Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/16/watch-paul-ryan-say-the-same-v.html
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Possibly the worst thing about the latest shooting (other than the dead innocents of course) is just how preventable it should have been. This kid was going on and on about wanting to be a professional school shooter and he was reported multiple times to the local cops and the FBI, but in the end their hands were tied. He had no trouble buying an AR-15 at a gun store and using it to massacre a high school, just like he said he was going to do.
That’s the very definition of a broken system. Is it really so unthinkable that the second amendment rights could be infringed in cases where the person is a potential danger to themselves or society? We have no problem infringing on first amendment rights (Free Speech Zones my ass), why hold the second amendment to a higher standard?
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School shootings are a form of terrorism. The shooters want fame and their grievances catered to. We saw how society has decided to care more about bullying because of school shootings. Terrorism is effective. That’s why they do it. Their names become famous and their grievances get talked about and their complaints get incorporated into best practices for high schools. How do we break the cycle? In this country we seem perfectly capable of ignoring when black or brown victims are shot (sarc), so what if we ignored the white victims of these school shootings. The incentive for the terrorists would be much less.
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The system is not broken. It is functioning just fine. Every record-breaking election (that’s spending record, not votes) goes to show just how successful the system is.
In the same way, cattle - if they could talk- might complain about how broken the system is when they keep ending up as hamburger. We might laugh at them for believing that the system has their well being in mind.
I am not laughing.
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What’s the proper amount of time that has to pass between and event and the reaction before that reaction isn’t considered knee jerk? Couldn’t we just say that we’re finally doing fucking SOMETHING in response to Sandy Hook? Would that make him happy?
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Yet a biologist would describe cattle as an incredibly successful species by their numbers on Earth. It just sucks to be that cow, just like it sucks to be a murdered child or their parent paying the price to have a healthy weapons industry.
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There’s a nanosecond between too soon and too late to discuss gun control and gun fetishists will never tell you when that occurs. Of course the reality is that they don’t care how many people die and their honest answer would be that it’s never time to discuss gun control. They just like to pretend that shooting victims are unintentional patriotic martyrs on the sacrificial altar to freedom. That their sense of freedom requires murders to be acceptable is absurd.
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All of it.
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Yeah, in your example, “population” is considered the number that determines overall success. The same trick is used when they talk about “number of jobs created” with no context of what the jobs pay or what the jobs accomplish. I want us to stop caring so much about how large the economy is, and start caring more about the shape (function) of the economy.
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School shootings happen so often now that there is a new one before we’re allowed to talk about the old one.
But really, the amount of time needed is however long it takes the public to forget about the shooting.
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This is what happens when a sportsman organization is taken over by a lobbying group for the Military Industrial Complex. The NRA was started to improve marksmanship after Civil War generals noted that on average there were was one Confederate causality for every 1000 Union shots fired. It was never about civil rights. The other problem is that the 2nd Amendments original intention have long since died away. The framers hated the idea of a full time standing army that could be ordered around at a moments notice, so they went with the idea that the bunk of the armed forces (excluding the Navy) would manned by a part-time “Citizen-Soldiers” that would only be deployed in A) a national emergency or B) some times to deal with a law enforcement problem.
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Accessory.
Let’s be careful to not start slapping that label on everything just because our government declared a war on terrorism. Without a political agenda, this is a mass murder. Mass murder is a terrible crime and it doesn’t need to be sensationalized further by attaching popular tragedy buzz words to it.
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A takeover is exactly what happened with the NRA. In 1977 there was a leadership coup that placed a no-kidding racist murderer in charge of the organisation, setting it on its new course and resulting in the right-wing lobbying organisation for the arms industry we see today (with lots of dues-paying individual suckers to boot).
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Rinse, repeat, thoughts and prayers.
Untill the next psychopath with an assaultrifle bought at walmart paints the next school red.
I am glad to live in Germany. Given, there have been mass shootings here, but not in the magnitude and frequency as in the US
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Of course if it was terrorism then homeland security would be justified in correlating social media posts glorifying guns to a highschool expulsion for bringing weapons to school to complaints of abuse against an ex-girlfriend to gun purchases and have this disappeared to a black site before he shot anyone.
I’m not advocating that. I’m just amazed by the lengths America will go to when it comes to defending security unless the security risk is an angry white American.
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The kid literally trained with a white supremacist group. This was an act of domestic terrorism, full stop.
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