Originally published at: Ted Cruz angrily walks away from a British reporter who asked him why school shootings happen only in the United States | Boing Boing
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For further context, those indices are compiled by conservative organisations – Cato (U.S.), Fraser (Canada), and Legatum (UK). Even they can’t put lipstick on that pig like Cancun Cruz is attempting.
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He would have answered, but he had to catch a plane to Cancun.
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Weird thing is that even in those countries/states where legislation was introduced after such an event, there wasn’t really a tradition of such horrors in any case. It only ever seems to have been a ‘thing’ in the USA. Perhaps the USA was just born at the wrong time in the age/progress of weapons technology? Maybe they’re stuck with it. Of course it’s possible to break out of such fatalism, but you’d need to be aware of it for it to occur to you I suppose.
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My favorite Ted Cruz joke, which is told amongst DC staff, politicians, and newspeople:
If Ted Cruz was murdered on the floor of the Senate in open session with full attendance there would be no witnesses.
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that may need some additional context. pretty sure a party of white supremacists took over germany and committed quite a few acts of horror along the way. and that’s just the most obvious counter example
if a country doesn’t deal with it’s problems, if it in fact fans the flames at every turn, outcomes regardless of geography aren’t going to be great
our belief that we are either specially good or specially bad only seems to let us off the hook. we need to change policies and laws. i think it’s that simple
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What a pathetic weakling.
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And this was in response to a question from Murdoch-owned Sky News. Imagine the questions he might get from a progressive-leaning news outlet.
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So Et tu, Brute thing?
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Do you just try to use facts to address Teddy boy?
I was talking about school shootings, but whilst I accept it’s part of a broader deal I’m not sure that horrors perpetrated by a state (admittedly built out of individuals with a mission statement) are in the same category as horrors commited by individuals acting out. But maybe that’s itself an arguable point as the victims don’t care.
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the history of nazi germany involved low level “individual” attacks on german jews and others as well as state perpetrated violence. these sorts of horrors always proceed from both the bottom and the top of political hierarchy. they feed each other, and make each other possible.
you sort of touch on that with “mission statement” – but the reason i put “individual” in quotes is that you can’t separate the ongoing political violence – attacks on gay and trans people, harm done to undocumented immigrants, the drug war, the rhetoric of replacement theory, etc – from the violence of individual people.
this person may not have had an explicitly political motive the way the buffalo shooter did but the constant drumbeat of fear and the way conservatives encourage people to turn towards guns to address those fears are exactly the same.
it’s not that we are special in these things. it’s that we aren’t fixing them so they keep getting worse. and we aren’t fixing them because conservatives (eta: to keep on topic, like ted cruz) have hijacked our political process.
[eeta: a ted cruz example:
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Cato and Fraser are both Koch Bro network organizations.
Cato occasionally surprises, but Fraser is notorious for crocked reports and useless ranking lists.
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I’d like to point out that Democrats are also prone to making “America, we’re #1” statements, maybe not as often as the Republicans, but still way too often. I think that lot of Americans truly believe these kind of statements.
I was thinking the other day that maybe a better strategy for Democrats might be to highlight just how far down many of these rankings the US has slipped. Of course, the rankings would have to be as objective as possible. The theme would be something like “look what decades of conservative/neoliberal policies have done to the quality of life in the US.” They could go on to list a list of reforms they would like to make.
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“America, #1 in far too many things” 
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“I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
Al Franklin
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There wasn’t a history of it in the US, either. The UT shooting in 1966 was the first really well known mass shooting that wasn’t organized crime or state-sponsored (or anti-labor).
Then there were decades until the next…then years until the next. Now hardly a week passes without a school mass-shooting and large mass shootings, with double-digit fatalities, now happen routinely. So it’s not the history here, either. It correlates to the mass proliferation of military-style weapons readily available to anyone who wants one with little to no waiting period.
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Lindsay Graham reportedly told that joke first.
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Ted Cruz engineered the case or controversy, because the Supreme Court can’t unilaterally eviscerate campaign finance law
Cruz lent his re-election campaign $260,000 — intentionally going above the limit to trigger a legal challenge — when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke ran against him in 2018.
IIRC the loan was made after the election.
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And mass shootings only account for 1% of all firearm deaths, most of which are done with handguns.
Mass shootings are horrific, but the high body count in the US comes from huge numbers of people killing just one or two victims at a time. Guns are just way too available.
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