A Good Guy With a Gun

[LDoBe]

Also known as the Lake Wobegon Effect:

Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.

Lake Wobegon | The Lake Wobegon effect

[miasm]

@Mister44

simple minded “we have to do SOMETHING” way of thinking

https://media.giphy.com/media/P57pH4PcBeTgA/giphy.gif(image larger than 4 MB)

[anon34812172]

It is. I don’t want the nukes that I have. I need a spot for another couch.

[anon8420928]

@jsebean

Dang it Cory Doctorow. Why you post things we can’t watch in Canada?

[Felton]

@codinghorror

I think we should allow citizens to have nukes – but only when stored in safe, locked containers, and only after proper licensing and training. I’m sure the occasional mistake, if there even are any, won’t be a problem.

[andy_hilmer]

@Mister44

I think you are giving the NRA too much credit/blame.

Apart from the amount of money they sling around and the crypto-bigot line of fear they sling? Like that’ll ever resonate in this country.

[anon68952647]

@Mister44

but while you point out how horrible this splinter is, you’re bleeding out

100,000 papercuts will kill you too.

Know what actually leads to bleeding out? Assault rifles.

[NickSay]

Jordan Klepper’s finest hour

[kenny]

Id like to know as well. Let’s look at the data gathered on gun violence in america. Oh wait…

[anon15383236]

@Foggen

I agree, next to the professional instructors the clowning seemed desperate and idiotic. That contrast undermined any rhetorical high ground the piece was trying to establish. You can’t make the gun instructor seem useless or unserious when you’re the one fucking around with the rubber gun and driving a shitty joke about “breaking rules” so far into the ground that you disrupt the water table.

When you can’t argue with what they have to say, just attack the way they say it!

(Is there a name for this feeble tactic?)

[kthejoker]

But this video clearly is echo chamber comedy. Show it to a bunch of Oathkeepers and they’ll just spend the whole time making fun of it, not getting “the message.” So how effective is it at puncturing the “good guy with a gun” myth among the people that hold it? And admittedly I’m not sure it’s concerned with being an “effective rhetorical tool” so much as a “decent (but highly watered down so HuffPo and Boing Boing will write about it) bit of dark humor”, but if you’re arguing it’s in any way the former then I’d say that yeah, it’s pretty much 100% appeal to ridicule which isn’t much of an argumentation tactic.

Whereas I can certainly imagine a video that could also demonstrate the fallacy of the “good guy with a gun” myth in a way that would be compelling to 2nd Amendment activists: you could do a tragic version of Papasan’s jokey image above about not being able to identify “good guys” and “bad guys”. You could certainly appeal to gun people by showing how bad guys usually come out to do bad things with body armor and explosives and your puny little open carry .357 is going to do bupkus.

[anon15383236]

I’m not arguing it’s in any way the former.

[kthejoker]

Sorry, I used your post as a springboard for my own little mini-rant : )

[anon50609448]

@Shuck

That’s not a failure to understand statistics, that’s simply flatly denying that the statistics apply to you.

Well, yeah, that’s what a I mean. If you tell people something happens 5% of the time, they mostly think that means it literally never happens, except when they figure that they will definitely be the exception. I don’t know the factors that go into making this distinction, but I assume it is probably just an extension of whatever they were going to think anyway.

@Shuck

Everyone wants to think they’re the special snowflake that’s smarter, more competent, more safe than anyone else, even when they’re clearly not doing anything differently than anyone else.

Look, I know that more than 50% of people who think they are responsible are just examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but not me.

[anon50609448]

@anon81034786

Woman who shot at Home Depot shoplifters vows to ‘never help anybody again’

The rest of the world sighs in relief and says we will hold her to that.

@ActionAbe

“I’m never going to want to commit suicide because mental states never change!” I’m always a little disturbed by how quickly people dismiss the suicide statistics as not applying to them. It tells me that people still don’t really understand mental illness.

I had to explain this to my doctor once when I was having a side effect from a medication that was making me think about suicide. I said, “At my age, I’m more likely to kill myself than to have a heart attack. If I was in here with pains in my chest you’d be taking it seriously, why aren’t you taking this seriously?” People still basically think we are magical beings of pure will capable of absolute choice and agency.

[Foggen]

Here’s the problem. If he spends the whole time acting like a dumb asshole who sneers at guns, then the demonstration that he is useless with a gun doesn’t carry any weight or actually produce any evidence that non-useless people will not potentially be of use during a shooting spree. And given that the end of his demonstration included police shooting him while he was surrendering with his hands up, it’s difficult to determine whether any part of what they did was honest or valid. There’s one expert casting doubt on the effectiveness of a legally-armed person, and the rest is the jackass fantasizing about confiscation. So, there’s not a lot of daylight between “what they say” and “the way they say it” here.

[anon26940528]

@anon50609448

People still basically think we are magical beings of pure will capable of absolute choice and agency.

Ever get angry over something dumb and can’t figure out why? It’s because you’re a primate. We’re not biologically all that far from flinging shit when threatened. Hell, we do it rhetorically.

[anon50609448]

@ActionAbe

Ever get angry over something dumb and can’t figure out why? It’s because you’re a primate. We’re not biologically all that far from flinging shit when threatened. Hell, we do it rhetorically.

Of course, having realized that we can be mindful of it and try to do a little better, right? I mean, intelligent people wouldn’t just use that as an excuse for how they were going to behave anyway… right?

MRA Dilbert

[anon67050589]

@anon50609448

I had to explain this to my doctor once when I was having a side effect from a medication that was making me think about suicide. I said, “At my age, I’m more likely to kill myself than to have a heart attack. If I was in here with pains in my chest you’d be taking it seriously, why aren’t you taking this seriously?” People still basically think we are magical beings of pure will capable of absolute choice and agency.

A few years ago my onco switched me to a new cancer drug, which has a high percentage rate (70%) of a particularly painful physical side effect (bone pain), and a lesser-but-still-not-negligible rate of depression as a side effect. At the first followup, her first question was whether or not I was experiencing the physical side effect. Yes, I said, but I want to talk about the fact that I’m also experiencing the depression. She started asking questions, typing on her computer the whole time. Within a few minutes, she had determined what anti-depressant was the right one to start with, and told me she’d already sent the prescription to my pharmacy.

Any doctor who doesn’t understand that depression is real and dangerous and can come from out of nowhere at any point, for a variety of reasons, isn’t a doctor worth having.

[anon33466019]

Like any normal human I also explained to my doc I had anxiety and depression. She prescribed, without any tests, two anti depressants over a short period of time. Neither worked (surprise!).

Neither worked because the root of the problem is my testosterone levels are below 100. And ADs don’t do jack about that.

God, even just angrily typing that probably raised my levels