calimary
calimary's JournalI. LOVE. THIS. POST.!!!!!
You nailed it, grantcart. And you definitely speak for me!
I am just sick to death of the gun apologists who nitpick whine and say "oh it ISN'T an assault weapon" because of some fine print they can fall back on. I'm sick of the excuses falling back on the Second Amendment. I'm sick of the rationales and justifications and fancy rhetoric that always wind up proving that the attacker's rights outweigh and override the victims' rights. Because THAT is what it comes down to here. In Aurora CO. In Columbine. At Virginia Tech. At too too too many other places where one bullet didn't kill one person - a BARRAGE of bullets mowed down dozens.
This keeps happening. And somehow America's okay with it. Well I AM NOT OKAY WITH IT. I just saw a "Meet the Press" segment where they all agreed this is a settled issue and can't be revisited. A woman's right to choose somehow doesn't get that. Hell, even the right to vote doesn't merit that anymore! Why are THOSE not settled issues, while the "sanctity" of gun ownership seems to be an absolute???
I actually wound up putting someone on full ignore here because of the relentlessness and the refusal in his arguments that guns are our right and guns must not be touched and - we have to blame something else, someone else, and when I argued - the Second Amendment was found necessary and drawn up when MUSKETS were the coin of the realm, and if all you gun folks are willing to go back to muskets again then I'm fine with it in the spirit in which it was intended. And he comes back with some smart-ass remark about how those of us who think as I do should then resort to quill pens. ASSHOLE!!!! Well, I don't care WHAT kind of smart remark, I don't care WHAT kind of statistics, I don't care WHAT kind of definition or loophole people like that jump through and cling to for the sake of justifying their right to own murderous objects. I don't care WHAT the reason or rationale or excuse or hair-splitting or justification is. I STILL believe, and I'll believe it till I die, that these guns and weapons and ammo clips and hundreds-of-rounds magazines HAVE NO PLACE in civilian society. Because the uncompromising insistence of those who insist on owning them tells me something exceedingly dark about their souls.
THOSE KINDS OF WEAPONS are designed for nothing else than killing. Killing PEOPLE. Killing people in MASS QUANTITIES IN A VERY SHORT SPAN OF TIME. That's all they're meant for. That's all they do. And NO amount of justifying or hair-splitting definitions or rationales or excuse-making or hiding behind the skirts of the Second Amendment (and always, as THEY define it, of course - always ignoring the "WELL-REGULATED MILITIA" part of it) will change that.
And no argument (please, don't even try. You're wasting your breath and your posting fingers, at least with me) will convince me that your point of view is valid. I don't care if you throw a hundred Constitutional Amendments at me and they all say it's okay to possess neutron bombs for personal use, freedom-freedom-freedom! You will not convince me. I want guns gone. ESPECIALLY these kinds of guns. If they're supposedly so illegal, as some here have argued - then why did this guy in Aurora Colorado get one? How did this guy get one. And if on the other hand these nightmare instruments of death are legal (by whatever hair-splitting technicality you can somehow excuse them) are legal, for God's Sake WHY??????
And again, please just save your breath. Don't try to convince me there's any good reason or flimsy rationale for any of this, or any good reason why we shouldn't keep trying to eradicate these weapons from ANYONE's use. Just don't. Yes. I said flimsy. Because that's all these are. Flimsy rationales. They don't stand up, at least with me. I don't care of spineless Dems are reluctant even to bring up the subject anymore because they lost the House in 1994 for having done so. I don't care if the NRA is jus too powerful. I'm sorry. NOTHING should be that powerful. That only makes me want to figure out how, someday, somehow, to make them UNpowerful.
You gun-lovers and gun-nuts and gun-excusers Will. Not. Move. Me. You can argue and filibuster about the blessings of any kind of gun ownership til every last one of you has passed out, breathless and exhausted. It won't work with me. It will NEVER work with me. I will never be okay with just giving in and accepting that these wretched Satan instruments are alive and well and allowed to exist and to fall into the hands of any Tom-Dick-and-Harry that has an axe to grind with society and feels its their right and their divine vengance to go wantonly wiping out a crowd of innocent people today - and that there's nothing we can do about getting them off the face of the earth.
And until you can tell me how many of these massacres is finally enough.
That doesn't mean we'll give up trying, permatex.
FACT: The Second Amendment was thought necessary and drawn up to apply to what they knew of gun currency of the day. Cannon and muskets. If all you gun lovers are willing to go back to muskets, which were the firearms covered by and the object of that Amendment, then I'm fine with it. Because then you're dealing with the actual nature of the Second Amendment. The same Second Amendment, mind you, that calls for a WELL-REGULATED militia.
I tell you this, and you're just going to have to find a way to accept my emotions here and if you don't like it, TOUGH SHIT.
I am FUCKING SICK AND TIRED of hearing gun apologists pop up after EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN ONE OF THESE MASSACRES, mewling about their rights and "guns don't kill people! People kill people!" Yeah. WITH GUNS. You all say the same thing. Second Amendment! Oh WOE! You take our AK 47s away today and tomorrow you're coming after our pop-guns too! Slippery Slope! Never mind all those who just died at the hands of a GUNman. Too bad for them but their rights are secondary! Cost-benefit anaylsis, 'eh? If a few people have to die so we can preserve our right to our precious guns that we can get at any gun show and then turn around in the parking lot of that gun show and sell them to anybody we damn well feel like, well dem's da breaks. We have the right to defend ourselves! WE're the victims here!!!! george zimmerman certainly thought so, didn't he!? You all fall back on your Founding Fathers who certainly would have blessed all manner of personal destruction devices all the way up to AK 47s and M16s and all the GOD DAMN Glocks you can eat.
And I have heard all the arguments and canards and BS about the way that, somehow, the term "Well-Regulated Militia" just magically does not apply to regulating ownership of guns.
I have heard it all, over and over and over and over and somehow you guys always trump the rights of the murdered. Hope it's worth it to ya.
I put it out there to fact-check and make sure that a correction was issued.
I'm sending that Mother Jones link to these assholes and alerting them that it's beneath them to be spreading lies, libel, and slander.
YES it's a chain email. That means it's going out to others who aren't paying much attention but could believe it. They'll take it for granted and not seek out the truth. They'll just swallow it the same way they swallow what limbaugh says and that everyone at Pox Noise says. These people who issue these emails are hoping to influence public opinion and they're also hoping that no one's paying attention. It rattles their cages when somebody calls them on it. I frankly don't expect them to do anything about it. But they need to know they've been caught, and challenged.
NO I don't believe everything I read especially in chain emails. I do, however, like to fact-check them. Remember, if this was sent to me, it was spammed to hundreds of thousands of people. People who will then believe this and spread the lie to their friends. Finding and posting the truth and correcting the record gives me something substantial to refute them with, when I email them with a complaint. Which I did. And it isn't just me. All of us are seeing these things. And I think it's useful for all of us to have material available to refute shit like this. We can answer with facts and the people parroting this have nothing with which to answer back.
I think it's also wise to spread this around for those who haven't seen it. It's more psy-ops among the extreme wrong wing trying to influence public opinion and dirty the Democrats by inferring that this is one of those dreaded liberal Dems they've spent 30 years resolutely and systematically attacking and demeaning.
I believe in return psy-ops if the bad guys try to send theirs my way.
Anyway, thanks everybody, especially those with the concrete answers. Those are helpful and we all need that data.
Stunning.
Amazing photo and even more astonishing that it IS a photo and not some fanciful art rendering.
I also appreciate your musings about it in light of this overwhelming Aurora CO nightmare. Makes me surf towards that prayer for Divine guidance or protection or something or other: "...for the sea is so vast, and my boat is so small."
Thanks for posting this, DemoTex.
I know how you feel, MrScorpio. I share that feeling.
I'm sick of this shit. And I'm equally sick of the platitudes and the fine print that always seems to go along with this shit. It's always either "guns don't kill people, PEOPLE kill people!" Or it's "well, it's not possible to have a perfect society, there's no way to be completely safe." Or it's "only a single nutcase, most people are nice people." And that doesn't make it better. Doesn't make it stop hurting. Doesn't stop making you want to bang your head against the wall. Doesn't make those newly dead come back to life. Doesn't dry their loved ones' tears. And saddest of all, it doesn't make guns in general harder to get - and it CERTAINLY doesn't make those abominable assault rifles and 100-bullet magazines less easy to get. It should be easier for a woman to get an abortion in Mississippi than it is for a civilian to get an assault rifle - in ANY state.
I do too. Agree with you and hate gun nuts, both.
There is no reason ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH for any civilian, one who's not with the police or National Guard or something, has any reason to own an assault rifle. Those fucking things exist for one reason: to kill masses of people in the quickest amount of time. NO REASON ON EARTH. Especially any civilian who's a paranoid or obsessive or whose jam is sliding off his/her toast. Seems to me as though many of the very people who covet and hoard weapons that extreme are the VERY people who should never be allowed anywhere near them.
Indeed? That's actually not a bad idea!
Seriously.
I'm often amazed at how money motivates people NOT to do bad stuff sometimes. I know of so many people, friends and otherwise, who don't do something because of what it might cost, cash-money-wise. Not so much because it's wrong or immoral or unethical or rude or not-nice. Because it'll hurt you in the wallet. In some cases, maybe we don't have enough of that kind of motivation.
Just a fucking bewildering day.
I'd add at least a couple of zeroes to the back of each of those figures.
Gun licenses should be as "easy" to get as the new voter IDs.
And I'd still be interested in that WELL-REGULATED militia thing. That's in the FUCKING GOD DAMN SACRED PRECIOUS Second Amendment, too.
Shit. Sorry to yell. I'm quite at frayed edges today. And this national madness doesn't help. I'm really sorry. I love you guys. As a matter of fact, I sincerely do love EVERYBODY I'm snapping at, today!
There's also the matter of the tear gas.
Okay, say there WERE people carrying in there when this guy started his attack. First, as I understand the circumstances, he threw a tear gas canister into the crowd, via an emergency exit through which he got in. So there goes your visibility, almost immediately, especially if that tear gas is stirred up and spread more quickly around the room by a full house of instantly panicking people, in an outbreak of extreme chaos? When people panic they start running every which way, looking for exits they probably can't see well because there's tear gas obstructing the view, AND filling their eyes with stinging tears, which means they'd be blinking frantically and temporarily nearly blinded. In the best of circumstances, how would one take aim? How would one even be able to spot the perpetrator? How would they even know for sure that WAS the perpetrator? I mean, consider that guy in the Giffords shooting, as referenced just above, here -
"He saw a man with a gun, and was concerned that he might not be the shooter, and he was right, as he was seeing a man who had just disarmed the shooter.
"He also worried that if he drew his gun, he'd be mistaken for the shooter, and get shot. He really was a well-trained and intelligent person, and I can't argue with the decisions he made. But it underscores the lack of credibility of the pro-CC claims."
How would you know? How could you tell? How could you even see? And with all those people running and hiding and panicking and screaming and some getting shot - how could you tell where the shots were coming from? How could you avoid shooting some other innocent person (or maybe more than one innocent person) by accident, even if you WERE gunning for the gunman and completely well-intentioned? How could you see to shoot through all that chaos and madness and mayhem?? How could you even take aim in the first place? Wouldn't your first instinct be to take cover? And where would THAT be? Could you even find cover in an uncontrolled, insane, chaotic scene like that? How do you know your hands wouldn't be shaking uncontrollably and maybe you couldn't even get a good grip on your precious sacred fucking gun in the first place?
It's awfully easy for these reckless free-guns advocates to sit there and say. I think many of these self-flattering "Dead-Eye Dicks" have been watching too many gunfight scenes and other assorted action movies.
"Hand-wringing."
Fuck that. I hate that one. Such a snarky, smug put-down. Like insulting someone by saying they're "do-gooders." As if doing good is a bad thing.
The fact is - there are at least 12 people who will never have a future because some nutcase had easy access to ridiculous, over-compensating guns. I mean - is this the Green Zone? WHY does anybody NEED an AK-47 or other kind of machine gun? Why? I don't get it.
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