[Spoonman]

"Thoughts & prayers..."

Fucking virtue signalling, ey readers?

Incidents like this remind me that at least in my eyes, the USA is a first world economic powerhouse with a tragic (mostly) third world society.

[Cyclist]

Some interesting charts...

America's gun culture - in seven charts


While calculating the number of guns in private hands around the world is difficult, figures from the Small Arms Survey - a Swiss-based leading research project - estimate that there were 390 million guns in circulation in 2018.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41488081

390 million guns. That's around 70 million more guns than people!

[Malcolm Armsteen]

[Andy McDandy]

Find a way of making serious money out of disarmament. They'll be like Bhutan overnight.

[Bones McCoy]

Find a way of making serious money out of disarmament. They'll be like Bhutan overnight.

Unfortunately it's about selling "stuff".
* More gunz.
* More ammo.
* Bulletproof schoolbags.
* Anti shooter training for the 5 year olds.

[Nigredo]

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas ... 83df6e4683

I suggest not watching any of the very distressing video footage on this, the real story is that in American policing it's apparently permissible to just stand to the side and spectate a crime in progress, only getting involved when it's a convenient moment to do so. I say apparently, the supreme court have actually backed the police's dithering in multiple cases in the past, and set precedent that the ONLY job the police have is to punish people who break the law, not to prevent crimes or protect anyone at all.

Why Americans aren't rioting just for that I have no idea.

[davidjay]

https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-texas ... 83df6e4683

I suggest not watching any of the very distressing video footage on this, the real story is that in American policing it's apparently permissible to just stand to the side and spectate a crime in progress, only getting involved when it's a convenient moment to do so. I say apparently, the supreme court have actually backed the police's dithering in multiple cases in the past, and set precedent that the ONLY job the police have is to punish people who break the law, not to prevent crimes or protect anyone at all.

Why Americans aren't rioting just for that I have no idea.

They have a police force. We, for all their faults, have a police service.

[Boiler]

Find a way of making serious money out of disarmament. They'll be like Bhutan overnight.

Unfortunately it's about selling "stuff".
* More gunz.
* More ammo.
* Bulletproof schoolbags.
* Anti shooter training for the 5 year olds.

Have a listen of today's "Today" programme and the interview with the Texas senator who's also a life member of the NRA.

His answer? "We need to harden our schools."

[Bones McCoy]

Find a way of making serious money out of disarmament. They'll be like Bhutan overnight.

Unfortunately it's about selling "stuff".
* More gunz.
* More ammo.
* Bulletproof schoolbags.
* Anti shooter training for the 5 year olds.

Have a listen of today's "Today" programme and the interview with the Texas senator who's also a life member of the NRA.

His answer? "We need to harden our schools."

The problem with this approach is that you also need to harden you movie theatres, shopping malls, bars, places of worship, shops, parks, streets, sports facilities, children's play areas.
Maybe not a problem if you think that real life would be improved if it was like a Terminator movie.
I suggest that a majority of people don't wish to live like that.

Hardening schools though: Maybe a proper job for Katherine Birbalsingh.

[Boiler]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0017k8r

Do please listen to the interviews in this, from 1:47:20 in.

[The Weeping Angel]

Do read this.

https://www.vox.com/23141551/mass-shoot ... un-control

This form of defeatism, rooted in so much heartbreak, diminishes the work of survivors and activists like Gabby Giffords and the Parkland students, who haven’t taken it as a given that their tragedies will be repeated in generations to come. It disregards the success that they’ve been able to bring on a state level, expanding background checks, banning bump stocks (which later became federal policy), and making it harder for high-risk individuals to get and keep guns. It is the least we can do, to honor their hard work and the memories of those who were killed, to not preemptively declare that they have lost.

[Spoonman]

Have a listen of today's "Today" programme and the interview with the Texas senator who's also a life member of the NRA.

His answer? "We need to harden our schools."

I see there was a talking head on F*x News suggesting that schools should be supplied with ballistic blankets. Well I guess it's one step on from selling bullet-proof backpacks.

I mentioned this before on the previous fire-burned forum but I reckon there is only one multi-pronged way an awful lot of 'murican's will change their ammosexual mind - that is starting to associate gun ownership with groups and/or certain sections of American society that are absolutely number one enemies with the Jesus/guns/babies demographic. For example, have some gay men (the bigger the celebrity the better) look and handle lustfully at some rifles. Get Amy Schumer to pose having an AK-47 stuffed down the front of her knickers. And then astroturf the hell out of groups like "American Muslims for the Second Amendment" showing photos of men with long beards and women in niqaabs being photographed in front of the star-spangled banner with a copy of the Quran & an American passport in one hand and an All-American sub-machine gun in another. You'll soon see loads of Jeebus loving 'murican's calling for restrictions on gun ownership faster than you can say "critical race theory".

Yes, I'm serious. Because if the killing of twenty white school children at Sandy Hook didn't change a damn thing, the shooting dead of nineteen schoolkids in a mostly Hispanic area certainly isn't going to.

[Watchman]

Something like this?

[Spoonman]

Something like this?

That's certainly one way of looking at it.

[MisterMuncher]

California doesn't have open carry anymore because the Black Panthers had the audacity to do so.

[Spoonman]

California doesn't have open carry anymore because the Black Panthers had the audacity to do so.

I understand that the above is true...

Throughout the late 1960s, the militant black nationalist group used their understanding of the finer details of California’s gun laws to underscore their political statements about the subjugation of African-Americans. In 1967, 30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, “The time has come for black people to arm themselves.”

The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions...

...In contrast to the NRA’s rigid opposition to gun control in today’s America, the organization fought alongside the government for stricter gun regulations in the 1960s. This was part of an effort to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans as racial tensions in the nation grew. The NRA felt especially threatened by the Black Panthers, whose well-photographed carrying of weapons in public spaces was entirely legal in the state of California, where they were based.

https://www.history.com/news/black-pant ... ulford-act

[Boiler]

California doesn't have open carry anymore because the Black Panthers had the audacity to do so.

Why am I thinking of this?

[Nigredo]

Jim Jefferies makes a lot of good points here and the gun control argument is so absurd he doesn't even have to try that hard to make jokes around it.

He's very firmly Australian though so would recommend headphones for the language if you're watching at work...

[Boiler]

"No way to prevent this" says the only nation where this regularly happens.

[Nigredo]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61604652

Mounting anger at the fact that Tough Real Men (tm) cops were wrestling grieving parents to the ground while an active massacre of toddlers was ongoing.