We have become a nation that accepts the blood sacrifice of our children as an ineffable part of our constitutional order, one of those things you have to tolerate, like pornography and the occasional acquittal of an unpopular defendant, in order to live in a free society. Better that one Stephen Paddock go free than a hundred law-abiding gun owners wait a week before buying an Uzi. This is a vision of the nation that has been sold to us by a generation of politicians who talk brave and act gutless, and by the carny shills in the employ of the industries of death. Better that one Stephen Paddock go free than a hundred law-abiding gun owners wait a week before buying an Uzi. We are all walking blood sacrifices waiting to happen.
Disgust isn’t enough.
Sorrow isn’t enough.
Nothing is enough because, if Newtown wasn’t enough, then how can Las Vegas be enough? And if Las Vegas isn’t enough, then how can anything be enough?
Guns are a tool designed to kill. Quori was not talking about murder, just the action of taking a life. So hunting falls under that because the intention of hunting is to kill a living animal. And while hunting is a legitimate use for a gun it does not change the point that the only purpose of a gun is to kill. Having the debate to limit access of guns vs other objects or tools is a derail because most other things don’t have that one sole function.
I’ve tried a similar tack in debating gun enthusiasts, mentioning that private armies have always been regarded as an existential threat to democracy, and that certain weapons can transform a single person into a private army. Of course it always falls on deaf ears.
The Police. Not private citizens, FYI–i.e. the people who would still have guns, and the training (ostensibly) to use them if guns were banned for private citizens.
Caleb Keeter, who plays guitar for the Josh Abbott Band, which was part of the weekend schedule, said on Twitter that the shooting had changed his mind on the issue of gun rights.
“I’ve been a proponent of the Second Amendment my entire life,” he wrote. “Until the events of last night.”
I’m 100% in agreement with Biden, and both he and Obama tried to attack the root of the issue, but were dismissed as anti-gun and out-bought by the NRA, unfortunately.
That pretty much echoes the writings of the killer from the École Polytechnique massacre in Montréal in 1989. It’s not a new problem and one not solely confined to the U.S., though they seem to bear the brunt of it.
Like I said technically true. In their history. The engineering. The base purpose of a gun is to explosively put holes in living things. Even as some guns are designed to get Batman around town or explosively put holes in paper. And may be uniquely unsuited to killing things larger than a rabbit. That’s still there, And they’re still fundamentally dangerous. A design history and base function derived from weaponry. I’m not arguing it isn’t.
But obsessing over that is a great way to derail the debate about sensible gun regulation. Because it’s as I said, an argument that chiefly seems to piss people off. It isn’t constructive, does not make a real practical point. It doesn’t have much real world utility in convincing people that a little bit more restriction in gun ownership might be a good idea.
I’ve stood in gun ranges and gotten some pretty nutty gun owners to acknowledge we need better regulation. Deep down most of them seem to know it. What’s never worked is harping on the fact that guns are fundamentally weapons.
So yeah. Side comment with advice on how to make the argument more convincingly. You’ll also notice I tend to avoid using the phrase “gun control”. As that’s pretty much synonymous in a lot of people’s minds with “libtards wanna take our guns!”. People seem to respond in less knee jerk fashion to “fire arms regulation”.
I think it’s more constructive to say that while guns are fundamentally built to kill, there’s a huge difference between sensible ownership of guns and the sale of guns fundamentally built to kill as many living things as possible as easily as possible. That’s a start, anyway.
I am usually not a conspiracy theorist, but I kind of wonder if there’s more than one gunman here. Or if possibly this guy Paddock isn’t the shooter at all. Usually the guys who do this sort of thing are alienated losers, but this guy seems like he was pretty much living his version of the dream. They haven’t found anything at all to indicate that he was planning this, nor that he was radicalized or crazy. Also, there were two scoped machine guns set up to fire from separate windows in his room. In the videos, the sound of machine gun fire seems to overlap at points, as if two separate guns were firing.
I mean none of that rules this guy out as the killer. I’m just worried that some very dangerous people might be on the loose while we’re all convinced this guy is the culprit.
