We lost the battle for the democrat party's soul long ago

[jfish26]

Perfect example of why the 2nd amendment is important. Scroll through for the gist of it. Or dig deeper elsewhere for more info. But its a real life story of guns stopping political corruption

NO ONE SERIOUS IS TALKING ABOUT REPEALING THE SECOND AMENDMENT.

[KUTradition]

that’s all he’s got

boogey man

[Mjl]

Lets say we ban ar15s only. As some of you want. Here's what happens:

Hand gun violence becomes the new talking point (majority of gun violence is committed by hand guns already, despite ar15s being the focal point used to manipulate you)
Big government slowly starts working to get people on board with banning hand guns

Banning ar15s is not an endgame for them. Its a stepping stone. Thats why we can't budge

You know they have been banned before, right?

And, you are the one that has brought up the recent uptick in gun murders... you know when that uptick started... right?

[jfish26]

Lets say we ban ar15s only. As some of you want. Here's what happens:

Hand gun violence becomes the new talking point (majority of gun violence is committed by hand guns already, despite ar15s being the focal point used to manipulate you)
Big government slowly starts working to get people on board with banning hand guns

Banning ar15s is not an endgame for them. Its a stepping stone. Thats why we can't budge

You know they have been banned before, right?

And, you are the one that has brought up the recent uptick in gun murders... you know when that uptick started... right?

Why are Americans shooting strangers and neighbors? ‘It all goes back to fear.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... ers-crime/

Across the country this month, at least four men have opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of “stand your ground” laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?

Why did a 65-year-old man kill a 20-year-old woman who had accidentally pulled into his Upstate New York driveway? Why did an 84-year-old man fire two bullets into a 16-year boy who had mistakenly knocked on his door in Kansas City? Why did a 43-year-old man in South Florida allegedly shoot at a 19-year-old Instacart delivery driver and his 18-year-old girlfriend who had arrived at the wrong address?

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating.

Since 2020, the share of Republicans who said that crime is rising in their community has jumped from 38 percent to 73 percent, according to the latest Gallup numbers from last fall. Among Democrats, that same concern climbed only 5 percentage points to 42 percent, marking the widest partisan perception gap since the polling firm first asked the question a half-century ago.

Reality is more complicated. A Washington Post crime analysis of 80 major police departments’ records found that reported violence across the country in 2022 was lower than the five-year average.

And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years.

Homicides and thefts, however, rose during the pandemic, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data — though not to the levels of the 1990s.

A Post analysis, meanwhile, found that states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55 percent higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the past two years than the states that didn’t have these laws, which remove the duty to retreat from an attacker before responding with potentially deadly force.

Let's take a breath here - states with stand-your-ground laws had a 55 percent higher homicide-by-firearm rate in the past two years than the states that didn’t have these laws.

Ok. We'll carry on.

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors: Over the past three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79 percent more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN, according to a Washington Post analysis of closed captioning provided by the GDELT AI Television Explorer and the Internet Archive.

So.

What's rising is not crime itself, but the perception of crime. And it's plain as day that that rise in perception is being fueled by conservative media.

And why would conservative media push false narratives?

Because: it's a grift.

[randylahey]

Lets say we ban ar15s only. As some of you want. Here's what happens:

Hand gun violence becomes the new talking point (majority of gun violence is committed by hand guns already, despite ar15s being the focal point used to manipulate you)
Big government slowly starts working to get people on board with banning hand guns

Banning ar15s is not an endgame for them. Its a stepping stone. Thats why we can't budge

You know they have been banned before, right?

And, you are the one that has brought up the recent uptick in gun murders... you know when that uptick started... right?

Its really spiked the last 2 years

[japhy]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

[jfish26]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

And it's not just that. I think people are failing to understand how the pieces fit here.

Grifting is so, so, SO easy and lucrative.

Say your profit margin on Right Light beer is $5 per six pack. To clear a million bucks, you've only got to sell two sixers each to 100,000 suckers. That's a lot of suckers in one sense, but thankfully for you in a more meaningful sense it's only a fraction of how many possible suckers there are; you will recall that Trump proudly got 74 million votes in 2020, and that's a good proxy for the size of the sucker pool (never you mind that that number was not-so-proudly 7 million fewer than Biden).

So, your 100,000 suckers is less than 0.14% of the pool. To keep your margins high, you guerilla-market to get to that 0.14%. You appeal to the worst instincts of the pool. You make that pool feel as if NOT buying two sixers of Right Light means they're literally in bed with scary trannies.

This won't work on all 74 million potential suckers in the pool, but you don't need it to; it only has to work on 0.14% of the pool for you to clear a million bucks!

(Of course, in your grift of a small fraction of the sucker pool, you ALSO more generally turn possible suckers into violent, armed, anti-trans psychos. But that's their mental health problem, and the trannies' mental health problem, not yours.)

It's like this with everything. The griftseeking relies on injecting poison into the bloodstream of our political discourse. Some people react to the poison by buying a lot of Right Light. Others react to the poison by, lol, working to further marginalize, stigmatize and demonize vulnerable parts of society. But lol the grifter didn't mean it!

[randylahey]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

Lol. Or when covid happened. Life as we knew it shut down for awhile. And everyone was on the internet too much and lost their God damn minds

[jhawks99]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

Lol. Or when covid happened. Life as we knew it shut down for awhile. And everyone was on the internet too much and lost their God damn minds

Hmmmm

[KUTradition]

“on the internet too much”

says the guy who wears out the “copy link” function on twitter

[randylahey]

“on the internet too much”

says the guy who wears out the “copy link” function on twitter

All of are. Nobody is acting like social media is good for anyone's mental health

[KUTradition]

all of [us] are?

if you say so

[jfish26]

all of [us] are?

if you say so

Keep in mind that one of the planks of rube logic is false equivalencies.

The rubes will never, ever, ever admit or agree that they are far crazier, and in much more damaging crazy ways, than the lefties. They will always just flood the zone with shit, and say that because lefties add some shit to the zone, the rubes (and their exploiters) are not to blame for the zone being flooded with shit.

[japhy]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

Lol. Or when covid happened. Life as we knew it shut down for awhile. And everyone was on the internet too much and lost their God damn minds

I'm sorry for your loss.

[randylahey]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

Since you randomly try to bring January 6th into conversation all the time. This phase had farrrr more to do with the increases in crime in this country than anything related to jan 6th

[jfish26]

Jesus Christ, the whataboutism and false equivalencies.

[japhy]

So you are saying this spike started around the time the insurrection got thwarted and the big lie became a rallying point for angry delusional gun nutters, yeah that sounds about right.

Since you randomly try to bring January 6th into conversation all the time. This phase had farrrr more to do with the increases in crime in this country than anything related to jan 6th

Again, sorry for your loss.

[randylahey]

January 6th, which was nowhere near the travesty the media made it out to be, never happens if we didn't normalize rioting

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

January 6th, which was nowhere near the travesty the media made it out to be, never happens if we didn't normalize rioting

Paging pdub!
If you ever create a HOF of posts on here - I nominate the post above.
I can't help but wonder if randy shares his thoughts and opinions on other forms of social media without using an alias.

[Sparko]

The BLM protests were beset by right wing nut agitators. And police violence that caused them and sustained them. January 6 was supposed to draw patriotic progressives to oppose the MAGA insurrectionist thugs, giving the yam yeti an excuse to declare martial law. Or as MTG would say Marshall law. Plan B was to just destroy stuff. Then call in the military and cancel the election.