to finish the kill on a wounded animal); and the gun advocacy folks are ever eager to insist that an M16 equivalent is a *fine* hunting rifle, don’t let those DEMONcRATS tell you otherwise.

    They’re not wrong, but it always seems to me to be like cheating, like copying from your brilliant classmate who doesn’t conceal his work on tests and quizzes. “Here, take this tool, designed to make putting a bullet, at very high velocity, in a nearly-straight line, trivially easy; then, act like ‘You Da Man!!!’ when you fire a bullet, in a nearly-straight line, through the chest of an animal” strikes me as dangerously close to “participation trophy” territory.

  49. 49.

    Jay

    @LongHairedWeirdo:

    yeah no.

    20 guage Parker for doves

    12 gauge for larger ducks,goose,

    .22 for “varmints” and small game,

    up to 30-30 for deer,

    .306 -.308 for up to moose.

    Bolt action, 3 shots means you are ashit shot.”needing a 15-50 round semi auto says you are a psychopath.

  50. 50.

    Martin

    @Jay: I remember the ’77 NYC riots. That was just a power outage, but man, the backlog of shit NY residents had been putting up with caused them to pop off something fierce. I think Son of Sam was still going on when that happened.

  52. 52.

    Jay

    @Martin:

    yeah, other than sporting events,…….

    there is a social media theme now, and where we as whipple, will vow to , ( and record) as witnesses, everytime the cops interact with a POC,  First Nations, the UnHoused,…….

    maybe it takes and creates action,

    And it’s not us, who were always there, taking that vow. It was the “kindly people” s’plaining how we were “protesting wrong”

    S’okay. Have my first weekend in 3 months,  with the love of my life. So of course, 4hours starting at 4 am!, helping the unhoused with medical and dental issues.

  55. 55.

    m.j.

    Just like moderate Republicans, there is no such thing as a responsible gun owner.

    Your damned hobby has a body-count.

  56. 56.

    brantl

    @Ruckus: People commonly hunt squirrels with shotguns. Shooting upward with a bullet often invites it to come down a LLLOOOONG ways away…. Shotgun pellets, (birdshot) won’t ruin the meat, though they will take some effort to find.

  57. 57.

    David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch

    Looking through various video on Twitter and it’s the cops who are rioting.

    They were always so much nicer on Adam-12 and CHiPs.

  58. 58.

    cmorenc

    @Martin:

    @James E Powell: Riots generally require a pretty big backlog of outrages. They pop off on a catalyzing event, but the outrage is cops shooting people, Covid killing people of color, people losing jobs, general lawlessness in the WH, and on and on.

    NONE of which provides any excuse or justification whatever for looting a Target store or burning down a block of businesses – instead, this is thugs hijacking the cover of legitimate protest and anger over lethal police thuggery toward George Floyd, in order to loot and smash stuff, creating a malignant distraction from the underlying reason for legitimate outrage and protest.

    …and DON’T lecture me about “thugs” being a racially charged word – it fits *both* the police action here and the rioters using cover of peaceful protest by white, black, and brown to loot and burn businesses that are completely apart from police.

  59. 59.

    Ixnay

    Mr. Ixnay here. Reminds me of the classic Lampoon cover. ”

    Buy this cat or Ill shoot my dick!”

  60. 60.

    glory b

    @cmorenc: Yeah, I have a cousin who lives in the area, she said there are now rumors and grumbling about white protesters taking the protest over (antifa), destroying businesses that were minority owned or employed lots of locals (Target) and then going home to their unscathed neighborhoods.

    They pointed out that the later it got, the more white the crowds got.

    Another reminder that we are a bit more conservative than white people tend to think.

  61. 61.

    Evil_Paul

    The way I see it, there’s two competing mindsets when it comes to gun safety.  Some people think safety is what you are, whereas smart people know that safety is what you do.

    The guys pointing guns at their dicks are mocking the gun owners who are calling them out because they know that they’re safe, therefore it doesn’t matter what kind of stupid thing they do with a gun because a safe person can’t have an accident.

    The people calling them out on the other hand know that it doesn’t matter if you’ve got twenty years of safe firearms handling in your past.  An unsafe action at this moment means you are unsafe at this moment.  And while you may realize your error and fix yourself a moment later, if you fire that gun before then, it won’t really matter because the bullet only needs a split second to do its business.

    This is why you follow ALL gun safety rules AT ALL TIMES.  The rules are designed to be complimentary and overlapping, so that if you screw up and forget one (and eventually you will, because you’re human), you’ll be saved from an accident by another (or, at the very least, the accident won’t be fatal).  If you’re not following ALL THE RULES, ALL THE TIME, you’re just basically counting down to your personal “Tiger King” moment.  You’ll be absolutely certain that everything is fine, thanks to your own personal qualities of safety, and then…oops…

  62. 62.

    Lymie

    One of the pictures of the dick shooters shows the speedometer on 65 mph and no hands on the wheel. Darwin Award nominee?

  63. 63.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Manxome Bromide: The article stresses that it’s not about owning the libs, but it’s exactly the same phenomenon as owning the libs. It’s just that the lib-ness is relative rather than absolute. Owning the libs is fractally self-similar.

  65. 65.

    Ruckus

    @Lymie:

    He’s pointing a gun at his dick.

    Not the sharpest pencil in the box. The gun is most likely loaded as well. The book of statistics on accidental shootings is thick and dumb, just like a lot of the people who shoot themselves or someone else – unintentionally.

  66. 66.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Evil_Paul: This is true.  I have followed all safety rules 99.99% of the time that I have handled a firearm.  I can distinctly remember the one time I fucked up and had an “accidental discharge.”*  The shotgun I fucked up with was pointed down range as it should have been so no one was harmed.  I, nevertheless, still cringe that I was that stupid.

    *There is no such thing.

  67. 67.

    Elizabelle

    @Ixnay:  LOL.  I remember the cover you parody.

    This dick aiming, it is a mystery.  I fear that some of these tools are aiming unloaded guns at their jewels, but we won’t know until the accident reports start coming in, no?

  68. 68.

    J R in WV

    @Aleta:

    “A Hubbard Broadcasting Company”

    From the KSTP web site linked to above. Seems like a local Twin Cities company from googling. Which doesn’t mean they don’t scare-monger for ratings.

    If it bleeds, it leads isn’t a slogan about TC news for no reason.

    We told new hires from abroad that WV has one of the lowest crime rates in a very safe nation. One very good guy, a Jain named Arpan, asked me “Then why is there a murder on the TV news every night?” and I told him that they reach out across three states to have a murder to lead with if needed.

    Across East KY, SW OH and all of WV, you can find some bloody stories to lead your news show with… of course, the situation in the Twin Cities is all different right now, but still, the TV news looks for a “good lead” no matter what.

  70. 70.

    J R in WV

    @Mart:

    Does it get any better than an Emily [sic] Harris Rodney Crowell duet?

    Yes, it would be called an Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell duet. No offense, but that’s her name, not Emily. Huge fan of hers, and her work on the Trio series with Linda Rondstat and Dolly Parton, two more of the best singers in modern music.

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