01.26.13
Pick the most inspiring (not a trick question)
Taken a week apart, the first in DC, the second in Austin.
Thousands of people, many holding signs with names of gun violence victims and messages such as “Ban Assault Weapons Now,” joined a rally for gun control on Saturday, marching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument …
Once the crowd arrived at the monument, speakers called for a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition and for universal background checks on gun sales.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the crowd it’s not about taking away Second Amendment gun rights, but about gun safety and saving lives. He said he and President Barack Obama would do everything they could to enact gun control policies.
As I’ve pointed out, the gun nut lobby has worked hard cultivating its image as rage-filled white male ogres who are stockpiling arms, a group that frightens or repulses normal people.
The only thing protecting it are feckless Democrats and the entirety of the minority GOP. They’ve lost any good will they might have had with everyone else.
And about the liberties I took with the photo: Yes, I put my fingers on the scale. But I didn’t have to.
I.T. said,
January 26, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Inspiring?
Does it matter whether something is inspiring or not? I heard plenty of people claim Obama’s speeches were ‘inspiring’.
Fact is, outside of warzones, very few people get shot by rifles every year. Was 120 in the US in 2011?
There’s no money to buy all the rifles out, neither the political will and so on.
Grandfathering is going to leave all the tens of millions of rifles out there.
Confiscation wouldn’t work at all, considering how bad record-keeping is.
And considering the falling police budgets, neither is it imaginable that a law could make everyone register rifles so they could be confiscated or bought out later.
So why the fuck care? Truly, why? Why 100-200 people per year in a country of 300 million where say 75,000 people die because of booze every year. And supposedly 300K deaths are caused by obesity.
Wouldn’t it be more productive do something about that?
Say, ban everything stronger than wine and slap serious taxes on all alcohol and severely fat people.
That’d create an incentive, right there. And save plenty of man-years of life.
Rationally speaking, the effort to ban semi-automatic rifle is completely bonkers. The possible benefits are very small.
It’s extremely politically divisive in the time where your country can’t afford that. Unless your politicians know something we don’t, such as that next year stars are going to be right and a quarter of the people are suddenly turned into violent psychopaths..
It only makes sense if one thinks it’s a red-herring exploited to draw voters away from economy, inflation, the rampant cronyism and corruption in government and so on. And of course divide & conquer. Seems to me it’s just like abortions and the culture wars… a sideshow to divide voters so that politicians can get on with business as usual and real issues such as DoD, out of control spending and all that crap are profitably not gonna get resolved.
The only thing protecting it are feckless Democrats and the entirety of the minority GOP.
What about the second amendment and all the court decision pertinent?
If US wanted to repeal it, wouldn’t it take something like 3/4 of all state legislatures agreeing so?
George Smith said,
January 26, 2013 at 4:22 pm
Rationally speaking, the effort to ban semi-automatic rifle is completely bonkers. The possible benefits are very small.
Opinions vary. Not a reason not to try.
It’s extremely politically divisive in the time where your country can’t afford that.
The country is already radically divided and the issues are all related to the politics of WhiteManistan and the white male right/GOP losing power. That was the side soundly beaten in the recent election.
The division isn’t going to be eliminated. It’s unbridgeable. The radical white right can, however, be increasingly marginalized, something it is helping along itself. The GOP destroyed itself in California simply by being what it is — a party of radicals against everyone not like it. Demographically, that’s the future of the rest of the country.
And, of course, social issues are tied to it. The gun nuts overlap with nuts anti-abortionists and the homophobes and the gold bugs and the tax resisters, the Islamophobe anti-sharia crazies, it just goes on and on — including a whole pack of unsavory historically old time American extremists which the modern GOP, by dint of its demographics and beliefs, have made part of its smaller but increasingly neo-fascist tent.
No one’s even talking about getting rid of the Second Amendment except the gun nuts. They’re the owners of the Obama Hitler mania. You don’t find that anywhere else -except- in WhiteManistan and it came about solely because they couldn’t accept an African American as president. They can’t separate themselves from an entrenched bigotry anymore.
I.T. said,
January 26, 2013 at 5:36 pm
Opinions vary. Not a reason not to try.
Well, US did try prohibition, while around here people made fun out of it.
There’s a short story by Jaroslav Hašek making fun out of some local US inspired temperance movement..
Demographically, that’s the future of the rest of the country.
That’s like saying Europe is going to die out because most countries are below replacement fertility. Right now.
Future is uncertain, and predicting it is a fool’s game.
And why do you think future holds a population more willing to accept gun control?
Also, if you look at it from another perspective, parts of the world where Kalashnikovs( not the semi-auto clones) are a must-have accessory for men and machineguns are sold at market stalls.. have lower murder rates than Washington D.C. Can someone claim, with a straight face, that it’s the weapons that cause the crime? You’d probably find a far better correlation between the amount of sub-saharan DNA and crime than between guns and crime. Yes, call me a racist, but it seems to me that ethnics which have been shaped by by law enforcement – such as Chinese are less likely to commit crime.
After all, violent fuckwits can’t possibly prosper in an ordered, civilized society, unless they can rein their impulses(impulse control is what separates the convicted psychopaths from the successful ones) and serve the government or other interests.
On the other hand, in primitive societies without order, where male homicide cause between 20-60% absolute male deaths, violent, impulsive types are more likely to prosper..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Before_Civilization
Take a look at these numbers:
http://pollingmatters.gallup.com/2012/12/newtown-shootings-context-americans.html
You really think only right-wingers are thinking about that repealing the 2nd amendment?
Look at this google search:
https://www.google.cz/search?q=repeal+2nd+amendment&aq=0&oq=repeal+2nd+am&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
plenty of articles by advocates of such a repeal. 2/3 alarmists, 1/3 proponents or so?
Christoph Hechl said,
January 28, 2013 at 12:56 am
My view on this is that the difference you make on actual deaths is entirely irrelevant.
With all the broken promises, gun control even if it is only on a marginal level would in fact mark a real change in US politics. If it at least means, that people would be allowed to call the police if they see someone running around with an assault rifle, and those policemen could then confiscate said gun that would make a difference.
It would put an end to the arms race between civil criminals and the police at least in terms of physical weapons.
Eventually the one thing, that is hardest to tear down, are the barriers in peoples brains. The mental obesity imho is far more dangerous than the physical one, although both often go hand in hand. Putting to much of the wrong stuff inside of you decreases your mobility and activity and likely makes your life less enjoyable (chose which type of obesity this applies to).
You have to start somewhere or you will never get off your ass.
George Smith said,
January 28, 2013 at 4:20 pm
Also, if you look at it from another perspective, parts of the world where Kalashnikovs( not the semi-auto clones) are a must-have accessory for men and machineguns are sold at market stalls … have lower murder rates than Washington D.C.
We went over some of this ground before back in December, here and here.
These are arguments Ted Nugent makes all the time and this fellow had a lively discussion on it back in December elsewhere, although I’d put the link in with some posts. .
http://globalsociology.com/2012/12/15/on-the-guns-thing-i-would-just-like-to-point-out/
The President has never made any statements that even come close to calling for repealing the second amendment. He did absolutely nothing on gun control in his first term. Nevertheless, the NRA monstered him and spent four years concocting elaborate stories about how he would do it, in collusion with Eric Holder, in his second term. And that narrative was peddled relentlessly to its membership until it became an article of faith.
I went into some of it here.
http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/2012/12/18/hot-manias-from-whitemanistan/
So for four years and counting we’ve had the odious and stupid “Obama Hitler” thing coming out of WhiteManistan, with a couple other dictators added as garnish. It’s just paranoid crazy rubbish because none of those uttering it know much detailed history at all. Neither can they point to one well-established western democracy that turned into a dictatorship. And the weight of this crazy nonsense outweighs by order of magnitude what some crackpots from the progressive side may have blurted out after Sandy Hook to get a few eyeballs. There’s also the strong smell of white bigot that comes along automatically with the the conspiracy he’s-gonna-take-all-our-guns jabber.
As for the Gallup results in December, they were widely disseminated and discussed. It’s certainly true American attentions always wandered awhile after each massacre. It’s also true the NRA, over the years, has been very successful at pistol-whipping legislators and the public at large on the issue of gun control.
But times may be changing:
“More than two-thirds of Americans favor a ban on the sale of military-style, semiautomatic assault weapons, according to a new national poll by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health — illustrating a deepening divide in the U.S. That is the one, not between gun owners and non-gun owners, but between the public and Congress, where an assault weapons ban introduced just last week is already thought to have no hope of passage.
” ‘This is the hardest of the hard,’ Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who introduced the legislation, admitted on Sunday.
“Yet even 45.7 percent of gun owners in the Johns Hopkins poll favored the ban, as did almost 68 percent of non-gun-owners living in households with guns. About two-thirds of the 2,703 survey respondents live in such a household, including 947 gun owners and 843 non-gun-owners. (In the survey, 85 percent of the non-owners in gun households were women, who tend to be less supportive of gun rights than men.) …”
The rest:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-28/americans-ready-for-gun-laws-even-if-congress-isn-t.html