It’s about frickin’ time. The good news that there is enough of a shift in attitude that we might even get some better legislation under Hillary.
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Well said. That would be a powerful way to fill the time as opposed to Ted Cruz’s reciting “Green Eggs and Ham.”
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If I was a terrapin, I’d sue.
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I’m sure the family of those we have lost to gun violence would be willing to provide biographies and remembrances of their loved ones that could be read on the floor. There is, sadly, no end to the amount of material that could be supplied to support this filibuster.
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Not just Orlando, but Aurora, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino… The list depressingly goes on and on and on…
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This IS how you break the power of the NRA.
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So I called Bob Casey’s DC office and the woman I spoke with couldn’t have been nicer. After putting me on hold to check, she told me that Senator Casey’s calendar is quite busy and that she didn’t think he had plans to join the filibuster. I told her that taking the first steps to address gun violence thru more intelligent gun control was one of the most important actions this do-nothing congress could take (I was much nicer to her…) and that, as a staunch pro-lifer who has evolved lately re: gun rights vs. the right to life, liberty, etc., I fully expected to see Sen Casey on the floor of the senate to aid these other Democrats in extending this filibuster as long as possible.
We’ll see but I expect next to nothing from Casey. I still haven’t forgotten that his single vote, or lack thereof, prevented the override of W’s veto on stem cell research. Literally. 66 yeses for the override, including every single Dem except Casey, but he wouldn’t do it.
In any case, take a moment and all you senator(s). I won’t call Toomey’s office since the 'pubs are already giving him shade by referring to the Manchin/Toomey bill.
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It’s an historical anachronism as is the 3d, which guarantees our right not to have soldiers quartered on us.
They should be repealed together. Neither the 2d nor the 3d have any REAL application in the 21st century we’re living in.
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It’s about time!!
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Although he is interred in a grave, that disgusting right wing extremist Tony Scalia is complicit in the murder of innocents in Orlando, San Bernadino and elsewhere across America. His craven acts have emboldened the pro-mass murder, “stuff happens” folks at the Republican party and the NRA. He is responsible in part for the culture of religious bible-based bigotry, hate mongering that have led to rise of Donald Tramp.
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Fuck you turtle man.
I haven’t got much else to say. I’d love it if a dem would get up and say, ‘fuck you NRA’ in about a million different inflections.
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One thing that these pols can do is talk. This sort of protest is right up their alleyway and it’s time to earn their pay.
Plus, it isn’t like there is a shortage of material to talk about on just the gun epidemic alone. It could take months to get around to having to read Dr. Seuss.
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So happy, I’m in tears. Democrats just grew some balls and will hopefully force Republicans to grow some values.
Too many luces lost to get to this. Please let it pay off.
McConnell, we are watching to see how you handle this?
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This quote from Ambulance Blues is a reference to Young’s one-time partners David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. I have no idea what it’s doing in this thread, with its inherent suggestion that Neil Young is anti-gun control. The quote has nothing whatsoever to do with guns or the debate about how to reduce mass killings in the USA.
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I was alive in the 1960s. A wee child, but alive, born and raised in the border south. And I’ve lived deeper south since the 1980s.
Trust me. Shit has changed. I’ve seen it. It’s real.
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The NRA has something like four million members.
If half the people who voted for Hillary joined up they could completely take over the organization.
I just called my Senator’s office. I don’t mind pissing in the wind if NRA goons get spattered.
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Please let me plagiarize… it’s perfect.
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The MCX is a lightweight weapon designed for use by Special Forces personnel. The civilian version has been painstakingly tailored to be as close to the military version as legally possible. It’s also highly modifiable, and capable of incredible accuracy in a pretty impressively lightweight frame. Honestly, for what it is, it’s a tremendous feat of engineering.
That’s ‘for what it is’. And what it is is not a hunting rifle. While the civilian version remains a semi-automatic rifle that’s incapable of higher rates of fire, and so not an ‘assault rifle’, the fact remains that this gun is designed from the ground up for hunting people. While many of the people I know who are gun enthusiasts will say that - like the AR-15 - this is a perfectly serviceable tool for taking the heads off of rabbits or dropping a white tail deer, the weapon itself was not designed with that in mind at all. Yes, it’s a perfectly serviceable tool for hunting game. I own a combat-ready Paul Chen longsword* with a 48" blade that’s a perfectly serviceable tool for chopping down bamboo stalks to keep the damn things from growing 18’ tall. That doesn’t make it what the damned sword was designed for.
This is a killing tool, and it was designed for killing human beings. It was designed at every stage for killing human beings. It’s designed around the 300BLK, or 300 Blackout cartridge, a 7.62mm bullet designed to give the M4 Carbine and other AR-based platforms a heavier round capable of superior performance at both high-power and subsonic uses. Subsonic use, btw, occurs when you use a suppressor on a weapon to make it quiet. So you can kill more people. You don’t use a suppressor to hunt deer, after all - by the time the report gets to the deer to spook them, your target’s already dead. You use a suppressor to kill people.
That’s what this gun is for: to kill people, to kill them efficiently, and to kill them quietly.
And it’s still relatively new - less than a year on the market - but like the MPX before it, there will almost certainly be conversion kits available within another 6-18 months to render it capable of fully-automatic fire. It will be highly illegal to use these kits, but as no one element of the kit will be anything that can be easily regulated (outlaw pins? Files? 3-position switches?), it almost certainly won’t be illegal to own the kit. Just like it’s not illegal right now to own an aftermarket kit to turn an AR-15 into a select-fire capable M-16-equivalent. This weapon, though, is lighter, and even more controllable than the current .223LR generation of ARs. And it will remain so, the first time someone actually uses that conversion kit to make it a better tool for killing crowds.
This weapon has no business being available for civilian ownership. I can see people wanting to shoot these at a range, but honestly, if that’s all we’re going to be doing with our guns, then maybe we should consider moving to a ‘go to the range and rent the damned gun for an hour’ model. And if anyone does tell you that this a perfectly reasonable hunting weapon, beat them mercilessly about the head and shoulders with exactly what this gun was designed for.
Edit for clarity: I also don’t own the sword for killing people - it’s rather a beautiful display piece, and hey, it’s arms. I know my rights! Today is Tuesday! Tuesday is Soylent Green da-what? Wednesday? Well, foo. Soylent blue sucks.
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Every time someone rails against “political correctness,” smile, because it means that we have been successful at making it socially unacceptable to be overtly racist in public. Yes, racism still exists. Micro aggressions exist. Dog whistles exist. But those who employ them have to pretend that they are not being racist while doing so.
It’s not enough, but it is progress.
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That is an excellent idea. Read their names into the Congressional Record. Every single one.
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