More guns in civilians hands is not some equalizer with the cops. It's the reason police can justify being so trigger happy in the first place - they'll shoot your face off before asking questions, because you MIGHT have had a gun. It's a lot different in other nations:Originally Posted by Draxil
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...ther-countries
England and Wales: 55 fatal shootings by police in 24 years. USA: 59 in 24 days.
More guns aren't protecting you from the cops, they're the justification for why they're allowed to shoot you and get away with it.
Last edited by Cipheron; 6th Feb 2023 at 22:29.
Gun control doesn't mean that nobody is allowed to have guns, just that guns and their ownership would be regulated (as they are in most of the world), so that not every nutjob would be easily able to sport one.
For example, If you have a prior history of violence, cruelty towards animals, spousal or child abuse, then you should not be laying down the law with a gun -- and that goes not just for ordinary citizens, but the police as well.
It's interesting, I've been reading about Buffalo soldiers and the Apache wars for my own project. My dad wanted to take me to the massive sports store in the US, Pro Bass Shop, which is bigger than most malls. The space is open but like 4 stories high, and there are heads of animals along the walls. You walk in and there was a two story high fireplace set up like an "intimate" hunting lodge hearth sized up 400%. It was almost sickeningly garish; down every aisle it was something.
The one thing I really noticed this time that I don't think makes anyone give a second glance was that most all the murals were of Anglo pioneers in covered wagons in some stage of taming the hinterlands. It struck me that the whole thing comes with an ideology that was suddenly really central, the guns, the tents, the 4 wheelers... the countryside today is pretty literally endless chains of stripmalls, but we're still in that mode of needing to be ready to subdue it, to develop the land, just in case.
You know what it reminded me of? After the warring period in Japan, the samurai ethos wasn't really relevant anymore; but the aesthetic and ideology still continued, and actually got purified and ritualized... It was like an entire class of men whose entire life revolved around the art of warfare that had nothing to do with actual warfare. (Until three centuries later it was and of course they brought their country to utter ruin.)
I feel like that's happened with the US pioneer spirit. It's like some kind ritualized aesthetic that's so radically detached from its roots that the whole thing swims in the ridiculous. There's all this wildly expensive tech just so you can have, e.g., a propane stove for when you're camping that probably costs more and has more tech stuffed in it than actually gas stoves in people's kitchens, and so on down the list. Fourwheelers that were more elaborate than actual cars, but very carefully designed to look like they were handmade in the plains 3 days travel from the nearest imaginary depot. Things you'd "need" just in case you found yourself out there again.
Anyway, yeah, guns in the US. It's ritualized pioneer spirit, a perpetual playacting of some delusional mythology to make people repetitively forget that they're driving in mindless circles around the most bleak, dystopian reality of endless strip malls, with any spiritual meaning in the land long since defiled and buried in a landfill.
Edit: Did I mention I've been spending some time with the fam in Oklahoma recently?It's culturally different than what I've been used to. Let's put it that way. But despite that ideology's best efforts, there are quite a lot of sacred places there if you look for them. Don't get me wrong. (And it's not the megachurches. BTW nobody gave me the memo that church services are apparently done by vid casting from a hub megachurch four towns away now, and people still raise their hands or shout towards to the screen as if the guy was actually there. Well he has his own video feed, so he can actually see them. But I mean... What reality are we even in now?)
Last edited by demagogue; 7th Feb 2023 at 04:14.
That retort only makes sense if you think defending yourself against police brutality is a legit reason for owning a gun. Which maybe you do, in which case good luck with that.
(It‘s also wrong on the merits, btw.)
This story is a pretty wild ride. FBI hires absolute lunatic to infiltrate BLM protests in 2020. The article covers a lot of interesting areas:
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/07/...sts-informant/
...
While COINTELPRO no longer exists, some of its methods remain inside the FBI. This is clear from the bureau’s investigation of racial justice activists in Denver during the summer of 2020.
As Windecker gained prominence among the protesters, eventually rising to a leadership role, he was accusing real activists of being FBI informants. These baseless accusations sowed mistrust and undermined some of the most effective organizers in the community.
Trey Quinn, the Black activist leading protests in Denver, was among the first to suspect that Windecker might be an informant. Quinn devised a way to test Windecker: Speaking in hypotheticals, he asked him about burning down a neighborhood. Could we get it done?
“And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I got the right guy for the job,’” Quinn said. “This is how he’s talking.”
Windecker’s enthusiastic response fueled Quinn’s suspicions, but he didn’t have proof, so he didn’t warn other activists then. But Windecker, appearing to view Quinn as a threat to his cover, started telling activists that he suspected Quinn was working for the FBI.
“Mickey seemed super concerned that Trey was an informant,” Hall said. “Then I started getting concerns about it.”
Suddenly, Quinn found himself on the outside. His fellow activists stopped communicating with him. As Quinn was being marginalized, Windecker encouraged protesters to become more militant and go on the offensive against the police.
In late August 2020, Hall went to an apartment that served as a base for Windecker and the young allies he’d recruited. Inside, Hall saw a table covered with guns. “I’m like, ‘Holy fuck,’” Hall recalled.
Another activist, who was with Hall in the apartment but asked not to be named because she fears retribution for speaking publicly, confirmed Hall’s account. “There are guns, weapons, medical supplies, literally looking like they’re preparing for a genuine battle,” she told me.
From August 22 to August 29, 2020, a series of demonstrations in Denver morphed into assaults on police stations, with protesters carrying homemade shields and hurling rocks and fireworks at police. The demonstrators called one of these events “Give ’Em Hell.” More than 70 police officers were injured that week.
The police response was ferocious. Officers in riot gear broke bones and fired pepper balls and rubber bullets. One man was hit in the head with a lead-filled bag fired from a police shotgun. A stingball grenade exploded next to a woman, knocking out her teeth. In the first civil judgment awarded at trial for police brutality in response to protests triggered by the Floyd killing, Denver police were forced last spring to pay $14 million to 12 protesters.
According to more than a dozen activists I spoke to in the Denver area, Windecker, the FBI’s informant, helped organize and promote these protests, which quickly turned violent.
---
A pervasive social media and cable news narrative in the summer of 2020 was that racial justice and antifascist activists were becoming increasingly violent and destructive.
“The violence and vandalism is being led by antifa and other radical left-wing groups,” President Donald Trump said. Right-wing news media reinforced and amplified that message. “Violent young men with guns will be in charge,” Tucker Carlson told his large audience on Fox News, adding: “You will not want to live here when that happens.”
Michael German, a former FBI agent, watched from his home in California as this narrative took hold. “It was frustrating for me to see how ably — usually that’s not a term that you use when you’re referencing former President Trump — but how ably he was able to make this boogeyman out of antifa,” German, now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told me.
According to FBI files and videos, Windecker’s mandate from the FBI wasn’t just to provide information about racial justice protesters — though his “intelligence” about activists filled dozens of reports — but also to try to set up protesters in a conspiracy that would have supported Trump’s claims.
Last edited by Cipheron; 8th Feb 2023 at 02:14.
That was a loaded post demagogue. It hits close to home for me. There's so many directions we could go with this, I feel like James Burke after act 1 of a Connections episode.
We could start with the decline of B&M retail. The big, multi-floor downtown department stores are all gone, the 90s superstore and outlet store craze is over, big box chains have consolidated, and most malls are in decline. Those Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's superstores (same company now, sad story) are among the last remaining 'destination stores' outside of major cities. Some of their stores pull in people from 1-2 hours away. They are kitschy cathedrals of materialism and impulse buying and waste. But you've got toys for dad, sportswear for mom, and kids love the decorations, so families come. I prefer REI, but I will miss those BPS/Cabela's stores when they are gone, because there aren't many places left you can see outdoor gear in the flesh before buying.
The decorations are regional, or even unique to the store. I've been to BPS in NH and Cabela's in PA and MA. None had any pioneer art, just murals of eastern landscapes and wildlife. Murals of pioneers in covered wagons seems surprisingly tone deaf for a store in Oklahoma.
Or we could talk about survivalists and preppers, but they're not blowing their money at Bass Pro Shops on a bunch of outdoor recreation toys. The serious ones are buying land and learning to be off the grid subsistence farmers. You could say they embody the pioneer spirit the most, but they're not driven by the same reasons the pioneers were.
One national trend you just picked up on is that outdoor recreation just keeps getting more popular. The trend has been going for a while, but COVID-19 really accelerated it. Trails, rivers, lakes, state parks, campgrounds, and ski areas are more crowded than ever. I once hiked Fuji-san, and the popular climbs around here are starting to get like that. Traffic jams on the trail are a little more fun than traffic jams on the road, but not that much. It has me dreaming of camping at remote sites only accessible by water, where I can enjoy nature, let my kids explore without bothering anyone, and see the sun go down quietly.
Of course you need some gear for that. With any outdoor hobby, there are some people who enjoy doing it old school, and some people who always want the latest and greatest gear. The latter are often backpackers, who are always looking to squeeze a little more comfort and convenience into their packs. That's why a child sized tiny mesh chair costs $150. But there's plenty of people camping with Walmart brand kit (Ozark Trail). I've gone through my share of it. It's cheap, it's functional, it breaks.
Getting back to the frontier spirit, I think of it in more abstract terms than living off the land. It's the source of the American dream and the reason why we are inherently forward looking. The positive elements of it are behind the country's economic strength, like the expectation that as soon as you are of adult age, you will set out on your own to chase opportunities. It's a source of entrepreneurialism, work ethic, and willingness to take risks. It's why mobility and liberty are values commonly shared across cultures here. It's why we're builders, it's why we're road trippers, it's why we have the national parks and Star Trek and explore the solar system. Unfortunately, it's also behind the manifest destiny theory that excused the destruction of indigenous nations and cultures. It's why we raped the land for 250 years until it started catching up to us, it's why Americans keep moving to open spaces in the mountain west despite the wildfires and lack of water. The frontier spirit has been kept alive for hundreds of years by waves of immigrants who came here because of it, and it's reflected in the Constitution, so I think it's part of the country's DNA for better or worse.
One of the ways it's hurting the country now is the home-is-your-castle kind of thinking. I wish we could get beyond thinking every family must need a detached home, garden, dog, and two cars to be happy, because that's the reason why we have vast suburban sprawl and a large per capita carbon footprint.
This is getting rambling, so I'll save gun culture for a later post.
I was certainly dramatizing things for effect, but thank you for the thoughtful walk through that anyway. I think the context here is I'm going through I think three layers of culture shock, first just spending an extended time back in the US after a decade by itself, second I think the US, or anyway through the lens of my family, has changed over the last 10 years, and third, even though central and north Oklahoma aren't even that far from where I grew up in North Texas, I feel like the culture here (in OK) is a lot different, and it's my first time spending any time here.
Texas gets shit from the rest of the world for being "crazy", but it's a rich state with lots of people coming in from all over, so it's more cosmopolitan than it gets credit for. Like its cities voted Blue in the last I think 3 elections, and I think of where I grew up as the kind of place where, e.g., Explosions in the Sky (the band) could crystallize post-rock as a genre. And the Oklahoma I knew was from my grandparent's perspective, like Will Rogers and Grapes of Wrath-era Oklahoma, very Democrat and pro-labor, which isn't really the case today. I saw a "Let's go Brandon" billboard off the highway a few days ago.
Anyway, I have no doubt I'm mixing fair and unfair observations in my disordered state. It's what's motivated me to write this thing about the Apache wars and talk to Native groups around here while I'm here. Now seems to be the right time for a deep dive into American identity and our moment in history these days.
Out on the road today I saw a deadhead sticker on a cadillac.
Elon Musk fires top twitter engineer because people are losing interest in Elon Musk:
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon...-report-2023-2
Elon Musk reportedly fired a Twitter engineer on the spot after the worker told him his popularity was sinking on the site
Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer who told him he was declining in popularity on the site, according to a recent report from the tech newsletter Platformer.
Musk met with several Twitter engineers on Tuesday to discuss his view count on Twitter, which had been on a downward spiral in recent months, Platformer reported. The billionaire had previously assigned workers to look into whether his reach on the platform had been restricted due to a potential issue with Twitter's algorithm, according to the report.
"This is ridiculous," Musk told the employees, Platformer said, citing multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. "I have more than 100 million followers, and I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions."
The employees showed Musk internal data and a Google Trends chart that indicated public interest in the billionaire was waning, Platformer reported. Google Trends data shows his popularity peaked at a score of 100 in April — around the time he offered to buy Twitter — and has since dropped to a 9.
When one of the engineers said Musk's popularity might be declining due to a lack of public interest since his Twitter purchase, Musk told the employee he was fired, according to Platformer. The billionaire also told some employees to track how often his tweets are recommended on the site as he was unconvinced by the meeting that his view count had not been impacted by an internal issue, the publication said.
No, the post was meant to illustrate the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously believing, as progressives do, that cops and policing in this country are irredeemably marred by white supremacism, corruption, and violence while simultaneously believing that these very same corrupt, violent, and racist officials are the only ones trustworthy enough to own a gun or determine who can own a gun, and should be responsible for our safety and security. It beggars belief.
I don't think cops are ultimately responsible for my safety, and don't trust them, and think there is a lot wrong with policing in this country--not least of which is the continued militarization of civilian police forces and drawing recruits from military forces who then proceed to tramp around Western Bumfuck, Iowa as if it were Fallujah. Cops should primarily have a service mindset; they can't be pushovers, but too many of my interactions with them, of all races, leads me to believe that aggression is the primary trait being looked for in recruitment. I've slowly walked out the front door of my house with my hands clasped behind my head while having a friggin' SWAT team and half a dozen patrol officers point their weapons at me. I'm white, reasonably affluent, live in one of the wealthiest and safest counties in the US, and was thinking of nothing but Daniel Shaver. It was supposed to be a "safety check" initiated by a well intentioned but very misinformed person--I was a hell of a lot safer before they came. I was cuffed and yelled at for 45 minutes, taken to a mental health facility and interviewed by a social worker, and released 1 hour later without charges, a ride home, a wallet, or cell phone. What I did get was a very bad opinion of the police in my city and a determination that they will never be my only option for safety or security. I'll call them and comply when they're present, but I'll be damned if I'm going to rely on them.
I think the mainstream liberal position is, not that police should be completely disarmed, but there should be an arms reduction and definitely a demilitarization. (It's usually branded as less money for police and more money to social services underlying a lot of crime.) They're trying to be rational about it. It's like a guns version of the START treaty. It may be difficult to get guns off the streets, and so with the police, but the way to start is to have a reduction across the board, including among police.
Coming from a law background, I myself am always thinking in institutional terms. Institutions are as good or bad as their structure (education, recruitment, training, procedures, incentives, culture, etc.). So if you have a bad institution, those are the things that you focus on. I'm both pessimistic, because the status quo of those things have deep roots, but not fatalist; they're things you can and should improve.
Draxil, your comments about progressives demonstrate your lack of thoughtful interactions with them. If you had ever genuinely conversed with progressives, you would not make such silly remarks.
For example, I'm a progressive who wants the second amendment to remain in place. I think the amendment's scope covers self-defense and hunting, and nothing else, and thus does not include assault rifles. I also want police armament to be every bit as restricted (in type, not quantity) as civilian armament, both to weaken the US police state, but also for the practical reason that police armament often finds its way into civilian hands via surplus stores.
Eh. He is always saying what progressives think according to some uninformed Fox news perspective. I would settle for a strict enforcement of clip size. We plug shotguns to keep the number of doves killed down but we can't extend the same to our kids. But all this has been said before to no effect.
Police are necessary. Gratuitous violence and killing not so much.
Oh, fuck off. If your intent is to kill, you're going to kill. Jerry Miculeck can shoot 6 rounds, reload, and put 6 more rounds in a target in under 3 seconds. You can ban high capacity magazines till you're blue in the face--3D printing and the sheer number of high-cap mags in existence have rendered it pointless, as has been covered in past threads. Biden has called for the ban of 9mm's, which "blow the lungs out of the body", semiautomatic firearms (hint: that's practically all guns), and.. god knows. He's a fucking dumbass. You know it. I know it. His recommendation ofis actually felonious and patently-fucking-stupid. I mean, grade-A fucking stupid. Recap: firearm=lethal force. That means: no warning shots, not wounding shots, no "fire it off the balcony" shots, no "fire it through a door that you don't know whose behind" shots. The man is a grade-A fucking moron.If you want to protect yourself, get a double-barrelled shotgun, have the shells, a 12-gauge shotgun, and I promise you, as I told my wife -- we live in an area that's wooded and somewhat secluded -- I said "Jill, if there's ever a problem just walk out on the balcony here, walk out, put that double-barrelled shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house." I promise you, whoever's coming in is not -- you don't need an AR-15. It's harder to aim, it's harder to use, and in fact you don't need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun. Buy a shotgun.
What is an "assault rifle", Fox? Define it. Is it defined by function (which includes 10's or 100's of millions of rifles) or by feature that doesn't improve function (barrel shroud, pistol grip, collapsing stock, etc.). Regardless, an insignificant amount of gun related crime is committed with "assault rifles", because quelle surprise, hiding a 36+ inch rifle on your body isn't exactly easy. Look it up. If progressives were serious about reducing gun crime, they'd target handguns. They're not, and they don't. If they were serious about reducing gun crime, they'd press for enforcement of straw purchases and felonious gun purchases (ala Hunter Biden). They're not, and they don't. If they were serious, they'd stop cashless bail and plea deals for felonious possession of firearms. They're not, and they don't.
Notoriously, spree shooters are typically expert speed shooters. Highly skilled people can reload fast, so therefore we should just not do anything about magazine sizes.
And it's good that nobody ever uses duffel bags, otherwise assault rifles would be relatively easy to conceal still. Phew.
Instead, we should just have an arms race among civilians and police. That'll really solve the issue. Get some more toddler v parent shootings, some more neighbor v neighbor ones too, and while we're at it, some more cop v unarmed civilian ones because who can tell who has a gun or not?
Hence the longest-running The Onion article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22No_...ularly_Happens
An assault rifle is a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine.
In the ten most deadly mass shootings in the US, eight of the killers used assault rifles. The other two used semi-automatic pistols.
Citations, in decreasing order of body count: 1 2 4 5 7 8 9 10.
Progressives focus on eliminating the most heinous gun crimes, which I've shown to overwhelmingly involve assault rifles. However, some do target handguns as well; personally, I'm on the fence about whether semi-automatic pistols should fall under second-amendment protection. Once again, this shows that not only do you rarely interact with progressives, you've got some kind of golem inhabiting your mind that makes you think you do understand us.
I don't know what this part of your reply is talking about.
The prison industry is part of the police state, and this part of the thread arose out of discussions decrying that police state. You should not expect progressives to advance one cause (firearm control) by giving up in another (the prison industry and the police state). In addition, your point relies on the unfounded idea that harsher sentencing is an effective deterrent to crime. It is not.
Last edited by Anarchic Fox; 12th Feb 2023 at 20:12.
You're focused on the few most sensational incidents, so you've shown nothing. America's gun crime epidemic is the result of drug gangs fighting it out for territory, or opportunistic crimes such as carjacking and street robbery. Which is virtually all committed by handguns.Progressives focus on eliminating the most heinous gun crimes, which I've shown to overwhelmingly involve assault rifles.
For example Chicago had 3,555 shootings in 2021 and 2,832 shootings in 2022. Almost all of those were committed via handgun. And that's just one city. Add in Baltimore, Denver, Atlanta, NYC, Los Angeles, etc and your "ten most deadly shootings" will be lost in an endless ocean of handguns.
Progressives can only see rifles, obsess over rifles, because their class enemy, the working-class white suburban man, likes to have rifles for hunting or range shooting.
Great first part of your post, as regards to the definition of "assault rifle". None of the killers used "assault rifles" by the definition you provided, which was remarkably accurate. AR-15's are not "assault rifles". They are not "select fire". I know you're copying and pasting things you have no clue about, but it actually does mean something.
Um hmmm. The rifle:handgun ratio of murders in the US is about 18:1, per most recent FBI stats of 2019. Less than 400 rifle murders in a population of 340,000,000. I'm ok with that, actually. About 1 in a million seems reasonable. The "Hunter Biden" portion of the post is to illustrate that, shock, criminal tendencies overlap. Drugs, guns, prostitution, etc.Progressives focus on eliminating the most heinous gun crimes, which I've shown to overwhelmingly involve assault rifles. However, some do target handguns as well; personally, I'm on the fence about whether semi-automatic pistols should fall under second-amendment protection. Once again, this shows that not only do you rarely interact with progressives, you've got some kind of golem inhabiting your mind that makes you think you do understand us.
The prison industry is part of the police state, and this part of the thread arose out of discussions decrying that police state. You should not expect progressives to advance one cause (firearm control) by giving up in another (the prison industry and the police state). In addition, your point relies on the unfounded idea that harsher sentencing is an effective deterrent to crime. It is not.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, it actually is. If you're in jail, you're not harming the general populace. I can't help if progressive goals are in conflict--that's on you. You can try to dress it up, move the goal posts, whatever. I'd be thrilled if you would look up the average felony rate of convicted murderers in Chicago or New York. It's nuts. There are violent felonts roaming steets who should be in jail, who are released due to the fact that the city doesn't want to appear racist. Reap what you sow.
Going one link deeper into Wikipedia, the page on selective fire says: "The selective-fire function was later seen in the Russian AK-47 (designed in 1946), the Belgian FN FAL (designed 1947-53) the British EM-2 (designed in 1948), and the U.S. AR-10 (designed in 1957) and its AR derivatives." Note the last items on that list.
The intent of banning assault rifles is to make the most horrific events less deadly. It won't budge the overall homicide statistics, but that's not the intent.
I stated my point more broadly than I should have. I want sentencing reduction and bail reform for nonviolent crimes. In the bit that I quoted, you were talking about cashless bail and firearm possession. Bail reform, which I support, is exclusively for nonviolent crime.
However, when I went looking for statistics, I found that the broader point is true too. This report, whose methodology looks sound to me, concludes: "This report demonstrates that when other variables are controlled for, increasing incarceration had a minimal effect on reducing property crime in the 1990s and no effect on violent crime. In the 2000s, increased incarceration had no effect on violent crime and accounted for less than one-hundredth of the decade’s property crime drop."
I did look up information on them, and I found that the recent increase in homicide rates is nationwide. The largest increases occurred in Montana, South Dakota, and Kentucky, which for some reason I don't hear named along with NY and Chicago. Here is a collection of information on the topic.I can't help if progressive goals are in conflict--that's on you. You can try to dress it up, move the goal posts, whatever. I'd be thrilled if you would look up the average felony rate of convicted murderers in Chicago or New York. It's nuts. There are violent felonts roaming steets who should be in jail, who are released due to the fact that the city doesn't want to appear racist. Reap what you sow.
And, that's my limit. The fatigue is real. At least I learned a few new things.
Last edited by Anarchic Fox; 13th Feb 2023 at 00:38.
About that crime happens in big cities part, especially Chicago...
Also, while we are on the subject, here's the other dynamic playing out here:
Pretty good video on fake news by a channel i just discovered. It's longer but good value.
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