After the first-graders were slaughtered, after the Congresswoman was shot in her forehead at

[Atticus]

point-blank range, after the klansmen wannabe murdered the people who had just prayed with him, after we learned what "bump-stocks" were when the Vegas madman sprayed death down on dozens, ----------------after each one of these and literally countless other senseless atrocities, we thought "Surely, this will do it! Surely this will be the tragedy that compels our government to protect us with stricter gun laws!"

After Buffalo, ---------------------------------------------------sigh-------.

[CrackityJones75]

1. Columbine shocked me.

Sandy hook ripped my heart out.

Marjorie stone douglas infuriated me.

And there have been so many more between those.

[Initech]

9. What Alex Jones and his goons did to the Sandy Hook parents is unforgiveable.

I hope that festering POS spends the rest of his miserable life rotting in prison.

[CrackityJones75]

13. Agreed.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

40. He's been charged with a crime?

AFAIK, it was a civil lawsuit, which you don't go to prison for.

[Ziggysmom]

2. More thoughts and prayers from the GQP!

[Hoyt]

3. Heck, a Republican Congressman got shot, and still nothing. I bet

if it had been 40 GOPers, they still would vote to protect and expand rube gun rights.

[Bluethroughu]

4. Madness...

Sick in the mind.

[TDale313]

5. If Sandy Hook wasn't enough to effect real change...

my expectation that anything can is, sadly, incredibly low.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

6. It won't happen until one of THEM is cut down in the street.

A high ranking repub politician or a SCOTUS justice or a powerful RNC donor. Or their children. Then the outrage will be white hot and the "How did this happen ?" will be everywhere.

[Act_of_Reparation]

18. It's already happened.

2017. The Congressional baseball shooting.

[Amishman]

21. Yup, they just double down each time, claiming more guns to shoot back would have stopped it

There will be no dramatic change in our lifetimes, the best we can hope for is for minor reforms to limit new purchases.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

25. Oh, PULEEEEZE.

Steve Scalise getting nicked and the mass murder of ten people is not a comparison.

[Jedi Guy]

26. Scalise wasn't "nicked."

He was shot in the hip, went into shock, and was in critical condition when he arrived at the hospital. The physician who treated him said he was "in critical condition with an imminent risk of death." Scalise was in the hospital for about a month and a half and underwent at least two surgeries.

That's considerably more than being "nicked."

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

27. He LIVED didn't he ?

[Jedi Guy]

28. Yes, he did.

That doesn't change the fact that your characterization of his injuries is demonstrably untrue.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

31. My point was that comparing what happened to Scalise

is HARDLY on par equivalent as the slaughter of innocent (Scalise is not innocent.) Black people grocery shopping on a Saturday.

The heartbreak of the tragedy in Buffalo has affected ten families and an entire community who have had their sense of security and community shattered. This trauma will linger on for decades.

Get it now ? Try to keep up.

[Jedi Guy]

33. Your point is irrelevant when you're using a demonstrable falsehood to make it.

Facts either matter to you or they don't. Based on your continued defense of a demonstrable falsehood, I can only conclude it's the latter.

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

34. Let me try to explain this to you one last time.

I'll use small words.

Ten Black private citizens were murdered simply for being.

Scalise is a public figure who has taken some very extreme positions. Every publicly-elected official knows that they could become the target of an unhappy constituent. In 2002, Scalise attended a conference at the invitation of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the KKK. No less than Speaker of the House, John Boehner, tried to remove Scalise, not just from his assignments, but from his leadership position.

Have a lovely evening.

[Jedi Guy]

35. Again, Scalise wasn't "nicked," your assertion to the contrary notwithstanding.

And if you're making the argument that he deserved to get "nicked" because of his politics or ideology, well... that says far more about you than it does about anyone else.

[Jedi Guy]

37. "Are you visually impaired as well ?"

On the contrary, my vision is excellent. For instance, I perceive that you're so witless that you don't understand how lying about the extent and nature of Scalise's injuries undermined the argument that you yourself made, whereas telling the truth about his injuries would have bolstered that argument. Alas, I have neither the time nor the crayons to explain it to you this fine morning.

I also perceive that your behavior in this little subthread of ours is peculiarly Trumpian.

Step 1: Barf up an "alternative fact."
Step 2: If and when someone points out your "alternative fact," become increasingly aggrieved, rude, and aggressive while using rhetorical sleight of hand rather than admitting that you were incorrect.
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Profit!

Now, please feel free to piss off.

Right back at you.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

41. It's really hard for some to admit they were wrong isn't it?

H4B seems to be unable to admit it.

[Hortensis]

43. Yes. "It" happens to Republican supporters as well,

many times, and hasn't changed the trajectory of the RW's increasing extremism.

Most victims are white, though the highest per capita are minority. It's worth noting on this issue that many, if not most, minorities are naturally conservative, leaning RW, whatever their position on gun rights might be. Some vote Republican; many don't, but refuse to vote Democrat. 40% of all AA last election.

Shining a light on who the "they" are. It's not just a few very powerful white men out of a population of over 330 million.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

44. +100.

I've never understood why any minority would lean conservative, especially in this day and age with the pukes trying their dead level best to disenfranchise them.
Makes me want to do this...

[Hortensis]

51. Conservative's one of the two big personality types, after all;

and disapproving of what America's white male-dominated conservative party does to them doesn't mean minority conservatives somehow approve of what the liberal party does. Liberals are the "all men are created equal" people; it's defining, we just tend to feel that in our guts.

Conservatives, of all colors, overall don't feel it, and most mildly to passionately disagree with the notion. But attitudes toward equality and government's role in securing equality is hardly the only difference. They have real issues with liberal progressive governance, the more strongly conservative, the bigger the issues. And the more conservative a person is by nature the more likely he is to agree with other conservatives politically, equality only one issue among many.

Btw, just look at ultra-conservative black nationalist Clarence Thomas and his bone-deep rejection of liberalism in government and its ongoing attempts to assure "equality." He's worked up a whole faux intellectual excuse for his dreadful attitudes about how the white people's liberalism-based constitution was designed to above all oppress black people, that every civil rights advance has actually hurt and degraded black people more, and that it can never be changed or advanced to do otherwise. He's a real (loaded and firing) pistol, like many of his Republican white supremacist counterparts these days.

[Jedi Guy]

52. Evidently, yes.

The most bizarre thing is that Scalise being seriously wounded supported their argument that the GOP doesn't care even when/if one of their own catches the bullets. The repeated doubling down on the false claim was very perplexing, to say the least.

[alphafemale]

45. You are saying Scalise deserved to be shot because you don't like his ideas?

Because that is an extreme thing to say.

About as extreme as you can get.

[Dorian Gray]

48. Jesus

[Act_of_Reparation]

39. I didn't compare the outcomes.

Jesus Christ, the scolds in this place...

[Dorian Gray]

49. It's hard to tell

whether you're advocating for this or not. It reads to me as though you are, so I just want to challenge this type of rhetoric. Not down with it.

Stop veiled threats. If that's not your intention, then i thought you should know that it reads as though it's your intention.

[3Hotdogs]

7. I still remember the quote, "My 2nd Amendment trumps your dead kid."

That's what we are up against.

[Journeyman]

8. I believe the true arsenal against the Second Amendment is unfettered use of the First . . .

Had we seen pictures of those children cut in twain and splattered on the chalkboards, I believe it would have been a hard sell to stop some sort of reform from being adopted.

Certainly, the same lies could have been deployed to negate the tale, but how much easier would it have been to discredit the naysayers had we possessed irrefutable, gut-wrenching evidence and displayed it everywhere until something was done?

Why fight them with appeals to imagination? Defeat them with the bloody truth.

[Leith]

10. I agree

I remember seeing TV news in the 1960s when I was about 8 or 10. A Buddhist monk had set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War - and it was shown on TV. War scenes and dead bodies were shown. I believe that broadcasting that was a contributor to opposition to the war.

Nowadays, bodies return in caskets in middle of the night with no media present.

Families of victims would have an averse reaction to it, but the general population has been sheltered from seeing the horrors. YouTube restricts or censors. There are websites that show horrible things, but most people don't look at them.

If everyone in the world could see the scene of a massacre, it would change the minds of many. And I believe that is precisely why the news does not show them any more.

[Journeyman]

12. Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner were censored when they took pictures . . .

of Civil War battlefields.

It was felt that exposure to too many of the war's horrors might turn public opinion even more against the conflict than it was for so much of the war.

Not hard to imagine, especially when you consider thow horrid some of those battles were, far more atrocious than modern battlefields. Imagine: Pictures of the carnage at Spotsylvania, when thousands of men battled hand-to-hand across a wooden barrier for 18 hours in a driving rainstorm -- such images would have surely turned opinions, even though they were grainy black and white. It was a well considered censorship that stifled those images. There was a lot at stake in 1864. But we're not fighting a civil war today; we are however in a battle for our nation every bit as desperate.

[Boxerfan]

24. This! (Leith's post)

I was of that generation & the war coverage was a substantial factor.
We also had the Fairness Doctrine.

People felt a moral duty to report the truth. Not save it for a tell a book for profit. We have fallen as a nation in so many ways.

[lees1975]

11. There was Buffalo and on the same weekend

A shooting in a California church, and another one at a Houston, Texas flea market.

If you are so passionate about the "sanctity of human life" then why are you facilitating the easy access to weapons that are being used to commit mass murder?

Raging on about Critical Race Theory didn't stop the killing of people who had no idea a trip to the grocery store would turn out to be deadly.

But it seems that not enough people are outraged, because they won't show up at the polls and vote out the monsters who allow this to happen.

[onethatcares]

14. and then protestors showed up

at USSC justices' homes and a bill got passed in record time........

[dwayneb]

15. US is a nation that loves death and violence

This is fact. Just look at a list of films that are the most popular in our culture - 90% of them glorify death and vengeance and violence. We feed on it every single day.

Even those of us who fight hard for gun control laws are part of the problem. How many times have you watched the Godfather? How many times have you watched Die Hard, or No Country for Old Men?

I am old enough to remember a time before we were desensitized to death and violence; back in the early 60's when the most violent film of the day was Psycho, which would be considered incredibly mild and boring by today's standards.

When we have a whole society that continuously absorbs countless images and scenes of brutal violence, it is not surprising at all that monsters like Gendron would emerge from the cesspool. Personally I think that this desensitization was and is deliberate. It is preparing us for what is coming - the establishment of a brutal police state here in the USA.

[Dial H For Hero]

16. So "Die Hard" is part of a plot to establish a police state?

[Act_of_Reparation]

19. Cool story, bro.

Charles Whitman must have watched too much Die Hard.

Good call.

[Cuthbert Allgood]

20. As someone with a Master's in media studies,

this is 100% not a thing.

Cool story, though.

[gratuitous]

32. Our national religion is the High Church of Redemptive Violence

It's how we settle our differences, and if some violence didn't decide an issue, the answer is more violence. We're so steeped in violence we don't recognize its pervasiveness shot through (you should pardon the expression) our culture.

The 9/11 attacks, for example. Some of us pulled together, but our national response was to invade Afghanistan, and later Iraq. We still haven't done a reckoning of why the terrorists struck at the heart of our financial industry and the headquarters of our war machine. I submit they weren't random targets.

If anything in the last 20 years, we've redoubled our greed and violence and caused a lot more misery all around the world while piously proclaiming our own good-heartedness while creating more poverty and death, and making our terrorist enemies all the more attractive to people with a legitimate gripe against our national policies.

[MarineCombatEngineer]

42. Wow!!!!

Swing and a miss.

[Johnny2X2X]

17. Sandy Hook cemented that there will never be change

A madman gun nut executed 20 6 and 7 year olds and nothing changed. If that wasn't going to do it, nothing would.

[beaglelover]

30. Absolutely correct.

[Dorian Gray]

50. Sadly

this is spot on.

That was our moment to change gun culture. If that couldn't do it, I have little hope that anything will.

[BWdem4life]

22. Perhaps when a black man shoots up a white church?

[dickthegrouch]

23. Remember when Dannemeyer read gay sex practices into the congressional record?

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-07-25-me-325-story.html

What we need now is for some brave congress member to speak the names and ages of everyone who’s died by gun violence in the last ?? Years.

Putting photos would just be asking for trouble from gun nuts. So I don’t advise that, but I was thinking of it. Make the congress squirm without revictimizing the survivors.

[BlueCheeseAgain]

29. Republicans are against gun control even though...

... someone shot them at their baseball practice. Heck, someone shot Ronald Reagan.

They'll never be for any kind of gun control.

[alphafemale]

47. Don't urge this type of violence here.

Just stop.

[Demovictory9]

46. rightwing radio nuts: "boys need fathers", "they took religion out of the schools"

said after each massacre

[Meowmee]

53. Nothing will ever do it in the US, ever

I try to avoid any places that could be obvious targets.