I tend to agree. Because I have lived in countries in which people WERE FAR LESS FATALISTIC AND APATHETIC ABOUT VOTING WHILE AT THE SAME TIME HAVING FAR FAR LESS OF A REASON TO HOPE FOR ANYTHING TO HAPPEN AS A RESULT OF VOTING…
When I see people lined up for an I-phone. Or a ticket scalper. Or a concert. Or a college basketball game. I simply do not excuse apathetic points of view about voting in a country like this one.
I might add that I DO NOT buy this rubbish about “lack of education” or “poverty”. In Latin America, sometimes political parties have coloured ballots because of the numbers of people who are “alalfabeto”.
POLITICALLY, I look at these non-voters (including my own brother who has always had a casual relation with the Ballot Box) in the same light as the most racist, vile, xenophobic TeaPottBagger. Because, hand-in-hand, they both are working very hard to strip away what is left of the Social Contract to the Right–in exchange for better abilities to kill and maim each other.
This is not to say that I do not love my brother.
After all, enough posters here have TeaBagg relatives who are their dearest ones.
Great show. Colbert’s and Stewart’s and Wilmore’s are/was my favorite shows that I rarely miss. Witty and very intelligent humor centered on current events political and otherwise.
Imagine if misuse of any other product caused 345,000 fatalities and over a million casualties in the last ten years that would not have resulted in Congress establishing a Cabinet level department to fund the research and studies to find solutions.
If any other product’s misuse caused the carnage the gun product does, the Wayne Lapierres of those industries would be dragged before Congress to explain why existing patents to make safer products are not part of routine production. They would be grilled mercilessly as to why they object to research that could find solutions to save not just one or two but tens of thousands of lives.
Instead Congress wastes time money resources on political investigations that achieve nothing. They unfairly grill and treat like a criminal Cecile Richards because she runs the nation’s biggest health care organization that saves the lives of poor women. Compare Ms. Richards’ treatment with Wayne LaPierre’s whose product takes the lives of many poor women. They heap praise on LaPierre and fall over one another to pass legislation to block gun victims’ lawsuits and research to find solutions to gun violence. It means little to Congress that their job is to act in the public interest when their A+ rating from LaPierre is at stake.
“Quinn was only 18 years old,” his family noted in a statement. “He just graduated in June from Roseburg High School. Yesterday was his fourth day of college. Quinn was funny, sweet, compassionate and such a wonderful loving person. He always stood up for people.”
The Cooper family went on, “Our lives are shattered beyond repair. We send our condolences to all the families who have been so tragically affected by this deranged gunman. No one should ever have to feel the pain we are feeling.” […] “We are hearing so many people talk about gun control and taking people’s guns away. If the public couldn’t have guns it wouldn’t help since sick people like this will always be able to get their hands on a gun(s).”
The Coopers closed by saying, “We need to be able to protect ourselves as a community and as a nation. Please don’t let this horrible act of insanity become about who should or shouldn’t have a gun. Please remember the victims and their families. Please remember Quinn.”
Yesterday, a parent of one of the students not killed in the shootings was interviewed on MSNBC and went on a rant about how we need more guns and fewer restrictions, not the opposite. She went on and on about how the shooter would probably have been stopped a lot sooner had there been more staff and students with guns on that campus, completely ignoring the fact that there were students carrying concealed weapons and those students didn’t do a damn thing. She was a raving idiot on national television and I cannot tell you how much I just wanted to slap her. I’m so angry as it is and she just increased my level of general disgust in this regard.
When the families of the victims make a point of arguing against gun control, when they can envision no change in laws that might help prevent the next death, even as they are literally burying their own murdered loved ones, you realize you’re dealing with cultists. Deprogramming is needed, not discussion.
The movie out now Captive also depicts events in Georgia one century later than the event you described. Brian Nichols was on trial for rape when he beat a security officer at the courthouse within an inch of her life, took her gun and used it to kill his trial judge, the judge’s court clerk, a deputy who attempted to stop him, and another federal agent whose car he commandeered (and took his gun also). Than he took the woman Ashley hostage, the subject of the movie.
I have talked about this before as you know, but if the gun in Captive contained existing patented technology to lock it from shooting in the thief’s hand, none of this would have happened. Nichols would not have seen the value to risk his life to get a weapon he could not shoot, and the officer need not have feared losing the weapon in a struggle.
While I agree that gun culture plays a role in gun violence, the solution to ingrained culture is hardest to find, while engineering solutions are easiest.
This not only is associated with guns, but nearly every wedge issue adhered to by TeaBaggRepubs.
It has a bunch of characteristics and foremost of these is the sense of Nativist, Know-Nothing Cultism. The second characteristic I will mention flows from the first:
The Lake Superior Effect****…The DEPTH of feeling.
There are few people on the,Left who have this kind of depth of feeling. The kind of feeling in which any adjustment in reality induces madness.
**** Lake Superior is so deep, it could cover both North and South America
Contrast that parent with the parent of Allison, the murdered TV journalist in Virginia. He is on a crusade for more gun regulation. I think the parent in Oregon is less about finding solutions and more about confirming life long views of guns and their value.
I wonder if it’s also what they need to tell themselves right now. Maybe they need to believe there’s nothing that could’ve been done to save their child than to deal with the fact that there IS something that could’ve been done, and that they and the people they support are the very reasons nothing has been done. I imagine that would be tough for any parent to reconcile, to admit to themselves that they’ve contributed to the problem that resulted in their child’s death.
You got it. Can’t blame the parent (who is also a victim here) if it would compound her pain to think she may have lent her support to policies that may have contributed to her child’s death.
Given the conservative bastion this area is, I wonder if their reaction/response isn’t also the result of countless friends and neighbors, even some family, offering sympathy in the same breath as decrying calls for increased gun regulations.
I don’t know who said this first, but it’s just great.
"How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion — mandatory 48-hr waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he’s about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence, an ultrasound wand up the ass (just because).
"Let’s close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun.
“It makes more sense to do this with young men and guns than with women and health care, right? I mean, no woman getting an abortion has killed a room full of people in seconds, right?”
I’m sure that’s a huge factor. I was too shocked to hear gun-nuttery coming from victim’s families to think about it but of course. But this is the first time I’ve ever heard victims’ and near-victims’ families making a point of defending the current state of gun laws. It just underscores how extreme, irrational, and intransigent the views have become.
