I’m confused why anyone participates in the meme with an actual loaded weapon. No one is going to be able check your weapon or tell the difference. Why not use an unloaded gun?
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OK, everyone, America is clearly great again, you can stop now.
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Fair - but neither do you to back up your statement.
I can say that page has 1.7K members - 1.5K added in the last week. Looks like they got nuked and reformed. That’s nothing. I can say that all of the reactions I’ve seen to these articles has been negative. No one is defending these morons.
This is hardly the first time where a small group of people are doing something stupid and it gets blown out of proportion by the internet. Before all of this there was this “lackin’ challenge” making the viral rounds. haven’t seen anyone else say that was a good idea either.
To call their actions anywhere near mainstream is ridiculous.
In general (not a direct reply):
You don’t like guns? That’s fine. You want different gun laws. Super cool, good luck with that. Like to point and laugh at the idiots. Please do. They deserve everything they get.
Pretending this is anywhere near common is disingenuous at best.
Someone is clearly trolling the gun nut groups trying to get them to Darwin Award themselves. That said, play stupid games win stupid prizes.
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It is a mistake to equate a motorcycle (a form of transportation), a skateboard (a toy/form of transportation), and a pistol (an instrument whose primary purpose is to end a human life).
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Even there it’s a problem. I’ve been to a gun range about 25 times in my life. On two occasions, I saw behaviour that got someone kicked off, and a few more times saw behaviour that was definitely dangerous but didn’t result in expulsion. If the vast bulk of gun owners were as responsible as ammosexuals claim I shouldn’t have seen any incidents over the course of so few visits, let alone (conservatively speaking) 10% of them.
I’ve also had one supposedly responsible gun owner wave one of his prizes at me and some others when he was showing off his collection and then telling us to “lighten up” when we all yelled at him. Again, the odds should have been against that ever happening to me if we lived in a country where this kind of behaviour was as uncommon as ammosexuals like to pretend it is.
This situation, not to mention the epidemic of gun violence in this country, is only going to get worse if ammosexuals keep blocking meaningful regulation of firearms because they want to fantasise about being action heroes and freedom fighters.
I’m really tired of insecure white dudes with the mentality of the sort of 12-year-old suburban boy who collects nunchucks and throwing stars dominating the discussion about anything involving dangerous weapons.
That’s a fair estimate of the original group’s size, when you take into account that in these situations there are usually a bunch of morons who don’t engage in the behaviour but cheer it on out of an earnest belief that it’s a way to “own the libs” and protect their own masculinity totems from being “taken away” by the gubmint.
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Warning: Keep your booger hook off the bang switch.
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As I said in another thread:
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Not sure that you can agree that there’s no data - then say you know the extent of the group without data and cast aspersions on others intent. I mean say and expect to be taken seriously. You can of course say whatever you care to.
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For once I actually hoped this was just clickbait. I actually was expecting to read something like the dude just pointed a Nerf gun down there
D: Wow.
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Considering what people were and are doing under pretense of God’s will, it’s a perfectly fine phrase.
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Heck, I wonder how many gun owners never go to the range. (Or have any kind of safety training, etc.) Some Pew survey I saw suggested that most don’t. (Only a minority said they “sometimes” went to a shooting range.) Not that unsafe behavior necessarily gets displayed, policed or corrected there, either.
It occurs to me that “responsible gun owner” is a lot like “law-abiding citizen.” First of all, there ain’t no such thing. People may want to be responsible/law-abiding, but it depends on education - being able to recognize when one has crossed the line (which isn’t obvious, given Americans routinely violate the law without knowing it, for instance) - and maintaining the mental equilibrium required to retain and make good on that intention (e.g. being insecure, upset, angry, drunk, mentally ill, etc. are factors that frequently cause people to cross the line into irresponsible or illegal behavior).
But more than that, it’s a statement of (dangerously false) binary certainties - people are either of the safe, “good” variety, or they’re dangerous monsters from whom the law is intended to protect the “good” people. One is in the “safe” category until one is ejected from it (because one got caught being irresponsible/criminal) - neither intention nor education come into it. “No true Scotsman” fallacies can run wild, as well as prejudices (one of the NRA’s own lawyers of recent decades explicitly making arguments about how black people shouldn’t have access to guns, whereas “responsible” white people such as himself should - despite the string of serious gun crimes he had committed as a youth, including murder).
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I had a friend who visited a small college campus in Louisiana. In the center of campus was a very small pond, barely an easy stone’s throw across in all directions. One each of the four sides of the pond was a large sign that read “Please don’t shoot the ducks”. At first it was funny, but as he thought about it, he realized that the signs wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t happened. In fact, knowing how college bureaucrats work, it had probably happened many times to merit buying a single sign, let alone four. He decided to not visit that campus any more.
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I think they’re cosplaying Matthew 19:12.
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“[We] are sick and tired of being demonized as gun owners, and looped together with the alt-right just for owning guns,” an admin of Loaded Guns Pointed at [B]enis told Motherboard in a Facebook message. “We are sick of republicans (think NRA) telling us what to do with our property, and we are sick of being told that just because we like guns It means we have to be anti woman, pro life and pro trump.”
I get the feeling that the SRA, John Brown Gun Club, Huey P Newton Gun Club, Liberal Gun Club and Pink Pistols want nothing to do with these gentlemen.
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As a motorcyclist, we definitely have subcultures of people like this. There’s the whole helmet law debate, ATGATT-vs-TeaShartandFlipflops arguments. There are bikers who rip through dense traffic at ill advised speeds. And so on.
Everyone I know who rides likes the feeling of freedom you get on a bike. I like the thrill of it. My main motorcycle is a powerful sport bike, and I like what happens when I crack the throttle open.
But helmet and gear usage affects more than just me. It affects insurance rates, and there is a big social and human cost. First responders, medical staff and everyone encountering an accident scene has to deal with the worse outcome for the rider. It makes both the mechanical and emotional portion of their jobs much worse.
And this is the same thing. A stupid, preventable accident made by an idiot who doesn’t think about anyone around him. Freedom means being allowed to take risks, but responsibility means taking measures to minimize those risks and their impacts on others.
Edit to add: I don’t think this group is as fringe as the NRA would want you to think. Given the size of anti helmet types, there are plenty of them.
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Well, fewer nuts than there used to be.
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Also… I’m laughing so hard at this dumbfuck and his dumbfuck friends. Sadly, he probably doesn’t have to suffer from hormone imbalances thanks to HRT. Still, net positive for humanity that transgender people have access to it.
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I can’t speak to the question of how many gun owners think it is hilarious to point loaded guns at their own junk, but clearly there are some.
What I can speak to, as someone who grew up hunting with gun safety being the #1 rule constantly emphasized by my father and his friends, is the prevalence of dangerous behavior among gun owners.
It is common among gun owners to hunt in groups while drinking. Not too smart, or safe.
It is common for gun owners who like to flaunt their weapons in public (see any recent demonstration) to exhibit unsafe behavior. Take a look at any picture to see how many of them have a finger through the trigger guard, even of the gun is pointed down. Not too smart, or safe.
It is common for many gun owners to leave a loaded weapon around unsecured in their home. For evidence look to the many cases of children accidentally shooting other children. Clearly not safe or smart.
While you yourself may be responsible and safe while handling guns, that does not extrapolate to far too many owners who view their weapon as a manly toy, or an own-the-libs cosplay object, and before they even pick up the weapon they are far too foolish and stupid to be handling one. The days of the NRA gun safety emphasis are long in the past. Now guns are more likely to be a fetish object, and they are far too easy to obtain.
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