Yves here. Actually, middle aged men are the biggest gun victims, via suicides. But those middle aged men typically own the weapons in question…
By Sonali Kolhatkar, the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
Mass shootings are good for gun sales. In the days following the horrific massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, firearm manufacturers’ stock prices predictably rose. Gun owners, who have been conditioned to purchase weapons out of fear of not being able to buy more guns, tend to run out and buy more weapons in anticipation of coming restrictions. That in turn boosts gun profits and stock prices. It is a macabre cycle that appears to be fueled by Republican-led fear-based culture wars.
Gun buyers behave in ways that suggest they logically anticipate that lawmakers will respond to a mass shooting by making it harder to buy a gun. After all, when consumer products are found to be a danger to humans, they are often regulated.
The federal government routinely recalls dangerous products—such as a line of children’s bunk beds whose defective ladder resulted in the death of a 2-year-old child from Ohio. In that case, nearly 40,000 units sold to the public were recalled. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group has a lengthy list of toys that the federal government has recalled that have posed choking hazards for kids.
It makes sense to regulate harmful products, especially where children’s health and safety are concerned. The government doesn’t sidestep the issue by saying that it was the fault of the child or the parents that a product caused harm. Instead, it acts on the assumption that only safe products should be available for purchase, and it punishes the manufacturer.
But, time and again, gun owners’ very rational fears remain unfounded as thousands of children are victims of gun violence each year, and yet firearms manufacturers are absolved of blame and weapons of war remain easily available for purchase. The Uvalde shooter reportedly bought two AR-15-style rifles legally from a federally licensed gun store just days before the massacre and used one of them to end 21 lives.
A group of pediatricians published a plea in Scientific American in response to the Uvalde shooting and to the fact that gun violence is now the leading cause of death among young people aged 1 to 19. The doctors wrote, “We must do better for our children,” and pointed to “the politicization of guns taking priority over public health.”
How else to explain the endless proliferation of deadly killing machines, when we won’t even tolerate a faulty ladder on a bunk bed?
It’s true that gun sales are big business, with millions of firearm sales each year. Some gun manufacturers with lucrative federal contracts are even using their profits to lobby the government against gun control. But the hold that guns have on the nation goes deeper than plain economics.
It’s also true that the National Rifle Association holds great sway in Washington via its political affiliates making large campaign donations to GOP politicians like Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to ensure inaction on gun control. But the NRA alone is not driving the tightened grasp on guns.
At the heart of the matter is how guns have become central to the right-wing culture wars in the U.S. today. They have become synonymous with “freedom,” or rather, with a perverse interpretation of the word. They are also associated with “defense,” a word that appears in the name of the manufacturer, Daniel Defense, whose rifle was used to kill the Uvalde elementary school victims.
The “freedom to defend” oneself has become a powerfully compelling cultural idea for a shrinking white population whose paranoia is being stoked incessantly by Fox News, the Republican Party, and gun manufacturers like Daniel Defense.
The gun-maker engages in aggressive marketing. In one commercial, founder Marty Daniel narrated, “There are two types of people in the world, good people and evil people.” He continued, “And just in case evil people get in charge, good people need to have the ability to fight back.”
While the language of “good versus evil” sounds simple and even benign, in fact, it is often coded language for good white heterosexual guys versus evil Black and Brown people. Or LGBTQ folks. Or undocumented immigrants. Or “woke” white folks.
What is often left unanswered is the question of guns offering the freedom to defend oneself from what, or from whom? It’s certainly not wild animals, in spite of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s recently ludicrous assertion that Americans need AR-15 rifles because of “feral pigs.”
There is a fear that “there are all these criminals out there; they’re going to break into your house in the middle of the night,” Michael Siegel, a visiting professor in the department of public health and community medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine, told me in a recent interview. “It’s a racialized fear,” he added.
So convinced are right-wing (mostly white, male) gun owners that they need to defend themselves against imagined evil “others” that in the hours after the Uvalde shooting, some went as far as speculating that since Border Patrol had killed the shooter, he must have been an “illegal alien.” Others were convinced the shooter was a transgender woman.
The facts about gun ownership and self-defense show just how ludicrous the idea of “freedom to defend” is. The polling company Gallup found that in 2000, 65 percent of Americans cited “protection against crime” as a reason for owning firearms. In 2021, that number jumped to 88 percent. At the same time, violent crime and property crime rates nationwide have dramatically fallen since the 1990s. Meanwhile, studies show that guns are extremely rarely used in self-defense and that it is far more common that they are used to commit assaults, homicides, or suicides or are accidentally discharged.
“This is a charade,” said Siegel of the self-defense trope. “This is not an issue of freedom. The Republicans who are refusing to support these laws, they’re not standing up for freedom.” If parents and children are justifiably afraid of school because of gun violence, “that’s not much of a free society,” he asserted.
Hollywood also bears some blame, using gun violence as a way to raise tension in the plotlines of movies and television shows in what amounts to a massive public relations campaign for gun manufacturers. Researchers Brad Bushman and Dan Romer writing in Quartz found that “acts of gun violence in PG-13 movies nearly tripled over the 30 years between 1985 (the year after the rating was introduced) and 2015.”
Furthermore, they write, “the gun industry pays production companies to place its products in their movies,” and “prominent placement in high-profile films can result in a significant bump in sales for gun models.” While Hollywood may not be feeding the same fantasy (“freedom to defend”) as the right wing does, it certainly makes guns appear “cool,” in the same way that the industry did for cigarette smoking.
A majority of Americans support various gun restrictions; but the Republican Party, which has spent years laying the groundwork for minority rule in anticipation of the coming demographic shift away from white conservative voters, need not listen to the will of the people. Instead, they have gerrymandered districts, enough seats in the undemocratic Senate, and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to ensure they remain immune from popular will.
Ultimately, the white male Republican belief that guns are a way to defend oneself from imaginary evil people is a hate-filled fantasy—a direct outcome of cultural conditioning by right-wing media, gun lobbyists, Hollywood, and the GOP. The price we as a nation are paying for this fear-based fantasy is the lives of our children and their sense of safety at school.
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“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”
Göring
I think people repeat that mostly because they unconsciously want it to be true. The antidote is to visualize Göring being brutally killed by 15-20 regular citizens armed with nothing but boots, brickbats, and determination. To put it another way, authoritarian war mongers are already enemy combatants against the people and ought to be treated as such.
See the end of Bertolucci’s 1900, where the peasants rise up against the fascist thugs that have been terrorizing them for years. They chase them across fields with pitchforks. That clip used to be on YouTube but now it’s gone!
Sigh the day when people had a attachment to land, labour, and its productivity … FIRE sector flame thrower … smirch …
The linked article points out that a lot of the gun deaths among young people are also suicides. It also seems to skirt the issue of gang violence entirely. I’m not sure what to make of that. There’s a kind of sickness among young men that’s causing outbursts of violence, I see no solutions proffered. These kids will terminate themselves some other way
I blame Hollywood more than the author does. We live in a hateful culture.
I suppose from the viewpoint of a Hollywood script writer, a gun can act as a quick plot resolution tool. So a problem arises for the lead character, a gun is pulled out, and then the problem goes away.
I guess i’ve seen tens of thousands murdered by hand cannon on the silver screen & cathode tube, but never really any grieving by those who’ve lost loved ones, unless its a plot device.
Well, one, total gun suicides in the US have outnumbered total gun homicides by a factor of 2-3 for at least the past 20 years. [Basically, it depends which figure for gun homicides you use, as the FBI’s database does not assign a weapon to every reported murder.] Granted, each age group is going to have its own ratio, but still.
And the thing with guns and suicides is – they enable “impulse suicides”. It’s literally a button push (trigger squeeze, whatever), as opposed to actually going through the motions of hanging up some rope, or slashing your veins, or whatever else. [Pills are another good “impulse” enabler, at least if you know which ones to take.] Especially for teens, who experience not insignificant rates of various types of depression and have a somewhat lower impulse control to begin with. So by eliminating guns, let’s imagine, you wouldn’t reduce suicides by the full 20k-25k per year presently attributable to firearms, but maybe by 10k or more, which is already something.
I’ve thought lately that the measure of a successfully government ought to be, do we have fewer suicides and overdose deaths this year than last? Far better than GDP, although suffers similarly from a time lag from policy implementation to results, I think.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice to have opposing political parties arguing over who made life better and less deadly, rather than who’s exploitative status quo economic plan grew GDP under which president?
This article is riddled with reductive arguments. Pretty typical for the last few decades on this topic.
This is interesting:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm
Gun deaths vary widely by state. Undoubtedly gun ownership does, too, but I haven’t seen that stat. Surely someone has a handle on that, but I don’t find it in a quick review of the above link.
gun ownership by state
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/gun-ownership-by-state
source: links to a cbs news post which references and links to a downloadable Rand database last updated 04/2020
The text at the Rand link gives an overview of methodology and sources.
strength of gun laws/deaths by state
https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/
(click on the blue or red portion of the state’s chart for list of gun laws and varying detail about gun deaths)
methodology: https://everytownresearch.org/rankings/methodology/
Thank you, marym.
Strict gun laws mean little unless they are enforced.
SF is a fine example, Ex Sherriff Ross Mirkarimi showed up on TV wearing a Pistol after he became a “Prohibited Person”upon pleading guilty to one count of spousal abuse during his divorce.
That is a felony committed on TV and preserved for posterity.
A few months before Lamonte Mims ( Age 19) murdered Edward French (Age 71) at Twin peaks he was caught in a car in SF with a fellow convicted Felon, two stolen guns were in the car,both Felons were on Parole.
Serious felonies, two each.
Mims served three Months and was back on the streets with another stolen gun with which he murdered Edward French.
In San Francisco, which has no gun stores and some of the strictest gun laws in the USA.
Wow, one murder by a felon with stolen hand cannons in SF, yeah that means that strict gun laws and no gun stores are a bad idea.
Don’t be silly Wukchumni. The enforcement is the problem. Think of the financial peculation laws. Somehow, Congresscreatures get away with “murder” using insider trading while ‘poor old’ Martha Stewart goes to Club Fed for doing the same. (Plus, the only woman out of the cabal does time? The rest get off? Something doesn’t look right with that point alone.)
Seing how ‘things’ are developing in America now, I’d go “long” Committees of Vigilance. The problem with that is that traditionally, Committees of Vigilance represent the local Chamber of Commerce crowd, not the average citizen.
Stay safe in the Sierra’s Redoubt!
Not original. “Guns are a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”
So Sonali blames Republicans for trading children’s lives for gun company profits. So can we at least blame the Democrats, along with the Republicans, for trading the lives of the elderly, the immuno-compromised, and increasingly children also for economic growth, especially the sacred bars and restaurants?
Trading lives for profits is so SOP for America that our “leaders” use already accepted examples, like the annual highway slaughter, to justify new ones.
THE goal of our society is to maximize return on capital for the billionaires. Sometimes it’s euphemized as “economic growth” or “jobs” or “profits,” but what it amounts to in a country where the richest 10% own 70% of the wealth, is return on capital, a vastly disproportionate share of which is owned by our beloved billionaires. All else, human lives included, is secondary or unworthy of “serious” consideration.
“America is not a country, it’s just a business”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V6GHnxEJjg
Thanks for that. YOYO indeed.
It’s not a country. It is a Market. It does not have citizens. It has “consumers” instead.
Blood sacrifice is a basic requirement for almost all magical thinking peoples, so it’s a “normal” expression of the majority of authoritarian religions, particularly if the sacrifices are not of your particular ( demographic ) “faith”. This is a nonnegotiable aspect of the majority of faith based authoritarian expressions.
As long as we can stipulate that the “god” we’re talking about here is not YHWH or Allah but The Great Invisible Hand. Listen to CNBC for a while, and you’ll hear all kinds of magical thinking about the signs and wonders they attribute to TGIH.
How many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and European children will be killed by the guns we taxpayers are sending to Ukraine, which have no tracking and will end up in the criminal black market?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/politics/us-weapons-ukraine-intelligence/index.html
Subtract child gun deaths in Chicago, New Orleans and Saint Louis and the U.S. would be one of the safer countries.
The there were 37,038 gun deaths in the US 2019 on the world report. If you subtract those for IL, LA, and MO on the state report for n2019 the total is 33, 406. US population in 2019 was 328,239,523. Subtracting those 3 states would take about one percentage point off the US per capital rate. Far from “one of the safest countries.”
(I didn’t tally the state deaths on the state report. A quick search shows numbers in a 37-39K range from different sites)
US figures
See Carla’s link above: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/our-country-is-trading-childrens-lives-for-guns.html#comment-3734612
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/popest-nation.html
World figures
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country
So, how many little kids drowned last year in backyard pools compared to other countries? Once we take care of the gun problem we can all go after backyard pools next. I may be wrong, but there is nothing in our constitution giving us rights to backyard pools.
I’m fascinated by how many what-about-some-other-problem responses there are to discussions about gun control.
Many jurisdictions have regulations about fences and other safety requirements for backyard pools. Insurance companies have requirements too.
Scalia: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” Scalia wrote as he laid out certain exceptions. History demonstrates, Scalia said, “the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/16/politics/second-amendment-heller-scalia-indianapolis/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/supreme-court-heller-guns.html
Or the (IIRC) the thousands of M-4s we left behind in Afghanistan.
Those bad Rs are blocking our efforts to ban guns in order to save our children. But, they are good enough to continue supporting our policies to kill Ukrainian, Yemeni, Syrian kids.
The author is wrong to paint this as Rs vs Ds issue.
Especially when the Ds do NOTHING when they have the opportunity. They may not take as much money from the gun lobby, but they are along for the ride on this. They speechify, tweet, maybe say something mean to a Republican when mass shootings happen then, as soon as they can, they’re back to doing nothing. Biden’s recent tweets, which essentially amounted to “Somebody needs to do something about this”, show how little they’re even trying anymore.
Exactly. I mean sure, Republicans/right wingers lead the charge here, but Democrats haven’t done a thing either, even when they had the power to. They just fall right into line.
And this author does not mention or implicate them even once.
Beyond that I don’t believe equating guns with bunk bed ladders is a productive line of argument. The easy retort is that only one of these is mentioned in the bill of rights.
you can’t separate domestic violence from US foreign policy. gun violence is American as apple pie
Both parties are complicit, with presidents routinely ordering drone strikes or assassinating foreign leaders. Think of Hillary while watching a video of Libyan jihadis murdering dictator Muammar Gaddafi by sodomizing him with a bayonet, she famously cackled: “We came, we saw, he died.” She then laughed heartily.
Daniel Defense is part of the weapons pipeline to Ukraine, shipping the same version of AR-15 as used by the Uvalde shooter.
The racial analysis of gun ownership, that it is very disproportionately white, has a lot of truth in it but it exaggerates to the point of being so misleading that it can’t do much to inform any conceivable strategy.
According to 2017 Pew data, gun ownership is much higher among white than black Americans (36% vs 24%), and much lower still among Hispanic Americans (15%). However, the ownership rate for black Americans is still very high by world standards and the gap with Hispanic Americans is just as big as with white Americans.
More important is that the numbers show that gun ownership is higher for suburban (28%) than urban residents (19%), and much higher still for rural residents (46%); also, gun ownership is lower in the Northeast (19%) compared to the other regions of the US (31-36%).
How much of the racial gap is just a reflection of racial segregation and regional differences (not all of it, but clearly a lot)? And what explains the much lower Hispanic gun ownership rate?
A message of “guns are white problem” does not reflect the reality on the ground.
I’m glad you posted your comment, as I kept thinking while reading the article that Kolhatkar was not aware of the wave of new firearms owners over the last two years that don’t line up with the old stereotypes for owners. I was glad to see firearms safety classes and ranges filled up with the new owners afterwards. Often the people at the ranges are couples and families.
Also over the last two years, how many people concluded they were on their own after observing politician and law enforcement behavior?
Those numbers were from 2017 so the stereotype was only a little true even then.
The only recent numbers I could find were from Statista and were paywalled, and anyway they did not seem to break down by race. I have no idea how the numbers have changed or if the relative proportions are different, but it is reasonable to assume that new owners would draw from underrepresented groups by necessity.
As for “being on their own” it amazes me that there is so much overlap between “back the blue” and “we need guns to protect ourselves.” Logical contradiction much? Or is the “back the blue” sentiment declining? Or is that a mistaken impression?
My observation of the Back The Blue in my semi-rural area is that the people with the stickers probably are either in law enforcement or related to someone in law enforcement. (We’ll ignore my teenage son who got a BTB licence plate on a lark.)
There is a strong sentiment of firearms for protection and many people have Georgia Weapons Licences, but I’d like to mention that at a local meeting the sheriff had to advise us that we need to start locking our cars due to armed gangs coming out to steal stuff at night, the sheriff at the end of the meeting mentioned he was surprised we didn’t have That Guy in the group asking about shooting at the thieves. We all looked at each other thinking why would you shoot someone over a property crime?
How did the shooter in Uvalde get a hold of the arms and bullets?
Given his part time income, he could not afford to pay for them, unless he stole or got as a gift(!)
The new law should close that loophole too, if it exists.
Exactly. Have you priced out ammo lately? It’s ridiculously expensive.
While I was growing up, my father taught me how to shoot and we really enjoyed our time out at the range. That’s where I learned that responsible gun ownership is indeed a thing, and my dad and his fellow gun club members took it very seriously. I got more than one talking-to for even joking about anything that was an unsafe practice.
Ditto for the home front. Dad loaded his own ammunition, and he took the safety aspect very seriously.
Agreed on the price of ammo. That’s if you can get some of the less ‘common’ calibres. The local WalMart has had almost empty ammo showcases for a year now. The same with shotgun ammo. All I have seen recently is boxes of 12 gauge #7-1/2 and #8, birdshot, and not even for big birds, like turkeys.
I was taught not to shoot it unless I wanted to eat it. (Varmints, like coyotes, were the exception.) Hunting is not like fishing. You can’t play “shoot and release” with firearms.
I stopped reading when this typical everything the author disagrees with is anti-black, anti-LGBTQ, anti-undocumented immigrant, etc:
“While the language of “good versus evil” sounds simple and even benign, in fact, it is often coded language for good white heterosexual guys versus evil Black and Brown people. Or LGBTQ folks. Or undocumented immigrants. Or “woke” white folks.””
How convenient, no mention of good versus evil (or even the numbers) in the record number of homicides (overwhelmingly black on black) in American cities with strict gun controls and Democratic leadership.
Serious question: where did you hear that gun violence was worse in places with better gun control?
These are the facts:
“Stricter laws in a state are related to lower levels of gun violence and homicide, and that universal background checks, checks for ammunition purchases and ID requirements are related to lower rates of firearm injury morbidity and mortality, and that there are more mass shootings in states with higher levels of gun ownership, and more firearm related homicides in states with permissive conceal carry laws.”
” Gun control ” is part of the PMC-Liberals hate-fueled culture war against the classes and sectors of people they understand to be the major ” gun culture ” sectors.
As long as hate-based PMC-Liberal “gun control” culture warriors insist on persecuting gun culture and gun ownership on the part of millions of non-lawbreakers, they will spur the ongoing purchase cycles of guns.
And they will of course do it again, by working for symbolic performative “bans” on “assault style weapons” while very carefully refusing to enact a whole ecosystem of mass shooter detection and prevention laws. And they will drive a whole new cycle of gun buying.
And as communities learn from the Uvalde police response-prevention response, the police are here to persecute you, not protect you. So more communities will buy and train on the tools and instruments needed to protect themselves from the people that police very carefully disdain to protect them from, as well as to protect themselves against the police themselves in more and more cases and places.
” Black guns matter”. And they will matter more and more to the PMC liberal racist gun control movement which will discover non-gang non-member black gun owners as a whole new group of people to wage their performative gun-control culture war against.
” Gun control” is part of a PMC Liberal hate-based culture war against ” Redneck Americans”. I remember decades ago back in college a hallmate noting that America’s “gun problem” was too many guns in the hands of “reactionaries” . . . which is the PMC Liberal way of saying ” too many guns in the hands of people with the wrong color neck”.
The DC FedRegime Democrats can either work for an ecosystem of laws and rules designed to keep potential mass-shooters from getting guns to mass shoot with. Or the DC FedRegime Democrats can work for a performative moral-superiority-display “ban” against ” assault style rifles” which is designed to fail on purpose in the Senate. It will also drive another cycle of gun buying. Guess which way the Democrats will go.
I would like to see some well researched info on how much of the murder suicide epidemic among young men is due to the SSRI (Zoloft) epidemic. I have a hunch it is causing a lot of the problem but not sure who to trust on this issue.
I have been on . . . off . . . on . . . SSRIs for a few cycles. This time to just stay on. I finally had a practitioner with experience in military psycho-medicine tell me that if someone was being put on an SSRI, ” you had to watch them like a hawk” for the first six weeks to couple months or so . . . because the SSRI counter-depresses some expressions of brain-mind faster than others. It permits the “do something” energy level to return a little bit and faster than it permits the ” feel better” factors to come back . . . . so one can still be depressionized and anxietised and get back the energy to act out on the depression and/or anxiety.
A Swedish study showed that SSRIs cause violence in young men, which they don’t in other people.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26372359/
This seems relevant since Chris Martenson goes through a list of mass shooters on psychopharmalogical drugs here.
“has traded”…already done.
Countries without the 2nd amendment beckon, Australia, New Zealand, England are examples. I suspect it’s probably more simple to move than effect a change in the US Constitution, but this won’t stop the whinging.
I live in a semi-rural area. Takes law &order 8-minutes – AT BEST – to get here. So that’s 8 minutes during which I have to protect my family as best I can. For me, this means a gun.
So does this mean I like the children being killed by wackos in schools? Of course not. Similarly I don’t like the 40k yearly deaths in automobile crashes but I don’t advocate for eliminating cars.
Meanwhile, pro gun advocates love to raise the issue of Chicago, and their many gun deaths, by observing the super strict laws which keep guns out of the hands of the law abiding, which don’t keep them from criminals. In essence, the point is Chicago prefers to leave the law abiding at the mercy of the criminals. There’s more than a grain of truth in this.
Then there’s the argument of allowing teachers and staff to be armed. Not as Marshals in the wild west, but simply as a matter of removing the certainty, which presently exists in the minds of predators, e.g. there are easy pickings in schools.
Since there are concealed permits already, nothing much needs to change other than local regulations prohibition educators from being able to exercise their constitutional rights. But it seems those on the left would rather see the slaughter continue, instead. Could it be because this aid/promotes their agenda of disarming the citizenry? This, versus bearing the thought of teachers who elect to be armed? I guess there’s a greater risk in their mind of teachers wigging out and shooting little Johnny, but whatever.
Here is a video talk by Beau of the Fifth Column explaining why he thinks calls to “arm teachers” are miscast even deeper than the teachers themselves think they are, and why such calls are performative, frivolous, and made in complete bad faith.
Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nT6LHDMO70&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=5
(Beau, by the way, has stated that he hopes the DC DemParty electeds take the serious approach of . . . seamless no-exceptions background checks, red flag laws, a several-day period between ” buying” the gun and “taking physical possession” of the gun, and the other methods which would be part of an regulatory and observational ecosystem designed to keep mass shooter wannabes from getting or keeping guns to do their mass shootings with. He hopes they don’t take the frivolous performative approach of passing a “ban” on types of weapons in the sure knowledge that it will fail in the Senate or be failed in the Supreme Court. He would like to see something actual actually achieved.)
Here is another follow-on video talk from Beau on the same subject . . . arming the teachers. He gets inside the head of people who suggest it and then goes over why it is more hazardous than helpful in the real world we live in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVZ1c9O2L6Y&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=4
Sonali Kolhatkar article is an example of why the American Left is so weak. As a putative leftist pushing negative clichés that reduces everything to identity politics and hate, which excludes most people, she makes it seem that being on the left means being as simple and bigoted as she is.
What goes around comes around. The mayhem that the US has been exporting for décades is coming home to roost. New laws will not fix the problem (dosen’t hurt to try though). Until the government starts acting in a civilized manner, people will continúe to act in the same way.
I read once in the 70s when they started to market the AR (with wood stock) they never sold very well.
Do people really think they can fight a goverment that has AC 130s ,or reaper drones?
Plus if you are involved in a “defense style shooting” ie robbery etc ,you better have a Lawyer even if justified its going to cost you alot in legal fees
Even in the 90s there wasn’t this crazy culture thing .
Last week’s “60 Minutes” TV show had a segment where they had a class of EMTs teaching 12 year olds how to use “bleed packs” on their fellow students. Bleed packs are meant for military use by medics on the battlefield and now they are part of the inventory in a 12 year old’s backpack which is made of kevlar by the way.
Is this OK with all the gun lovers out there?
Well… Korean-Americans were fortunate to have their guns during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Fire and police were not responding. People in the Korean business district were abandoned to their fate. Being armed allowed Korean families and shopowners to defend themselves to a degree.
https://qwant.com/?q=korean-americans+los+angeles+riots+roof+koreans
A constant theme on websites like Asian Dawn is that progressives treat crime against Asian-Americans as acceptable, negligible collateral damage in the social-justice wars. Some even argue that people with East Asian background have it coming for being culturally and politically “white-adjacent.”
51 almost all black people shot at and by black people in Chicago Memorial Day weekend.