calimary
calimary's JournalWow - no kidding about feeling held hostage be these assholes.
That's exactly how it feels! I'm with you - let 'em rant. They've HAD their way on this again and again and again and again, and how many mass shootings have we had by now? I've lost count. I heard someone calling into either Randy Rhodes or Stephanie Miller and say something REALLY great: "MY right not to be shot to death outweighs your right to bear arms." I couldn't agree more with that one, either.
I don't feel ONE BIT safer knowing there might be multiple people packin' heat around me. That makes me feel much more in danger of great bodily harm. I wonder how many people on the freeway in SoCal these days are armed. Traffic is remarkably ungodly here anymore. LOTS more impatient and pissed-off people on the roads all over town nowadays. The congestion on the freeways and surface streets is heavier than EVER! Almost every hour here, anymore, is rush hour. Except of course between maybe 3:30am and 5am. If you figure even one in 20 is carrying a concealed weapon, with all the fear and hostility and paranoia and rudeness manifesting out there on an increasing basis, it makes for some very unsettling moments, and lots of scofflaws. We've certainly seen our share of road rage. And somebody with a gun could be anywhere around you within a 100-foot radius.
Scary. The LAST thing we need to throw into this witches' brew is more guns. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph - WHAT ON EARTH IS WITH the louie gohmerts and rick perrys of the world?????? What did their mothers feed them for breakfast every morning when they were growing up???????
Who cares how they feel? We're supposed to care that they aren't happy?
Fuck 'em. To Hell with them. If they're unhappy about something, it must be something good. If they're unhappy about what we're doing, we must be doing something correct, fitting, proper, and moral.
Welcome to DU, TheBlackAdder!
Glad you're here! That's one of my husband's all-time favorite comedy series.
I think we should fight these assholes ANY WAY WE CAN. ANY WAY WE CAN THINK OF. Even the frivolous, nuisance stuff. ANY way we can. Keep 'em busy. Maybe if they exhaust all their money and contributions defending lawsuits, they won't have as much money for gas to travel so they can blight the mourning of others. And they do this in the name of God!?!?!?!?!?!?!
"Meaningful contributions." Yeah, probably figures they didn't spend enough in the
last campaign. More meaningful contributions to their pet congresscritters, senators, governors, and state legislators.
"To make sure this never happens again." Yep - we can't have this tide in public opinion suddenly turning against us!" Gotta nip THAT one in the bud, 'eh?
Kinda sounds like it, doesn't it?
Feels like we're all hostages to the NRA and associated gun-nuts. We have to pay the price for their "freedoms." I know of 20 innocent little schoolchildren and six much-loved adults at their school who just paid for those "freedoms" - with their lives.
Welcome to DU, sanatanadharma!
Glad you're here! I think they just don't really grasp what it is they're wishing for. Which is a coast-to-coast DIY unregulated yer-on-yer-own, every-man-for-himself Shoot-Out at the OK Corral. In which the "good guys" always win and are always far better shots than the bad guys are. And the good guys can nail the bad guys while moving, bouncing around on horseback, while the bad guys are moving at the same time, and with a single shot blow the bad guys' heads off. You know, just like they do in the movies! Instant Rambo meets Will Smith! Carnage on Parade! Cool, 'eh? Always works - every time!
The ridiculously weird world-view these people have - I swear, it's just staggering. Completely dumbfounding!
I just LOVE this man! He's got the best and most fun page on Facebook!
Especially if you're a "Star Trek" fan! Hilarious stuff!
Did anyone see the post he had about Snow White and the Seven Worfs? It was an image of the Disney cartoon Snow White, surrounded by seven photographs of Michael Dorn as Worf from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." And they were labeled "Grumpy," "Grumpy," "Grumpy," "Grumpy," "Grumpy," "Grumpy," and "Grumpy."
Another idea to throw in, too: Full disclosure, linkage, and accountability.
My husband came up with this one. In gun and bullet manufacture, serial-number everything. At the manufacturers' level. EVERYTHING. EVERY part of every gun and rifle of every sort, make, and model. And all accessories and every component and part and particle therein. Let that allow for traceability - back to where that gun or rifle or bullet or component or accessory was sold. Doesn't matter how long the chain of custody was, or whether it was stolen. Trace it back to the gun shop or broker or gun show booth. Do we not also hold bar owners and bartenders and party hosts responsible if somebody drinks too much on their premises or at their gathering and then goes out, drives drunk, and injures or kills somebody? Don't we have that law in place? If it's localized, then to hell with "states' rights." It needs to go NATIONAL. ALL 50 STATES. NO WIGGLE ROOM. Same rules for EVERYBODY across-the-board. NO EXCEPTIONS. On an issue like this, we can't allow for a legislative crazy quilt. Those guns, devices of death, do cross state lines, after all.
The objector or "devil's advocate" will say - Oh, but you'd have to find and replace ALL THE GUNS EVERYWHERE and that just won't happen, totally impractical, can't be done, so why even start down that road and blah-blah-blah. Well, being ruthlessly realistic about it, that's correct. You won't get everybody to get in line and hand in their guns out of the goodness of their hearts, just because it's the right and moral and noble and selfless thing to do. A few might, because their consciences and/or their small children started bothering them about it. But the majority won't so why even go there. In other words, do nothing and just give up, shut up, and go away. And pay no attention to that gunman behind the curtain. We're not set up to be able to achieve the whole pie.
But how 'bout a piece of it? Could be small, but it could also be big. Big enough to make a dent and a difference maybe? Or perhaps you'd rather see nothing done at all? Perhaps an empty pan with scattered crumbs in the bottom is good enough?
So maybe you start with a gun swap, or gun trade-in for some other such thing of value or a no-questions-asked dispensation. Then you're apt to get a LOT of guns manufactured before this new serial-number law was implemented. No, of course you won't get them all, but you'll get a LOT of 'em. You play the odds here and you gain more than you lose. There'd be that many fewer guns out there in circulation that couldn't be seriously tracked.
A deterrent, perhaps. And I think that's a good thing. The sales and brokerage and acquisition of guns 'n' ammo is taken far too lightly. THESE ARE NOT TOYS, OR COOL THINGS TO HAVE AROUND THE HOUSE OR SHOW OFF TO YOUR FRIENDS. THEY ARE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH. DEVICES DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY TO CAUSE MURDER AND MAYHEM. You shouldn't be able to just walk up to your local Walmart counter or gun show and casually point at the merchandise you want. It should be a far more serious business and treated as such, with all kinds of heavy penalties hanging over heads on all sides of the transactions, all the time.
I don't know if stuff like this is real or you saw it in a movie, but it's still a most interesting
idea. WHY NOT? Hasn't there been much discussion about cars that won't start if the person who gets in behind the wheel has been drinking? I don't know how far that technology has gone, either. But why not? This is a multi-pronged problem that requires - and DEMANDS - a multi-pronged solution. You have to come at it from multiple directions, using multiple approaches. So by all means bring the electronics into it. Maybe install MULTIPLE fail-safes in every gun. Lojack 'em so nobody's sure where they are to locate and disable them. Vary their electronics so a different defeat process is needed for each one.
YES I KNOW: you won't stop a really determined bad guy. But you sure will slow him down. And you'll utterly defeat somebody else who's a random loose cannon. Would this kid on Friday have been inclined to stop and have to disassemble every gun in the house to find all the little nanos (no-no's?) or whatever. Nobody can know his state of mind in the hours before he did what he did. But I'd guess he might have gotten pissed off and given up. Maybe thrown the guns at the window or the mirror and broken a bunch of glass. What he's reported to have done with his computer, messing it up so badly the professional experts are having trouble recovering any information at all. He didn't want us to know his state of mind, seems to me. But maybe it would slow him down. Maybe it would have rendered him less deadly. Maybe he'd even go to that school and try to get in and then punch a few people, or drive his car through a wall. Would 20 children and six adults be dead now?
The city finally put a stop sign up on a very goofy corner on our street. We neighbors were pushing for it FOR YEARS. People speed like idiots up and down our street. The stop sign doesn't make them stop. But at least they do slow down. Even if only a little! That means maybe an extra second or two that some slow-moving pedestrian or little old lady or kid with a dog will have to spot and evade oncoming traffic. That's all we can realistically ask. It's really an itty-bitty change but it can make a BIG difference over the alternative. It was routine for fast cars to go barrelling up or down the road, too fast to react if some kid runs out into the street after his baseball and forcing moms and babysitters with strollers to almost literally dive into the ivy between curb and sidewalk to get out of the way.
Why can't we apply the same approaches to the gun crisis? AND WHY DO WE FAIL, OR HESITATE, ON GOING AT LEAST THAT FAR? Why should we still have to hear the mewlings of gun apologists with their various objections and complaints? Fortunately, only the few, the proud, and the berzerk can still be heard, like the disgraceful louie gohmert and the reckless rick perry and all their willfully-ignorant friends.
I think we may be starting, FINALLY, to break through that part of it. I've had CNN and MSNBC on while I'm working, and I'm watching the crack slowly widening, and starting to separate some of the more redeemable of the wrong wing and the GOP and the NRA members. Joe Manchin is one (he's a Dem). scarborough. Now this fellow Hogan Gidley, who was with the santorum campaign forcryingoutloud! Talking about how his colleagues need to go forward to discuss things, and be open to change. As though he really had had a knocked-off-your-horse-on-the-way-to Damascus moment and he was now seeing things very differently. He referred to the Friday morning school massacre as a pivotal point that led directly to his own personal change of heart. AMAZING. Just AMAZING.
Welcome to DU, duwizrd!
Glad you're here. You reinforce a good point: this is a MULTI-pronged problem and demands MULTIPLE solutions. We have to approach this crisis from a few hundred different directions. This is definitely one of those, but it's more systemic. I was going to say it's longterm as though this is the only angle that's longterm. Quite the opposite! ALL of these solutions and approaches are important for the longterm. I see no need to build sunsets into a lot of the legislation that's being proposed. Maybe all of it, but it depends on the individual bill. This is a more profound aspect of the problem, and it's going to take many decades to refine to the point where most of us (at least within DU and others of like mind) would prefer. You describe a very necessary wholesale change of mindset, a shift in the national zeitgeist if you will (and if you wish to sound excruciatingly pompous! 
) .
There's a whole revolution in mindset that needs to happen. Maybe THIS is the kind of thing the Mayans were talking about. This SHIFT. This tilt. I've heard some pro and amateur analysts and speculators hypothesize about the upcoming 12/21/12 date is a shift of the Earth's axis, a magnetic shift. Maybe it's a whole mindset shift. A paradigm shift. In which case I believe we're living it at this very moment. Maybe it's all vibrational, or metaphysical, or some such thing.
Look at what's going on around us. Did any of us actually envision a day like this - when talk of gun control - as in the NEED for gun control - is THE subject of the day? When despite an avalanche of money and a media/propaganda machine mightier than any we've ever seen, we kept the black guy in the White House, four states went for legalizing or otherwise protecting marriage equality, two states went for pop legalization, and California voted to increase taxes for education. And then a month later, we're talking about the need and indeed the DESIRABILITY of gun control. When did any of us realistically expect the tide of public opinion to turn the way it has? I'm just stunned. Good stunned, that is. Not bad stunned. Hell, just a couple of days ago I saw some graphic on Facebook, or maybe it was here, too, with a slogan-type message that ended with "the 'hippies' were right." As I said, good-stunned.
We've had a generation or two who've been spoon-fed on the concept that the liberal worldview was wrong in every way and with every label and adjective. That becomes what they believe when they reach adulthood. It's what they see as their mission if they go into public service. I'm looking at government officials who may be my age or a few years younger - who are having their eyes opened almost forcibly by the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. That Joe Manchin guy is speaking about it as though he just never even dreamed that easy access to guns would lead to stuff like this, stuff this bad. Joe Manchin wouldn't even have entertained such a notion before last Friday.
It is VERY dreadful that it took an epic catastrophe like the gun-massacre of 20 children and their teachers to provoke this change of mindset, this awakening, this shift in the conventional wisdom and status quo. It's a seismic shift, for sure. I think we're honor- and duty-bound to make it a good shift, a positive one for the greater good. There are 20 innocent children and teachers/school administrators who paid for this, in advance, with their lives. And they're OWED. BIG-TIME. We owe it to them so that their lives, their sacrifice, won't be wasted.
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Gender: FemaleHome country: USA
Current location: Oregon
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 81,209
