crickets
crickets's JournalPREACH! Louder! Do NOT bring it down a notch.
The man who interrupted him (edit: Massie, KY) with nonsense about arming teachers just stopped Bowman's message with what he knew was idiotic. The nutbars who claim to want MORE guns are to be ignored completely because they are doing exactly what Bowman said: carrying water for the gun lobby. To even address nonsense arguments about things like arming teachers is a waste of time and that is the only point of such: to waste time.
DO NOT ENGAGE with faithless actors who just want to interrupt for its own sake. KEEP ON MESSAGE and keep doing this every single day until they answer questions seriously about gun control and saving children's lives.
Bravo! Bravo!
YouTube version - had to hunt it down because the vid on Twitter
wouldn't play properly for me. Good on James Shaw for posting it. It was originally put out three years ago by
Sandy Hook Promise. Well done to them. Thanks for posting this, Tanuki.
There should be no billionaires.
It's fiscally irresponsible to let that much money concentrate into so few hands. Tax the hell out of the uber-rich until they are billionaires no more.
Corporations are not carrying their own weight. Tax them, and make them actually pay their share.
That would go a long way to solving the problem, because continuing to ask everyday citizens to cough up enough dough to keep the country running does not work. No wonder we're in the hole.
How the NRA Hobbled the ATF (2 of 2 related articles)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/atf-gun-laws-nra/According to Cox, the most important of the ATF riders is a prohibition on creating or maintaining a database of gun owners or guns, which the NRA and other gun-rights advocates say could be used by a tyrannical government to confiscate firearms. The rider, which dates back to 1978, was a response to President Carters attempt to create a national registry of handguns. A related rider, dating to 1997, bars the government from creating an electronic database of the names of gun purchasers contained in 597 million gun sale records from 700,000 out-of-business dealers. (Those dealers are required by law to turn their records over to the ATF.) In addition, a 1986 law, the Firearm Owners Protection Act, explicitly forbids the government from creating a database of gun owners. [snip]
Today, gun sale records are kept at 60,000 separate locations by the nations 60,000 federal firearms licensees (FFLs). With a centralized database, an ATF agent in possession of a gun found at a crime scene could simply plug the guns serial number into a computer and identify the name of the dealer who sold the weapon, along with the name of the first purchaser. Without a database, agents must often embark on a Rube Goldberg-style odyssey, contacting the guns manufacturer or a guns importer who will direct the agent either to a middleman who sold the weapon to a dealer or to the dealer himself, who can identify the first buyer. Dealers are required to keep records of each firearm transaction. Frequently, however, the records are on paper, and dealers cant locate particular ones quickly. At the same time, there is no law requiring consolidation of wholesale weapon transfersthose sales by the manufacturer or middlemanwhich means ATF inspectors have no way of knowing whether a dealers ledgers accurately represent all of the guns he has bought or if he is illegally selling guns off the books.
One gun database that works
Joseph Vince, a former ATF special agent and now a partner at Crime Gun Solutions, a consulting firm, says solving gun crimes is all about gathering information and having the tools to make sense out of it. He says US gun laws often make that work far more difficult. People talk about 9/11 and not connecting the dots; but when we talk about gun laws, were taking the dots off the paper. Vince says concerns that a centralized database of guns and gun owners will lead to gun confiscation have been disproved by 80 years of history with the National Firearms Act, a 1934 law that requires citizens who own machine guns, short-barrel shotguns and certain other highly dangerous weapons to register them with the federal government. Owners of NFA firearms, as they are known, are fingerprinted, photographed and subjected to an FBI background check, and the serial numbers of their guns are kept in a federal database, whose contents, Vince says, have never been divulged outside of a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. Most important, these weapons are rarely used to commit crimes. The NFA has effectively removed these guns from the criminal marketplace.
The ATF's Nonsensical Non-Searchable Gun Databases, Explained (1 of 2 related articles)
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-databases/The war on searchable technology continued. In 1986, Congress enacted the Firearms Protection Act, which bans the ATF from creating a registry of guns, gun owners or gun sales.
Congress also put a rider barring the agency from consolidation or centralization of gun dealers records in every spending bill affecting the agency from 1979 through 2011, then made the prohibition permanent, under law.
First comes keyword searches, and the next thing you know, you have national gun registries.
That, at least, is the rationale for the law that prevents the ATF from creating a searchable system. Gun rights groups argue that once the government has a list of firearms, it could use that list to confiscate weapons from private citizens.
The world thinks America's gun laws are crazy -- and they're right
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/05/world-thinks-americas-gun-laws-are-crazy-theyre-right/No paywall: https://archive.ph/vVB25
But it isnt just the number of guns; its also what kind of guns and ammunition are legal and how you buy them. The shooter in Dayton, Ohio, who killed nine people in less than a minute, legally ordered his AR-15-style assault rifle online. He also bought a double drum magazine, allowing him to fire 100 rounds in the span of a matter of seconds without reloading. In most other developed countries, such semiautomatic assault-style weapons and ammunition magazines are banned. There are also several more hurdles to clear before buying a gun in every other developed country compared to the United States.
And yet, despite the relentless body counts piling up in movie theaters, food festivals, Walmarts, schools, synagogues, churches, offices, hospitals, bars and nightclubs, the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to even vote on a common-sense measure: requiring universal background checks before all gun purchases, without any loopholes. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is blocking a vote on that bill, even though 92 percent of Americans support that reform, including 89 percent of Republicans.
Will that measure prevent every gun death in the United States? Clearly not. But that reform, along with others such as reintroducing the ban on assault-style weapons, banning large-capacity magazines such as the one used in Dayton, and requiring gun safety training would go a long way in reducing deaths. We should also consider requiring licenses from those who wish to own a firearm as well as some form of reference system (such as the character references required in Canada or some form of mental health evaluation as is used in Germany, Austria, India, Brazil, Israel and Japan). A recent international study that examined the entire body of research on gun legislation found convincing evidence that gun safety legislation reduces gun-related deaths.
Brian Klaas: It's the Guns.
https://brianklaas.substack.com/p/its-the-gunsDec 12, 2022
With guns, gun violence, and mass shootings, the United States is in a dystopian league of its own. But whenever I write about guns, I get the same bad-faith arguments shot back at me by American gun advocates who are, perhaps, unaware of just how extreme, and just how unusual Americas gun culture is relative to the rest of the rich, democratic world.
The satirical newspaper The Onion nailed this dynamic with one of its all-time great headlines.
No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Ive decided to write a comprehensive guide to understanding Americas gun extremism, engaging with all the main, spurious arguments, showing the truth with proper evidence and data. Its my hope that this can be your go-to guide to defeating bad arguments being made about Americas gun cultureand that you can share this article with others, perhaps to help persuade them that the United States needs to fix its broken gun culture. [more]
Adding a link from the Huffpo piece:
The First Drag Queen Was a Former Slave
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/drag-queen-slave-ball/
No paywall - https://archive.ph/ORiwB
Fascinating article.
I tried to find a transcript and couldn't, but maybe somebody else
has better search skills and can point to one. There is video with captions available - turn on auto captions and they work surprisingly well. Connolly speaks beginning at 1:01:05.
This.
I can't find it now, but there was a photo of an adorable toddler girl that appeared right before the war started, with dark curly hair, and the caption was some version of please don't kill us.
It was absolutely heartbreaking.
What really angered me was the helpless feeling of watching the psych buildup from months before. One day there's a story about Sept 11 droning in the background as usual, but right afterward is a story about Iraq. *sigh*
Step one: associate two things by mentioning them together.
It was months before any action, but I knew. A bunch of assholes had decided to make a bunch of money. Yee ha.
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