Amendment. It’s right there in the name, ffs.
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Moreover, when America had a real-world, out-and-out tyrant running the government and his own party refused to hold him accountable for his crimes, 2A”patriots” lined up behind him, supporting tyranny, instead of fighting against it.
It always stank of hypocrisy, but now that position has been exposed as an excuse for treason.
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And were only able to act at all because the national guard was prevented from acting by the traitor in chief.
Otherwise they’d have been put down in 10 minutes- tops.
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The well regulated militia of the National Guard could easily have put down the lynch mob of 2nd Amendment enthusiast right wing traitors.
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Watch out for their rivals: Meal Team 6
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Claim: the real issue in this shooting is [mental health | white supremacy | misogyny | bullying | economic anxiety | police brutality | domestic violence | etc. ]. We must address it first so these tragedies don’t occur.
A distraction/derailing tactic. The existence of (or speculation about) a contributing factor does not change the fact that the number of casualties in an incident are higher than they’d otherwise be because of the relatively easy availability of access to firearms in the U.S. Also, we’re capable as a nation of addressing more than one problem at the same time if we have the will to do so.
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But but … If this shooter had been unable to access an assault weapon, he would have used a handgun! If he couldn’t get a handgun he would have used a knife! /S
Argh. Yeah, the guy is a terrorist. But if there are no military grade weapons, there is a lot less death.
Also- we don’t have to focus on just one issue at a time. The US is one of the richest countries in the world even without the richest residents paying taxes.
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Or a nunchuk, or a throwing star… or a crossbow or any other weapon that is isn’t a firearm.
One of us (maybe you – anyone can play) will eventually get around to writing an entry that de-bunks that particular BS claim by the gun-strokers.
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Re, the “mental health,” claim. In case anyone is not already aware, people suffering from mental health issues are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
But for anyone who wants to make the “mental health” argument, the next logical question is: okay, so you are saying that it’s probably a bad idea to give mentally unwell people guns, right?
So, you’re saying people should be screened for mental health before purchasing a gun? And then screened, what, annually, as long as they continue to own those guns?
Who does the screening and what standard do they use?
Would you pass?
Would this guy have passed?
If so, maybe mental health isn’t the issue. Maybe we just need a lot fewer guns around.
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The Good Guy With A Gun Myth
People successfully defend themselves with a gun less than 1% in violent crimes:
People carrying a gun are 4x more likely to be shot in a violent crime:
People carrying firearms don’t stop mass shootings very often. Four times as many mass shootings are stopped by unarmed people as armed people:
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Including by the police, especially if Black.
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It also includes times when aforementioned unarmed people disarmed the shooter and a Good Guy With A Gun ™ barged in and shot the person who disarmed the shooter.
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Thank you. “Moar gunz” isn’t really the answer.
Related claim: “An armed society is a polite society” (Heinlein).
Putting aside the implied strange desire to live in a society where the only way to be a considerate person is by constantly living in fear of someone shooting you, this doesn’t work out in real life. Rank these OECD countries on their reputation for politeness and then consider the degree of unfettered access their citizens have to firearms: Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, the U.S. There may be some debate about which society is the most polite, but there will be little on which is the least polite.
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Counter argument: it takes mad skills to kill 10 people in two minutes with any kind of melee weapon. Any idiot can pull a trigger 10 times in a row.
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Most “defensive gun use” isn’t. People with guns are more likely to use them to initiate or escalate a confrontation to illegal and deadly levels.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun-ownership-myth-114262/
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The claim made by Heinlein is, well, juvenile. And often repeated by young men, rarely women. But the empirical evidence proves that an armed society is a society constantly on edge, with none of the room for error in dealings that other societies have. So, I guess “polite” is a euphemism for “paranoid”.
In fact, I suspect the phrase may have been hinting at that. Robert E. Howard made a similar claim about how civilized people got away with rudeness that would have incited a split skull amongst barbarians. A masculine idea of how being polite is only enforced by threats of violence.
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An armed society is a dangerous society.
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Starting to get a little bit tired of all these real-time confirmations of what we already know about mass shooters:
Of course this mass shooting happened over four hours ago so there have probably been several more since the story broke.
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I feel the really painful thing about this argument - even if made by gun nuts - is that when we talk about reducing wealth disparity by using tax money to fund medical care and education, we can’t do that because it will be claimed that “we’re talking about gun violence, not tax policy”.
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