One: Gun culture is driven by a simple situation: mediocre white men who want to feel powerful. Guys who are just waiting for "something to happen" so they can step in and be a hero for once because they are no longer seen, unquestionably, as heroes. Why? Because as white men, likely christian, the social, political, economic and cultural dominance they once could expect is no longer quite so easy to enforce and they have to work for it a little. Which they can't because their expected dominance has sapped their wills and skills and ability to compete. Thus their desire to kill.
Two: "Concealed carry reciprocity" is the Fugitive Slave Law of our age.
Yes, and they look ridiculous doing it. A few weeks ago I was in Leavenworth, WA (a fake German town in central WA). It was Friday evening, we were sitting eating ice cream cones, as were most of the people around us and this guy walks past us, clearly armed. For what?!?! I have never been in a situation where I felt I needed a gun to be safe, yet, these supposedly brave men need to be armed to walk down to the river? It is completely nuts.
This is what is called ammo drag (of which camo drag is a subset), a performance of exaggerated masculinity that, ironically, undermines the stereotype of men as powerful and confident. Nothing says, I'm scared and weak, better than a handgun at the HyVee.
I don’t for the life of me understand how guns are something to idolize and something to prove you have a penis or want a penis. I grew up around hunting rifles and my family lived off the deer my Dad and/or grandparents shot.I am not 100% anti-gun but they need to be purposeful and must be stored properly at all times. Parents whose children access these guns will be charged with endangering a child or if they are “used” by the child, the parents will be held .responsible 100%.
There is very little reason to have a concealed weapon. Everyone who qualifies needs to be registered to carry it on their person or in a purse. This isn’t the Wild West, we have armed police and the “good guy with a gun” theory is a myth. The NRA created a powerful Macho Man marketing campaign to convince the survivalists, small penis crowd, toxic people and those that are convinced that the government is just waiting attack us. Maybe it’s from playing too many violent videogames.
There should be no weapons of war owned by private citizens. These weapons are designed to KILL PEOPLE fast. I can hear the “guns don’t kill people. People kill people’ crowd now. Save it! It’s weak bullshit. And Nothing. Nada. Zip is this covered by the Second Amendment. Did you cross yourself? Did you remove your hat in respect? The “beyond the basic rights” granted to gun owners are merely Supreme Court gifts. They got money so you get a bone thrown at you.
I would venture to say if Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, David Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson were all reincarnated they would be appalled at the barbarism Americans are worshipping. The Wild West would be a vast graveyard. Nothing would be settled because no one would want the families to face the potential violence. The movies aren’t real.
Perhaps Emergency Rooms should start handing out pictures of those dead and wounded by a machine gun. Do you ignorant fools demanding more bigger, better, faster weapons actually consider what happens to innocent people?
After the Uvalde School shooting, we learned that children were literally blown to pieces beyond recognition. Bones were shattered, bullets ripped through flesh and internal organs became mush. It took days to clearly identify each tiny corpse. One little girl had to be identified by her glittery tennis shoes. So what did Texas governor do? He sent TX families DNA identification kits so they’d be prepared next time. This is evil, disgraceful and disrespectful to all the families in the U.S.
If anyone ever says “thoughts and prayers” to me. I’d slap their face. Embarrase them, demean them, shout to God to strike them down.
This gun-lust must stop. It isn’t just mass shootings, it’s the boyfriend who comes back and kills his ex, it’s the old White man who shoots an unarmed BlCk teen who was at the wrong door, it’s the cheerleader who got mixed up and opened someone else’s car door, it’s the man who was helping herd a few deer across a rural road, it’s the young kids whose ball accidentally rolled into a neighbors yard, it’s Kile Rittenhouse who comes from another state because he had a gun and thought shooting a few BLM protesters would make him a man (he’s still a punk kid but he has been anointed as a hero), it’s a 2year old who shoots and kills his pregnant mother, it’s the first-grader with anger issues who shoots his teacher….. There is almost no end to the horror stories.plus suicide by gun affects kids as young as 7.
As long as the Republicans want to get paid for promoting and making guns easy to get and to use, AMERICA WILL BE WIPING UP THE BLOOD OF AN INNOCENT PERSON.
I know there are concerned gun owners who feel the same way as I do. Recent polls showed more than 70% of gun owners want additional safeguards to significantly reduce gun violence. And I haven’t even got to ranting about how only a small fraction of licensed gun dealers are audited by ATF for compliance. It should be every 3 years that the ATF makes a surprise visit. But the ATF estimates it’s running from 6 to 9 years between visits. The dealers know this. So if they aren’t honest who knows how many guns are in the hands of he underaged, felons or the mentally ill.
You can probably tell I’m pissed that people are so damned selfish and greedy that owning a gun is more important than a human life.
I know we’ve got so much work to do in every aspect of our lives. I just don’t want to bury someone I love.
William H. Macy, otherwise better known for being part of a self-dealing Hollywood couple with two daughters trying to cheat their kids into a prestigious school, has an insightful pitch about the messed up portrayal of violence and its consequences in our popular culture:
Thank you for sharing Macy’s interview. His step-by-step mini-series idea is brilliant. I really believe that violence in the media (from having the Vietnam War shown on the news nightly to violent video games to violent music to violent TV/movies) isn’t harmless. We’ve become numb to it and need more and more to get the same emotional effects. As a society, consuming a significant amount of violent visuals is like memorizing the times table. It’s incrementally being stored in the brain to access when needed. Guns solve problems? No.
I’m not saying that everyone who watches (or even experiences) violence will go bat-shit crazy and indiscriminately gun down people, but we can see how violence becomes an ordinary part of peoples lives. Violent gangs pull young women and men into their gun culture and they learn that survival and respect comes in a gun.
Owning weapons of war is part of the toxic masculinity problems we’re seeing. Big guns = macho, cave man attitudes. And more and more young women are discovering the false self-importance and independence that a gun gives. In under 30 seconds, dozens and dozens of people can be murdered.
There are plenty of videos that demonstrates the destruction of a body from automatic weapons plus specific ammo. We also have dozens of medical experts explaining how these weapons and ammo don’t just kill, they maim and violently disintegrate internal organs. More people won’t survive.
An off-the-wall idea is these teaching films with AI images of loved ones might make it much more effective. But I doubt it. So we’re back to major legislation outlawing, improving regulation and manufacturing safer guns.
The “scared straight” indoctrination would break the desire for guns in some people. But there are plenty of people who have taken the Second Amendment and twisted it to some God-given right. They truly believe that the right to own any gun supersedes the right to life. The only solution is federal laws banning weapons created for war. People whine that they have to have them to protect their family. They’ve been watching too many of those survival movies. If the world devolves to that state, your guns won’t be any good. A cache of guns and ammo won’t be enough against the government’s fire power (or invading aliens).
Something has to be done now. 70% of gun owners agree. The other 30% plus the financial power of the NRA and fat-cat manufacturers have learned to manipulate legislators without any guts or with big donations.
Gun advocates holler that it’s because of mental illness. That is a real factor. But if there wasn’t easy access to guns and/or ammo, suicide rates and mass shootings would be significantly reduced. At least automatic weapons, would save some people. A few is better than none.
There's something very important about gun culture that doesn't show up in the ownership statistics: the "guns as tools" versus the "guns as identity" tradeoff. And the division is real and tangible.
I live in a rural area. Nearly all of my neighbors have guns, and many have hunting permits. But they also have farm animals, crops, and freezers with a bit of wild meat. Guns are utilitarian tools, treated with respect, but nobody spends much time thinking about them. If a fox tries to break into the hen house, sure, someone will take out their old rifle, and shoot the fox. These folks mostly shop at one of the local farming stores, which also sells hunting supplies. The nice older man who works in the gun department is very excitied about their new bottled deer urine.
But there's a second gun culture in the US, and it's a scary as hell. There's a second gun shop nearby. It's brightly lit. Their employees are professional and friendly. Their guns, though. Their guns look like prayers to a god of death. They have a video screen playing ads for a tactical training course. If they sell you a backpack for your gun accessories, they'll explain how it's lined with defensive Kevlar. Which, well, I've rarely seen foxes assult the hen house with AR-15s. So I'm not sure how the Kevlar helps.
But as scary as that second gun shop is, it's beacon of professionalism compared to what goes on at the gun shows. I know a firearm safety instructor who told me, "I've stopped going to the gun shows. The vendors there are getting scary. They're each competing to be more outrageously fascist than the next." They're selling merchandise with the logos of militia groups condemned as terrorist organizations in multiple countries. They're selling paper targets with the faces of politicians. And they're really smug about it all.
And if you ever spend any time a gun range, it's really easy to tell the hunters from the lunatics. The hunters mostly have bolt-action rifles or shotguns, and they take their time setting up their shots. But the second group has their AR-15s and poor muzzle discipline and high rates of fire, and lousy accuracy. And AR-15s chew the hell out of the target frames.
So when you say that Wyoming has a lot of guns, that doesn't surprise me. It's a rural state with lots of agriculture and hunting, so of course it has guns. The real question is who owns those guns and why. Are those guns tools, or are they part of someone's paramilitary power fantasy? And that's a bit harder to measure. But the madness has been spreading for decades now, and many places are full of people who dream endlessly of being a movie hero blowing away their enemies.
Thanks - very important context. We've seen recently how the number of gun sales has exploded while the number of gun owners fell for a long time, and went up during the pandemic but not at nearly the same rate, which means that some subset of gun owners are buying LOTS of guns. Those are the people you're talking about.
Yup. There's a massive divide right down the middle of American gun culture. The hunters and the farmers don't like mass shootings, and many of them have a deep uneasiness about the people who fantasize about violence.
Politically, the fastest route to fewer gun deaths is to split these two groups. So I focus on policies which the hunters/farmers/etc support:
- Red flag laws.
- Maximum rounds fired without reloading.
- Background checks.
- Fixing the gun show loophole.
- Bump stocks.
- Open carry restrictions so the Proud Boys can't just walk around town with their rifles intimidating people.
- Educational requirements, either in the form of hunter safety courses or concealed carry courses.
These policies would have relatively little pushback from the sane gun owners, and they'd buy us a lot of public safety.
The cultural issues are harder. And the cultural poison around guns has been very consciously created and pushed by the gun manufacturers
The right is winning today, but the day is coming when the rest of us, the overwhelming majority, get so fed up that we actually elect Democrats with sufficient spine to ban these weapons of war and require their owners to either turn them in for cash, or face long prison sentences. Clarence Thomas and his corrupt co-conspirators brought that day one step closer with last week's insane ruling that a machine gun is not a machine gun.
Please, please, please get me this gentleman's t-shirt size. I have the logo worked out already:
"I'd much rather wear a 'kick me' sign than a 'tease me' sign"
I am certain this was a curated media opportunity by Georgia Republicans for media psyops, but it probably does reflect some attitudes of people who are among demographic groups who are intended constituencies of multiple policies supported by the Biden Administration, CBC, and Democratic Party. All the points about execution failure, or arguable failure to exercise every possible counter-obstructionist tactic aside, if these demographics intentionally adopt this farmer's attitude en masse, they will be plastering themselves with a suit of "kick me" signs and "bulls-eyes" and signaling that neither attempts nor promises to help are wanted or appreciated and that kicking them politically is profitable, even at getting *their* votes. Doesn't seem a route to increased political power or influence.
One: Gun culture is driven by a simple situation: mediocre white men who want to feel powerful. Guys who are just waiting for "something to happen" so they can step in and be a hero for once because they are no longer seen, unquestionably, as heroes. Why? Because as white men, likely christian, the social, political, economic and cultural dominance they once could expect is no longer quite so easy to enforce and they have to work for it a little. Which they can't because their expected dominance has sapped their wills and skills and ability to compete. Thus their desire to kill.
Two: "Concealed carry reciprocity" is the Fugitive Slave Law of our age.
Yes, and they look ridiculous doing it. A few weeks ago I was in Leavenworth, WA (a fake German town in central WA). It was Friday evening, we were sitting eating ice cream cones, as were most of the people around us and this guy walks past us, clearly armed. For what?!?! I have never been in a situation where I felt I needed a gun to be safe, yet, these supposedly brave men need to be armed to walk down to the river? It is completely nuts.
This is what is called ammo drag (of which camo drag is a subset), a performance of exaggerated masculinity that, ironically, undermines the stereotype of men as powerful and confident. Nothing says, I'm scared and weak, better than a handgun at the HyVee.
I don’t for the life of me understand how guns are something to idolize and something to prove you have a penis or want a penis. I grew up around hunting rifles and my family lived off the deer my Dad and/or grandparents shot.I am not 100% anti-gun but they need to be purposeful and must be stored properly at all times. Parents whose children access these guns will be charged with endangering a child or if they are “used” by the child, the parents will be held .responsible 100%.
There is very little reason to have a concealed weapon. Everyone who qualifies needs to be registered to carry it on their person or in a purse. This isn’t the Wild West, we have armed police and the “good guy with a gun” theory is a myth. The NRA created a powerful Macho Man marketing campaign to convince the survivalists, small penis crowd, toxic people and those that are convinced that the government is just waiting attack us. Maybe it’s from playing too many violent videogames.
There should be no weapons of war owned by private citizens. These weapons are designed to KILL PEOPLE fast. I can hear the “guns don’t kill people. People kill people’ crowd now. Save it! It’s weak bullshit. And Nothing. Nada. Zip is this covered by the Second Amendment. Did you cross yourself? Did you remove your hat in respect? The “beyond the basic rights” granted to gun owners are merely Supreme Court gifts. They got money so you get a bone thrown at you.
I would venture to say if Daniel Boone, Wyatt Earp, David Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson were all reincarnated they would be appalled at the barbarism Americans are worshipping. The Wild West would be a vast graveyard. Nothing would be settled because no one would want the families to face the potential violence. The movies aren’t real.
Perhaps Emergency Rooms should start handing out pictures of those dead and wounded by a machine gun. Do you ignorant fools demanding more bigger, better, faster weapons actually consider what happens to innocent people?
After the Uvalde School shooting, we learned that children were literally blown to pieces beyond recognition. Bones were shattered, bullets ripped through flesh and internal organs became mush. It took days to clearly identify each tiny corpse. One little girl had to be identified by her glittery tennis shoes. So what did Texas governor do? He sent TX families DNA identification kits so they’d be prepared next time. This is evil, disgraceful and disrespectful to all the families in the U.S.
If anyone ever says “thoughts and prayers” to me. I’d slap their face. Embarrase them, demean them, shout to God to strike them down.
This gun-lust must stop. It isn’t just mass shootings, it’s the boyfriend who comes back and kills his ex, it’s the old White man who shoots an unarmed BlCk teen who was at the wrong door, it’s the cheerleader who got mixed up and opened someone else’s car door, it’s the man who was helping herd a few deer across a rural road, it’s the young kids whose ball accidentally rolled into a neighbors yard, it’s Kile Rittenhouse who comes from another state because he had a gun and thought shooting a few BLM protesters would make him a man (he’s still a punk kid but he has been anointed as a hero), it’s a 2year old who shoots and kills his pregnant mother, it’s the first-grader with anger issues who shoots his teacher….. There is almost no end to the horror stories.plus suicide by gun affects kids as young as 7.
As long as the Republicans want to get paid for promoting and making guns easy to get and to use, AMERICA WILL BE WIPING UP THE BLOOD OF AN INNOCENT PERSON.
I know there are concerned gun owners who feel the same way as I do. Recent polls showed more than 70% of gun owners want additional safeguards to significantly reduce gun violence. And I haven’t even got to ranting about how only a small fraction of licensed gun dealers are audited by ATF for compliance. It should be every 3 years that the ATF makes a surprise visit. But the ATF estimates it’s running from 6 to 9 years between visits. The dealers know this. So if they aren’t honest who knows how many guns are in the hands of he underaged, felons or the mentally ill.
You can probably tell I’m pissed that people are so damned selfish and greedy that owning a gun is more important than a human life.
I know we’ve got so much work to do in every aspect of our lives. I just don’t want to bury someone I love.
William H. Macy, otherwise better known for being part of a self-dealing Hollywood couple with two daughters trying to cheat their kids into a prestigious school, has an insightful pitch about the messed up portrayal of violence and its consequences in our popular culture:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/william-h-macy-doesnt-like-violence-films-1235912076/
https://deadline.com/2024/05/william-h-macy-has-big-pitch-how-violence-plays-out-1235945557/
Thank you for sharing Macy’s interview. His step-by-step mini-series idea is brilliant. I really believe that violence in the media (from having the Vietnam War shown on the news nightly to violent video games to violent music to violent TV/movies) isn’t harmless. We’ve become numb to it and need more and more to get the same emotional effects. As a society, consuming a significant amount of violent visuals is like memorizing the times table. It’s incrementally being stored in the brain to access when needed. Guns solve problems? No.
I’m not saying that everyone who watches (or even experiences) violence will go bat-shit crazy and indiscriminately gun down people, but we can see how violence becomes an ordinary part of peoples lives. Violent gangs pull young women and men into their gun culture and they learn that survival and respect comes in a gun.
Owning weapons of war is part of the toxic masculinity problems we’re seeing. Big guns = macho, cave man attitudes. And more and more young women are discovering the false self-importance and independence that a gun gives. In under 30 seconds, dozens and dozens of people can be murdered.
There are plenty of videos that demonstrates the destruction of a body from automatic weapons plus specific ammo. We also have dozens of medical experts explaining how these weapons and ammo don’t just kill, they maim and violently disintegrate internal organs. More people won’t survive.
An off-the-wall idea is these teaching films with AI images of loved ones might make it much more effective. But I doubt it. So we’re back to major legislation outlawing, improving regulation and manufacturing safer guns.
The “scared straight” indoctrination would break the desire for guns in some people. But there are plenty of people who have taken the Second Amendment and twisted it to some God-given right. They truly believe that the right to own any gun supersedes the right to life. The only solution is federal laws banning weapons created for war. People whine that they have to have them to protect their family. They’ve been watching too many of those survival movies. If the world devolves to that state, your guns won’t be any good. A cache of guns and ammo won’t be enough against the government’s fire power (or invading aliens).
Something has to be done now. 70% of gun owners agree. The other 30% plus the financial power of the NRA and fat-cat manufacturers have learned to manipulate legislators without any guts or with big donations.
Gun advocates holler that it’s because of mental illness. That is a real factor. But if there wasn’t easy access to guns and/or ammo, suicide rates and mass shootings would be significantly reduced. At least automatic weapons, would save some people. A few is better than none.
There's something very important about gun culture that doesn't show up in the ownership statistics: the "guns as tools" versus the "guns as identity" tradeoff. And the division is real and tangible.
I live in a rural area. Nearly all of my neighbors have guns, and many have hunting permits. But they also have farm animals, crops, and freezers with a bit of wild meat. Guns are utilitarian tools, treated with respect, but nobody spends much time thinking about them. If a fox tries to break into the hen house, sure, someone will take out their old rifle, and shoot the fox. These folks mostly shop at one of the local farming stores, which also sells hunting supplies. The nice older man who works in the gun department is very excitied about their new bottled deer urine.
But there's a second gun culture in the US, and it's a scary as hell. There's a second gun shop nearby. It's brightly lit. Their employees are professional and friendly. Their guns, though. Their guns look like prayers to a god of death. They have a video screen playing ads for a tactical training course. If they sell you a backpack for your gun accessories, they'll explain how it's lined with defensive Kevlar. Which, well, I've rarely seen foxes assult the hen house with AR-15s. So I'm not sure how the Kevlar helps.
But as scary as that second gun shop is, it's beacon of professionalism compared to what goes on at the gun shows. I know a firearm safety instructor who told me, "I've stopped going to the gun shows. The vendors there are getting scary. They're each competing to be more outrageously fascist than the next." They're selling merchandise with the logos of militia groups condemned as terrorist organizations in multiple countries. They're selling paper targets with the faces of politicians. And they're really smug about it all.
And if you ever spend any time a gun range, it's really easy to tell the hunters from the lunatics. The hunters mostly have bolt-action rifles or shotguns, and they take their time setting up their shots. But the second group has their AR-15s and poor muzzle discipline and high rates of fire, and lousy accuracy. And AR-15s chew the hell out of the target frames.
So when you say that Wyoming has a lot of guns, that doesn't surprise me. It's a rural state with lots of agriculture and hunting, so of course it has guns. The real question is who owns those guns and why. Are those guns tools, or are they part of someone's paramilitary power fantasy? And that's a bit harder to measure. But the madness has been spreading for decades now, and many places are full of people who dream endlessly of being a movie hero blowing away their enemies.
Thanks - very important context. We've seen recently how the number of gun sales has exploded while the number of gun owners fell for a long time, and went up during the pandemic but not at nearly the same rate, which means that some subset of gun owners are buying LOTS of guns. Those are the people you're talking about.
Yup. There's a massive divide right down the middle of American gun culture. The hunters and the farmers don't like mass shootings, and many of them have a deep uneasiness about the people who fantasize about violence.
Politically, the fastest route to fewer gun deaths is to split these two groups. So I focus on policies which the hunters/farmers/etc support:
- Red flag laws.
- Maximum rounds fired without reloading.
- Background checks.
- Fixing the gun show loophole.
- Bump stocks.
- Open carry restrictions so the Proud Boys can't just walk around town with their rifles intimidating people.
- Educational requirements, either in the form of hunter safety courses or concealed carry courses.
These policies would have relatively little pushback from the sane gun owners, and they'd buy us a lot of public safety.
The cultural issues are harder. And the cultural poison around guns has been very consciously created and pushed by the gun manufacturers
The right is winning today, but the day is coming when the rest of us, the overwhelming majority, get so fed up that we actually elect Democrats with sufficient spine to ban these weapons of war and require their owners to either turn them in for cash, or face long prison sentences. Clarence Thomas and his corrupt co-conspirators brought that day one step closer with last week's insane ruling that a machine gun is not a machine gun.
Unless of course your name is Hunter Biden, in which case Republicans love gun laws.
Apropos of nothing in particular in your article today:
https://x.com/ElieNYC/status/1802750072293089462?cxt=HBwW7IK33fXo04QyAAAA&cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email
Please, please, please get me this gentleman's t-shirt size. I have the logo worked out already:
"I'd much rather wear a 'kick me' sign than a 'tease me' sign"
I am certain this was a curated media opportunity by Georgia Republicans for media psyops, but it probably does reflect some attitudes of people who are among demographic groups who are intended constituencies of multiple policies supported by the Biden Administration, CBC, and Democratic Party. All the points about execution failure, or arguable failure to exercise every possible counter-obstructionist tactic aside, if these demographics intentionally adopt this farmer's attitude en masse, they will be plastering themselves with a suit of "kick me" signs and "bulls-eyes" and signaling that neither attempts nor promises to help are wanted or appreciated and that kicking them politically is profitable, even at getting *their* votes. Doesn't seem a route to increased political power or influence.
Thank you for this.