I know this has nothing to do with the results of the 2016 elections, yet I look around and what I see is just a part of the toxic stew of the very worst of my country that seems to be bubbling cheerfully on every stovetop; arrogant, corrupt, ignorant, splenetic...it makes me think of the piece of Robert Graves' I, Claudius where the cunningly-not-really-a-gimping-halfwit emperor turns his appalling heir loose on Rome, whispering "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."
What hits me hardest about these nutter shootings is how they never change anything because of the magical incantation "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" as if the whole "well-regulated militia" thing was a fantasy and the U.S. Constitution is some sort of Holy Writ, handed down on gold tablets never to be altered or re-imagined.
Well, the Constitution once said that black people were 3/5ths of a registered voter, and that it was illegal to drink a beer.
Both of those ideas were fucked up. So We the People changed the Constitution.
So far, the score of the Second Amendment is "resisting tyrannical government", zero; "butchering other Americans", about a gajillion. I note that all these ammosexuals with their arsenals seem curiously mute about "tyranny" like the idea that the government can freely spy on our communications, or take our stuff if we get arrested - not convicted, mind you, just arrested - for smoking weed. So I conclude that the notion that the "right to keep and bear arms" has pretty much zero percent to do with the sort of people doing actual tyranny-resisting and 100% to do with the sort of fucking people who get a woody out of busting out more than thirty rounds a minute.
But who gives an actual fuck?
Nobody is going to do anything about this. Tomorrow another nutter will take another semiautomatic weapon into another school and another N > 0 number of kiddies and teachers and random poor sonsofbitches will die or be hideously wounded. And we'll hear that there's nothing we can do - in the only industrialized nation that this happens regularly - and we need to have more mental health care (but fuck-all funding for it), and we need to send our thoughts and prayers to the new set of grieving parents and lovers and brothers and sisters whose beloveds have been blown away so I can go to the range tomorrow and bust out 200 rounds of 5.56mm in fifteen minutes.
So, fuck it.
Here's a cute fucking picture of a cute fucking cat.
It's really hard to avoid political stuff if one browses on anglophone pages. Here's what I found on BoingBoing:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/paul-ryan-no-knee-jerk-reactions-on-guns-ever-1162885187935
Have I noted lately what a colossal dick Paul Ryan is..?
DeleteIt's video games. And television. And music. Nothing to do with letting doofuses with no weapons training buy weapons of war and AP rounds. From the Hon. Matt Bevin, governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:
ReplyDeleteKentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said passing stricter gun laws won't keep school shootings from happening.
Bevin blames things like violent video games, TV shows and music for the quote, "desensitized culture."
"The reality is it's not a gun problem," Bevin said. "It's not having too many guns. There used to be more guns per person in America than there are now, but children did not go to school and kill other children." (WBRD.com)
And he served 4 years active and made O-3.
Frankly, I think he's correct, though the culprits aren't video games and music. Those have been exonerated by research.
DeleteThe problem is IMO that Americans pay way too much attention to firearms, think of them as much more useful than they are and some of them eventually think of them as a solution to a problem (which guns hardly ever are in peacetime).
From time to time I think about how I would defend if someone attacked me at home, and my thoughts wander to a fine knife I own. The I feel silly, for violent home invasion hardly ever happens, and when it happens the victims are rather elderly women.
Meanwhile, Americans discuss topics like 'is an AR-15 better for home defence than a pump action shotgun, and what's the best ammo?'.
This extremely exaggerated readiness to think of guns as solutions and to use them is the key of the problem.
A German frustrated 18 year old wouldn't grab dad's guns and kill people at school. He would maybe try to burn it down, or become an online harasser.
In the end it's about what place do guns have in a society? Are they high up in the list of potential remedies to problems? For they will often be used if they are.
Walter Olin -
DeleteI note that Matt Bevin was Colorado born and raised in New Hampshire. Pat Toomey, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, was born and raised and educated in Rhode Island. Ed Gillespie, perpetual loser in statewide politics of Virginia, was born and raised in New Jersey. At least the Virginians got it right, but he still received 1.7 million votes by Virginians last year in his race against Northam.
What is it about Republicans that they are electing or trying to elect out-of-state carpetbaggers? Or is that just a sign of American mobility & rootlessness? I'm guilty also, born and raised in New England, lived for decades in the Carolinas and California, now living happily in the great state of Washington.
Well, Bevin's statistic about the "guns per person" is ridiculous. First, I have no idea where he gets that information, since one of the biggest problems here is that there IS virtually no accountability in firearms sales and ownership - and in the 21st Century there is WAY more than there was in, say, 1940.
DeleteBut let's say he actually has some sort of data on number of weapons and population. That is meaningless out of context, and the context is that the US has become vastly more urbanized in the past half-century. One of the big reasons that those "electoral maps" that show a vast portion of the US as Republican red are utter bullshit is because that "red" is mostly empty fields and woods. The people who used to live there because they were small farmers or ranchers moved to the cities and the suburbs around them.
Those country folks had both a reason to have a rifle or shotgun as well as room to use them. In Levittown? No; you have to be a hardcore hunter or a gun nut to want a rifle in the suburbs, if only for the time, money, and effort it takes to go where you can use it.
And his point on how much more violent US society is is nonsense, too. More violent than "Bleeding Kansas"? More violent than the Five Points slums of NYC in the 1860s? Go read my "New York City Draft Riots" post over at Graphic Firing Table where I list all the urban riots that rocked the Big Apple in the 19th Century.
So Bevin is full of shit. The bottom line is two things. First, Americans have always tended to think that "war (violence) works", as Sven notes. And, second, the advantage provided a violent nutter by firearms technology since 1945 is massive. A semiautomatic rifle with a 10-round-plus magazine makes killing large numbers of people ridiculously simple. Point and shoot, just like an instamatic camera.
Love of violent force is kinda baked into the American pie. But the slavish devotion to unrestricted firearms is something that the ammosexuals have worked hard at developing since WW2. Kind of ironic since - and possibly a development of - the trend has been that increasingly Americans are unfamiliar with and do not possess firearms. Something like a single digit percentage of US citizens possess something like half of all the firearms in the country.
But the issue is one that gives the GOP a solid electoral advantage and only costs the lives of people that the GOP could give a shit about. So there's no downside to the Republican fealty to the obsession of the gun-nuts.
And I've been told that the shortage of warm bodies and the optempo means that so long as you don't actually drool at random times you are pretty much guaranteed to make O-3. Even O-4 is no longer the career cutoff it used to be. Never underestimate the power of desperation as a promotion boost.
DeleteFDC -
ReplyDeleteI believe the tide is about to turn. The arms debate here is on the cusp of changing. Or perhaps I am just hoping and praying that is so. The public seems to be finally waking up to the lethality of these modern assault weapons. The media only tends to focus on magazine capacity and bump-stocks or such. IMHO they should educate the public on the tendency of AR-15 high-velocity rounds in soft tissue to swerve and fragment inflicting major internal injuries. Worse than dum-dums IMHO.
I don't think they will ever be banned for civilian use. And a return to ball ammo will not be legislated on either. But the $3 million dollars received via the NRA by Senators Rubio, Toomey, and many others in Congress is starting to filter in to the public consciousness. I am anticipating these weapons will face much stricter background checks and mandatory insurance. Is that enough? No! Unfortunately many more children are going to be killed or maimed.
I never liked the M-16. The early model they issued to us in Viet-Nam was a piece of crap. Every platoon I ever served with in-country had a couple of illegally held back M-14s, or captured Kalashnikovs.
I hope you're right. I doubt you are; if the appalling bloodbath at the Sandy Hook elementary school didn't change anything I see no event that will. That fact that there are "Sandy Hook Truthers" amongst the ammosexuals is perhaps one of the finest examples of the utter venality and loathsomeness of the human species I can think of.
DeleteI think one problem is that the U.S. public in general is much less familiar with and knowledgeable about firearms than it was in, say, 1920. Hunting has become a tiny niche activity. Most Americans don't serve in the armed forces. Gun violence - for all the headlines it generates - is usually something that happens to someone else.
So there's no context for most citizens to evaluate the ammosexuals' claims for the "value" of civilian versions of military firearms. The fact that semiautomatic versions of assault rifles are relatively worthless for hunting doesn't register with them, and the notion that you "need" an AR-15 for "personal defense" being nonsense also doesn't sink in.
The other parts of this is that the gunlickers are insane about their obsession and will respond immediately to any threat to their lust objects, and for the GOP in particular (and rural legislators in general) the issue is a pure win. The violence typically impacts people they don't care about and won't vote for them, anyway. It's like "abortion" and "gays"; something that is utterly unimportant to their plutocratic masters but central to the groups of proles whose votes they are counting on.
That calculus is unlikely to change unless the politics of those groups change. And the hardcore ammosexuals aren't going to change; theirs' isn't a reasoned position - if there's any question about that just look at the typical justification for keeping and bearing arms - "resisting tyranny". How many of these bold heroes took to the hills and fields to fight against the domestic spying of the PATRIOT Act? How many took to the streets to strike down the cops stealing innocents' money in civil forfeiture, or killing unarmed black people? To fight against sending fellow Americans to illegal wars of aggression? So "resisting tyranny" seems to not apply to, y'know, actual "tyranny". Instead, what you read is idiotic comparisons to the Soviet Union and Uganda, as if the social and political conditions are anything like comparable.
So I wish I thought that this was an actually rationally-debateable issue. But, at least in 2018 America, I don't see that.
I don't think it's a ammo or rifle issue. Sure, being a rifle that is used by the military and in movies makes ARs more desireable for young idiots. And they are cheap and easy to use. But any magazine fed self loading rifle using hunting ammo would cause mayhem in close quarters as long as they are not too heavy and cumbersome. I hope this is not in bad taste, but 3 years ago a friend of mine invited me to go hog hunting (pest control) and it was suprisingly easy to drop them at close quarters walking through the fields using his fancy polymere Sauer self loading hunting rifle that fired .308 Winchester hunting rounds from 5 round magazines.
DeleteFrankly, to me that makes a case, not for doing nothing, but for restricting public possession to bolt- and lever-action rifles with a 3-round capacity or less. If a 5-round magazine makes a self-loading rifle that lethal, it's too lethal to let just any mook walk around with one. As I mentioned below; it should be more difficult to own and operate a firearm than it is a motor vehicle. At least the car is a practical necessity in an industrial society.
DeleteYes, sorry if I made it look like I advocated for doing nothing. Thinking about my hunting experience and drawing the mental connection to a school shooting creeped me out a bit and I just wanted to send off my post so I can think about something else. The point I wanted to make was more on the line that focusing on the modern assault rifles/military cartridge aspect might be shortsighted because in my opinion the only reason these weapons are used and not 2500€ hunting rifle is the "hoolywood" effect that makes them popular among young people. The ability to just point and shoot until empty and reload within seconds has been around since the days of the M1 Garand and although a modern, lightweight AR15 would be that much better at it it's not like there aren't plenty of other weapons that share the same qualities and don't fit the "assault weapon" category.
Deletehttps://9gag.com/gag/aV3Dx5O
ReplyDeleteI keep reminding the gun nuts that it was Reagan's letter to Congress back in 1994 asking them to pass the Assault Weapons Ban that led to its passage. They ignore it and start squawking about the FBI should lay off of Trump and start paying attention to every depressed kid in the country. Maybe they think I am lying, or maybe they just don't give a rat's ass because that was then and this is now, or maybe they think Ronnie would never make the same mistake twice.
ReplyDeleteThey are in denial that Nikolas Cruz was an alt-right dirtbag. If they had known he was alt-right before the shooting they would have protested any attempt to keep him from his God-given right to buy a gun. They believe he was in ANTIFA or some other leftist group. I recall the same right wing meme was started after the Las Vegas Massacre when Fox and friends convinced millions of viewers that Stephen Paddock was a libtard who specifically targeted country music fans. While in actuality Paddock was a 2nd Amendment Freak, a bipolar drunken former millionaire who wanted to get back at the city of Las Vegas. Definitely NOT liberal or Antifa material.
I propose a gun buyback program. You show up with a gun at your local post office or public library and you get a hundred dollars. Immediately. No questions asked. Every night, they take the guns given, cut em up with a torch and ship them off for scrap.
ReplyDeleteIt won't fix everything, but it will bleed away some of the mountain of firearms.
Besides, it will stimulate the economy.
There are super-effective policies that would not collide with 2nd amendment. Americans are unaware of those because they routinely disregard the rest of the world and don't look there for solutions.
DeleteFor example, Germany has regulations that you need to store guns & munitions separately in separately-locked safes. This goes against the "home defense" crowd, but not against the 2nd amendment.
All those 18 year olds who use daddy's guns to kill people at their old high school would be locked out from said guns if this policy was implemented.
The expense for the safes (hundreds of Euros for a rifle-sized safe, for example) also make gun ownership much more expensive.
Enforce such a regulation by making violations a felony with guaranteed six months jail time whenever it's being discovered that someone did not follow the regulation. Once in force, make an example in a few cases, send people to jail with lots of media coverage.
The NRA would still freak out because it's the gunmakers' and gunsellers' lobby, not the gunowners' lobby, but the safemakers' lobby might be helpful for once. ;-)
Here are some examples:
Deletehttps://www.eisenbach-tresore.de/Waffenschrank/
2 pistols and separate munition = 350 €
4 rifles and separate munition = 750 €
I used to work with a gun freak that had multiple pistolas and long guns including an AR-15. He bragged about his gun safe. The burglars took the whole thing after cutting the studs it was anchored to with a power saw.
DeleteMy grandkids and I are big fans of Emma Gonzalez, Dave Hogg, Jaclyn Corin, Cameron Kasky and the other survivors from Parkland that are taking on the NRA.
ReplyDelete@Redpainter1 on twitter has the right idea: put them all in Congress. Unfortunately the qualification for Congress is the 25-year age constraint.
https://twitter.com/Redpainter1/status/965615383863578626
There are about a dozen ways that the number and accessibility of rapid-firing, point-and-shoot firearms can be reduced, and have been in various other industrialized nation. Those means remain legal, even under the ridiculous Heller decision that reversed decades of 2nd Amendment holdings for no real statutory reason other than "fuck you, I like moar gunz!"
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line is that while the U.S. public widely supports those sort of restrictions the U.S. representative system continues to do what it was originally intended to do; privilege rural white people over everyone else. Many of those people are violently "pro-gun", and as the past several decades have shown, connot be reasoned with. Look around at the "mass shootings are committed by violent nutters who won't obey gun laws anyway!" justifications for doing nothing that pop up every time these nutter shootings happen and the ammosexuals are threatened with the loss of their Precious.
So, no, sorry, gang. It's not that there aren't good ideas and practical means to change this. It's that the GOP has hatched all the poisons that lurk in the swamp in order to gain power despite its' plutocratic agenda. The Republican Party knows perfectly well that if they had to run on their economic and political agendsa they'd get creamed. So they cling to these groups of political naifs - the gun nuts, the abortion obsessives, the queer-fearers - who will perform the function that the bastard Frick claimed they would; they will gleefully shoot the other half of the proletariat that should be their allies rather than consider for a moment that they can have just as much fun shooting a 1906 Springfield or that neither their pockets are picked nor their legs broken if that slut aborts her baby or that transsexual squats in the stall next to them.
The problem isn't the laws, or the weapons.
It's us.
The other thing that gives this away is that it should be no easier to own and operate a firearm than it is a motor vehicle. And yet you need to pass no test, get no license, carry no liability insurance to own any firearm sold to the public.
ReplyDeleteI didn't read much about toddlers killing people by driving their cars yet.
DeleteFDC -
ReplyDeleteThe reason is $$$$$, not "I like more guns". Follow the money!
With the decline of people in my generation and my father's generation who used guns for hunting, the arms industry was losing bucks because not many shotguns and elk or deer rifles were being sold anymore. So with the help of the NRA they created a civilian market for military assault weapons. And they put huge amounts of blood money into the hands of politicians to keep that market open.
I do not believe it is the rurals that are buying up all those AR-15s either. I would expect any valid poll would show the gun market increased most in the suburbs where terrified homeowners were afraid that riots in the inner city would spill over into their malls or onto their front lawns.
Here are some stats as to why I believe that a change may be in the air:
https://twitter.com/Patrick_J_Egan/status/965070734845448192
Yes, the red line for the 'echo boomers' is troubling. I am betting that is due to NRA agitprop that Obama was going to confiscate all guns. And probably aggravated by Ferguson, G20 riots, and several others.
FDC -
DeleteI like your comment on liability insurance for guns. My homeowners insurance would only cover fire and theft for my shotgun and 9mm, not liability. So I have looked into liability insurance for them. It amounts to only $57 per annum for me. I imagine a lot more for an AR-15 or for a freak with a big collection of guns like Steven Paddock.
It should be mandatory. Or if not liability insurance then at least make gun buyers post up a bond with the state. Amount to be determined by the type.
Demographics don't matter much IMO. The majority of NRA members is favouring stricter background checks, and NRA leadership is still zealoting against them.
DeleteYoung people favour the left - but (R) controls both houses of Congress and the WH.
As I mentioned before; there seem to be entrenched special interests and ideologies behind all major problems of the United States.
In Germany it's mostly special interests, with very little ideology. We have apathy as a key stabilising factor instead of ideological fanaticism.
For a sense on how ridiculous the existing "registration" system is for firearms, this is worth a read:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns
Good story.
DeleteAnd then on top of their paper/microfilm nightmare, there is the problem of phantom guns that were never registered. Like the 9mm I bought from a pawn shop in Carolina fifty-seven years ago.
It is an old Belgian made FN, probably predating WW2. I intend to get it registered before I kick the bucket and it gets stolen from the family heirs - - or perish the thought it gets used stupidly by one of them.
Or better yet would be to deep six that nine in the bay next time I'm out salmon fishing, field stripping it first of course.
DeleteLots of verbage coming from the alt-right claiming that the 17-year-old Parkland high school survivors are not mature enough to understand the 2nd amendment and have no business advocating control as they are too young to realize the consequences.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, some of these same people were not long ago saying 13- and 14-year-olds were mature enough to date Judge Roy Moore.
I'm offering up my thanks to Mike for providing an explanation for the obsessive gun fetish that has taken hold in the U.S. It makes perfect sense. I guess "follow the money" rarely, if ever, steers you wrong.
ReplyDeleteJill
Jill -
DeleteFDChief wrote the post, thank him. I'm just a tagalong.
Mike, The post I'm referring to appears under your name, I think (Feb 19 @ 10:21 a.m.). If I'm confused, always a possibility, and you did not post that, then my thanks to the person who did.
DeleteJill
Jill -
Delete10:21 is my comment. But NRA money in politics is not and has never been a big secret. Perhaps the amounts of money being used to bribe congressmen has been kept under wraps in the past. $54 million in the 2016 election for Trump and Congressional Republicans. More than $3-million lifetime to Marco Rubio, same for Pat Toomey.
Where does the NRA get that kind of money? Definitely not from individual members, or from Mom&Pop gunstores. In 2016 they got it from AR-15 manufacturers like Aero Precision, Armalite, Bravo Company, Colt, Daniel Defense, LaRue, Rock River Arms, Sig Sauer, Smith & Wesson, Windham, and many others. Nobody knows the numbers sold in this country. But they have been making them for 50 years. My assumption is an average of two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand per year. At $400 to $1000 per AR-15, that equates to anywhere from $4 billion up to $15 billion.
Moe than enough to buy votes in statehouses and Congress.
And that $4B to $15B does not include accessories for your AR-15, which can add another $40 to $400. And neither does it include ammo sales, the manufacturers of which also donate bigly to the NRA.
DeleteThe bottom line of this whole discussion is this; internal disarmament is fundamental to civil society. Pace Heinlein, an armed society is anything BUT a polite society. It is, instead, where every public encounter risks becoming lethal, Hobbes' war of all against all.
ReplyDeleteI'm living proof; a proud, touchy, argumentative sonofabitch with a hair-trigger temper. Unarmed I'm a law-abiding citizen - perhaps a big asshole, but no more than that.
Give me a weapon and I'd use it. In 16th Century Japan I'd have been one of those irritating samurai who used to bully peasants and pick fights with other swordsmen. In 18th Century Europe I'd have been dueling all the time.
So the simple fact is that, short of full disarmament, reducing the quantities of available firearms wouldn't get rid of assholes like me. But it'd make me 99% less lethal.
And, frankly, if that means no gun-fun for "I luuuurve my rifle!", well, xin loi Joe. Sucks to be you.
I assure you Germany is not internally disarmed. There are lots of firearms, especially .22.
DeleteInstead, we follow a principle that we call "Gewaltmonopol des Staates": The government -OUR government- has the monopoly on violence.
Sure, there are exceptions (self defence, helping others, contact sports), but we don't fantasize about those exceptions that much. We don't fantasize about how best to kill a home invader with overwhelming firepower, how to wage war on our own government with mere man-portable firearms et cetera. We don't even have baseball clubs in our homes.
Again; it's about mindset, not hardware.
I would go at it both ways, starting with the hardware. People have their talismans and objects of worship. You want to replace the object of worship with the perception that it is a heavy, dangerous, marginally useful object that would be far more useful if it was sold to be scrapped for a hundred bucks.
DeleteAs religions know well, the best way to end an old religion is to replace it with a new one, stealing and re-purposing whatever small bits of dogma that are too cherished to outright abandon.
The problem, Sven, is what we discussed above; the "war works" mindset is pretty much baked-in here in the Home of the Brave. Let me give you an example.
DeleteA pal of mine posted a link to a "wtf do you need that rifle for?"piece. Another of her pals replied, saying essentially what you have - that it's a people problem. I mentioned that almost all other industrial democracies have "people" but none share our firearms troubles.
There was a bit of give and take...and then this guy was arguing that the National Firearms Act restrictions on fully automatic weapons were excessive, and that noise suppressors (i.e. "silencers") were awesome because hearing.
I was gobsmacked. I'm more than willing to discuss the bounds of what "well-regulated" means...but full auto? Silencers?
If your arguments start from the position that every random joe and molly should have an actual machinegun and a silenced Tokarev...what the hell you gonna do with that? If the risk to the public versus the reward to the individual gun nut isn't bluntly obvious there, how are you gonna get this guy to agree to a limit to non-magazine-fed firearms only? Or a three-round-cutoff? Or ANY sort of commonsense let's-not-help-people-shoot-up-schools-and-malls regulation?
So IMO the weapons are the only practical starting point. The hardcore ammosexuals aren't reachable and their allies and bought legislators are unwilling to risk angering the nutters.
It's ridiculously depressing, but that's where we are now.
Ask him if a Muslim Brotherhood guy who just came out of jail after serving 15 years for manslaughter should have the right to possess a live Stinger launcher and missile.
DeleteFrom that answer you'll have established that "shall not infringe" cannot be taken literally as a matter of sanity.
Then there's the question of where to draw the line. One option would be "where it saves the most more citizens' lives than it costs".
But to be honest; I suck at discussing with idiots. I assume too much ability to think logically, when most often they don't even have the same idea of what "logical" means.
One way to win that political battle might be to go after the NRA board with charges of misappropriation and corruption. After all, it's well-established that the board's policy on background checks has little to do with NRA members' majority opinion and there are certainly plenty points for corruption charges in their personal relations with gunmakers.
Expose them as gunmaker/gunseller lobby, discredit them, deter corporations from supporting the NRA, with rebates and stuff gone membership would become a worse deal, with corporations shying away because of corruption charges the funds would dry up - and with less funds there would be less paying of (R) pols.
Sadly, I think we have the same problem with the NRA we have with the GOP. There's more than enough information out there to assess them as the amoral grifters they are. But there's a solid 25-35% of the U.S. public that doesn't care. They reject the facts and the sources; FOX and Infowars and Rush tell them that they're the Good Guys and that's enough for them.
DeletePlus there's another 15-20% who are just clueless idiots who will buy enough of the NRA/GOP hogwash to keep the grifters grifting.
I really wish this was a rationally debatable problem. But like so much else in the U.S. circa 2018, the level of aggressive self-delusion makes any sort of rational discussion nearly impossible; there will be a nutbag like my full-auto-and-silencers-RAWK! guy standing boldly in the public square preferring to burn it down rather than accept anything less than his maximal demands.
I'm watching the Stoneman Douglas Town Hall.
ReplyDeleteTed Deutch for President!!!
I have always detested Rubio for the $3-million plus he has taken from the gun lobby. But he had the courage to show up and face the music, unlike five-deferment Donny. So even though he is a scumbag, I have to say that Little Marco is a taller man than Trump.