I’m going to leave mine as it stands, because far too many people think that way, but noted 
Rather than regulate guns, Texas seeks to teach battlefield trauma care beginning in the third grade
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My HS Latin bows in submission! 
But the point holds. I’ll stick to English for this one.
Power never takes a back step — only in the face of more power.
[Malcolm X]
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Beau has some good points, as usual. In thinking about the training currently required to be offered to 7-12 graders, I am definitely thinking first aid type training. Because, in reality, even the eldest kids, are not going to be able to use this training in a mass shooting. Based on what I’ve seen in our district, it is definitely first aid training.
And this is why there’s currently a proposed bill to ban polling stations on college campuses. The children who are becoming adults are enraged. Just the way every adult should be. I hope they don’t all leave. I hope they help us turn this state around.
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Our [state] rep is fighting this BS as I write this, but our state senator is fine with disenfranchising this portion of our electorate. Unsurprisingly, our state senator is a Republican, and yes our state representative is a Democrat.
Of course, disenfranchising young voters is not just a Texas thing:
A friend down the road here told me his adult son went through all of his paramedic training and ended up quitting shortly thereafter because of the gore, the trauma… the intensely visual aspect of the job. Even if the kids learn first aid–which I think is a great idea–the reason they are being asked to learn it is because the Gun Problem in the Great State of Texas is given primacy over our students lives and mental health. Over everybody’s.
It’s one thing to teach kids to duck and cover (not that that would necessarily save you in the event of a nuclear strike near your school). That threat comes from far away, from another country entirely, and is or historically was unstoppable once initiated.
It’s a whole 'nuther thing to teach kids that their own peers, neighbors and countrymen might shoot them, in school, at any time, and in Texas not a damn thing will be done to address the source of that very local threat.
I can hardly blame them for leaving.
You can’t fix crazy, and RWNJ in Texas own very special brand of it.
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As somebody from outside the States, this possibility is insane.
If there was something ridiculously dangerous that constantly hurt, maimed and killed thousands of people every year, like, maybe, wolves, you wouldn’t suggest that nothing could be done except buying, selling and breeding your own wolves.
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It reminds me of arsenic in England. There was so much delay between the time when everyone knew arsenic everywhere was killing everybody faster and the time when they were like “maybe we should stop this somehow” and then there was the fight from the industries who were like “why should our profits bear the cost of keeping people here alive!?”
It’s always mostly poor children who pay the price in mortality.
And of course there were the people then and now who are like “but isn’t that, like, really a good thing?”
But the people on those cold and rainy islands of the past managed to put together some unprecedented environmental regulation for themselves eventually so perhaps some later people like us over here could one day also do the unthinkable and overcome a self-made problem through law and social pressures.
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We are in a post-satire world.
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Yay.
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Depends on your POV.
If you aren’t part of the gang of fascists that approve of this sort of thing, then your opinions/thoughts/wants/etc don’t matter, since they are in control.
This is a House bill… we will see what sort of priority Taliban Dan the lite Gov. gives it, since he controls the Senate agenda.
Who knows what kind of fuckery the Senate will do to it.
There’s big bucks in privatization, not least for those enabling the privatizing.
It’s not the Legislature that’s broken.
It’s the people running it; and the people that vote them into office.
A bit of election fuckery & gerrymandering doesn’t help things, either.
They are pretty much committed to christofascism at this point.
With the end of the national COVID emergency pending, it remains to be seen if Czar Abbott will follow suit & end his Texas COVID disaster declaration.
After all, the declaration does give him give him more power. and he is power-hungry.
He wants to be POTUS so bad, he can’t stand it.
ETA:
Now, we have this little gem:
The GOP-controlled Texas Senate on Tuesday passed a proposal allowing the state to overturn elections in Harris County, home to the state’s most populous city Houston.
Needless to say, Houston is blue, and has a Black mayor.
They are also mad because MAGAt candidates lost several county elections, last time around.
Local control is slowly being usurped, starting with the largest* cities. State control of the Houston School District is proceeding.
*Why, yes, they all just happen to vote blue.
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Whichever way it goes, I’m sure he’ll just roll with it.
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He’s a Christian, which has it’s own long sorid history of awfulness that predates the Taliban (from the 80s)… how about Klan Dan instead, since that much more accurately reflects what he’s doing and why. 
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Now that’s just an unfair characterization.
They actually aren’t solving ANY problem.
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Like others of his ilk, he calls himself that. but his [and their] actions and policies are very unChristlike.
Sure does.
More like the mid-90s, but that hasn’t kept them from trying to play catch-up, in terms of blood shed & cruelty imposed.
Nah. It doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way… it has no rhythm. 
BTW, ‘Dan Patrick’ isn’t his birth name, and he is not from Texas.
He was born ‘Dani Goeb’, and he is from Baltimore. He was the sportscaster for the CBS
tv station in town, and that was his stage name. Afterwards, he bought a radio station and fashioned himself into Yet Another El Rushbo Wannabe, then went into politics.
The Klan was/is a racist organization at its core, with overtones of Protestant Nationalism thrown in for justification.
Patrick is a religious fundamentalist at his core, and fascism is his method of imposing it.
He wants to destroy the public schools in Texas, using the cloak of ‘school choice’; he is in favor of imposing religion in public schools, as well. His Social Darwinist policies fall hardest on POC & the Poors, so while he isn’t explicitly racist or elitist, his actions speak for themselves. Needless to say, he is also anti-LBGTQ and pro forced-birth… the list is long.
For all their screaming about ‘sharia law’, he, and those of his ilk, have no qualms about imposing their own version of the very same thing, and I have no idea what to call that.
I think they might call it ‘traditional American values’, but that’s bullshit. Given their animosity towards all things Islam, and given the propensity for English to shamelessly incorporate foreign terms [schadenfreude, anyone?], ‘sharia law’ does the trick in regards to meaning, and alerts others in no uncertain terms.
‘Taliban Dan’ manages to insult both entities. It’s a twofer!
I don’t care much for fundamentalists, no matter which particular cult they may belong to.
Sharia just means law.
Sharia law is Law Law.
It’s not clever to use one religion with billions of adherents, most of them peaceful, to trash another religion, with billions of adherents, most of them peaceful, because of the actions of a few. Leave Islam out of it.
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He first claimed to be a Christian in his 40s. His principal religious beliefs involve gaining personal power and discriminating against POC/women/LGBTQ etc. He’s a Christian politician in exactly the same way the Klan was a Christian group.
Let’s leave off trying to associate him with “scary foreigners” to make him sound bad.
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So now the survivors of school shootings not only have survivors guilt to deal with for the rest of their lives, many of them will also be able to spend the rest of their lives struggling with the (completely untrue, but common) belief that they failed to save the lives of their classmates who were shot and died despite their efforts to help them.
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AND in this modern era, those survivors will ALSO have to live with the knowledge that the training at how to be an effective school shooter (by knowing how kids will react) has been drilled into modern school shooters. The school shooters nowadays know exactly what their victims are going to do and are starting to plan accordingly, because they’ve been trained on how to DEFEND against it.
Instead of the obvious, hey , maybe we shouldn’t have so many guns.
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Are they? It’s been a common strain in American Christianity (and going back to Europe, too)… a very top-down, autocratic version. I might agree that it doesn’t really align with what Jesus said, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a real force in the world. I really don’t like blaming shit that we do on other people, especially given the imperial relationship between the West and places like Afghanistan.
None the less, let’s not pretend like this comes from the Taliban. It doesn’t.
Oh, so it’s fine to blame others for our own bigots, because it sounds better? Really?
No shit. MY POINT.
Same shit, different day? Again, not like this is a new thing inspired by Islamists. You can see this way back in the Antebellum period. It was inspired by the Bible and not by the Q’uran. As @anon85524460 below me points out - Sharia just means law, and it’s kind of insulting to over 1 billion people to lump them in with both the Taliban and these chucklefucks.
I disagree. All it does it shift blame and lets “scary foreigners” (as @Scientist notes) to take the blame for our own fucked up culture.
I think how we use language to talk about this stuff matters. It might feel good to say that - these assholes are not “real” Americans or “real” Christians so let’s associate them with assholes of another religion (that we’re partly responsible for creating!!!), but all that does is ignore the very real history if deeply ingrained racism and Christian bigotry at play here. It isn’t really understanding US history in all of it’s complexity. We don’t get to ignore the bad stuff that white people did to make ourselves feel better. The awful truth is that white people have done and continue to do shitty things in this country, it’s a part of our history we need to learn and remember, if we expect to improve the situation.
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If only we could force the legislators to take the trauma course before they voted on this bill.
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