#gun culture

[odinsblog]

America doesn’t simply have a gun problem, it has a problem with gun owners who are just itching for the opportunity to murder. For non-life threatening “crimes” like knocking on doors, accidentally opening the wrong car door, entering the wrong driveway by mistake, and apparently even fishing.

These alleged adults, who are afraid of their own shadow, are desperate to live out their Wild West fantasies. Anything that frightens them, startles them or makes them feel uncomfortable is fair game, as long as they get to tell their stories about how they “bravely” “defended” themselves from an unarmed person in a a non-dangerous situation.

We need to overturn all Stand Your Ground laws and take the Castle doctrine back indoors where it belongs.

[not-safe-for-democracy]

[liberalsarecool]

Gun culture is diabolical. It turns your heart and mind into a fragile consumer identity.

You become the gun.

[kp777]

Republicans ‘glorify political violence’ by embracing extreme gun culture

[queerism1969]

Gun violence is now the leading cause of death among children in the USA.

Every developed nation has people with mental illness, video games, disgruntled ex-employees, alienated people, homicidal and suicidal persons, etc. Why does the U.S. have the problem it

does?

It's the same things it always has - the number of firearms, access to them, fetishism surrounding the 2nd Amendment, and the immense political power of the firearms industry.

Not a single politician has the courage to step up.

[porterdavis]

Guns and no healthcare gets you this:

[o-kurwa]

[contemplatingoutlander]

In this opinion column, Jamelle Bouie explains in detail what I have believed for a long time--that overvalued Second Amendment rights can limit First Amendment free speech rights and make the democratic underpinnings of our nation very difficult to sustain.  

There is a saying, borrowed from the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein and popular among supporters of an unlimited right to own and carry firearms, that an “armed society is a polite society.” The proliferation of weapons, in other words, brings social peace. [...] Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this belief is right. That firearms work to tame rather than inflame the passions. That, the evidence of our eyes and ears notwithstanding, guns do more to resolve disputes than escalate them.

But even if that were true, which it manifestly isn’t, peace is not the absence of conflict. And social peace in a democratic society cannot simply be a perpetual standoff among armed individuals. The reason is that democracy rests on a measure of trust and respect among citizens, what the philosopher Danielle Allen calls “political friendship.”

“Political friendship,” Allen writes in “Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,” “is not mainly (or not only) a sentiment of fellow feeling for other citizens.” It is, instead, a way of “acting in respect to them.” [...] “The best one can hope for, and all one should desire, is that political friendship can help citizens to resist the disintegration of trust and achieve a community where trust is a renewable resource.”

We don’t have to like one another to govern together, but we should try to see and speak to one another as equals, so that we can debate, deliberate and disagree as members of a shared political community.

Guns, when carried as totems through public space, make this impossible. Whether they are carted to a restaurant or a grocery store, a park or a library, they send a clear message: that a disagreement might turn deadly, and that I, the gun wielder, do not respect you enough to refrain from the threat of lethal violence. This is especially true when guns are used to confront and intimidate protesters, as happened again and again during the racial justice protests and demonstrations of 2020 and 2021, according to Everytown, a gun safety organization.

The mere fact of armed counter-demonstrators brandishing guns at people they oppose is why legal scholars like Timothy Zick of the William & Mary Law School have warned that in our age of extremely permissive gun laws, the Second Amendment to the Constitution threatens to overwhelm and overtake the First. “The visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights,” Zick and Diana Palmer, a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University, write in The Atlantic. “The increased risk of violence from open carry is enough to have a meaningful ‘chilling effect’ on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests.”

A chilling effect on citizens’ willingness to participate in political protests is also a chilling effect on citizens’ ability to trust one another. And in the absence of trust, democracy is a hard game to play. When distrust “pervades democratic relations,” Allen writes, “it paralyzes democracy; it means that citizens no longer think it sensible, or feel secure enough, to place their fates in the hands of democratic strangers. Citizens’ distrust not of government but of each other leads the way to democratic disintegration.” [...] If an armed society is a polite society, it’s because an armed society is a fearful society, where we train our children in “lockdown drills” to evade shooters and go about our lives with an eye on the nearest exit. Democracy might be able to survive in that kind of society, but it will never thrive there.

[emphasis added]

[nerdykeith]

Dear gun nuts of Tumblr, I support smart gun control. Sorry not sorry. Deal with it bitches!

[2bpoliticallycurious]

Another excellent critique by Ruth Marcus of the Supreme Court’s originalist madness when it comes to guns. She notes a recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision that overturned the Federal government’s charges of illegal gun ownership of Zackey Rahimi, a man who was involved in “five shootings” in Texas, and who had a restraining order issued after reportedly assaulting his ex-girlfriend. 

Judge Cory T. Wilson, of the Fifth Circuit Court wrote:

“Rahimi, while hardly a model citizen, is nonetheless part of the political community entitled to the Second Amendment’s guarantees, all other things equal.”  [emphasis added]

 Here are some other excerpts from Marcus’ column:

This is the insane state of Second Amendment law in the chaotic aftermath of Bruen. The problem isn’t that decision’s precise outcome, striking down New York state’s gun licensing law because it required a showing of “special need for self-protection” to obtain a concealed carry permit.

The problem is that in doing so, the six-justice conservative majority imposed a history-based test — a straitjacket, really — for assessing the constitutionality of gun laws. No longer can judges decide whether restrictions are a reasonable means to protect public safety.

Instead, they have to hunt down obscure, colonial-era statutes to determine if there are counterparts to modern rules. So it’s little surprise that conservative judges in the lower courts are now busy declaring all sorts of perfectly sensible gun laws unconstitutional. [...] As to historical analogues, [Judge] Wilson acknowledged that there were “laws in several colonies and states that disarmed classes of people considered to be dangerous, specifically including those unwilling to take an oath of allegiance, slaves, and Native Americans.”

But, he said, despite some “facial similarities” with laws disarming domestic abusers, “the purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another.”

As Pepperdine law professor Jacob Charles pointed out on Twitter, this criticism is “absolutely bonkers” — it faults the domestic abuse law for being “too tailored.” The law applies to those who have been determined, after a court hearing, to present a “credible threat to the physical safety” of an intimate partner or child.

All of which serves to underscore the real difficulty with the Supreme Court’s history fetish: As Bruen itself demonstrated, the matter of what historical examples to accept and what to reject is open to manipulation by judges predisposed to strike down gun laws.

And it poses a dilemma for the conservative justices, who are about to find this issue back in their laps. Are they going to instruct lower courts they have gone too far, or are they going to let it rip, while bullets fly and judges scour statutes from the age of muskets?

[emphasis added]

A dystopian America will be the legacy of the far right justices now sitting in majority on the Supreme Court--as well as the legacy of Trump, McConnell and the GQP senators who appointed them.

[odinsblog]

In “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” Carol Anderson argues that the Second Amendment is not about guns – it’s about anti-Blackness. She says it “was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African-Americans powerless and vulnerable.”

Anderson cites legislative debates from the Founding Fathers and a range of historical records to make some bold points. She says some early lawmakers who supported the Second Amendment were more worried about armed Blacks than British redcoats. She says that even after the Civil War ended, many Southern states banned Black citizens from owning weapons.

And that famous line about a “well-regulated militia?” Well, that was inserted primarily to deal with potential slave revolts – not to repel a foreign army, she says.

“The crafting of the Constitution was of primary concern for folks like James Madison because the Articles of Confederation were not working. And when they went to the Constitutional Convention, the Southern delegates made it really clear that they weren’t going to sign off on any kind of Constitution to strengthen the United States of America unless they could get the clear extension on the Atlantic slave trade, the Three-Fifths Clause so they could get more representation than they were due in Congress, and the Fugitive Slave Clause. Those were the bribes. That was the sign-off for the South to sign off on the Constitution.

But then as Virginia is looking at this Constitution and sees the federal control of the militia, this is when Patrick Henry and George Mason really started leading the charge. And that charge was about either scuttling the Constitution or getting a Bill of Rights to curtail the power of the central government and protecting the militia. Protecting the militia means that they are protecting slavery.

One of the things that many previous historians have not linked up was the role of the militia in putting down slave revolts, in buttressing slave patrols and keeping enslaved Black people, and free Blacks, under the boot of White supremacy.

The emphasis on the Second Amendment has been crafted as a well-regulated militia in terms of (opposing) a tyrannical government or stopping a foreign invasion, and the individual right to bear arms. That’s the way it’s been cast in the legal debates. That’s driven our historical debates. We’ve got a weird bifurcation in the scholarship between the history of slavery and the history of the Second Amendment. What I’m doing is saying these things are all happening at the same time. Let’s see what’s really going on.”

(continue reading)

[not-safe-for-democracy]

She's going to vote, are you?

[liberalsarecool]

Allen, TX is a red city, in a red county, in a red state. Going shopping gets you killed in Texas.

It does not have to be this way AND it's only going to get worse with Republican policies.

#VoteBlue #SaveYourKids

[thingstrumperssay]

Gun culture spreads dangerous paranoia.

This actually happened, by the way. I don’t remember if I talked about it when it did but a woman did get shot just for using somebody’s driveway to turn around. So this “joke” is based on reality.

[0-tto]

Young fella knows

[thedreadpiratejames]

nope, no gun problem in this country at all