Was there ever a time when idiotic loons were largely ignored, rather than being rewarded with headlines whenever they top themselves… Or is my memory out of whack?
Back in the day, they had to go to all the trouble and expense of publishing and sending out their own newsletters.
I’m old enough that I was around for 25 years or so before the interwebs. And yes, the cranks and loons were ignored for the most part because they didn’t have a platform.
Social media has altered the hellscape so everyone has a platform and the crazies have a much easier time finding each other.
Trained with ?
Of course she does, the upcoming Civil War 2.0 will need lots of child conscript soldiers who can fire a gun at the enemy, just like the civil wars in Afghanistan and Yemen. So effective, so cheap, so easily manipulated into forever hating and fighting the enemy, and they self-replicate! What’s not to love! /s
No, I don’t think sensible parents would agree with that. Sensible parents would keep all firearms out of the house, period. Every adult I know who owns a firearm has had a bad incident with one. Every adult. We’re talking about people who are very responsible in other aspects of their lives, who people trust their lives to, in some cases, in their professional pursuits. And every single one of them has either misplaced a firearm or had one go off unintended. Teach a kid how to use a firearm, and that same kid as a teenager will be overconfident and mishandle one. It’s not a maybe or even a probably. It is guaranteed.
Look out! A madwoman with a gun!
Has she ever met a child? One of those notoriously levelheaded, slow to anger, impulsiveness tempered by wisdom and discipline; notably merciful in dealings even with the soft targets among their peers type people?
If you have an ideological commitment to pretending that collective action problems either do not exist or are fundamentally and universally unsolvable you have a difficult time not either drifting into a libertarian dreamworld where property acquisition and use are still somehow not meaningfully impeded by the Lockean proviso; or, if you can’t quite slip the surly bonds of earth, basically looking at modernity and insisting that all its flaws are either sacred or impossible to fix.
That’s the charitable interpretation, at least; I’m personally not convinced that there isn’t a solid slice of people who don’t even insist on ruling in hell rather than serving in heaven; but are content to live there so long as they know everyone else does too.
So this is the link with the forced-birthers: enough kids to maintain or grow population versus the gun deaths that there’s no alternative to.
Childhood diseases will take a few-- some of these populations don’t like vaccines.
Yeah the idea that crime and gun violence are only big problems in big cities rather than rural America is really just a myth conservatives use to let their base feel a sense of superiority.
Yeah the high gun ownership rate caused all sorts of problems - the suicide and fatal gun accident rates were (and probably still are) huge, on top of whatever the murder rate was (which for such a small community wouldn’t have been particularly noticeable). Plus, alcohol abuse was and is still a real issue there, so plenty of people die in car accidents (either drinking and driving or getting drunk and getting hit by cars). It’s quite a high crime area these days.
Also, I’ve heard stories about how the young men of the town would drive 150 miles each way to big cities (in the SF Bay Area) to commit crimes. SF used to be a particular favorite - apparently seeing the gay/Black/Asian populations as people they could target with impunity. My mother talks about being horrified and sickened by guys she knew from high school bragging about assaulting and robbing gay guys in SF, back in the late '50s/early '60s. They didn’t act like they had done anything wrong. I suspect it didn’t stop then. All these conservative rural folks afraid that “predators” / “antifa” from big cities will come and cause trouble in their towns, when the reality has always been the opposite.
Why do people like her want to live in a horrible Mad Max/Lord of the Flies hellscape?
One possible answer (not one I’m married to or anything): They’re bored, lazy, and have low self-esteem and poor impulse control.
It’s simply more fun (in the sense of giving an immediate endorphin rush of excitement) to imagine a Mad Max hellscape. Since this sense of fun is difficult (requires work) to justify, it’s more fun still to imagine that “others” are up to no good and ought to be on the receiving end of your fun. And needless to say, it’s even more fun to imagine that you yourself are uniquely virtuous in meting out this fun.
It was the obvious next step. The Republican solution to the gun problem is always more guns. Of course playground squabbles would result in some fatalities, but, hey, only the strong survive, right? And the survivors would be better prepared for life as adults in a gun culture, isn’t that the point of education? Whew! At what point will they finally realize the insanity of the their position on firearms? Arm-a-geddon-outa-here.
Fuck me sideways!
Just watched that ten minutes.
Astonishing, truly.
You’re partly right.
I can’t agree that ‘sensible parents’ think their children should be trained how to use firearms.
The American obsession with gun ownership (‘God given’ no less!) is batshit crazy, and seems to be getting worse.
