You say that now, but you tell me that again when you’re in a life and death struggle with a deer across the meadow with raging death in his eyes and a taste for blood! Then you’ll be sorry all you have are 30-round magazines for fuckin’ pistols and high-caliber sniper rifles and six-round-capacity shotguns! There are no civilians in hunting, Private!
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I hope Colbert reads this: Nothing is done because guns have a mystical, religious significance to a lot of ignorant or just-plain-foolish people, similar to a belief in Holy Relics, St. Christopher’s medals, crosses, and so on.
The NRA and other pro-firearm groups have convinced a lot of people that owning guns will magically protect them from any and all danger, whether it comes from a “Crazed Shooter” or “Big Government Obama”.
Any sensible person knows owning guns is more dangerous than not owning guns, but the gun-nuts have a religious faith in firearms that defies reason.
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…or they have a tiny penis!
Well, my bathtub could cover both north and south america in water molecules if spread thin enough and with enough space between the molecules. I think you wanted to say ‘in xxx cm of water’, so here we go with calculations!
Lake Superior has a volume of 12,100 km³.
The Americas (North+South+Central, which I’m assuming you meant to include) have a top-down (i.e., not taking texture into account at all) area of 42.55 million km², which is 42,550,000 (approximately) km².
Dividing the volume by the area, and multiplying km by 1000 to get meters, we have 0.2844 meters of water, which is 28.44 cm, or 11.2 inches. You’d be forgiven for rounding this up to “about a foot”.
So, I think you meant to say:
Lake Superior is so deep, it could cover both North and South America in about a foot of water
Except Rosewood is exactly where these things happen - where people are armed to the hilt. The shooter had mental problems - he went to special schools. You mean his parents had no clue. He bought all of his guns legally.
Hear hear.
Seductive beaver mascot. McCarthy hearings.
Colbert is pure genius, or his writers are.
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I don’t recall hearing it before either, but denial is certainly a part of the process and can be extremely powerful. I’ve got to believe, however, that some of those family members ar
Or, just imagine you’re stuck on an island and a bear is eating your kayak. What are you gonna do then? Stand there shrieking and crying at him until he finally goes away and leaves you with a half-eaten kayak? Are you going to spray him with pepper spray? Nope, you’re gonna blast that hairy bastard back to the enchanted forest he came from.
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Well, maybe “off label use” would be more apropos.
For instance, Oxycontin has real legitimate uses, which include long-term pain relief. However, using it to “dull the pain of life” or “put someone out of their misery forever” is not the use for which it is sanctioned.
Likewise, guns have a place in hunting (tradition), self defense (not protected but claimed as such), and police/military (well-regulated militia, Constitutionally protected). While taking one out to shoot a bunch of people is an obvious and foreseeable side effect of fetishizing gun ownership and use as a “self reliance” measure of one’s worth, it is not what has been sanctioned.
I guess the Oxycontin metaphor would be true if we had a contingent of very well-funded and very vocal people fighting to ensure that there are never any regulations on the sale or use of the drug, because the one primary effect (long-term relief of debilitating pain) was mentioned in the nation’s founding documents (maybe “pursuit of happiness”?) Even then, you lose the intimidation factor (“You can take my Oxycontin from my sleepy, respiratorily-depressed fingers!” loses a bit of its punch).
Liability insurance made mandatory for all gun owners. That could not be interpreted as infringing on the right to bear arms any more than demanding proof of liability insurance to drive your car in order to license it.
Each and every gun, so if you are stockpiling guns it starts to get pricey.
Liability insurance might make a mother like that of the Oregon shooter and Adam Lanza think twice about putting guns into the hands of their children that they know to be highly unstable.
And surviving victims and the families of those murdered should sue the hell out of the parents.
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We know what to do, but we won’t do it, because mostly white men have an irrational fear of “others.”
Ugh. Yes, just like in every other civilized country in the world which doesn’t fetishize gun ownership and proficiency, killers routinely show up at schools with arsenals of weapons they illegally obtained and open fire.
Back in the real non-RWNJ world, when insane people want to kill themselves and others in other parts of the world, they have to risk being caught because they are taking many illegal steps (procuring guns or explosives and ammunition), and tend to show up with weapons like knives and clubs, and routinely get taken down before they have done much irreparable damage.
The Onion article sums this up perfectly. What logical deficiency has infected such a large swathe of the country which causes refusal to see that the entire rest of the civilized world has found a solution to a problem we claim is intractable? I mean, I understand the right wing is obsessed with “American Exceptionalism”, but really? We have to be exceptionally efficient at murdering one another?
The most depressing thing about news like that coming rom Oregon this week is not the lives that were cut short, but the reminder that politics in this country is so fundamentally fucked up that over half of the country’s leadership can’t add two and two and come up with anything other than “more guns!”.
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he then follows up with how someone won’t be Speaker since he was honest in public
I disagree. We don’t pretend it won’t happen again. We know absolutely it will happen again. And again. And again. We’re immune to it and with each additional attack we bury our heads in the sand a little bit more. Oh yeah, another shooting just took place. Remember to send your prayers. Nothing will change until our current political process begins to function again. We have to reverse the insidious culture of hate, anger, fear and distrust that holds our country hostage. Until this is gone nothing will change.
Thank you Stephen.
You said you don’t know what to do. OK…
What I am going to do is what Andy Dufrene did to build the Shawshank Prison Library. I’m gonna email my State senators and my Housecritter an email a week for as long as it takes. Then I’ll email their successors for as long as I’m around.
The problem isn’t scary assault rifles. Semi-auto weapons have to go. And all hand guns.
If I’m not mistaken open carry in schools is allowed in Oregon under federal law. He owned 14 guns, took six with him. In this part of OR most people own guns and use them without hesitation.
Well said, my friend.
Stephen has always been one of my favourite comedians…and even his snark cannot cover the depravity of the trajectory of the Right–so he decided to get serious here.
It will get worse…for the marketing reason that Crazy (a) stimulates Baggers (b) catches more in the Marketing Net, and (c) exhausts and enervates most compassionate and thoughful people (see BeattyCat’s sabbatical)
zombies?
Exactly.
For a sense of the gun-nut freakout at the idea of armed black and brown people, take a look at the comment section under any Conservative website article about Black Panthers who say every black person should be armed.