I’m feeling so uneasy with everything I’ve been seeing. I keep thinking about what we will be this time next year, and if shit hits the fan, what is your plan? I’m queer and was politically active in 2020, so I would potentially be considered a political enemy.
The only blueprint I can think of is what you do in an active shooter situation; Flee, Hide, Fight.
I know there’s that romantic notion of “don’t be a coward, get out and protest”, but I remember the brutality of the 2020 protests firsthand, and even then I thought “thank god I’m going toe to toe with the CPD and not the CCP”. Next time is going to be different. The president now has authority to send drone strikes. Protests and riots don’t stand a chance agains missiles and live rounds.
Flee- I have an Uncle in Montreal who my family could potentially use as a way to at least temporarily escape the chaos. The hope I’d have is that Canada and other countries would accept American refugees, however that’s not a guarantee.
Hide- If borders are closed, lay low and move away from major cities if possible. If civil war breaks out, try to get away from the violence even if you think your side will win. Todays losers may be tomorrows victors.
Fight- If cellular data/ social media algorithms can keep track of you, and surveillance can make sure there’s no movement, this would be the last resort of desperation. I guess if possible try to either find a group for safety in numbers, or conversely go guerrilla as groups of resistance would make easy targets.
Sorry my mind is running and I’m getting scared.
I have, because of my father, dual citizenship with the UK and now that Labour has gotten in, I feel like that’s a legitimate way out, so I am expediting getting a UK passport.
Due to a technicality of the sort that their bureaucracy will hate, I also have the possibility of German citizenship. I’d much rather have the ability to live and work in the EU, so I’ll probably start working on that when I get to the UK.
My daughter is queer, I’m Jewish and (although this may not sound like a problem to some of you, I suggest researching it) my wife is a librarian, so I want an exit plan.
Nothing will probably happen if he gets elected.
Keep my head down and power through the next 4 years same as last time.
Last time there was a pandemic that killed millions of people…
I hate to say it but if Trump wins, it will not be the same as last time. Trump and the Republicans have both learned a lot from their last go around, and they’ve got the benefit of a captive supreme court at their back this time. Last time they had no clear plan for what to do if they won. This time around their plan is very clear and very scary.
This is VERY MUCH not last time. There’s intent this time, you really need to tune in.
I’m on page 449 and there is nothing about banning contraceptives.
Seems to be referring to the whole section
In the context of current and emerging reproductive technologies, HHS policies should never place the desires of adults over the right of children to be raised by the biological fathers and mothers who conceive them. In cases involving biological parents who are found by a court to be unfit because of abuse or neglect, the process of adoption should be speedy, certain, and supported generously by HHS.
Page 451 (tbh more about voluntary adoption and possibly sperm donation than contraceptives but not that much of a stretch considering the mention of reproductive technologies.)
Additionally, TANF priorities are not implemented in an equally weighted way. Marriage, healthy family formation, and delaying sex to prevent pregnancy are virtually ignored in terms of priorities, yet these goals can reverse the cycle of poverty in meaningful ways. CMS should require explicit measurement of these goals.
Page 476 (They really want to promote abstinence and fertility awareness as the end-all be-all methods of contraceptive.)
Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) and Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP). TPP is operated by the Office of Population Affairs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health; PREP is operated by the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Both programs should ensure that there is better reporting of subgrantees and referral lists so that they do not promote abortion or high-risk sexual behavior among adolescents. CMS should ensure that Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) proponents receive these grants and are given every opportunity to prove their effectiveness. SRA programs, both at ACF and at OASH and both discretionary and mandatory, should be equal in funding and emphasis. Qualitative research should be conducted on both types of programs to ensure continuous improvement.
In addition, certain provisions should be employed so that these programs do not serve as advocacy tools to promote sex, promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics, or for similar purposes. Parent involvement and parent–child communication should be encouraged and be a part of any funded project. Risk avoidance should be prioritized, and any program that submits a proposal that promotes risk rather than health should not be eligible for funding.
Site visits should be revamped to ensure adherence to these optimal health metrics, and a cost analysis of programming as compared to students served should be a metric in funding (taking into account that in certain cases, intensive programs will serve fewer students and can have more positive results). These same parameters should apply to sex education programs at ACF. Any lists with “approved curriculum” or so-called evidence-based lists should be abolished; HHS should not create a monopoly of curriculum, adding to the profit of certain publishers. Furthermore, lists created in the past have given priority to sex-promotion textbooks. HHS should create a list of criteria for evaluating the sort of curriculum that should be selected for any sex education grant programs, both at OASH and at ACF, with the aim of promoting optimal health and adhering to the legislative language of each program.
Page 477 (again more about sex ed than contraceptives but how are adults supposed to know about them if they cant be legally taught at school age, for fear of “promoting sexuality” despite abstinence-based (so-called “”“risk avoidance”“”) programs not actually reducing sexuality in young people.)
Restore Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate (also a CMS rule). HHS should rescind, if finalized, the regulation titled “Coverage of Certain Preventive Services Under the Affordable Care Act,” proposed jointly by HHS, Treasury, and Labor.70 This rule proposes to amend Trump-era final rules regarding religious and moral exemptions and accommodations for coverage of certain preventive services under the ACA. Preventive services include contraception, and it appears the proposed rule would change the existing regulations for religious and moral exemptions to the ACA’s contraception mandate. There is no need for further rulemaking that curtails existing exemptions and accommodations.
Eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient. One of the emergency contraceptives covered under the HRSA preventive services guidelines is Ella (ulipristal acetate). Like its close cousin, the abortion pill mifepristone, Ella is a progesterone blocker and can prevent a recently fertilized embryo from implanting in a woman’s uterus. HRSA should eliminate this potential abortifacient from the contraceptive mandate.
Pages 483/484 (actually, everything 483 - 485 really, its just a lot to paste here so im pulling out the worst ones. Left out the calls for promotion of fertility awareness, because totally in isolation of the rest of this stuff and with proper warning of its limitations I have less a problem with that than with losing access to more reliable contraceptives.)
Promoting Life and Family. In dealing with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, the OASH should focus on root-cause analysis with a focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance. Strong leadership is needed in the Office of Science and Medicine to drive investigative review of literature for a variety of issues including the effect of abortion on prematurity and breast cancer; lack of evidence for so-called gender-affirming care; and physical and emotional damage following cross-sex treatments, especially on children. The OASH should withdraw all recommendations of and support for cross-sex medical interventions and “gender-affirming care.”
Page 490 (they really talk around it here but the mention of STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and again “risk-avoidance” makes this pretty loaded. Hormonal contraceptives could also be considered gender-affirming care, as it alters a person’s natural hormonal state.)
Edits for formatting
You have to buy the book dummy - it’s always a grift inside a grift. Here, spend some coin: https://www.project2025.org/policy/
I have not bought the book. Many, many scholars have. I suppose they are all lying though, you know, deep state this that or something?
There’s a link just above “buy the book” that says “read the mandate” and downloads a PDF of the book when you tap it.
I don’t have time/computer access right now to dive into actual doc and work to point you in the right direction work citation. But it’s likely discussing measures that would indirectly eliminate access to the so called “morning after pill” plan b, or oral birth control at least. Maybe through something like title X or things like that attempt to enforce that obscure law from the 1800s that didn’t ban the drugs directly, but banned shipping them into states (which again, would be an effective ban unless every state stood up its own infrastructure, which of course they’d also likely be trying to eliminate that ability to do that in parallel)
If you’re genuinely curious and not just a sad, impotent troll that looks at an entire mountain rocks on “blue mountain” and says, “AHHHH!!! But I found this one greenish blue rock!!! So it’s not actually blue mountain!!!” then here is a link that dives into some of the fascist’s angles on this specific matter - https://www.mediamatters.org/project-2025/inside-project-2025s-attack-reproductive-rights-contraception
A better question would be what are you going to do to make sure the orange Mussolini doesn’t win?
Make sure you, your friends, and your family are Registered to vote.
Make sure everyone you know gets to the polls on our before election day.
Become a poll worker.
We need to make sure we vote in numbers too big to steal. In 2000 the election was handed to Bush by the Supreme Court because of one state. Looking at the last term, the court would absolutely find a way to shift the election to the con in chief if it was just one swing state with irregularities.
Talk to people about project 2025 and what it will mean. This is how the guardrails from 2017 are removed. This is how we start a Christian theocracy. If we vote blue all the way down, the Dems may be able to put stronger rails in place. If it’s not Project 2025 it will be Project 2029. These conservative think tanks have been doing this since Reagan, but this is by far the scariest.
Talk to friends and family about the Biden administration wins. It’s not just Biden you’re voting for, it is a continuation of his administration.
- CHIPS and science act bringing an entire industry back home. This will make us competitive with China and boat domestic manufacturing.
- Inflation reduction act an investment in renewable and traditional energy.
- Biden has actually increased fossil fuel production which has kept energy prices low and curbed the post pandemic inflation. Record oil production SPR management
- What Has Biden Accomplished? Look at These 10 Metrics, Not the Polls
Bottom line, this is likely the most important election of many of our lives. All of us must participate.
Start looking for jobs in Canada.
Business as usual - just like his last term, just like Biden’s term. This years gonna be a good one for me either way.
What did I just read
Does your uncle have room for one more? I’ve been feeling very uneasy about things too. I really don’t know what I’m going to do yet if Trump wins, but even if he doesn’t by some miracle, I feel like we’ll just be in the same situation again in 2028, 2032, etc. I feel like the democrats are not effective at fixing things and the republicans have gotten very effective at breaking them. I don’t think it’s going to be civil war time if he wins, but I do think he’s going to really mess things up for everyone, especially those in blue states again and it’s going to be even more difficult to fix. I’m pretty fortunate to be where I am now in my life and I don’t think I can just uproot everything and move to another country. I also wouldn’t even know where to move other than maybe Canada, but I kinda also don’t want any country that elects Trump as a king to be my next-door neighbor either. I think I just have to keep my head down, keep going and hope things get better then keep voting to try to change things and hope enough people feel the same, but I’m really feeling like they don’t.
Sic semper tyrannis…
Was what Boothe shouted when he shot Lincoln. But Lincoln was no tyrant and history has proven him to be the best President we ever had.
I wonder what historically interesting quotes will occur in the future.
I can’t comprehend why there aren’t people marching in the streets demanding a constitutional amendment to limit the executive branch and restore checks and balances. The recent Supreme Court decision granting absolute presidential immunity is a direct threat to our democracy. We all need to be more proactive. Government moves so slow if not pushed.
The president has less power than you think. I know it’s hard, but don’t let this make you worry too much. Best thing you can do is be strong and help your local community however you can. The media has hyped up this whole thing more than ever.
You forget about the 3 SCOTUS seats? And all the damage that’s caused?
The president has less power than you think.
which is why they started project 2025 this time
“On Tyranny” has some great guidance on this, as well as some guidance on how to do what you can to help put the brakes on it happening.
TL;DR there’s quite a lot more, but stay off the internet, get used to making small talk, making eye contact. Know who’s in your community physically and who has your back. Renew your passport, make friends in other countries if you can. Make friends. Stay off the internet.
It’s really hard to make friends in other countries without the internet. Gonna have to go back to ARPANET.
He didn’t actually say stay off the internet; that was my oversimplified retelling. A little more complete but still oversimplified version would be: Be careful and don’t share more than what you think is safe to share, and try to focus on the real world as much as you can. The real world doesn’t have mass surveillance in quite such a prepackaged and straightforward fashion, and it is where all the real outcomes good or bad will eventually take place anyway, so prioritize it as much as you can.
Curious: Why “stay off the internet” ? It’s mentioned twice, so I’m assuming for a good reason.
Is that a mental health thing or a keep from being profiled/targeted thing?
Your IP addresses, home, cellphone, etc… They all lead back to your actual home address where you can be identified.
It is soo easy to forget about just how much identifying metadata you leave on the internet just by reading stuff.
You know the cookie banners you see? Those that claim to let you opt out from being tracked by advertisers?
Yeah, those are just the overt tracking mechanism, tracking pixels are far far more insidious.
Lets backtrack a bit, back when Facebook started getting big, companies started embedded Like buttons on their webpages, cool right? You could just click the Like button and it would help you post a link to your Facebook feed to the page you were visiting.
Seems fine, right? What’s the issue?
It would be fine if the image of the Like button was stored on the local web server hosting the rest of the site.
But it isn’t.
It is stored on Facebook’s servers, it is stored in a way that every single Like button has their own ID, so every time you load up your favourite website about abandoned radiation experiment sites it makes your browser send a request to Facebook’s servers as well and depending on how the request is sent they can at minimum log that your IP address loaded the Like button with the ID number X, the ID number X is tied to the specific webpage you visited.
Then you go and do some research on impotense and how to cure it, the pages you read all have Like buttons as above, but with their own ID numbers, Facebook now knows at a minimum that you are a man who is interested in science, technology, society and modern history, you may also suffer from impotense.
Well, you keep browsing the web and read local news, well the Like button is also there, and with the ID number Facebook can add an area of interest to your profile.
It keeps going like this, but with one huge important change, people are starting getting warey of the Like buttons and Facebook in general, so they simply remove the button, while introducing the tracking pixel, a 1px*1px transparent picture, it works like how the Like button loads, and keeps generating data for Facebook.
Facebook is not alone in this, I just used them as an example.
You can read more here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_pixel
This is also not even getting into browser fingerprinting.
Oh, yeah. I’m aware of all that. Good info, though.
I meant for the purposes of what moz was saying from that “On Tyranny” TL;DR guidance. Like, should I just assume that metadata is going to be immediately used against me to determine if i’m an “undesirable” ?
May have answered my own question there lol
Well, yes. There’s no take backsies, but showing you’ve dropped off the internet, as sus as it is, also shows you’re done with all this, and makes it harder to prove your current status as “undesireableness” by lack of evidence. The longer you wait to disappear, the more relevant the evidence that can be used against you.
I have not read that book, but seeing as the right is on the rise also here in Europe, it might be worth checking it out.
you guys have cried about your guns for two hundred years in case of this exact situation
Not America’s left. America’s left has wanted gun control.
That said, it’s not like the left leaning cities are hurting for guns. There is a reason the left wants gun control.
And the strong push against gun control isn’t a 200 hundred year old thing. It’s a 40-50 year old thing. The NRA used to be about responsible gun ownership, not saving up for the fallout wasteland.
Maybe I’m more of a moderate but I just want some gun control, like universal background checks and mandatory training.
Not really on board with other things though, for example: Banning certain models of guns is just stupid and ineffective: Ban one and there are probably at least half a dozen other functionally identical firearms they can be replaced with. It’s meaningless performative legislature.
America’s liberals have wanted gun control. go far enough left and you get your guns back.
Civilians with guns against an actual military would never work, it’s just some fantasy those on the far right have.
It doesn’t seem like you’ve read much about insurgencies and rebel groups. It doesn’t actually take much firepower to inject enough chaos into the system that you cause issues with traditional militaries. One person with a rifle could keep a FOB alert and wasting resources for a couple of hours in Afghanistan. IEDs placed by individuals or small groups caused absolute terror in Iraq.
These types of things are unlikely to “win” a war. But if you make it costly enough, the other side will decide it’s not worth fighting. The point is not to engage in head-on combat, that’s suicide.
Or hell, look to the tactics of some of the rebels in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War.
Yes, I understand how an occupied enemy force is hard to dislodge. I actually was in the USMC for 8 years and was stuck in 29 Palms with nothing to do it in the middle of the desert but operation Mojave Viper over and over as groups cycled through. War in the middle east was hard because of ROI and a lower tolerance for collateral damage. You remove those and it’s not even a question. Just drop bombs and roll tanks.
I’ve also seen how we can take over a country or city in a matter of nights. I’ve seen buildings leveled because there was a singular shooter in them. If you roll APCs down a street with an armed patrol squad there isn’t much you can do. Sure you could make IDEs, setup daisy chains and such, that could take out a patrol for sure. But that just gets a bigger, more aggressive response that will not be so easily pushed back.
And let’s be clear, the middle east has been at war for generations upon generations, it’s part of their life at this point. Bill who hunts deer sometimes is not a battle hardened fighter. Hell, people who sign up for war, get training, then ramped up for deployment still freeze up in combat.
Also, civil war tactics don’t work anymore, hell,guerilla tactics barley work. We have drones, night vision, thermal, air support, satellite imagery. If the US military did actually attack it’s people, and members of the service actual did comply, it would be an extermination not a war.
To your point about one person looking out for a FOB. First, I don’t know how one person is covering every possible line of attack and approach vector, but that side. One drone or fly by could destroy that entire rebel FOB in second with not a damn thing you could do, with no warning. What is your defense against fighter jets or a blackhawk? Shoot small arms at it?
Sure, if they’re willing to just destroy everything then it’s less of a solid tactic. Will the American military be so willing to just destroy the places they grew up in? Perhaps. Will they be willing to shoot the neighbor they grew up playing with? Perhaps. Will they be willing to level the school they have so many fond memories of? Perhaps. And if so, then yes, that’s game over.
The US military has historically been pretty terrible when it comes to insurgencies. But obviously they haven’t been fighting in their own backyard.
It’ll be interesting either way. I sure hope it doesn’t come to pass.
I sure haven’t. That’s a deluded conservative thing… they say they need guns to defend from an overbearing government, then they’re the idiots who vote for freedom-infringing authoritarians. It also hasn’t made sense in decades at best, given that they’d be gravy seals fighting army or police with their handguns while the government has helicopters, grenades, night vision, comm systems (like, they think they’d have cell service in a civil war?) and so on. Maybe some organized group could pull off an Iraq or Afghanistan style resistance, but it seems unlikely.
I’ve dabbled in ham radio a bit, comms is something that at least some of the right are thinking about with these kinds of things, there’s more than a handful of right wing doomsday pepper lunatics in the ham radio circle, if you ever decide to listen in on CB radio chatter, there’s a good chance you’re gonna hear some lunatic ranting about conspiracy bullshit, I’m pretty sure I saw some pictures of guys at 1/6 with some baofengs (cheap Chinese ham radios, pretty much every ham has one or two kicking around)
I remember when I first started looking into ham radio, I was googling some stuff, clicking into a whole bunch of different results not paying too much attention to where I was, and I found one forum thread that was actually pretty informative until halfway down the thread someone said something really unhinged about race wars or something, and no one called him out about it and some even agreed with him, so I took a look at what site I was on and it was the stormfront forums. Nope I out of there really quick.
Also not the only experience I had like that, few of my hobbies and interests have significant overlap with the right wing lunatics fringe since I’m into some outdoors camping and survivalist type stuff, the algorithms try really hard to suck me into crazytown sometimes.
Honestly. I wish we had more leftest prepped stuff. The darknet hacker scene (privacy is a mixed bag) is decent IMHO, but as soon as you want to prepare for disasters (canning, homesteading, HAM radio, reloading, guns, etc) ALOT of the content and social media is a mix of ethno or Christian nationalism bunk.
We, the left, really should be interested in this stuff. This is how you provide mutual aid in disasters. How you help the marginalized avoid oppression and how you raise the cost of faciest take over.
Yeah that would involve actual work so no
gravy seals
Lmfao
The problem is that the cops are on their side.
Small arms like pistols, shotguns, rifles are great against a random meth head that breaks in to your home. But against a coordinated response by the government!? They have machine guns and drones and troops and bombs. And have been known to use them on civilians.
They’re still crying about Biden coming for their guns (I’m American), happily ignoring “take their guns first due process second” Trump
You make it sound like these people have a bone in their bodies to take the fight to their government… all a bunch of hot air. Even the ex military ain’t got it in them. Not many people are willing to sacrifice their lives for their ideals.
i think the gun people might be voting for trump
Not me.
Never underestimate dem/liberal gun ownership. We are just quiet about it and don’t make it our entire personality.
sure, but they’re in the minority, and i wouldn’t bet on even the majority to win against the national guard and their tanks
Tanks need support personnel.
Ask the Russians how well it goes when the tanks fight alone.
how many PG-7VLs do you have at hand? or maybe do you have a 2A36 howitzer stashed in garage? believe or not, you can’t fight tanks with good vibes only
Thank you for explaining to this former 11-H / 11-M the difficulties in fighting tanks. :D
You’re not wrong but infantry against tanks that have no infantry support will win every time. Tanks are fuckin blind when buttoned up and will get absolutely wrecked by close in infantry, even without anti-armor weapons. It’s almost trivial to immobilize them from up close.
Okay? What’s your point? That the national guard will rise up against the system?
The national guard are famously conservative. Which side do you think they’ll pick when push comes to shove?
the military people severing are not a a republican block, they are mostly poor people that looks for support and jobs. i only meet a few bigots while i was in and they were quickly shut down when the spouted their shit.
in the real military yeah
but usually the national guard are made up of people who wanted a “military” career without the risk
fortunate sons and all that
Biden just said he’s going to roll over and kiss the ring. “Liberal” gun ownership, lol.
Wait so we’re getting Jan 6 Part 2 if Trump wins?
The issue is military and police tend to side with fascists, and fascists know this so it’s a 3 way fight
The issue is military and police tend to side with fascists,
While police will always side with fascists - it’s a purely fascist institution, after all - there is some caveats when it comes to the military, and, surprisingly, the prospects of the US military simply joining with fascists does not look promising for them. The problem is that the military-industrial complex has it’s bread buttered on both sides by the liberal status quo - it simply has nothing to gain from a fascist regime in any way whatsoever.
The bad news is, of course, is that they might not actually need the military if they just plan on doing it through lawfare as they are currently doing it.
I am still sure that the right has more. Like you might have 1 or 2. A lot of those nutjobs have 1 or 2 hundred.
What, are they going to aim 200 guns at once?
Arm their friends? Make boobie traps?
Making boobie traps is illegal they can’t do that /s
Knowing some of the redneck mother fuckers I’ve met:
They’ll figure out how to do it, yes
“I’ve gon’ an’ dun it, y’all! I dun made a weapon to surpass Metal Gear, I tell you hwhat.”
Well they’ve only got 2 arms at the most (maybe 3 in Alabama) so they can only hold 2 guns at once. Kinda hard to hold an arsenal dual wielded
Your absolutely right. But how many guns can you shoot at once?
I mean, those weren’t just fireworks making noise in America’s major liberal cities last night. The blue cities are drowning in guns. That why those cities want regulations to dial shit down.
I can’t be the only one to roll my eyes at comments like this. Like in one respect I get it, we want to say we will fuck up the fascists. But on the flipside, what the fuck are you guys actually suggesting here?
Bear in mind per Propublica reporting that the right-wing extremist groups want to incite a race/Civil War. They hate the fact that there is such a stark contrast in violence between the left and right and it’s making them look TERRIBLE.
Bear in mind firearm manufacturers are actively trying to break into the leftist market to sell more guns. Pretty obvious.
Forgetting the evidence that guns for all intents don’t make you safer. We need to use our brains before bullets, lest we’ve all already lost.
Cool so when they come for you, you’ll be unarmed.
🤔
Ah yes, I’ll have my Mini-14 and 1911 and fend them off as the mighty hero as the nation burns to the ground!!
…
You probably slipped about 20 steps where you could’ve had more viable impact at preventing that. You also are probably distracting yourself with hero fantasies when you could be more focused on something else.
Forgetting the fact that mere possession of a firearm in your house elevates your risk of everything from a safety accident, domestic homicide, suicide, etc. That are probably all more probabilistic than you defending yourself from roaming right-wing mobs.
Your M14 and 1911 are literally ancient compared to the advanced ergonomic stuff Republicans can get delivered to their front doors thanks to less regulations in their states.
The ergonomic differences are so much better than what you currently own, it can allow a fucking morbidly obese diabetic to shoot the dick off a mosquito without getting out of their mobility scooter, meanwhile your wooden World War 2 rifle and hand-gun invented in the 1900’s (hence 1911 name) and won’t fire after several mags without properly cleaning.
I also own a 1911 and Ruger m14 and am not biased, just really angry about the state-by-state arbitrary laws restricting sales based off features that don’t actually reduce crime, and simply performance by lawmakers restricting the fucking availability of modern guns to appease ignorant dipshits scared of firearms.
Guns dont mass murder people, mass murderers do.
Blaming guns wont fix social injustice and wealth inequality, so you’ll just end up creating the next unabomber or OKC bombing.
Shit will only get worse if we dont focus on the underlying issues.
Well, more accurately, mass murders with guns do. I’m not saying we ban guns. But let’s not ignore half the issue. It’s mental health and easy access to weapons of mass murder. Some gun control makes sense. Doing something about mental health makes sense.
But you’ll never see a Republican vote for either. Government provided mental health programs? That’s communism! They are fine to let both problems run rampant.
Im ok with barriers of entry, 5 day waiting period, etc.
Im less ok with people carving lines in the sand on a wedge issue and instead focus on ones that has high approval ratings and enact change.
Medicare for all/single payer is widely popular and would greatly reduce mental health issues in America.
Legalizing cannabis will also help.
UBI and the like arent quite as popular, so will be more difficult for those things that curb poverty to get passed, but probably still easier than banning guns in USA.
Guns dont mass murder people, mass murderers do.
Sure, but the guns help.
Try for a mass casualty event with some knives. It’s doable, but you have to work for it.
In the hospital we address both the disease as well as the symptoms. If the symptoms aren’t controlled, the prognosis of the disease is worse.
A deranged person who slips through the cracks of society can inflict more devastation with a firearm than a knife, as seen time and time again.
So sure let’s focus on underlying issues. But let’s stop pretending aRmInG tHE leFt will do jack shit, too.
I’d say it’s a reaction to where ammosexual conservatives talk as if they have all the guns and would therefore win instantly in the civil war scenarios they masturbate over.
Fair I can see that. In the event they threw the first punch a la Fort Sumter, it may take a while for the left to spin up but I have no doubt they’d get steamrolled as they always do, from the Confederacy to the Third Reich.
After all, we’d just have to wait for their heart meds to run out.
For real, diabetes and war marches don’t exactly pair nicely.
You seem to be taking an “either / or” approach here. In my opinion the left should do everything possible to avoid violence, and also own guns in case these efforts are unsuccessful. It doesn’t need to be one or the other.
It’s really kind of a matter of definitions to me. In my view, there exist situations where a firearm is about the only way to prevent super bad outcomes for myself. Those situations are uncommon, there are many good ways to avoid them usually, and I hope to never find myself in one. But by definition, if I find myself in a situation like that, having a firearm available is the difference between having agency and having none.
Some people feel that the likelihood of such a scenario is so small that it’s a bad idea to prepare for it. Maybe this is how you feel? I do understand that point of view, I simply disagree. I don’t really understand points of view that seem to argue there is no scenario where firearms are useful, or that we’re magically “past that” as a society (and to be clear, I’m not sure you’re taking that stance). To take one example, just look at the response to Hurricane Katrina as an example of how flimsy our law and order really is. Once a situation is bad enough to overwhelm the existing structures we have in place, all bets are off and rules for behavior evaporate. We’ve seen this happen, in our country, in our lifetimes, more than once. I don’t understand the derision - why eye roll?
Fair points.
I view it mostly as either/or chiefly for two reasons:
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The statistics to me suggest that the possession of a firearm generate greater alternative risks than the probability of the positive use-case we all imagine in our heads. For me, I am not in a bad neighborhood. Nobody is out to get me. Despite how bad things have become, we are a long ways away from some civil war. So to me it’s a net-negative.
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Any time focused on firearms is time taken away from focusing on preventative measures to shift this country in the right direction. One more phone conversation with a friend or relative on the fence to alter their vote to me is far more impactful at preventing what we all come to fear.
I roll my eyes because some people get very gung-ho akin to the whole “fuck around find out” vibes of righties that I cannot stand. Big talk almost yearning for civil war when they’re focusing on the wrong things.
Ah, those are reasonable points of view to me. I think responsible gun ownership is fairly straightforward and the statistics look that way because of the extremely irresponsible folks who don’t take it seriously, and because suicide is usually included. Proper gun safety really only requires diligently following a few simple rules, make those consistently followed - habitual - and the additional risk drops to pretty close to zero.
But I concede that owning a gun does - at again just a definitional level - create a path of escalation which is almost always inappropriate to pursue, which is not available without that gun, and that’s inherently risky too. It’s not a decision to be taken lightheartedly, but we all face risk at varying degrees and have to make our own decisions about what are good and bad tradeoffs there.
There are a lot of folks (of all political persuasion, which is not to say it’s evenly distributed at all) who are definitely LARPing, and I think their idiot rhetoric is foolish and potentially harmful. I just think the quiet gun-owning left shouldn’t be automatically associated with that group, and if I remember the original comment right, I don’t think the poster indicated any hidden desire for violence.
I agree that we should be discussing and insisting on action for way more substantive and impactful stuff, guns are a ridiculous wedge issue that will never be “resolved”, and our limited time is definitely better spent trying to force improvements that would benefit and be popular with a majority of people.
I’m kind of coming around on the idea of liberal/progressive gun ownership. Maybe we should start hitting the gun shows and buying them off the cons. If we have enough to scare them, maybe we can get some sensible gun laws passed too, then turn them all in like Australia did.
But only if we can follow the example of Swiss-like compulsory service and training. I have some liberal friends who I do not want handling guns.
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As a liberal gun owner, I can’t agree more. I hate that I have to own a gun to feel safe. I have been within 1 mile of no less than 5 mass shootings, and in 2 scenarios where I had to put my hands on my gun ready to use in the last 5 years. My wife was 100 yards from the shooter at the Texas State Fair shooting last year.
I own guns to protect my family. I also own them in case civil war breaks out and all my right-wing, crazy neighbors lose their shit.
what the fuck are you guys actually suggesting here?
There never is a suggestion. It’s never thought through. It’s all just abstract. Civil war is an abstract thought that can be talked about without anyone needing to consider how it would actually play out.
So how does it work? Do conservatives from Texas take a greyhound bus to california, get out, and start blasting indiscriminately? Do they stop people on the street and randomly ask their political views before blasting?
It’s hard to have a civil war when your enemy is ill defined. People arent going to be standing in fields with blue and grey uniforms.
What is more likely to happen is simply clashes during protests .
While they have a large number of guns, they can still only operate one at a time.
I might be old but I seem to recall the French taught the proper way to protest this kind of stuff, rather than the soft protests we saw in 2020, let alone 2016.
As for me, fortunately I live in tbe Best Hemisphere so I plan to offer whatever housing space I have available so my friends from the US can flee over and nap the Trump Kingdom over.
