A la “Looks like you brought an AK-47 to a drone fight!” 
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So these two prevalent conservative topoi are less confusing then:
We need guns to defend against the government!
Support our troops. Yeeehaw - let the government spend a fuckton of taxes to buy them bigger guns.
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I think cognitive dissonance is the correct term, but you’ve coined a new expression that rather works - I like the idea of cognitive dissidence.
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I believe some of the people you describe learn history from TV shows and movies. That’s where they get the fantasy that they should be able to support a household (with a housekeeper) on a single salary in today’s economy. When it comes to guns, they cast themselves in the role of the hero/gunslinger in films like High Noon and High Plains Drifter, instead of realizing they are far more likely to become one of the cowering townspeople:
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People are shitting on you for choosing examples from the 90s (as if the IRA and PLO didn’t face major material disadvantages for the entirety of their existences as militant organizations), but the same argument can be made today if you look at the Taliban, Rojava, the Zapatistas, the Communist and Moro insurgencies in the Philippines, etc.
No, an assault rifle will not let you go toe-to-toe with the US military. But that’s not how insurgencies are conducted, and never has been. The US is currently in the process of negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban, and unless the situation on the ground changes drastically in the next few months, it’s going to be hard to call the result anything other than a defeat for the US.
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It seems to me the idea that Americans should be arming to fight a bloody insurgency against the Federal Government is not at all at odds with the recommendation that the United States is becoming a dangerously unstable place for international travelers to visit.
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And the weird thing is that it’s not the people really opposed to the current corrupt govt. (say Antifa) that are arming to the gills in some sort of masturbatory gun fantasy.
It seems to be the people who would gladly suck tRump’s teeny tiny (and let’s be honest, woefully inadequate) member who are harboring this “the second amendment protects the first” mindset. Nah, nowadays the fight happens in court.
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I stand humbly corrected.
Perhaps I should have written that we are an exceptionally exceptional shithole, and have been for some time? (honestly, I’d be okay with that)
If the government goes full fascist the people with the guns are going to be the ones joining posses to round up dissidents and brown-skinned-people. Those guns are never going to be used to fight the government.
If the government is coming for you and you have a gun, what can you do? You can kill one person that the government considered entirely expendable before they get you. I’ve seen references in this thread to the IRA, Palestinians, and the Taliban fighting against more powerful, better equipped enemies. None of them did it with handguns.
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Number of US mass shooting deaths so far in 2019: 246.
Number of US traffic fatalities in 2018: 36,750.
So why isn’t Amnesty issuing travel advisories about cars and complaining the government hasn’t done enough to “regulate access” to cars and “protect the rights of people to live and move about freely without the threat of” being killed by a drunk driver, run over while walking or riding a bike, or honked at or flipped off by some jerk? Are you sure Amnesty doesn’t have a “horse in the race,” that is, an agenda of their own?
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Number of people killed by shooting in the US in 2017: 39,773
Whoopsie.
Amnesty International’s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. In pursuit of this vision, Amnesty International’s mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of these rights
Horrible, all this talk about human rights and stuff… sounds very anti-american, eh?
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That’s not even the total number of mass shooting incidents, let alone the number of gun deaths (which is well into the tenst of thousands).
That figure is still smaller than the number of gun fatalities this year even though the number of Americans who actively use cars on a daily basis is orders of magnitude higher than the number of Americans who actively use guns on a daily basis.
Go to a major city any day of the week and you’ll see scores of thousands of people using their cars at the same time in the same place. The vast, vast majority of them will go through their day without incident, largely because we have many regulations involving the manufacture, ownership and use of cars. The last time that many Americans gathered in one place to use guns at the same time was the Battle of Gettysburg.
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You just hit the nail on the head; but it’s even deeper than that.
Over the last 50+ years, tv and movies have had a detrimental effect on the cognitive processes of the masses in the US, and the way we perceive not only info, but reality itself; it’s calling programming for a good reason.
The stories we tell ourselves matter.
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You realize the government does a lot to regulate access to cars, right? If a country had no licencing or required skill tests for drivers and people in that country were dying in traffic at double (or more) the rate of other countries, wouldn’t we all be wondering what the hell was wrong with them?
But anyway, I was wondering about whether the absolute number of people being killed in mass shootings warranted a travel advisory when this thread opened. I compared the number of US mass shooting deaths over the past three months (which is around 200 a month according to tables listing all the incidents on wikipedia) to the people killed per month during the Troubles (obviously dividing by total population). It’s less, but not orders of magnitude less. Basically if you think a travel advisory was warranted for Northern Ireland in the mid-80s, then a travel advisory to the US is warranted now, for mass shootings alone, by the numbers.
Your odds of being shot on a weekend vacation to the US are very, very small. Travel advisories don’t have a lot of risk tolerance.
But as others have pointed out, the total number of shooting deaths in the US is astounding. It’s more than one percent of all deaths.
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Add to the list of police bigotry: bicycles and pickup trucks with toppers.
Fellow on a recumbent bike with a cargo trailer came pulling in here a few years back with a convoy of cops following him. Of course, this is the county which tased the old refugee lady. The traveler told them that he had a reservation and they took off. This guy rides all over the country in winter, name Adams, help him out if you see him.
Next county over, Whitfield, bought heat seeking devices so they can determine if someone’s cooking meth, but they use them to harass car and truck sleepers. I take this very personally because I did the John Steinbeck tour around the South, sans dog, for about two years of precarious employment and unemployment.
I seriously resent these dudes who want to make America a big white shithole.
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