The Hard Bigotry of Rock-Bottom Expectations

everybody should arm himself and do it the good ole wild-west-way – that would be historical correct – Right?

Require all gun owners to be insured, and require the NRA to provide the insurance. See how quickly they start demanding gun control when they’re on the hook for the payouts.

I hope you’re right but I’m afraid gun rights is the issue the Republicans want right now. This idea isn’t any stupider than the Wall, so don’t underestimate Trump’s marketing ability. They desperately need to hold the House, this is the issue that can close the “intensity gap” and get a few more Republicans to the polls. They don’t need much.

Hi John, re: nobody will be talking about arming teachers in two weeks. Nobody you know, maybe. But CNN denying the ‘arm the teachers’ survivor the opportunity to make that case at the town hall has ensured that ‘arming the teachers’ is very much going to be talked about for a lot longer than two weeks. And the next time there’s a school shooting, a whole lot more districts are going to be allowing teachers to ‘carry.’ (I’m so old I can remember when schools didn’t even need metal detectors.) Trying to pretend that arming teachers is a non-starter and beyond the pale is a lot like arguing that Donal Trump can’t possible become president. More and more counties are going to vote to allow school employees to carry. The only real question is where fire-arms training and expertise will be required for a teaching certificate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/14/across-the-country-school-districts-are-quietly-arming-teachers-for-the-next-shooting/?utm_term=.99f8eeed1b1b

In a world characterized by increasing complexity and global interconnection, in which advanced skills are at a premium, and the education of the young the highest priority, it makes perfect sense to train students how best to respond to the prospect of their slaughter.

I’m still boggling at the idea that you can defend yourself with a gun. I thought the best you could hope for is a counter-attack that doesn’t kill too many bystanders. Maybe if it was a really big gun, like an old school mortar, you crawl inside and lock a cap in place over the end of the barrel?

Not to mention that the armed individuals at mass shootings overwhelming seem to hide or run away. Didn’t the most recently attacked school have an armed guard? I think running away is sensible of them, but it does rather suggest that having more armed people in schools isn’t necessarily going to help kill people with guns. I mean, “bad people with guns”, because the bad people are always blatantly obviously bad.

Arming teachers, quite apart from all the other reasons why it’s an obscene idea, will just transfer the problem to some other soft target. Once all the schools are behind barbed wire and armed guards then gun enthusiasts will just go after shopping malls, or sports events, or concerts (already done that), or swimming pools, or parties. I know some Republicans seriously suggest ‘hardening’ all these too but, well, words fail me to be honest.

– all these suggestion to solve the problem are so… so ”practical” or may we call it ”political” but driving across ”the homeland” and having reached only Oklahoma -(and there will be Fort Smith for lunch and Memphis for dinner) makes one believe that one needs some other ”tools” in order to change ”deep seated cultural believes” in ”the correcting ability of bullets” – and it isn’t ”insurance” as Goethes Faust might have suggested – as Germans -(and Japanese?) might believe in insurance – but no ”Real” American believes in something silly as ”Freedom Restricting Insurance” –

Right?
So I suggest – one needs to take the whole thing ”right over the cliff” -(the way US took this presidents-thingy over the cliff by electing an orange f-moron) – and so only ”practical thing” will to have every American to carry a weapon from birth -(if she or he doesn’t carry constantly already?) – like my mom has in the homeland her little shooter always in her purse – as you never know – right?
-(and pepper spray is so inefficient)

“Because … it’s obviously a terrible idea.”

Surely the greater the gravity of the crisis, the more that analysis and evidence are called for? Not just an appeal to the obvious. This is no time for kneejerk reflexes and virtue signaling. The stakes are too high.

Don’t get me wrong. In an ideal America I’d wave a wand and disappear all guns (well, with some exceptions).

But we don’t live in an ideal America, and we are running out of options. In today’s New York Times a front-page article has the headline “Shootings Led to Tougher Gun Laws, but to What End?” The authors report that “Experts are uncertain about the extent to which gun control laws have improved safety and curbed violence.”

So is the idea of arming teachers — forget its source — so terrible? I assume the teachers would be volunteers (is it necessary to point that out). They would pass background checks (for what that is worth) and undergo training. It surely isn’t beyond the wit of man to devise safes for the guns (and Kevlar vests?) that can be opened only using a PIN number and/or fingerprint. Likewise the gun might be operable only by a person with the an authorized fingerprint.

Might there be unintended consequences (?teachers going off the rails). Of course there might, but when aren’t there? and how do the risks and benefits compare?

And so on. I am no expert, but let’s give this idea its day in court rather than thinking with our viscera.

If USan’s want to kick the NRA in the funding nads, they should treat guns the same as cars are treated. That would kill the gun market which is a significant source of funding.

Just listened to the Trumpster at CPAC. If Democrats plan on demonizing gun-owners to get elected, they’d best check Ian @ 20. Nothing is guaranteed to get CPAC part of the Republican vote out like promising to change the second Amendment. The Jonah Goldbert, David Frum, Max Boot gang are done and dusted. I didn’t hear the whole speech, but not a peep about cutting the deficit, or exporting democracy at gun-point.

Trump calls for trained experienced fire-arm familiar teachers and school staff invested in the well-being of students they nurture every day to be given the freedom and responsibility to keep schools safe. Trump hit 50 percent. Too many Dems are still invested in the piss-dossier unicorn to magically render Trump impeachable. Unlikely.

At some point, maybe, folks will be able to understand that Trump is a formidable adversary. To many here, he sounds nuts. But even when he’s shoving both feet in his yap tweeting at 3:00 am he’s got better messaging skills than any of his opponents. His supporters don’t (much) care what kind of nonsense he spews, cause they trust him to come up with solutions that sound good – to them – ideas like tax cuts for corporations and others to motivate companies to repatriate cash and put 1000 ‘crumbs’ in the pockets of ordinary folks. I’ll restate my own view – I wouldn’t live in a place where ordinary folks carried weapons for protection. I expect many parents who do will take great comfort in Trump’s proposal to arm a specific subset of teachers.

Too many Dems still believe piss-dossier is going to free them from doing anything more difficult than wailing about Hitler. I wanted to connect all this to Space Aliens Hack 2018 election, but I can’t bothered to go back for the link to the Weekly World News. Good luck with all this.

Can they be made to care by linking guns to suicide? Well, I was just at a kids’ movie this week and the first trailer was for a story about a real life HS volleyball player who died and inspired her teammates to greatness. Their slogan was “live like Line.” As far as I could tell, this involved riding a motorcycle without a helmet. So I’m guessing they can’t.

The link between gun ownership and suicide rate is pretty sketchy. As a group that thinks of ourselves as fact oriented, I wouldn’t hang too much on it. A bunch of the research focuses on gun suicides which is kind of missing the point. Also much of the research appears to code Canada as a low gun state, which is not true at all. And nearly all of the research wants to avoid talking about Japan (it is almost always specifically excluded) since it has the very highest suicide rates and the very lowest gun ownership rates in the developed world.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201607/fact-check-gun-control-and-suicide

Basically the current thinking on suicide/impulsivity/available means (with important caveats being that psychology is a baby-science so we should be cautious about believing its findings either way) is that for super impulsive possibilities (like jumping off a bridge where you can easily clear the guardrails) small hurdles can save lives. So putting up a net that is somewhat hard to get around, or making the guard fence a bit on the high side can help. But beyond that you end up pretty much just moving around the suicide method (especially with men who use the harder to recover from methods of attempted suicide).

Possible counter argument is the recent Swiss study suggesting that if you reduce mandatory conscription rates by half (reducing the availability of guns to the general population) you can get a small decrease in suicides (about 30 per year in Switzerland). It seems weird to me that other explanations aren’t discussed (like the concept that conscripting 200,000 fewer men might make them happier) but it is evidence in the other direction.

Your ‘rock bottom’ is the bedrock of the Conservative world-view. In this they (‘they’ from my lefty perspective) have an advantage over us. Conservatism starts from the position that the world is shitty, human nature sinful and corrupt, and strong authority etc needful to restrain our worst impulses. Socialism starts from a more optimistic view of the world, and believes that working together we can make things materially, measurably better. I like to think that I subscribe to the latter view for eyes-open, historically literate reasons, but I would say that, wouldn’t I.

However this different in bedrock gives Conservatives a considerably more teflon practical-politics than lefties. If ‘we’ try something (let’s say, Communism) and it goes wrong, that reflects poorly on our politics. If ‘they’ try something (massive tax cuts that bankrupt the state, looser and looser crazy-people-enabling gun laws) and things go wrong, Conservatives can say, in good faith: but of course, that’s because the world is a shitty place and people are sinful and corrupt.

“Obviously this arm-the-teachers idea is going nowhere.”

Actually, this is already happening in some parts of the country and in large geographical swathes where it hasn’t already people would have few objections to implementing it.

“Obviously this arm-the-teachers idea is nothing but a ball of unintended, flagrantly terrible consequences waiting to happen. ”

Agreed, but I think you are seriously misreading how large portions of this country feel about these things. When I was in high school metal detectors, locked buildings during school hours, and armed guards were a crazy idea, now they’re commonplace.

As I type this comment there was just a story on the TV news in the background; 44% are in favor of armed teachers according to a new poll.

Speaking of insurance: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-chubb-ltd-ch/insurer-chubb-says-will-stop-underwriting-nra-insurance-for-gun-owners-idUSKCN1G724A

It seems that at the moment disafiliation pressure seems to be having an affect on companies that have collaborations with the NRA.

ph@26 Trump calls for trained experienced fire-arm familiar teachers and school staff invested in the well-being of students they nurture every day to be given the freedom and responsibility to keep schools safe.

Has Trump also offered to fund the training of those teachers, or the training of experienced fire-arm users as teachers? He’s also going to need to fund schools to have gun facilities on site, and access to gun ranges and ammunition for the ongoing training that’s required.

An unfunded mandate on already under-funded schools is not going to happen. Or it will happen at the expense of teaching. Without money this is just thoughts and prayers.

Or you could say the I-want-loyalty-figure merely picked up Sarah Palinism or Cheneyism (etc)—

Chait in NY magazine today:
Trump did not invent the bizarre right-wing lies about the shooting survivors that are currently enthralling the right. They are being circulated by long-standing conservatives and echoed by Trump. Trump did not invent the birther theory; he exploited it as a way to build his support among conservatives. And the wild accusations Trump promotes are no loopier than the kinds of claims that have been circulated for decades by such platforms as Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal editorial page (which accused Bill Clinton of murder and linked him with a cocaine ring, among other fever dreams).

. . . His descent into paranoia is linked with his growing absorption into the right-wing media echo chamber. Trump has not infected conservatism. Conservatism has infected Trump.

@35 Garbage, as you would expect from the gun lobby

http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/the-rate-of-all-suicides-and-homicides-in-australia-has-declined-since-the-gun-buyback-20160622-gpp4wp.html

@40
“Has Trump also offered to fund the training of those teachers, or the training of experienced fire-arm users as teachers? ”

Wouldn’t be surprised if a serious proposal for federal grants to fund arming and training teachers gets made soon. There are already similar initiatives at the state and local level. Seems like a natural for Republicans, the idea is popular with their base.

I can’t be the only one here who found heaven in the cramped backseat of a VW bug.

T.S. Quint: You know that guy?
Gwen: I went out with him once after we dated. He tried to screw me some place very uncomfortable.
T.S. Quint: What? Like the back of a Volkswagen?

Ian:

So is the idea of arming teachers — forget its source — so terrible?

Well, yes.
— As pointed out by this combat veteran and that one, it’s one thing to know how to shoot, it’s quite another to be able to kill someone. Especially a near-suicidal pyschopathic someone with an AR-15, where you have a handgun. The presence of trained, armed personnel at Parkland, at Columbine, at the Pulse nightclub, and in Las Vegas did not prevent anything. Police and soldiers train over and over for weeks to be able to face such desperate situations, and even then, many soldiers in combat don’t fire during an engagement, for a variety of reasons.
— First responders will find it hard to tell “good guys with guns” from “bad guys with guns”
— The more guns, the more accidents, such as the sixty-plus times someone was shot and killed in 2017 when a child picked up a gun, or the 317+ other accidental gun fatalities in 2017.

Hi John, the shooting resulted from failures to detect and treat mental illness. Arming a generally responsible subset of an already heavily over-armed populace seems like a reasonable proposition. Trying to disarm an already extremely highly-motivated set of voters might be a worthy ideal. But given that there people die from morbidity and lifestyle choices I’d say the priority is modelling drug-free, healthy lifestyles. Lots of communities have relatively high numbers of gun-ownership without violence.

With respect, you seem to be trying to have it both ways – guns are out of control and represent a clear and present danger, and people shouldn’t feel the need to own guns. I don’t live in a society with guns, but if I did I’d make sure it was in some place like Utah where responsible gun-ownership seems the norm.

If you want to try win 2018 by demonizing gun-owners I can’t think of a better way to motivate the GOP base. Jim Messina has some interesting observations about intensity levels and losing elections. No link, I’m afraid.

Those who refuse to listen to Trump’s CPAC speech should expect to be surprised, shocked, and disappointed when the 2018 results come in. They claim to fight an enemy they do not respect, do not observe firsthand, and fail to arm themselves against. They understand neither the rhetoric, or the tactics of their declared enemy.

So, as far as filter go, I find the easiest way to get to both sides of any issue is to, you know, do the actual work of listening to both sides of the arguments. Anyone who’s actually listened to Trump’s speech, or read the transcript probably grasps the persuasive power of his arguments. His arguments are simple, clear, and on target: ‘Democrats are coming for your guns.’ He had more, but that was all he really had to say – the crowd roared.’

But go ahead, make his day.

In ‘The Smoke Screen’, an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, a health minister proposes the following program, with the intention of massively reducing the rate of cigarette smoking: ‘complete ban on all cigarette sponsorship and advertising, even at the point of sale, £50 million to be spent on anti-smoking publicity, ban smoking in all public places, and progressive deterrent tax rises over the next five years until a packet of 20 costs about the same as a bottle of whisky’. (On the show, for reasons not pertinent here, the proposal is not implemented, but it looks less extreme now than it did at the time of composition, I bet.) How much of that program, I wonder, could be adapted to this issue?

I think the point ph is trying to make, is that you better be careful which hill is worth fighting abd dying for. Choose poorly, and you lose the war. So ph thinks liberals had better be pretty careful with this issue, it could backfire on us.

I’m not especially good at reading how something is going to play with the masses, particularly when one side seems totally irrational and immoral to me.

Hi John, Thanks for the finely-crafted reply. Toilets are finished and I’m on my to other tasks. Spectacular fine day here in Tokyo, btw. Re: my lack of clarity. ‘Within an already heavily overly armed population, arming a generally responsible subset of said populace seems like a reasonable proposition.” Not one I personally advocate. Apologies for the lack of emphasis. I don’t own weapons and don’t want to own weapons, but it seems silly to ignore their intense cross-cultural and deeply-ingrained social appeal. The link on the other thread to our PM dressing up like an Indian is a case in point. Sikhs must carry the kirpan: http://reason.com/blog/2014/10/27/if-sikhs-can-bring-knives-into-schools-w

I’m generally very sympathetic to the anti-gun argument. We strongly disagree, however, in the methods of getting guns out of the hands of the fearful and of those bound up in American mythology. You do not look like idiots or nazis to me. Most Americans seem like wonderful people working to resolve difficult problems and very often doing a good job. Repatriating off-shore cash does seem like a good idea to me. So too with borders and selective, legal immigration policies.

Screaming Hitler is coming and the GOP wants sick people to die doesn’t sound like a reasonable and fair-minded assessment of voters who pull the lever for Trump. And until Democrats stop screaming and start reacting to ‘reasonable sounding propositions’ with ‘reasonable sounding propositions’ of their own (and ones that factor in social and cultural cost) instead of shrieks and bleets, Dems are going to continue to lose. Most voters would dump Trump in a heartbeat, if they were presented with a real alternative instead of dynastic succession. That’s how you look to me.

Watch the speech, btw, listening to the blowhard won’t take up all of your brain and you can key your attention level to audience response levels to replay the parts where the Trumpster pulls their heart-strings just so.

John, your compelling arguments are difficult to ignore. So, I’ll close with this and you can respond as you like. I come at these issues as a cultural historian and of course through my own experiences. Slavery and its legitimacy isn’t an axiom, but can be a frame. It was also a historical norm well outside the tiny place and period so many love to fixate on. The same goes for the religious and cultural power of weapons and the warrior. It’s less a question of bending the knee to the NRA (and somehow I have great deal of difficulty imaging you doing so) than understanding the power of mythology and how to persuade and win, which you evidently see as a form of surrender. What Trump does to such great effect is co-opt language. There’s great blogggingheads up now with Robert Wright and Greg Gutfield that touches on this and on Trump as the voice of the old, in the larger sense.

Making mythology and respect for history the core of the discussion, I suggest, is a better approach. Listening to the pope lecture about the evils of promiscuity and abortion is grating. Listening to an HIV-positive person speak of the need for safe-sex practices is usually riveting. Cultural change comes from within. The gun community is one that needs to reform itself. Stigmatizing gun ownership might work, but I doubt it.

And that’s it!!!

ammosexuals — they don’t actually believe their own…

Surely not? I thought there was huge push by the NRA to defend all those black men shot by police because “he looked like he might have a gun”? And to make sure the cops always, always look first to defend the right of any citizen to carry a firearm in any situation?

The idea that black men should always carry a gun so they can defend themselves against rogue cops is one of the main reasons for keeping the second amendment . Isn’t that the NRA line? Or maybe I’m thinking of Malcolm X.

You’d have to be a particularly racist cop to look at a group of 12 year old “black men” all carrying AR-15’s and decide that today was the day for a bit of KKK-style thuggery. And you’d only do it once, I reckon, because either the kids or their parents would step in and “the best solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. Exit racist cop stage right.

Only somewhat at a tangent: in the NI troubles, there were a fair number of people with access to serious firearms, who sometimes did atrocious things. There were, and still are, religiously segregated schools (and if you want to argue that was a major cause of the troubles, I would agree, but it’s not obvious what could be done about it). And yet, despite the other atrocities, republicans never shot at state schools, loyalists never shot at Catholic schools.

I wonder why not?

It’s “concern trolling”. There is NO problem of breaking the cultural norm. In the U.S., 95% of the people want universal comprehensive background checks. 80% want increased access to mental health care. 70% want a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons. The current “cultural” situation is due to the capture of politicians by the gun manufacturer’s lobby posing as a hobby club.

The problem is your insistence that Trump’s proposal to arm teachers is a reasonable alternative proposal. It isn’t

Thanks to Layman, I decided I ought to address “ph”‘s position. B/c truthfully, I think ph’s a gun-nut, and is arguing in bad faith. But hey, let’s pretend that he actually believes in arming teachers. I’ll go down a different path from Layman, and, assuming that teachers WILL want to be armed, note that:

(1) it takes enormous amounts of training to get a civilized human to be able to pull the trigger and kill another human
(2) even after that, it takes MORE training to get them to be effective at it.
[studies done after WWII found that most soldiers were unwilling to shoot at their opponents — this revolutionized training for Vietnam, using operant conditioning to teach soldiers not to shoot at the -man-, but at the -target-. Just so, today soldiers today shoot at shoulders, not men.]
(3) And such training needs to be repeated consistently and frequently, or it wears off.
(4) and even with such training, in pressure situations a very high percentage of bullets miss their targets
(5) highly-trained guards did nothing, and could have done nothing in Las Vegas. They can only have an effect in close-in firefights. Sniper situations? Fugeddaboudit.
(6) All those guns in schools need to be secured, make massive targets for theft, and every teacher who isn’t on top of their game, is a walking target, waiting to be disarmed. Hey presto, the shooter has another gun! Maybe you don’t remember how flabby your teachers were. In my high school, several of the coaches approached a single characteristic dimension ….
…. and the list goes on and on and on ….
(*) When law enforcement arrives, everybody holding a gun is a possible perp. This is a recipe for a bloodbath.

@67 Please do not put words in my mouth. I do not support the arming of teachers. Given a choice between Trump and the current crop of Republican and Democratic partly duds, Trump still stands head and shoulders above; and the proof of that is that he continues to beat the crap out of the opposition in part because he champions reasonable sounding propositions – like standing during the national anthem.

Arming teachers (contra the OP) sounds reasonable to a significant subset of your own overly-armed populace. Do you deny that fact? – the 44 percent who already agree?

A free gun-safety class for teachers offered in Ohio filled in minutes, enrollment was expanded from 20 to 50 and then 300. I doubt with your busy retirement schedule you have the time to volunteer at any local schools, but were you that sort, surely a former military man like you would at least consider packing if that meant keeping children alive.

Or, maybe you wouldn’t.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374802-hundreds-sign-up-for-concealed-weapons-class-in-ohio-county

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/20/us/ohio-concealed-weapons-sheriff/index.html

Since pH is back, a reminder to all the good folks here not to engage with him. This thread has been thoroughly hijacked, given the mods won’t ban him I again (as I always do) recommend doing as i do: don’t read his comments and don’t reply to him.

ph: “I doubt with your busy retirement schedule you have the time to volunteer at any local schools, but were you that sort, surely a former military man like you would at least consider packing if that meant keeping children alive.”

It’s odd that you respect my military training and experience enough to suggest that I employ it in a way aimed at protecting school kids, but reject it – even ridicule it – when I try to do exactly that by pointing out what a bad idea arming teachers is. Apparently, like gun-loving Americans, you only approve of advice which loves guns and the using of guns.

Well-trained soldiers and cops very rarely hit what they’re aiming at when not on a gun range. No one should expect teachers – or armed security guards for that matter! – to be any more effective. Mass shooters are only successful because they’re in a target-rich environment, one where they can fire indiscriminately with a non-zero chance of hitting something, and since they’re happy to hit anything at all, it works for them. Those protecting the kids are in exactly the opposite environment. If they fire indiscriminately, they’ll kill kids. If they fire with discrimination, they’ll nearly always miss.

Also: If you’re opposed to putting gunmen in schools, why are you suggesting that I become a school gunman? Other than as an opportunity to offer an insult, I mean?

@63
Pretty much this.
It isn’t possible to disentangle American attitudes about guns from racial fears.
This is why it seems so impervious to reason; Because it isn’t really about anything remotely reasonable.

Democratic consultants have long held that gun control is a loosing issue for Democrats. Theories vary as to why but the simplest answer, elections in the US are regional (excluding Presidency). Gun Control is popular in major cities but Democrats already win those regions by overwhelming numbers. In the swing areas the popularity is decidedly mixed. Which raises the second reason it tends to be a losing issue. Gun rights advocates are a highly motivated single issue voting block.

Below is a take on this theory from 2012.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/why-america-cant-pass-gun-control/266417/

Online discussion of guns has caused me to rethink Carl Sandburg’s rule: If the politics are against you, argue the truth; if the truth is against you, argue the politics, if the politics and the truth are against you, just make up some bullshit.

From all the dead people with bullets in them, I expect.

@87: I believe that you were suggesting that news outlets “cover any mass shooting with…unremitting hysteria”. Since, as I noted, mass shootings occur every other day, the hysteria must be a little more remitting than you propose.

On the other hand, when faced with the prospect of a nightmarish hellscape of thugs and looters after Katrina, as painted vividly by Wayne LaPierre, the just plain folks might get pretty frightened, even if the thugging and the looting was greatly exaggerated, and the worst violence was white-on-black killing. Using guns.

But I would welcome any specific corrections or clarifications you might have.

@88, 89
Since neither of you seem to have understood I’ll try again.

A commenter noted that teachers in Ohio were lining up by the hundreds for gun safety class. He said they were “terrified” because of “guns-rights-activism.” There is a lot to unpack there but I focused on one patently absurd angle; that masses of people are living in terror because of “guns-rights-activism.”

I’ll try to keep this short. Guns rights activists focus their attention on Congress. Ordinary people barely interact with them. On the other hand, ordinary people interact for hours every day with the news and entertainment media. I just checked Google News and the top story is STILL the fallout from the mass shooting in Florida. And have you watched any entertainment TV lately? One of the most popular genres, judging by how endlessly they are rerun, is cop/forensics shows. If you haven’t seen one I’ll save you the trouble and give you the Cliff Notes, because they’re all the goddamned same: There is an endless supply of psychopaths out there kidnapping, torturing, and murdering ordinary people, until our brave (and heavily armed) teams of police and forensic scientists finally catch up to them. Just the other day here in my household we surfed past an old episode of CSI which literally depicted a victim’s head being chopped off. This is all run on an endless loop, both in prime time and reruns during day.

Getting back to the news people, they don’t just give us breathless coverage of the mass shootings and, at the local level, most of the crime and violence that occurs in the community, they also never stop telling us that we must be afraid of TERRORISTS and THE RUSSIANS. Two more insidious plots to destroy our society that our news media never shut up about. And on and on it goes, I’m barely scratching the surface with my remarks here.

We are a deeply pathological society that absolutely wallows in violence, sadism, and fear. Remind me again of how guns rights activists run the news and entertainment industries, run all aspects of the intellectual culture, and are solely responsible for all this.

Elsewhere on CT there is a well-considered post on responsibility. Would that everybody — you, me, everybody — considered their own responsibilities for the consequences of participating in all this, rather than forming little circle jerks and pretending that somebody else is the monocause. Yes, we are a fearful society, and the guns rights activists have their share of responsibility for it, maybe an outsized one. But I tend to think not that we are violent and fearful because of guns rights activists but that guns rights activists exist because we are violent and fearful. YMMV.

Since there seems to have been some misunderstanding I hope this helps.

Since there seems to have been some misunderstanding I hope this helps.

But you have no particular evidence of “misunderstanding”. Chet just mocked you, and didn’t actually address or mention what exactly he understood you to mean; since he didn’t say how he understood you, you have no reason to believe he misunderstood you.

But you’re acting as if you were convinced that misunderstanding was the only possible explanation…

… and the only reason you could possibly have that confidence is if you’d already mentally ruled out the other possibility, that you were in error.

… but you got no reason to rule that out, either. Do you? So it’s just gross overconfidence verging on narcissism on your part.

[Even if you happen to be correct and Chet did misunderstand you, btw: because you’re a fallible human and subject to error, “I am wrong” always sits next to “they misunderstand me” as a possible explanation for disagreement, unless you’ve ruled it out for Less Than Good reasons]

OP @ 61
“Maybe the solution is to give up on this front and focus on climate change instead because it’s more important.”
FWIW, I 100% agree. It’s the most important issue in the world. And it’s the one future generations, assuming there will be future generations, will look back on as the great failure of 20th/21st century societies. Also pot. I know a lot of libertarians and non-voters who would gladly schedule a trip to the polls to vote for anyone, of any party, who would promise to legalize weed. “Rational self-interest” and whatnot.
Not that guns aren’t important, but I think they are the issue Democrats probably don’t need to foreground unless they want to scare off fence-sitters and fire up the Republican base. Committed Dem voters already know where their electeds stand, and just about anyone off the street can tell you which party is up your alley if you’re someone who wants gun control.

“Democratic consultants were pretty firmly convinced HRC would win the election in 2016.”

And they were right! That she isn’t President is because of a relatively unlikely fluke in the distribution of her majority. Even Trump was firmly convinced she would win.

I don’t know if that’ll work, though. We’ve got ample evidence historically of jobs being downgraded when women started moving into them, and even a few cases of jobs increasing in status as women get moved out. You give teachers – women, largely, these days – guns and tell them to kill and I reckon gun ownership and firstresponder shit all gets cooties.

Violence is fetishised because it’s masculine. You make it girly and god knows what will happen.

… which doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, now that I think about it.

@96 Hubris is the gift that keeps on giving.

The ‘reason’ so few rational people predicted that Hillary could very well lose is that the discourse police trashed anyone and everyone with the temerity to openly suggest that ‘Let Them Eat Confetti’ couldn’t lose. Gambling that all your enthusiastic voters will turn out and that core elements of your opponents won’t isn’t a ‘fluke’ it’s a low-probability event. One that Trump campaign believed was quite likely in large part because people like you claimed that it was impossible for Hillary to lose. Nothing says ‘we’re taking victory for granted like not visiting Wisconsin and letting the African-American vote drift away.

Obama sold out African-American voters and favored the rich, enough people saw that HRC was nothing more than more of the same only worse. The election for was about sticking MAGA hat in the face of every smug, rich, entitled ‘liberal’ (such as ?) and making ‘them’ eat dirt. 304 to 227 is the only number that counts – and if you don’t believe that then you’re in worse shape than I thought. Hillary won the popular vote and she’s now selling books. That’s the significance of the popular vote. She’s not nominating Supreme Court Justices etc. because she L-O-S-T.

And lots of people predicted she would lose, you simply chose to shout them down, insult them, mock them, and generally do everything possible to ensure that folks somewhat sick of being sneered at and used as the butt of jokes made damn sure the found their way to the polls. Combine that with sucking up to the rich to the tune of 220 k per Goldman Sachs speech and the coronation starts to look a whole lot less certain.

And given the level of derision you and others continue to display towards Trump voters, I’d say his chances of re-election remain excellent.

Which you’ll no doubt call another fluke.

Can’t wait!

Ken Lovell
I like the way you think.

Trump’s base couldn’t give a fig about the NRA’s holy pr campaign. They know and the NRA knows that Trump has their six, as it were. Which is an apt metaphor, because while he was drawing attention to an issue that will only fire up his own base, he was planning a raid on on all those Dem blue-collar cross-over voters.

Last month Trump offered Dems a deal on DACA which Dems turned down, arming school employees does indeed ‘sound reasonable’ to a lot of independents, and now we Trump a/announcing he’s running in 2020 – sticking a timely pin in the balloon of any Republicans contemplating a challenge b/making an open plea to the AFL-CIO membership who Dems need on board badly for 2018. If Trump can push through some modified assault rifle ban/minimum/bump stock ban and do the others, Dems may manage to flush another excellent opportunity down the toilet, again.

The question is: can they do it? Why yes, yes they can.

Unfortunately, arming teachers is not going to go away in two weeks, but JH is right, there will be another tweet-driven crisis to worry over. Waiting for piss-dossier to do remove Hitler makes as much sense as visiting Arizona instead of Wisconsin.

What happens if Trump peels of ‘segments’ of the Dem base in key areas? Again?

Never. Going. To. Happen.

You heard it here first, and always. Discuss!

105 No worries! You’re doing an excellent of being provably wrong.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just selectively edit your candidate out of fixing the Democratic primary, joking about killing people on camera, and losing a winnable election to a rodeo clown. But, didn’t Hillary actually intend to go to Wisconsin, but had to stop and administer CPR to a gasping hedge-fund manager in order to cash that check?

I’ve already got your next excuse: ‘Space Aliens Hack 2018 Election! Putin trolls linked!’

I meant to ask, did you support the Iraq invasions? That seems so you.

Did you know that when Bill Clinton warned Hillary’s campaign people that skipping the mid-west could cost her the election, her experts laughed in his face. True. I don’t have the slightest expectation that you know the source – nationally recognized reporter on election-night coverage.

Hillary’s finest experts ridiculed Bill for suggesting that the white, working class votes mattered. Laughed. In. His. Face.

Fluke!