What happened to...

[John Eppstein]

Well, the last school shooting only got two people, plus the perp, so I guess guns aren't always that effective, either, right?

You're cherry-picking. Statistics trump your anecdote.

How many school shootings compared to school bombings?

How many bomb murders overall, compared to gun murders?

Just wait a bit.....

[weedywet]

In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S

bombs have a way to go to catch up

[John Eppstein]

She helped trounce them. The SS's oldest tactic was to fund far left candidates who would then lose the primary and their supporters wouldn't show up to vote.

Gun control?

To be fair, sentiment may actually be slipping a bit it's really hard to tel;l what's actually going on with all the biased media.

[John Eppstein]

In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S

bombs have a way to go to catch up

As I said, just wait a bit.

[Gronk]

In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S

That is fucking crazy! 38,000?

[Bob Olhsson]

She helped trounce them. The SS's oldest tactic was to fund far left candidates who would then lose the primary and their supporters wouldn't show up to vote.

Gun control?

To be fair, sentiment may actually be slipping a bit it's really hard to tell what's actually going on with all the biased media.

I learned about the Koch party's divide and conquer voter suppression from working on campaigns in California during the '70s-'90s. I've never seen it in the media.

[nobby]

In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S

That is fucking crazy! 38,000?

I've lived in the US all my life and I have a hard time swallowing that also. But almost all of these deaths are local news so I only hear about massacres; if only a few people are killed in an armed robbery outside of my low gun violence state (NY) it is local news and I never hear about it.

Just wait a bit.....

Do the basic arithmetic, ffs.

[John Eppstein]

She helped trounce them. The SS's oldest tactic was to fund far left candidates who would then lose the primary and their supporters wouldn't show up to vote.

Gun control?

To be fair, sentiment may actually be slipping a bit it's really hard to tel;l what's actually going on with all the biased media.

I learned about the Koch party's divide and conquer voter suppression from working on campaigns in California during the '70s-'90s. I've never seen it in the media.

Really?

I guess I get a lot of media you don't - it's slacked off a lot in the last 6-12 months but I used to get all manner of stuff about the Kochs in my email every single day. I seems the Kochs don't really get on well with Trump. I guess he's too crazy even for them.

[John Eppstein]

I've been really hesitant to bring this up because it seems somewhat crackpot even to me, but has anybody done a correlation between the increase in school shootings and other acts of "random" domestic terrorism and the rise of the internet? Because unless my memory is extremely faulty there was pretty much ZERO such violence before the internet, save the single incident on the Texas Tower, which was proven to be caused by a brain tumor.

Ponder that a bit. Logical extrapolation later. Maybe.

[nobby]

Nothing crackpot about that at all.

Every form of stupidity, insanity and brainwashing has increased exponentially due to the internet, along with a lot of valuable info for those who can discern it from fake news.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Jonesboro massacre, which got the whole school shooting ball rolling.

Unhappy Anniversary

PS the perps were 11 and 13 years old and they got out of juvenile detention 10 years ago.

With no criminal record.

The lesson? Murder people while you are a child and you can get away with it.

God Bless America

http://abcnews.go.com/US/living-us-mass ... d=36986507

PPS there would be no ISIL w/o the internet nor would we have a stupid scumbag for a "president".

[John Eppstein]

Some disquieting figures that appear to go against conventional "progressive" "wisdom"......

Watching MSNBC's "The 11th Hour with Brian Williams" and he has some disquieting figures about the recent marches.....

Conventional "progressive wisdom" has it that the recent/current anti-gun marches indicate huge gains in numbers to the progressive and antigun movements. Headcounts and polls by MSNBC indicate something quite different and more in line with what I've been saying for awhile.

In essence, the figures on the massive marches over thye last week indicate the rather than picking up large numbers of new converts, which is what the "progressive" mouthpieces have been crowing about, what has been actually going on is simply more efficient mobilizing of people who have already been staunch believers in that cause, primarily middle aged well educated confirmed leftist upper middle class urban women.

NOT the "non-partisan" up-rising that has been being touted.

Now, that's good as far as it goes, but, as the 2016 presidential elections showed, that's NOT ENOUGH to flip many "Red States" and may very well not be enough to get a majority in either house of Congress in the next election. Brian Williams did not go so far to put it quite that way, but he very pointedly stated that the makeup of the crowds were not as it has been presented.

Specifically, once again the "progressive" Democrats are preaching to the choir and deluding themselves that they're actually accomplishing something.

They're not.

What they're doing is setting themselves up for a repeat of 2016, and when the figures come in they're going to be all surprised, shocked, and butt-hurt that somehow they didn't prevail when they'd convinced themselves they had a sure thing.

People who are incapable of learning from their mistakes really annoy me, especially when the fate of the entire country hangs in the balance.

What we need to be concentrating on is recriminate the government from the nest of cheats, criminals, usurpers, and foreign spies who are presently going about dismantling our democracy in a very systematic manner and replacing it with a Russian-style oligarchy.

And that means shutting the fuck up about the one issue that consistently causes the majority of red state voters to go against their own interests. Because that issue is MASSIVELY unpopular in the areas we sorely need to flip.

We need to follow the example of successful FDR-oriented moderate Democrats who have been successful in places like Pennsylvania, Texas,. and Alabama.

Later, after we've regained control of the country and things have calmed down at bit we can approach that issue in a less polarized, more rational manner, but the time to do it is NOT NOW, regardless of the publicity garnered by a bunch of school kids who aren't old enough to vote. And who may in fact be being manipulated by adversaries waging a false-flag campaign.

It may already be too late, and we REALLY can't afford to lose this upcoming election, because if that happens our democracy may be toast.

So called "progressives are childishly easy to manipulate by leading them around by their emotions in ways that make them massively unpopular with the average citizen. And just yelling louder doesn't bring any new converts to the cause. Quite the opposite.

[John Eppstein]

Nothing crackpot about that at all.

Every form of stupidity, insanity and brainwashing has increased exponentially due to the internet, along with a lot of valuable info for those who can discern it from fake news.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Jonesboro massacre, which got the whole school shooting ball rolling.

Unhappy Anniversary

PS the perps were 11 and 13 years old and they got out of juvenile detention 10 years ago.

With no criminal record.

The lesson? Murder people while you are a child and you can get away with it.

God Bless America

http://abcnews.go.com/US/living-us-mass ... d=36986507

PPS there would be no ISIL w/o the internet nor would we have a stupid scumbag for a "president".

That stupid scumbag is being used as a pawn by a master chess player. Who should not be underestimated.

[weedywet]

voter suppression is the biggest story in the last election.

the "average citizen" isn't intrinsically conservative.
The average citizen, and the working class, is also decreasingly white.


Liberals don't have to win over "trump voters", they just have to come out and vote, and have to be ABLE to vote when they want to.

[weedywet]

also, I don't know what Williams had to say but:

"American voters support stricter gun laws 66 - 31 percent, the highest level of support ever measured by the independent Quinnipiac University National Poll, with 50 - 44 percent support among gun owners and 62 - 35 percent support from white voters with no college degree and 58 - 38 percent support among white men. .."

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-de ... aseID=2521

[John Eppstein]

also, I don't know what Williams had to say but:

"American voters support stricter gun laws 66 - 31 percent, the highest level of support ever measured by the independent Quinnipiac University National Poll, with 50 - 44 percent support among gun owners and 62 - 35 percent support from white voters with no college degree and 58 - 38 percent support among white men. .."

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-de ... aseID=2521

I don't think it's a question of "supporting stricter gun control laws" really - I think it's a matter of the extremely strident way the issue is being promoted, which turns off a LOT of people. And urban "progressives" have a way of thinking that they make up a much larger segment of the public than they really do.

They need to back off the issue - really back off the issue - because they're promoting a backlash. I'm presently living in Fairfield, about an hour's drive out of SF. I'd guess that probably half the households out here are gun owners. They support the right to own firearms. They're generally pretty solid, mostly blue-collar people who hold down good jobs in construction, trucking, etc. They're not wackos and most are fairly liberal on most issues.

But that's in Northern California.

The same class of people in states in the south, midwest, and "old west" states (and other states with large rural populations) are a lot more likely to (a) own guns, (b) hunt on a semi-regular basis, and (c) be more susceptible to right wing propaganda that the "Libs" want to take away their firearms - and based on the way things are being handled right now it's kinda hard to blame them for being concerned.

There are other factors in play that are less obvious - the fact that the rate of gratuitous incarceration in this country is several times greater for people of color causes some people in those communities - who SHOULD be supporting such measures - to view background checks screening for criminal records to be a "stealth" way of disarming those who aren't of European descent. That's a pretty volatile situation right now.

The gun issue is also being used as a red herring to distract the population from the really serious issues in the country - corruption, the concentrated effort to subvert our government by a foreign power, and the very real threat that we may very well lose our democratic form of government once and for all - we're more than half way to that already. In case you haven't noticed, Trump's recent firings have pretty much destroyed the last resort in getting rid of a corrupt, unfit, traitorous president in the case of Congress being unwilling to act -which they clearly are. That last resort is removal by the cabinet, which is looking increasingly unlikely now that Trump has fired the majority of career bureaucrats in that organ, who are not firmly in his pocket. With the cabinet castrated there is little to prevent him from moving against the Special Prosecutor.

We HAVE to flip Congress this year or the country may well be unrecognizable by the 2020 Presidential Approval, er, "election".

[Bob Olhsson]

Voter suppression happened because Democrats failed to control state government on a massive scale. That is where John's point comes in. It's not about flipping Mango S. Mussolini's ardent followers but simply attracting more people in the middle.

[John Eppstein]

Voter suppression happened because Democrats failed to control state government on a massive scale. That is where John's point comes in. It's not about flipping Mango S. Mussolini's ardent followers but simply attracting more people in the middle.

Nailed it in one. We can't afford to scare people off and we need to appear more attractive to the centrist voter.

Why don't we have a "like" button here yet?

[weedywet]

some issues require a "strident" voice.

I don't think anyone needs to be afraid to be loudly for more gun control.
and specifically an assault weapons ban.

[nobby]

also, I don't know what Williams had to say but:

"American voters support stricter gun laws 66 - 31 percent, the highest level of support ever measured by the independent Quinnipiac University National Poll, with 50 - 44 percent support among gun owners and 62 - 35 percent support from white voters with no college degree and 58 - 38 percent support among white men. .."

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-de ... aseID=2521

I don't think it's a question of "supporting stricter gun control laws" really - I think it's a matter of the extremely strident way the issue is being promoted, which turns off a LOT of people.

The "extremely strident way the issue is being promoted" is being done by the right wing propagandists at Fox News, right wing radio talk show hosts, the NRA and countless crackpot websites.

There is no way to say "we're limiting you to ten round magazines" that is nice enough to keep the aforementioned propagandists from amplifying and distorting it until it becomes "they're taking your guns and putting you in concentration camps".

That went into a fever pitch during the Obama presidency as every bigot in the country was shocked to have a black president and surely the end times were near. "They're gonna take are guns! We got to take back are country!"

As far as background checks go, Republicans are loathe to restrict gun sales to the criminally insane because they rely on the criminally insane vote to go their way in tight elections, and they need to go to the criminally insane community to find people who will be loyal to Trump for key government positions.

[John Eppstein]

some issues require a "strident" voice.

I don't think anyone needs to be afraid to be loudly for more gun control.
and specifically an assault weapons ban.

AFTER the election.

[John Eppstein]

also, I don't know what Williams had to say but:

"American voters support stricter gun laws 66 - 31 percent, the highest level of support ever measured by the independent Quinnipiac University National Poll, with 50 - 44 percent support among gun owners and 62 - 35 percent support from white voters with no college degree and 58 - 38 percent support among white men. .."

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-de ... aseID=2521

I don't think it's a question of "supporting stricter gun control laws" really - I think it's a matter of the extremely strident way the issue is being promoted, which turns off a LOT of people.

The "extremely strident way the issue is being promoted" is being done by the right wing propagandists at Fox News, right wing radio talk show hosts, the NRA and countless crackpot websites.

You are joking, right?

When MSNBC and other major outlets spend entire days promoting it despite the "administration" making far more serious and disturbing moves in Washington that work directly to destabilize our democracy that hardly get mentioned?

The damn thing is a red herring. We need to keep our eye on the ball, and the ball is getting rid of Trump and minimizing the long term damage he is doing to the country, the world, and the environment.

Putin is ROTFL.

There is no way to say "we're limiting you to ten round magazines" that is nice enough to keep the aforementioned propagandists from amplifying and distorting it until it becomes "they're taking your guns and putting you in concentration camps".

Sure there is - SHUT UP ABOUT IT UNTIL WE GET THINGS UNDER CONTROL!

Pushing it now is like pissing into the wind - it's totally ineffective and it get piss on your pants. Do you honestly think that making noise about it now is going to change anything with the ReTrumplicans control the House, the Senate, the Administration, and most of the Judiciary? And the few Repubs who still have minute vestiges on independence and conscience folding like a broken card table rather than resist?

We're playing right into their hands, it's like a total amateur playing against a grand master in a game of chess played for the future of the world.

Emotion and short term thinking will always lose to strategy and planning. And the real opponent isn't Washington - it's Moscow.

That went into a fever pitch during the Obama presidency as every bigot in the country was shocked to have a black president and surely the end times were near. "They're gonna take are guns! We got to take back are country!"

There you go again.

Most gun owners are not bigots. Many of them are black and Hispanic.

But hysterical memes like you just parroted are NOT going to get those blacks and Hispanics to join you.

Look, Nobby - you live on Long Island. That's about as far from reality as you can get on this issue. Probably as far as San Francisco, which is totally delusional.

As far as background checks go, Republicans are loathe to restrict gun sales to the criminally insane because they rely on the criminally insane vote to go their way in tight elections, and they need to go to the criminally insane community to find people who will be loyal to Trump for key government positions.

The "criminally insane community"? You're joking again. There is no "community" among the criminally insane. And most of the people you think you're referring to probably would pass a check and those that wouldn't would simply bypass it an go to the black market.

The "criminals" they're talking about are primarily those with drug convictions, who make up the majority of our jail population. Mostly pot smokers. The reason they want to keep guns out of the hands of such people is that a majority of older politicians still identify drug users with '60s radicals.

No type of gun ban will ever keep guns out of the hands of real violent criminals.

[nobby]

Look, Nobby - you live on Long Island. That's about as far from reality as you can get on this issue. Probably as far as San Francisco, which is totally delusional.

Judging what people know based on where they live is a great way to be frequently wrong.

As far as background checks go, Republicans are loathe to restrict gun sales to the criminally insane because they rely on the criminally insane vote to go their way in tight elections, and they need to go to the criminally insane community to find people who will be loyal to Trump for key government positions.

The "criminally insane community"? You're joking again. There is no "community" among the criminally insane.

It's called satire.

If there actually was a criminally insane community, you, being part of the generally law abiding insane community could probably fill us in on the details

[John Eppstein]

some issues require a "strident" voice.

I don't think anyone needs to be afraid to be loudly for more gun control.
and specifically an assault weapons ban.

A strident voice is never effective for anything except divisiveness. You want to demonize something, use a strident voice. You want to appeal to reason, use a calm, measured tone.

We've has too much demonizing and too little reason.

And the more strident the anti-gun crowd gets, the more suspicious I am of ulterior motives.

You want to reduce the popularity of so-called "assault weapons" (which aren't really, they not full auto. It's mostly a styling thing)? Stop glamorizing them in blockbuster movies and video games. But that might reduce armed forces recruitment and we don't want that, do we? We might not be as able invade as many foreign countries for their oil and other resources. And who cares about a little "collateral damage" at home, anyway?

[John Eppstein]

Look, Nobby - you live on Long Island. That's about as far from reality as you can get on this issue. Probably as far as San Francisco, which is totally delusional.

Judging what people know based on where they live is a great way to be frequently wrong.

As far as background checks go, Republicans are loathe to restrict gun sales to the criminally insane because they rely on the criminally insane vote to go their way in tight elections, and they need to go to the criminally insane community to find people who will be loyal to Trump for key government positions.

The "criminally insane community"? You're joking again. There is no "community" among the criminally insane.

It's called satire.

If there actually was a criminally insane community, you, being part of the generally law abiding insane community could probably fill us in on the details

I'm no more insane than anyone else in the music biz. Not much anyway.

I just think for myself and regard nearly everything someone tries to sell me on with a certain amount of skepticism.

And it's not what people KNOW, it's what they THINK they know.

[John Eppstein]

(duplicate deleted) Why doesn't "delete" work for me?

[nobby]

I'm no more insane than anyone else in the music biz. Not much anyway.

That's not very reassuring.

Anyway, I have to sign off before Nurse Ratched comes back and sees me using the computer terminal...

[weedywet]

reasoned response to Nazis didn't work, and won't.

it's like the people who said it wasn't "nice" to sit in or burn draft cards...

[John Eppstein]

reasoned response to Nazis didn't work, and won't.

Which is PRECISELY why I want to keep my options for purchasing an effective weapon open, especially with the current gang of thugs and neo-Nazis in power. Even though I really don't like guns, especially since having had to stare down/negotiate out of have them aimed at my head several times in my younger, wilder days.

Granted, resisting a military force with hand weapons would, of course, be futile, but I'd rather die resisting in a firefight than be worked to death (and in my physical condition I wouldn't last long) in a concentration camp or gulag.

It's nice to live under the pink, fluffy illusion that it can't happen here, but history has repeatedly proven otherwise.

My father was born in 1901 and volunteered for the Marine Corps when WWII broke out, although he has to get a waiver because of his age. The only reason I'm here is that he got flagged for TB just before his unit shipped out. I grew up hearing about the Warsaw Ghetto and the French Resistance, as well as the Zionists fighting for the establishment of Israel (on land they had already purchased from the Arabs.) I grew up hearing about how Hitler subverted and took over Weimar Germany (which was a liberal democracy), in a succession of events eerily similar to what's going on here, now.

In Germany the Jews adopted an attitude very similar to that of our liberal "progressives" and got slaughtered for it in the millions. Just because the Brownshirts are avid gun nuts is NOT a viable reason for refusing to arm yourself - because nonviolence only really works against people who have some moral sense.

With help, the French Resistance WON. The Vietnamese resistance beat the crap out of the USA.

You're right - a "reasoned response" against Nazis cannot and will not work.

[weedywet]

Thinking a gun protects you is delusional.

[John Eppstein]

Thinking a gun protects you is delusional.

Who said anything about protection? If I was one of those idiots who thinks that a gun is "protection" I'd probably own one.

A gun is variously a tool for hunting, a sporting device for target and skeet shoots, and an offensive weapon. Offensive weapons can be useful for defense, but generally not in the kind of personal situations that the NRA talks about. Carrying a gun around "for personal defense" is stupid.

You have to understand, I am a Jew. You are an Englishman. People have not been attempting to exterminate and/or enslave you and your ancestors for over two thousand years, at fairly regular intervals throughout history. They have mine. Although under strict Jewish orthodox law I am not considered a real; Jew because my mother was a goy (regardless of the fact that she converted when she married my father) and therefore am probably not automatically eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return, from the viewpoint of your garden variety anti-Semite I am a Jew and the son of a rabbi. I grew up in Oklahoma and spent my childhood summers in a rural area of Maine - I KNOW about anti-Semitism. The worst ones are the one who come up to you as a little kid and start going on about "how beautiful your religion is" and you immediately know that (A) They don't know the first thing about Judaism and (B) they don't view you as being a person like them, they look at you like some kind of weird alien bug. You get beat up, made fun of, and the girls in your class won't go out with you. Anti-Semitism, is alive, well, and pervasive in large segments of American society.

Now, I ask you - in a time when the President of the USA openly supports organized Nazi and other racist groups in American society and openly admires fascist dictators above the Rule of Law in America, why in the world would I support laws limiting my access to weapons?

I suspect that I might have difficulty passing a more stringent background check - a couple of drug arrests (no convictions) when I was young, a 4-F rating for unspecified "psychological reasons" (I came in to my draft board in Oklahoma City with long hair and told them I liked motorcycles), and the fact that there's probably a flag in my dossier because I was a member of SDS during the '60s, yeah, that's probably enough to cause problems, although there's technically nothing there to disqualify me and I've never had any sort of history of violence. In fact, to the contrary, I openly (and effectively) advocated nonviolence when the massive student protests broke out in the wake of Kent State. I was one of two student leaders who managed to keep a cap on the situation, despite the efforts of a verified FBI agent provocateur*, who was trying to get the kids to burn the ROTC building - which would have been all the state and federal governments needed to bring in the National Guard with tanks onto the campus. Not paranoia or exaggeration - they were parked just outside city limits, totally encircling the town, champing at the bit to "go shoot us some hip-pies".

People forget quickly. People on the "left" these days also tend to be complacent about the real dangers facing the country. They'd prefer to ignore things that might scare them and pretend they don't exist, while loudly clamoring for "feel good" causes.

Now, I really hope that my misgivings about the present situations are groundless - I really hate being right about things like this - but I also believe that the notion that "It can't happen here" is the most dangerous form of naivete. Because history has proved over and over again that it CAN happen here - or anywhere.

And when you live through crazy times you never forget. And to me things actually feel more dangerous now than they did back then.


* - a couple years later in the wake of Watergate when they had the televised Congressional hearings this character showed up testifying in front of Congress (shocked the hell out of me when I saw him on the TV screen, my jaw literally dropped. We'd just assumed he was simply a radical nut, we had no idea he was really a Fed) - under a different name, which was likely just as fake as the one he used when he was masquerading as a student on campus. He told all about being paid to travel from campus to campus, infiltrating nonviolent anti-war organizations to try to incite violent action. IIRC he claimed a certain amount of success, but not at OU during Kent State. thanks to me and Mike Wright (a radical organizer and concert promoter who also played a mean bluegrass mandolin.)