If Republicans concede that yes, mass shootings are the price we pay for freedom, at least we can an honest debate. https://t.co/i1E275OXaa
— Alex Hazanov. (@alexhazanov) March 23, 2021
To its worshippers, a gun is not a tool, it is a powerful implement of magic. It makes a terrified woman equal to a violent home invader, a soft-handed aging man equal to an angry antifa mob, an overleveraged landscape contractor with a string of small-court claims and unpaid child support warrants equal to an uncaring bureaucrat. How can we lie-berals besmirch the honor of the Sacred Implement, and its loyal defenders?
And the Republican Party, desperate for continued electoral relevance, only too happy to court the Cult of the Mighty Gun, finds itself increasingly bound to the arguments of a tiny, self-centered minority…
"Every time there's a shooting…" is a helluva way to start your defense of guns ?? https://t.co/T1OWLVIgYI
— Scott Upton (@uptonic) March 24, 2021
2 cases of voter fraud in 2020: let’s make it harder to vote
38,000 gun deaths a year in US: let’s make it easier to buy guns
— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) March 23, 2021
Americans make up less than 5% of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45% of all the world’s privately held firearms. https://t.co/98yh4EX8ta
— Vox (@voxdotcom) March 23, 2021
Erick Erickson: The most heavily armed nation on earth also has the worst gun violence on earth. Here is my logical solution. pic.twitter.com/tXGS7Za6Rs
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) March 24, 2021
Herd immunity but for mass murder
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) March 24, 2021
It is 100% true and fair to say that the NRA did not murder all those people in Atlanta and Boulder. In the same sense as it's true and fair to say that Osama bin Laden did not fly the planes into the World Trade Center.
— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) March 23, 2021
The biggest difference is that bin Laden's feelings were negative: he hated America.
The NRA's attitude is entirely positive: it loves America for giving it a chance to earn money on selling death. And it loves your children's deaths for earning the NRA money.
Love conquers all.— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) March 23, 2021
piratedan
I find it hard to believe that the GOP will change their tune on this… why? well, they’re not the ones being killed. Sure a few GOP voters may get gunned down, but hey, the tree of Liberty or the Free Market or whatever…
Until someone goes off the rails and shoots up the Faux News sets and murders their own “on-screen talent” and producers, not one thing will change. You walk into the Corporate Headquarters and massacre the staff at NRA Headquarters… well, they’re all working remote now. Maybe kill a few GOP legislators at a State Capitol, even that can be waved away and won’t make a difference until someone goes after them and hunts them, specifically… then, and only then, might you see a change.
As far as the GQP is concerned, we’re all expendable, collateral damage.
HumboldtBlue
Lots of drinking and reluctance to hoe a field?
cain
Honestly, I was distracted by the pair of legs next to Ted Cruz which I’m sure is intellectual much more superior than Ted Cruz’s face.
If Catholic gun nuts could replace eucharist with a AR 15 – they would.
cain
@piratedan:
I reckon if someone shot up an NRA conference with an AR-15 – I would be curious to what the NRA’s response would be. Would they start putting metal detectors? All their shit is performative – they are probably scared shitless of guns.
cain
I wonder if Erick son of Erick is absolutely sure he wants to arm non-white people? It seems that it’s a big deal for black people to get free steaks, but apparently they won’t blink an eye to spend hundreds of millions to arm everyone with a gun.
How many re-creations of reservoir dogs will it take to decide that’s a bad idea?
Major Major Major Major
Off topic palate cleanser
hitchhiker
I don’t know why, but I just spent an hour figuring out that Megan McCain is married to Ben Domenech, and that Ben Domenech is kind of a fuckface Performative Asshole who is known to have plagiarized all kinds of shit and published it without attribution.
Also, Ben Domenech is a founder of something called The Federalist, which is a trumpy rats nest of writers that is funded by unknown donors … except the NYT recently outed one of them as Mr and Mrs Ueline, of Wisconsin, who are worth about $4 billion, and who have been spending lavishly on Republicans ever since Citizens United, tho’ they hide from the spotlight.
The Ueline’s are homophobic, anti-tax, anti-choice, every-ugly-thing, and of course trump donors. They probably helped fund the recent activities at the US Capitol. They try to keep a low profile.
Anyway, that was my evening’s entertainment … realizing that Megan is married to someone her famously mavericky dad would probably despise, and taking joy in the idea that Biden and the Democratic party are going to tax the living fuck out of Mr and Mrs Ueline in order to pay for hotel rooms for migrants desperate to get out of Central America.
Among other things.
Oh, also Ben Domenech’s sister, Emily, holds a high-level position in Kevin McCarthy’s operation. I hope they’re all miserable.
mrmoshpotato
Oh Eric Sonoferick…
Comrade Colette
As usual, the only response I can think of is, entirely fuck all of these people.
Except the owl. The owl is cool.
mrmoshpotato
@hitchhiker: You could’ve saved an hour and just asked. :)
Amir Khalid
The Second Amendment was never meant to allow the general public to have lethal toys. It had nothing to do with empowering citizens to resist a tyrannical state power, either; that is just an anarchist fantasy. In the early days of the American republic, states relied for security on citizen militias — men reporting to the town square with their firearms. The right to bear arms was all about ensuring citizens could perform that duty.
Now that states have fulltime law-enforcement/security forces, none of them has a use for citizen militias any more. The Second Amendment is obsolete in purpose; all it does now is encourage those who fetishise firearms and the cynical politicians (lke Ted Cruz) who egg them on. America has the planet’s most serious small-arms proliferation problem, and its consequences are seen on the world news almost every day.
/End self-righteous foreigner’s rant
SiubhanDuinne
@Amir Khalid:
Well-regulated malicious?
Dan B
@Amir Khalid: Such a clear and logical “rant”.
Is that possible? Is it a thing? I believe there is the perfect amount of rant.
BTW, more please!
scott (the other one)
Guns were banned at the NRA convention when Trump spoke there.
opiejeanne
@scott (the other one): I thought the NRA banned weapons at all of their conventions.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@opiejeanne: That was my understanding as well.
mrmoshpotato
@opiejeanne: Mass shootings for thee, but not for me.
scav
Another significant difference between Osama bin Laden and the NRA, the one that proves Osama wasn’t a real American and thus was ineligible to slaughter Americans without consequence is that he didn’t do it personal profit.
Frankensteinbeck
@piratedan:
The GOP legislators were shot at having a baseball game. Their answer was to get even more gun-happy. GOP voters lose their kids to school shootings the same as liberals. Their answer is to get even more gun-happy. Hate, Clark’s Law, and a toddler tantrum that reality dares to contradict their side are much more important to conservatives than their own lives. That latter is the mechanism. Fuck liberals and fuck facts, White People (as an identity group) are right all the time, in every way.
JWR
In last night’s A Closer Look, Seth Meyers played a 1991 clip of Justice Warren Burger saying, “If I were writing the Bill of Rights now, there wouldn’t be any such thing as the second amendment.” Burger went on to say that it had been turned into one of the greatest pieces of fraud on the American public by special interests.
lowtechcyclist
Remember when they used to say an armed society was a polite society? (I think that was originally a Heinlein quote, but don’t hold me to it.)
Still waiting for the politeness to kick in.
lowtechcyclist
I can respect people who are willing to die for their precious rights.
The gun people, OTOH, are perfectly OK with other people being forced to die for their precious rights. Basically, the Second Amendment worshippers are a human sacrifice cult.
Anne Laurie
Heinlein popularized it, though he probably didn’t invent it. And as far back as the early 1980s, you could get buttons at sf cons that followed that quote with ‘… Ask any Lebanese!’
Today it would probably be Syrian / Afghan / Sudanese... or maybe Atlantan / Boulderite / Las Veganite…
lowtechcyclist
Since the pro-gun types always do the ‘whatabout’ with automobile deaths, a few handy rebuttals:
1) We’ve been doing stuff about automobile safety all along. In 1972, the year I got my driver’s license, there were 54,589 motor vehicle-caused deaths. In 2019, the most recent year we have the stats for, there were 36,120. That’s right, we cut auto deaths by one-third, even as the population of the U.S. grew by >50%.
So maybe we ought to work on reducing gun deaths the same way we’ve been working on reducing auto deaths. Seat belts and air bags on the one hand, background checks and waiting periods on the other. Licenses, registration and insurance on the one hand, licenses, registration, and insurance on the other. Etcetera.
2) And if they’re really sincere about wanting to reduce auto deaths further (they’re not, needless to say), let ’em get on board with mass transit, because the best way to avoid auto accidents is to reduce the necessity of driving in the first place. When they’re out there demanding decent transit like every European city and country has, we can take their whatabout seriously.
Until then, it’s just a ruse, and we can tell that to their faces. They don’t give a shit about people’s lives, they’ve shown that over and over and over again, whether it’s cars, guns, or Covid. That’s what it all comes down to.
Gvg
Re Erickson’s idea, great have a forced tax on the poor, bet tired people working 3 jobs can learn gun safety and afford a new purchase instead of food or medicine and they will thank you for it….and won’t shoot their tyrannical manager…or shoot the legislators who implemented this dumb idea.
Or how about we force all insane people and depressed people to but a gun. That will make us all safer.
Has he even tried to think of what would really happen? No.
debbie
@Major Major Major Major:
Aww, he was just coasting at the end. Lazy thing?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s actually the whole problem, guns like AR-15 have been fetishized like Katana’s; they are magically imbued with the spirit of some dead warrior in their fan bois. It’s probably no coincidence that the sale of a weapon that’s been around since the 60s, been widely derided as finicky and unreliable, sudden popularity parallels the popularity of anime since magical weapons is common theme in Japanese culture, like magical robots.
Gun fetization has also clouded the debate with the gun control advocates, I have talked to people on the control side, who because they view guns as magical weapons and not tools, are unable to deal with the reasonable use one. It’s reasonable for say a farmer to have a hunting rifle to stop mountain lions from attacking his family or his live stock, it’s not reasonable for Cletus McBasementDweller to own an assault rifle since assault rifles/sub machine gun are designed for purpose of shooting up rooms full of people.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@cain: I am also sure that if Congress did pass a guns for all act like Erikson wants, Erikson has the editorial denouncing it as out of control socialism already written.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Anne Laurie: Even earlier than that, that was pretty much the argument for dueling in the early 19th Century.
Dueling as in cranky, middle age white guy shooting each other at close range… hmm why did we stop it?
Matt
I believe all privately-owned firearms in this country should be shredded and/or melted down.
But an important clarification: I don’t think they should be confiscated. If the owners want to lovingly caress The Precious as it goes into the shredder/furnace, we’ll make sure the opening is big enough for them too.
SFAW
@Gvg:
He’d think it’s a great idea until the darkies started arming themselves.
I can’t recall any mass shootings where the murderer was Black. Perhaps I’ve got selective recall. But I seem to recall hearing that CA’s gun control laws (1960s era) were enacted because the Black Panthers did open-carry, and Saint Ronnie the Fascist weren’t about to let that continue. And I bet the first — or maybe the second — time that a Black man killed 10 white people at a Cracker Barrel (like shooting crackers in a barrel?) — the usual suspects (e.g., Cruz) would be calling for various measures, and certain states would rush to enact laws aimed at POC.
But maybe I’m just being unjustifiably cynical.
Geminid
Yesterday the U.S. 9th Circuit upheld a Hawaii county’s right to restrict open carrying of handguns. The county had limited open carry permits to security guards. The L.A.Times article noted that the Supreme Court would decide this week whether to review a similar result in a case coming out of New York.
Current law on gun control comes out of the Heller case, which affirmed an individual right to own firearms, subject to reasonable regulation by governments. The Heller opinion was written by Judge Scalia, whom few would call a “squish.” I am no Supreme Court watcher, but it seems to me that a substantial revision of Heller would be too radical for even this court. The accession of Justice Barrett has given gun rights groups hope though, and they have filed a flurry of court challenges to existing gun safety laws.
Although my state of Virginia is an open-carry state. I rarely see people with a pistol at their waist. (gun rights demonstrations are a different story). I was a little surprised when Texas passed an open-carry law a few years ago; I had assumed they already were open carry. The South Carolina legislature is in the process of passing an open-carry law for that state.
marklar
@Major Major Major Major:
Never saw a wet saw whet before!
A Ghost to Most
Continue to focus on the How, not the Why. Gotta protect the cult.
VOR
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Ah, reminds me of when Betsy DeVos said we needed guns in classrooms so the teachers could defend the students from bears. Or was it mountain lions?
Chat Noir
This paragraph is poetry. I love your writing, Anne Laurie.
AnotherBruce
@marklar: Nicely done!
SFAW
@VOR:
Knowing DeVos (figuratively speaking), she recalled her earlier schooling, and was talking about the dangers of arming bears. Or something.
planetjanet
In response to the Erwickkk Erwwikkksons of the world, I would like to see a graph of the increasing number of guns in American against the number of shootings in America. My bet is that the correlation would not be in his favor.
laura
@Amir Khalid: Your ideas interest me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Bill Arnold
@SFAW:
The DC Snipers, John Allen Muhammad, Lee Boyd Malvo. (Search on their names + images )
They spread the killing (with a scoped 223 rifle) out over a period of time, though.
There are some others (wikipedia has a few collections, though check the edit history) but as you say it’s not common. In the US. (In some African countries, oh my.)
Just Chuck
@Gvg:
He’s paid not to. In fact he’s paid to make sure others don’t either.