More sacrifices to the 2nd Amendment

[brenthutch 383]

35 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

 

How you are unable to see that publicly promoting a cache of unnecessary, and frankly ridiculous, guns 

Fun, you failed to mention fun

BTW one can take a man out of the Airborne Rangers  but there will always be a piece of the Airborne Rangers in the man. I have had an M-16, M-4 or AR-15 in my hands for four decades now 

[olofscience 420]

53 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

One person said it was the guns another said it was the ammo, I say it is the person pulling the trigger.

But nobody said a mass shooting would surely result. So, you're just making stuff up.

[JoeWeber 2,294]

53 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

Fun, you failed to mention fun

BTW one can take a man out of the Airborne Rangers  but there will always be a piece of the Airborne Rangers in the man. I have had an M-16, M-4 or AR-15 in my hands for four decades now 

We can all be glad you weren't in tanks, I guess.

[JerryBaumchen 1,046]

2 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

We can all be glad you weren't in tanks, I guess.

Hi Joe,

They drank the KoolAid.  It is like water under a bridge, you cannot move it upstream.

Looks like the separation discussions really do not work. *

Jerry Baumchen

*  Worked for me, I could not get rid of that military stuff fast enough.

 

[JoeWeber 2,294]

3 hours ago, brenthutch said:

Fun, you failed to mention fun

BTW one can take a man out of the Airborne Rangers  but there will always be a piece of the Airborne Rangers in the man. I have had an M-16, M-4 or AR-15 in my hands for four decades now 

At the risk of being atopical, in addition to my usual atypical, I think it's important to point out that using your military career to justify your thinking on the value and appropriateness of gun proliferation in America is a cheap play. As has been observed here ad nauseam, albeit necessarily, the United States is the only Western Nation with this problem and in this degree. Of course, the rest of those Western Nations have advanced militaries and a lot of retired veterans just like you and they seem to get along just fine, no better than fine, without our Second Amendment gun culture insanity and the consequent carnage against their own citizens. So thank you for your service but now let's all get to the position of enjoying that which you were, ostensibly, protecting: a safe, civil society.

[BIGUN 1,042]

8 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

We can all be glad you weren't in tanks, I guess.

You can buy one of those also - from Uvalde Texas, no less.

https://www.drivetanks.com/own-one/

[winsor 185]

6 hours ago, BIGUN said:

You can buy one of those also - from Uvalde Texas, no less.

https://www.drivetanks.com/own-one/

They're quite impressive, but they get really shitty mileage.

[kallend 1,619]

2 hours ago, winsor said:

They're quite impressive, but they get really shitty mileage.

Is that an issue in Texas?

[kallend 1,619]

9 hours ago, BIGUN said:

You can buy one of those also - from Uvalde Texas, no less.

https://www.drivetanks.com/own-one/

I'm 'wintering' in the Keys and drove through Miami on Wednesday.  One of those would have come in handy.  Worse traffic than Chicago.

[BIGUN 1,042]

41 minutes ago, kallend said:

Worse traffic than Chicago.

Been there, done that - on a motorcycle. Skydiving was much safer. :)

[billvon 2,379]

I have an XM radio in the car, and the other day I heard "I don't like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats playing on First Wave, a station dedicated to the new wave of the 80s and 90s.  Bob Geldorf wrote the song about a mass shooting in San Diego where a 16 year old girl shot up a school, killing 2 and wounding 9.  (I was in New York at the time.) The song hit #1 in the UK for a few weeks and made it onto the charts here in the US as well.

The song was so popular, I think, because it summed up everyone's shock at the shooting.  A 16 year old girl took a .22 rifle her father had given her and just started shooting.  What stopped her was the police parking a garbage truck in front of her house.  After she was arrested (by being offered some Burger King) she said the reason was "I don't like Mondays.  This livens up the day."

All the signs we now consider usual were there.  Alcoholic father, some brain damage, evaluated for both depression and as a suicide risk, caught several times shooting out school windows and shooting squirrels in her neighborhood.  She expressed hatred for cops and talked about doing something big to get on TV.

Then one day she started shooting.

Bob Geldorf was doing an interview in a newsroom in Atlanta and was next to the teletype machine when the story emerged.  He stopped the interview and read it, being shocked at the shooter's answer to a reporter's question - "I don't like Mondays."  And that experience became the song.

And of course one of the reasons it became so popular is that almost never happened back then; it really shocked people.  It was a once-a-year, at most, occurrence.  Nowadays it's just Tuesday.

A big part of this, of course, is the availability of guns.  There are no hard stats on how many guns there are in the US for obvious reasons, but while the US was making and selling about 3 million guns a year in the 1980's, in 2021 that number was up to 13 million a year.  Best estimates put the number of guns as greater than the number of adults in the US.  And when there are more guns around, a kid who snaps is going to have a much easier time getting one and shooting up the local school (or gay bar, or synagogue etc.)

So why are there so many guns?  A big part of this, of course, is the gun industry, which like every other industry tries to sell more of their product.  But another big part is how the right has adopted gun fear as a political tool.  Democrats will take away your guns, so buy more.  The country is going to hell because of those democrats, so buy more.  SHTF so buy more.  Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring under a pizza parlor in Washington, DC so you better get a gun and save them!  Live near the border?  MS13!  Get more guns!  Like your gun?  Now you can Stand Your Ground(tm) against those evildoers!

The gun industry understands and welcomes this.  Ten years ago Ruger agreed to donate $1 to the GOP for every gun they sold.  So if the GOP wanted to make their fundraising targets, they had to push that fear for all it was worth.

And it has worked.  We now have a society so fearful that many people feel they need guns just to survive.  A poster here feels she needs a gun in her shower to defend herself.  And as a result, guns are readily available for the taking for anyone who feels like shooting up a school.  Sure, sometimes they have to get them from a parent or a friend, but that has posed no problems in the past - and that is getting progressively easier as time goes on.

This is, unfortunately, just going to get worse. Now that a political party has associated their party's platform with guns, half the politicians in the country are going to be pushing for more guns with fewer controls and less oversight.  And if the problem does get worse?  That WORKS for both republicans and gun manufacturers - the more people get shot in schools, the more people will be afraid, and the more people will translate that fear into a $799 AR-15 and a vote for a pro-gun republican.  To protect themselves, of course, from another shooter with an AR-15 - wouldn't want to be outgunned!

We really are getting closer and closer to the Ameristan that Neal Stephenson described in Fall.  I wish there was a way to turn this around, but I just don't see it.

[lippy 764]

9 minutes ago, billvon said:

A poster here feels she needs a gun in her shower to defend herself. 

Bill, I generally tend to agree with most of what you post on here, including the general point of this post. That said, I think the above is a bit of a misrepresentation of what she posted. It seems like she’s taken a disproportionate amount of shit for one post she made about what was an undoubtedly traumatic experience. 

[billvon 2,379]

1 hour ago, lippy said:

Bill, I generally tend to agree with most of what you post on here, including the general point of this post. That said, I think the above is a bit of a misrepresentation of what she posted.

That's fair.  I should have said that she wished she had been armed.  Sorry Lisa.

[Phil1111 905]

1 hour ago, lippy said:

... It seems like she’s taken a disproportionate amount of shit for one post she made about what was an undoubtedly traumatic experience. 

 

15 minutes ago, billvon said:

That's fair.  I should have said that she wished she had been armed.  Sorry Lisa.

Ditto

[JerryBaumchen 1,046]

Hi folks,

Our insane gun culture in this country now brings us to 7 dead; all because of a $100 repair bill:  Half Moon Bay shooting sparked by $100 repair bill, prosecutor says - oregonlive.com

Somehow, we have to come up with a solution to change this.

Jerry Baumchen

[gowlerk 1,901]

16 minutes ago, JerryBaumchen said:

Hi folks,

Our insane gun culture in this country now brings us to 7 dead; all because of a $100 repair bill:  Half Moon Bay shooting sparked by $100 repair bill, prosecutor says - oregonlive.com

Somehow, we have to come up with a solution to change this.

Jerry Baumchen

At least it wasn't just another senseless killing. Where I live it is not legal to charge an employee for damage caused during work.

[kallend 1,619]

On 1/28/2023 at 12:55 PM, lippy said:

Bill, I generally tend to agree with most of what you post on here, including the general point of this post. That said, I think the above is a bit of a misrepresentation of what she posted. It seems like she’s taken a disproportionate amount of shit for one post she made about what was an undoubtedly traumatic experience. 

Anecdote != data

Anecdote .ne. data

Anecdote <> data

 

[SkyDekker 1,120]

1 hour ago, kallend said:

Anecdote != data

Anecdote .ne. data

Anecdote <> data

 

Weird comment from a guy who loudly proclaimed nobody was ever offended in another thread.

[JoeWeber 2,294]

On 1/28/2023 at 4:20 PM, billvon said:

That's fair.  I should have said that she wished she had been armed.  Sorry Lisa.

But the fact that she posted that in a public forum as a defensive response remains emblematic of the entire point of you so eloquently made. Not only was she the unfortunate victim of an attack but she is also a victim of the glorification of guns in America; a glorification that is equally unfortunately made when Brent posts pictures of his arsenal covered with bullets hoping to show that guns and bullets alone do not a danger make. That such nonsense is considered mature and socially acceptable by some is, in my opinion, the real problem.

[oldwomanc6 38]

4 hours ago, JoeWeber said:

But the fact that she posted that in a public forum as a defensive response remains emblematic of the entire point of you so eloquently made. Not only was she the unfortunate victim of an attack but she is also a victim of the glorification of guns in America; a glorification that is equally unfortunately made when Brent posts pictures of his arsenal covered with bullets hoping to show that guns and bullets alone do not a danger make. That such nonsense is considered mature and socially acceptable by some is, in my opinion, the real problem.

I am absolutely not a victim of the "glorification" of guns.

 

And the fact you consider any defensive position "remains emblematic" of using whatever defense one may have at hand is sad.

 

Guns are tools.  nothing more, nothing less.  They don't kill people, people kill people.

 

I'm out.

thank you to those who understood the intent of my post.

 

Edited January 30, 2023 by oldwomanc6

[jakee 1,254]

4 hours ago, oldwomanc6 said:

I am absolutely not a victim of the "glorification" of guns.

Just out of pure curiosity, and feel free not to answer, do you now carry a gun with you in the shower?

[Stumpy 254]

6 hours ago, oldwomanc6 said:

 They don't kill people, people kill people.

 

Ahh that old nonsense. People with guns kill other people (and themselves) much more quickly and easily.

[riggerrob 558]

On 1/25/2023 at 10:21 AM, brenthutch said:

My gun my marble counter top.

You can see it here on top of some of my other guns 

 

A wiser man would leave the bad guys guessing as to how many guns you own.

[riggerrob 558]

On 1/25/2023 at 10:21 AM, brenthutch said:

My gun my marble counter top.

You can see it here on top of some of my other guns 

 

A wiser man would leave the bad guys guessing as to how many guns you own.

[riggerrob 558]

On 1/25/2023 at 10:21 AM, brenthutch said:

My gun my marble counter top.

You can see it here on top of some of my other guns 

 

A wiser man would leave the bad guys guessing as to how many guns you own.