Guns: Infinity

[Johnnie]

[DaveInSeattle]

and now its 18 kids...3 adults...



madness. Total, absolute madness.

[L-Jam3]

This one is really fucking hitting me hard. Shock. Grief. Sadness. Anger. And maybe worst of all, despair. The fucking GOP pussies won’t do anything because they need laundered NRA money to win elections. Motherfuckers. Fuck every one of them.

[Nonlinear FC]

The much MUCH sadder truth is that this isn't just the evil NRA bogeyman anymore. I used to sort of be able to think that lots and lots of Americans were just being hoodwinked by one evil organization. I thought that with true leadership and enough tragic deaths, enough of my fellow countrymen will come around.

The older I get, the more I see... There are vast swaths of this country that are just irredeemable. This is just who we are. Too stupid and too recklessly hard-headed and hard-hearted to even reconsider the durr-hurr, mouthbreathing idiocy spewed out by the Right.

Makes me sick, but mostly, at this point, just makes me very very tired.

[Johnnie]

[The Sybian]

What drives me nuts in this video, well several things, but first is the childlike black and white, good guys and bad guys mentality. Everyone who murders is an across the board life long bad guy and would get a gun anyways. Everyone who has not committed a crime to date is an always good good guy. We can't limit good guys access to guns because all the bad guys will get guns anyways, because all criminals are the same and their crimes are pre-destined and restricting access to guns won't stop them. Is it possible people who go on killing sprees were good law abiding people once and snapped with a mental illness? Or some wouldn't have gotten guns to go on a killing spree if they weren't so easily available?

Not to mention the false narrative of "Libruls want to take YOUR guns!!!!"

[Nonlinear FC]

It's just fucking exhausting. So so incredibly lame and easy to rebut arguments, but so many Americans are fucking morons.

I'm moving down to Mexico with brian.

Wait... Fuck.

[The Sybian]

It's just fucking exhausting. So so incredibly lame and easy to rebut arguments, but so many Americans are fucking morons.

I'm moving down to Mexico with brian.

Wait... Fuck.

Since you are looking for sexy time with Swampers' wives in other countries, Brian's ex is available!

[Nonlinear FC]

It's just fucking exhausting. So so incredibly lame and easy to rebut arguments, but so many Americans are fucking morons.

I'm moving down to Mexico with brian.

Wait... Fuck.

Since you are looking for sexy time with Swampers' wives in other countries, Brian's ex is available!

LET ME HAVE MY DREAMS

[Giff]

Thinking about starting a thread called “My ‘hatred’ of Steve Kerr”.

[mister d]

I like Kerr a lot but at this stage, what does addressing McConnell as a reasonable person accomplish? The Gallego approach might isolate some “centrists” but if you can’t muster up that adversarial courage now, what’s the fucking point? He’s not going to ask Luka to score under 25 tonight in order to present a more balanced product for the fans. An absolute torching at that podium will do more to reel in people who aren’t paying attention than an angry-but-mannered appeal.

[Johnnie]

Do you mean 'hatred ' as in you like what he has to say but you're conflicted about his on the court stuff? Genuinely asking.

[Giff]

“Hatred” in that I truly hate no one because of sports no matter what I say in the heat of the moment. I only hate those who truly hate. I know Steve Kerr deep down is a good person.

[mister d]

[mister d]

And here's what parroting "Blue No Matter Who" allows for. National party jumps in late to save an anti-abortion, NRA A-rated "Dem" against a challenge from the left.

[Johnnie]

[The Sybian]

And most of the people against gun free zones argue this proves their point... if teachers had guns, this wouldn't have happened! Of course, there were armed police officers on site who couldn't stop an armed gunman in body armor, but teachers or civilians with little or no training would have no problem and not miss and accidentally kill more innocents.

[Johnnie]

Ah, yes. Beto is the 'sick son of a bitch.'

[HaulCitgo]

Does anyone know why someone goes and shoots a bunch of people. Just mad and angry for some reason?

[pruitt2]

And most of the people against gun free zones argue this proves their point... if teachers had guns, this wouldn't have happened! Of course, there were armed police officers on site who couldn't stop an armed gunman in body armor, but teachers or civilians with little or no training would have no problem and not miss and accidentally kill more innocents.

And they expect teachers making under $50,000 to add this to their list of duties.

[tennbengal]

Soooo...good guy with gun stopped bad guy with gun but 21 still dead 18 of those children. Seems like there may be a flaw in that plan.

[HaulCitgo]

Yeah but that school resource officer needs to win. Serious question about training and competency. The kid was 18 and just bought the guns a couple months. This is no army soldier.

[HaulCitgo]

Makes me look at the lady cop a bit different at carpool today. I think she'd light you up but I need to know. The kids old private school had armed officers all over campus. Racial thing really but I had all confidence in those guys. Bunch of brothers. Actually taught my son a lot about relationships with police.

[Johnnie]

[The Sybian]

Soooo...good guy with gun stopped bad guy with gun but 21 still dead 18 of those children. Seems like there may be a flaw in that plan.

I'm sure I've said this after other mass shootings, but even trained police officers are generally terrible in these situations, so expecting untrained "good guys with guns" is just a horrendous and idiotically simplistic solution. You just can't train for the adrenaline rush of an active shooter situation, and the amount and level of training most law enforcement officers get is shockingly minimal. When I worked for Homeland Security, the Chief Inspector at one of the airports was legally blind and passed his firearms training every year. Someone would literally tell him where to aim as he shot at the target. He was required to carry a loaded service weapon while on duty. My father had to go to a gun range 3 times a year and score a certain number of points shooting at a target. That was it. He said the required score was pitifully low.

[The Sybian]

Paul Gosar is the worst





The GOP accuse Dems of politicizing this incident to push for gun control, but holy fuck! I hope the gunman's family sue Gosar for libel and slander (there are videos of Gosar speaking at a rally making the same claims).

[sancarlos]

[Nonlinear FC]

Soooo...good guy with gun stopped bad guy with gun but 21 still dead 18 of those children. Seems like there may be a flaw in that plan.

I'm sure I've said this after other mass shootings, but even trained police officers are generally terrible in these situations, so expecting untrained "good guys with guns" is just a horrendous and idiotically simplistic solution. You just can't train for the adrenaline rush of an active shooter situation, and the amount and level of training most law enforcement officers get is shockingly minimal. When I worked for Homeland Security, the Chief Inspector at one of the airports was legally blind and passed his firearms training every year. Someone would literally tell him where to aim as he shot at the target. He was required to carry a loaded service weapon while on duty. My father had to go to a gun range 3 times a year and score a certain number of points shooting at a target. That was it. He said the required score was pitifully low.

Not that I want to send anyone down this rabbit hole, but...

There are dozens (probably hundreds, but I got tired of watching) of clips on YouTube of body cameras in active shooter situations and, yeah, a lot of them have dozens of shots being fired and not hitting the suspect/person/victim/whatever. It's speculated that in a lot of instances where someone is riddled with bullets it's because the police doing the shooting aren't all that confident in their shooting ability, so they just unload and hope for the best.

[Johnnie]

Soooo...good guy with gun stopped bad guy with gun but 21 still dead 18 of those children. Seems like there may be a flaw in that plan.

I'm sure I've said this after other mass shootings, but even trained police officers are generally terrible in these situations, so expecting untrained "good guys with guns" is just a horrendous and idiotically simplistic solution. You just can't train for the adrenaline rush of an active shooter situation, and the amount and level of training most law enforcement officers get is shockingly minimal. When I worked for Homeland Security, the Chief Inspector at one of the airports was legally blind and passed his firearms training every year. Someone would literally tell him where to aim as he shot at the target. He was required to carry a loaded service weapon while on duty. My father had to go to a gun range 3 times a year and score a certain number of points shooting at a target. That was it. He said the required score was pitifully low.

And I think I've mentioned it too. The amount of weapons training I get in the military is extremely minimal. I think I need to qualify once every few years at this point? I honestly don't remember because the last time I did was 2 bases ago prior to a deployment 4+ years ago.

And I've been through Fieldcraft Hostile twice, multiple active shooter exercises, and went to the range fairly consistently on my own dime because I wanted to be proficient in the event I needed to. I haven't even been to the range in nearly 3 years either. Firing is a perishable skill. So I can't even consider myself decent right now.

These fucking people are sadistic and out of their minds.

[mister d]

Dow Jones up almost 200 points.

[tennbengal]

https://defector.com/what-its-like-here/

What It's Like Here

---Albert Burneko (Defector)

When my oldest was little, sometimes in uncertain moments fear would pile up on him in a great wave, the awful way it can for any little kid who does not yet have an older person’s experience of what fear mostly is like. The fear itself would be scary to him, alien and incomprehensible, in a way it isn’t for an adult. He could not always see it and he could not ever know what it would do. As it piled up it would become scarier than whatever caused it.

A little kid cannot know what an older person usually knows, that the fear probably will go away, and soon, even if all you do is wait and continue breathing. All a little kid knows is that the fear is getting bigger; it is inside and it is making itself bigger. A little kid does not know anything to do about it. All a little kid can do is hope that the bigger people will notice, and will know how to take it away, and will take it away. That is what crying is for: It is a way of asking for mercy.

Even when he was little, he tried to be brave. His lip would wobble. You would catch him in that in-between moment, the line in the center of the road, frozen between hiding the fear and showing it to you so that you would help him.

There was a freak storm one summer afternoon when he was eight, a downburst, the kind of storm that happens every once in a while and mostly isn’t all that big of a danger to anybody inside a sturdy house, but it caught us by surprise and we hurried down to the basement. All at once the sunlight, so oppressively hot one minute ago, had been replaced by black sky, roaring wind, thunder so sudden and loud even indoors that adults flinched and threw their hands over their heads. The giant oak trees outside looked like some fist larger than imagining was yanking them around by their tops, like hair. Every window filled with what looked like explosive violence. It seemed impossible that the forest would not come crashing down on us.

He was afraid and trying not to be. We tried to reassure him that it was OK, that just as quickly as it had come the storm would pass, that we grownups had seen two dozen summer storms more-or-less just like this one, that once you understood that you were not in serious danger it could even be kind of thrilling and fun to ride it out, that the worst that could happen is we might have to clean up some damage to the roof. (But then why were we down in the basement?) That hey, this is just what living in the forest will be like sometimes. What he needed, though, was not for us to tell him not to be afraid; he needed for us to take the fear away before it got too big, to make it not like this, and we couldn’t. His resolve broke and he cried, a little at first and then, briefly, a lot, before the storm passed. He was safe the whole time, or anyway reasonably safe, but the fear was just too big. He just needed Mama and Daddy to make it better: The bedrock of a little kid’s understanding of the world is that we can do that, and he was still, amid all his courageous bravery, all his earnest effort to be big, a little kid.

I can picture his face that day right now. Right before the first sobs, the fear in his eyes turned to the most naked and vulnerable of grief. He had learned something awful, just then, that he couldn’t have put into words if I’d asked: That the storm and the fear would go away or they would not, but if they did it would not be because anybody took it away for him; it would not be because of mercy. It would just be what happened. That’s what it’s like here.

Parenthood is a lot of things. Most of them are wonderful. One of them, though, is the gradual painful piling up of all these small moments when you watched your kid learn something new and cold about the world, when you witnessed their gradual terrible coming to learn that bad things, fear and pain and loss, are not ever stopped simply by the fact that they make you feel bad, that that is not how it works in the world someone brought them into. When you could not give them what they’d believed you could. When you couldn’t make it better. When they were all alone.

It is hard to bear even the smaller of these moments. To love your kid is to wish you could give them the mercies the world withholds. To be haunted by a terrible ghost, the knowledge of what you cannot prevent them from learning: what it’s like here. You can only fail at the effort; no little kid anywhere ever gets a life as simple and joy-filled as they first think it might be. Even the happiest kid will have their heart broken when the world betrays them, and it will. Capriciously and without hesitation or remorse, likely without even noticing. The consolation is that they might also learn good things about it, that they might have adventures in it, that they have it in them to strengthen and grow into someone kind and courageous and good who can wring joy out of this tired old rag and share it with others.

What if they don’t get to? What then? Nineteen little kids got shot to death in their classroom on Tuesday, in Texas, for no reason on earth other than that they were small and alive where a man with a gun who wanted to kill little kids could get to them. What was it like for them, for each of the 19 little kids who began the day as a sleepy bed-headed goofball and ended it in a morgue? In the last moments they ever got to have, I mean. As little kids stranded alone to face a darkness beyond description or understanding. I picture my son’s face. How can I not? I see him lost in his maelstrom, swallowed by it, not knowing what this is or why it’s like this. Pinned by something too big and terrible to comprehend. Wanting only for it to stop, for it not to be like this. I remember how he looked around for my eyes during that storm, for me to know what to do when he did not, for his parents to make it better—in that irrational little-kid way, for the possibility that the bad way this was making him feel, lost and lonely and small and afraid, might cause the world or someone in it to be merciful and to make it stop. Trying to be brave and hold his lip in place, and then crying as that gigantic fear engulfed him. I remember the grief on his face right before the tears came, and how sharply I wished I could have protected him from it.

But I also remember that a few minutes later, he felt better. That an hour later he was playing video games with his brother and cackling and doing weird voices. That the next morning we cleared a car-sized pathway under the tree that had toppled across the driveway, and drove to the beach. That life went on and eventually he became a healthy wiseass 13-year-old leaving socks all over the place. Kids are astonishingly resilient when allowed to be, when given a chance to be. He had learned something sad and disappointing during that storm, but he was not going to write the world’s verdict just yet, when it still had beach trips and Mario Kart and people who love you in it.

Those 19 little kids will never get to learn anything else about the world after what this country showed them in the violent, incomprehensible last moments of their lives, when the people who loved them could not protect them or be with them or help them make sense of it. What they learned then, whatever they learned, is the verdict. Watch America decide that this is the only way things can be. Watch it sentence more little kids to abbreviated lives and lonely, terrified, violent deaths. Watch the grownups squabble and roll the dice on every small new person who greets the world with eager curiosity, who doesn’t know better than to just assume that life can be gentle and guided by care. Watch them negotiate each little life against what they want to pretend to believe about some garbled shit written on a piece of parchment 200 years ago by no one who could imagine what happened in that school on Tuesday. This is what it’s like here. The next schoolroom filled with murdered children will include you or it will not, but either way it won’t be because anybody who didn’t want things to be like this could take it away, or because anybody with the power to take it away cared to try. It won’t be because of mercy. It will just be what happens.

[Johnnie]

It's speculated that in a lot of instances where someone is riddled with bullets it's because the police doing the shooting aren't all that confident in their shooting ability, so they just unload and hope for the best.

Exactly why we have a load out of 7 30 round magazines when we deploy with an M16.

We're not all snipers. All the bullets we'd waste can be in training.

[pruitt2]

The fact that there's only one country in the entire world that needs armed guards at elementary schools says it all.

And these bought and paid for assholes in government deflect and create strawmen and invoke prayers to a God who would let 9 year olds get massacred... if they were real Christians, you'd think they'd fear hell at this point.

[Square Rob]

The fact that there's only one country in the entire world that needs armed guards at elementary schools says it all.

And these bought and paid for assholes in government deflect and create strawmen and invoke prayers to a God who would let 9 year olds get massacred... if they were real Christians, you'd think they'd fear hell at this point.

This. Very well said.

[A_B]

This fucking talking point about making schools "hard targets" makes my blood boil. What if...and I'm just spitballing...they weren't FUCKING TARGETS AT ALL?

[mister d]

I don't know how a cop can live with themselves having stood outside while 19 kids were murdered and I don't know how a parent could continue to live in that town with those cops.

[Johnnie]

I found this comment to be interesting a bit. It's from the perspective of someone who was a victim in a school shooting.

Kinda long, so I used the spoiler button

[+] spoiler

[DaveInSeattle]

Excuse me...and excuse the language....

But the police trapped the shooter, in the fucking room with the little kids and teachers, and that sat on their asses for 40 FUCKING GOD DAMNED MINUTES and did NOTHING but stop parents from rushing the building? And then when they finally decided to get off their fat fucking asses and actually do something, they COULDN'T BREAK DOWN THE DOOR!!!!! They had to find a staff member with a god damned key?



Look at these pathetic cos-playing mother fuckers.



And they sat around waiting for the Border Patrol SWAT team to get there?

Look at them....every single of one of them should be out of their jobs, TODAY. Not tomorrow...not next week. TODAY.

But, oh yeah...we can't even say the words "Defund the Police". I read that the Uvalde Police Department is 40% of the city's budget. For what? What exactly is all that money going towards?

Ok...I'm done...wait, I lied. One last thing:



This mother-fucker had a press conference, and then went to a fund raiser. Beto should have beat his fucking ass on that stage.

[HaulCitgo]

This is not zero sum. You can increase security and training and you can build up mental health support and funding and you can pass gun control legislation.

[Giff]

Our schools don't need to look like prisons. And all they're going to end up doing is harassing the students. We need to stop scapegoating mental illness right fucking now and ban assault-style rifles.