It’s even started to creep into Canadian debates. The anti-gun crowd is now using “assault style sporting rifle” since they can’t get away with “assault weapons”
Well, I'm some average guy from a small town in Canada, not a politician from the U.S., so I wouldn't take my verbiage as gospel since I have zero control over what would happen in that country.
Let's make this easier, more specific. AR-15s have been used in multiple mass shootings. They have killed many, many innocent Americans.
Let's start there. Let's ban AR-15s from here on out and go from there.
yeah, some of those speeches were pretty impressive again.
so impressive in fact that I sadly wouldn't be surprised if they were some boneheaded "those are hired actors" claims from certain people again.
I've already seen some idiots on Twitter claiming that these kids are nothing but pawns being controlled and manipulated by the Dems and gun control groups. It's all a big left-wing conspiracy. Hillary! Emails!
Until both sides are will to come to the table and engage in fact and evidence based discussions, nothing will happen.
You mean like the NRA does?
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Using made up terms to try and instill fear or ignore the laws as they exist isn’t the way to effect change. Once people realize that, maybe there can be a real discussion
You need to spend five minutes watching anything on NRATV. That would have you change your mind. As it is, you're uninformed and don't really understand the issue or any of the outcomes.
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Originally Posted by llwhiteoutll
“Assault style weapons”
Why not use “semi-automatic rifle”?
Because there is a difference. A significant difference. There are all sorts of semi-automatic weapons that are used for purposes other than chewing up a target. Assault style weapons are designed for one thing, and one thing only - to inflict as much damage in as short a period of time as possible. End. Of. Story.
And that comes from someone who owns an AR-15 and enjoys shooting it. I don't take it hunting, because it is not designed for hunting.
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It’s even started to creep into Canadian debates. The anti-gun crowd is now using “assault style sporting rifle” since they can’t get away with “assault weapons”
Because you believe in responsible gun ownership and protections against the greater good does not make one anti-gun. Just the opposite in my view. I know plenty of gun owners, like myself, that recognize there is a great responsibility that comes with having and maintaining a weapon. Unfortunately, there are too many idiots out there that think just because you can breathe you have the right to own a gun. Far from the truth.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Let's put this into context shall we. At the time of the drafting of this language the country did not have a standing army. Each of the states had a small group of professionals, referred to as the militia, responsible for the defense of the colony/state. This was much like the National Guard today. People were allowed to maintain their weapons so they could be called up in support of the militia. Hence most of the colonists did not keep or maintain muskets, because of that requirement. Just a reminder, only 3% of the colonists took up arms and fought the British, and only 40-45% were sympathetic to cause. It should also be noted that the weapon of the day was the long musket. A weapon that could fire two-three rounds a minute in the hands of a very skilled operator. A similar weapon today would be the 50 caliber black powder rifle. If people want to own that, more power to them. I would wholly support that claim!
The biggest problem with the majority of American gun owners, especially the NRA member types, is the paranoia that grips their every waking moment. They claim they want to own weapons to safeguard the country and protect their families from a tyrannical government. Seriously? We are the ####ing government. You want to change the behaviors of government, get involved in the mechanism and vote your dip#### representative out of office. Owning a gun doesn't change a damn thing. Frankly, the government laughs at your collection of assault rifles and side arms. One apache gunship can end an entire modern militia in its tracks. A single drone can eliminate any number of AR wielding #######s, and doesn't put any of the government at risk. All those small arms don't impose a threat to the government. Period. Gun ownership, especially for assault weapons, is ridiculous. Limit weapon access by action, and allow civilians to only have access to manual action weapons. Also restrict the number of rounds in a magazine. Simple and effective solution.
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I've already seen some idiots on Twitter claiming that these kids are nothing but pawns being controlled and manipulated by the Dems and gun control groups. It's all a big left-wing conspiracy. Hillary! Emails!
Do you mean the NRA on Facebook...
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Stand and Fight for our Kids' Safety by Joining NRA. Today's protests aren't spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones."
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I'm onboard with the student manifesto, but I have a fear or a problem with
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Change privacy laws to allow mental healthcare providers to communicate with law enforcement
I firmly believe that this would make people that would willingly seek help, from going to see a medical or psychiatric professional.
If as a person that might be feeling anger about something like a divorce or whatever, and knowing that if I went to a medical professional and an admission of this might result in the police showing up at my door, I might not voluntarily seek health.
Its the same with people that are already paranoid or suffer from serious mental illnesses that create paranoia or even fear of exposure.
I also don't get the use of the CDC to research gun violence.
All the other stuff, I'm clearly on the same side as them.
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Schools are already designated as gun free zones under federal law. Taking one onto school grounds (even without malicious intent) is an offense and has been since the 90s. It was George H. W. Bush who signed it into law.
Pretty clear that intent of the sign was to try to impart that it is not illegal to bring a firearm to a school, and using a small child to deliver that message makes that much worse.
The point of the sign is that because guns are so prevalent and easily available, even to children, there is just as much risk of children bringing guns to schools as bringing peanut butter.
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I'm onboard with the student manifesto, but I have a fear or a problem with
I firmly believe that this would make people that would willingly seek help, from going to see a medical or psychiatric professional.
If as a person that might be feeling anger about something like a divorce or whatever, and knowing that if I went to a medical professional and an admission of this might result in the police showing up at my door, I might not voluntarily seek health.
Its the same with people that are already paranoid or suffer from serious mental illnesses that create paranoia or even fear of exposure.
I also don't get the use of the CDC to research gun violence.
All the other stuff, I'm clearly on the same side as them.
Mental health providers are already compelled to reach out to law enforcement if they feel an individual poses a threat to themselves or to someone else. This is nothing new and more of a restatement of what is already an accepted practice.
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Really that's what gave it away! not the appropriate or otherwise use of the word hyperbole in a sentence?
At that age, kids have just leaned the definition of these words and haven’t forgotten the proper usage. I think it’s more likely it was written by a kid than an adult. I am pretty certain kids can use “literally” more accurately than adults.
People get tied up far too much in the definition of assault rifle etc. You ought avoid that by simply defining an unacceptable rate of fire for a civilian firearm. Any firearm or modification to a firearm that exceeds said rate goes the way of the dodo.
You talk seriously about actual true universal background checks, if that means every private or gun show sale (or change of possession) has to go through a broker to do that check then so be it.
You talk seriously about safe storage and Legalizing what it means. You make actual gun courses real, effective and mandatory....same with licensing. I say this after witnessing an ass hat with a concealed carry permit yesterday have his gun and holster fall out of his waist band of his sweat pants multiple times yesterday at Walmart. Clearly this is a guy who has no business with a concealed carry permit. And I can tell you that there wasn’t one person in the store witnessing this that felt safer because there was a good guy with a gun.
These aren’t perfect solutions and I don’t pretend they are but people need to stop looking for the 100% solution on everything.
Above all to actually get to good solutions they need to allow gun violence research and follow the science.
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My comment about the poster being a fake was tongue-in-cheek.
It's entirely possibly that kid has plenty neat enough writing, because he's a student and they, you know, write, and likely knows what hyperbole means more than most adults because he had an English class the day before.
People get tied up far too much in the definition of assault rifle etc. You ought avoid that by simply defining an unacceptable rate of fire for a civilian firearm. Any firearm or modification to a firearm that exceeds said rate goes the way of the dodo.
You talk seriously about actual true universal background checks, if that means every private or gun show sale (or change of possession) has to go through a broker to do that check then so be it.
You talk seriously about safe storage and Legalizing what it means. You make actual gun courses real, effective and mandatory....same with licensing. I say this after witnessing an ass hat with a concealed carry permit yesterday have his gun and holster fall out of his waist band of his sweat pants multiple times yesterday at Walmart. Clearly this is a guy who has no business with a concealed carry permit. And I can tell you that there wasn’t one person in the store witnessing this that felt safer because there was a good guy with a gun.
These aren’t perfect solutions and I don’t pretend they are but people need to stop looking for the 100% solution on everything.
Above all to actually get to good solutions they need to allow gun violence research and follow the science.
I think everyone here understands that a change in laws today won't result in a change in outcomes tomorrow. It will take some time. Actually, I think the vast majority of folks calling for gun control understand that, but the language of protest doesn't usually allow for subtlety. So you have to say STOP NOW or call for action NOW, even understanding that the effect will take time.
As others have pointed out, while there are gazillions of guns out there already, there's a reason why gun sales are still strong. For most folks who want guns, the easiest way to get them is to go to Walmart or some place like that. Eliminate the easy route, and things get harder, prices go up, etc.
Police offices say folks turn in guns all the time. I'm sure others fall into disrepair. If we added a buyback program, that would reduce numbers as well.
There's no way to snap our fingers and eliminate guns in the US. And that's OK. The trick is understanding that "solving" the problem in this case doesn't mean 100% elimination. Any reduction in gun violence is a good thing.
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I'm onboard with the student manifesto, but I have a fear or a problem with
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Change privacy laws to allow mental healthcare providers to communicate with law enforcement
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Originally Posted by New Era
Mental health providers are already compelled to reach out to law enforcement if they feel an individual poses a threat to themselves or to someone else. This is nothing new and more of a restatement of what is already an accepted practice.
Are you sure of what you're saying here, New Era? "Changes privacy laws" seems like they want to change the law. Right now mental health professionals (assuming the same as Canada) can only reach out to police in cases of an immediate threat to themselves or someone else. That's a very high standard and for good reason.
They appear to want that to broaden so that there's more "dialogue" of mental health issues to law enforcement.
According to Rick Santorum, those kids shouldn't protest against guns, but instead take CPR classes and prepare for active shooter scenarios.
You really can't make this #### up.
This is actually the stupidest thing, GWB included, that I've ever heard any elected person say. It's freaking mind numbing. Cash me outside Rick. How bow da.
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Today has been a day of awakening for me, and I suppose it has been for many of my age-contemporaries, too. As a fifty-one year old man, I don’t cry much, but, wow, have I been a weepy mess all day today watching these magic kids. And that’s the term that keeps coming back to me: These kids are magic.
They somehow don’t seem real. They seem more like fully formed wizards who just popped into existence, as if the shooter who tore through their high school just showed up expecting sheep and found warrior-paladins instead.
But then it makes even less sense, because they aren’t just from Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. They are kids from everywhere. And they keep demanding that the media recognizes that they are from everywhere. These kids, these magic kids, keep saying to the interviewers, GO TALK TO THE OTHER KIDS. GO TALK TO THE BLACK KIDS. GO TALK TO THE POOR KIDS. GO TALK TO THE LATINO KIDS.
Then, as happened time and again today, when the cameras finally turn to the black kids and the Latino kids and the poor kids, THEY talk about other kids.
This isn’t a story about Parkland, Florida and a really smart AP class with great prospects. It’s about a full-on generation shift that caught me, and I’m guessing you, totally by surprise. These magic kids are from EVERYWHERE.
Which begs the question: If they came from everywhere, then how did they happen?
The NRA and their sad, angry ilk have a readymade explanation: They’re actors. They’re following a script. They’re shills of Big Peace. Whatever. All that is insane, of course, but you can almost understand the confusion. The kids just don’t seem normal. They aren’t what we understand children to be, which of course is to say, “They aren’t like us. They aren’t like we were when we were kids.”
And so we cast about for an easy answer.
But perhaps the answer isn’t easy at all. Perhaps the answer is through a mirror darkly.
Millennials (who, believe it or not, are now in their thirties) and these Gen-Z kids have been painted with the most unflattering colors by my Gen-Xers and the Baby Boomers before us. We’re the ones in positions of power in the world and what do we do? We call them all a bunch of crybabies. We give them endless grief for their constant insistence on things like “white privilege” and “non-binary sexuality.”
We mock them for their safe spaces and their sensitivity to being triggered by language. We tell them they need to toughen up. We tell them that the world is a harsh place, as if we know better than them that brutal truth.
I think the reason we are so surprised by these kids is that we’ve spent so many years telling ourselves that they were “snowflakes” who were going to get blown away by the real world, that we missed the coming storm.
God, were we wrong.
The truth is these kids didn’t spontaneously erupt from Florida a month ago. They have been deconstructing the bull#### of our generations for their entire lives, and now they’re ready.
Not for nothing, these are the kids that were born, literally, in the months after September 11, 2001. They came into a world at war. They grew up in the shadow of ever-threatening “Red Alert Levels” and endless “Active Shooter Drills” and the ubiquity of “Rekt” videos on 4Chan. They did not know one day of school before Columbine. They did not know one day of life without the threat of terrorism. They have not known one day of their nation in peace. Like it or not, they have lived every day of their lives, twenty-four-seven, on the battlefield.
We give them endless grief for playing video games. We tell them they should be outside, at school — but for so many of them, the schools and their streets are “soft targets.”
God, I’d stay in and play games where the bullets weren’t real, too.
These kids grew up with the native ability to parse the OBVIOUS racism of Trayvon Martin’s murder, of Tamir Rice murder, of Philando Castile’s murder, of African American teenagers in McKinney, Texas getting the #### kicked out of them by police for being in a “white” neighborhood for a pool party. Just two days ago, they watched Stephon Clark get put down by over-amped, trigger-happy police while he was in his grandmother’s backyard. They can see with their own two eyes that our society is grossly unjust — and so when the camera focuses on David Hogg, we shouldn’t be surprised that this smart-dressed white boy says, TALK TO THE CHILDREN OF COLOR, as he did just yesterday in an interview with Axios. We shouldn’t be surprised when he says “Our parents don’t know how to use a ####ing democracy, so we have to.”
They’ve seen how badly we’ve screwed up a free society for their entire lives and they are, in their own beautiful way, “calling bull####.”
The kids didn’t magically arise in a fortnight; their whole lives have been calling bull####.
They are digital natives with an ability to see the whole grand world. As such, they note that we’re the only economically advanced nation in the world where 30,000 people die from gun violence every year. They aren’t cloistered in their own communities playing kickball, so they know that those deaths are skewed all to hell in the obviously racist, classist ways that are evidenced in the above mentioned state-sponsored crimes of racial bias. They know that Trayvon, Tamir, Philando and all the others aren’t aberrations in the data set.
These kids might just be learning to shave, but Occam’s razor is intuitive. You need to train yourself into NOT believing obvious truths. Maybe Gen-Xers and Boomers have learned to bend themselves into a knot over that, but these kids? Not a chance. Of course they call bull#### on that.
When the “adult” generations sit on our hands and say we can’t just get rid of AR-15s because of the NRA and their power, of course they call bull#### on that.
When politicians who are blatantly sucking money from horrible people who manifestly make their world worse, of course they call bull#### on that.
We adults — and FINALLY with some level of self-consciousness in these matters, I’m speaking as a middle-aged, white, privileged, man — have been so busy lampooning their beliefs, that we missed the point where they just went ahead and actually included everyone into their generational tribe — regardless of their race, gender-identity, sexuality, religion, or class. We’re still arguing about gay wedding cakes and we’re still OBVIOUSLY treating kids of color worse than white kids. Of course they call bull#### on that.
What we missed, and why we’re so surprised that they have “magically” appeared, is that these kids threw our bull#### overboard years ago. They don’t need our rigidity. They don’t ever again need to hear someone say, “Hey, everyone is a little bit racist.” They have no time for our “God-hates-the-gays bigotry.” They have no place for our transphobia.
Grow up on a battlefield and you lose your illusions. They’re well over our befuddling myths of the way the world must be.
Moreover, they know they’ve got a fight ahead of them.
They are looking square into a future denuded of the possibilities we older folks took for granted. They can see, quite clearly, that like plagues of locust, our grown-up generations have stripped the nation’s resources, be####ted the global environment like we had a spare planet tucked in the garage under a tarp, presided over the destruction of our own middle class, and for a kicker, welcomed a parade of nationalist buffoons with fascist tendencies back into power.
These kids can see the tribalism and they know that soon they’ll be ascendant.
Their tribe is different than mine or yours. For now, they’re young, but for all the rest of their time on this planet, they will be multiracial, non-binary, non-dogmatic, digitally native, omnivorously curious, and significantly bigger than either the surviving Boomers or the aging Gen-Xers.
These kids didn’t spring suddenly from nowhere. They’ve been watching us and learning from our nearly countless, self-imposed mistakes. They’ve seen us run in pointless ruts, like cattle through an abattoir, and they’ve decided that’s not for them, and so they called bull####.
They’re calling bull#### and they’re not making any safe space with their language for us if you consider this withering fusilade of truth from Mr. Hogg.
“It is truly saddening to see how many of you have lost faith in America because we certainly haven’t and we are never going to. You might as well stop now because we are going to outlive you.”
Yes, thank God, you will. But for as long as I can, I’ll follow you into the future. I just hope I can keep up. I have so much to learn.
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The GOP and NRA keep pushing this ridiculous narrative that these kids are trying to take their precious guns away, which isn't the case at all. While a total ban would obviously be ideal, it's also not realistic, and the kids know that. They've made it perfectly clear that they're talking specifically about military-style guns (AR-15s), and that they're simply asking for more serious, comprehensive, and common sense legislation in regards to these weapons.
And yet slimy dirtbags like Santorum and Rubio keep pushing this bulls**t that their 2nd amendment rights are being threatened, which is the furthest thing from the truth. I don't know how these a**holes can sleep at night knowing that they're willfully bowing down to the NRA and trying to smear and distort what these kids are trying to accomplish. It's beyond shameful, and I'm certain there's a special place reserved in hell for these turds.
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Man was shot dead by police because according to them, the cell phone he was holding looked like a gun. Police also muted their on-body mics at one point.
Are you sure of what you're saying here, New Era? "Changes privacy laws" seems like they want to change the law. Right now mental health professionals (assuming the same as Canada) can only reach out to police in cases of an immediate threat to themselves or someone else. That's a very high standard and for good reason.
They appear to want that to broaden so that there's more "dialogue" of mental health issues to law enforcement.
Yes, I am certain of what I am saying. From time in law enforcement, being a psychologist, and having a wife who did counseling, I know this cold. What they are suggesting already exists and happens more than anyone knows. Mental health providers are compelled to communicate with law enforcement when someone is a possible threat to themselves or others. Period. Nothing what they have asked for in this regard is new.
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