#nra = no lives matter

[socialjusticeinamerica]

Over 800 cops and the bad guys with guns still shot over 20 people.

[sordidamok]

GOP doesn't want the CDC to study gun violence because the CDC might figure out a way to decrease gun violence.

[tehjleck]

I'll say it...

Your 'all knowing god' knew these people were pedophiles, rapists and murderers

Your 'all powerful god' did nothing to stop pedophile priests from raping children, just like nothing was done to stop ignorant people from murdering other people with assault rifles

Enough with useless fucking platitudes like empty thoughts and prayers...

No lives matter to the NRA

[whoneedstosleep]

[imagesarchive]

Daily News: Shame on the U.S.!

[wilwheaton]

The GOP wonders why young people (and others) don't want to vote for them. Some wise scribe assembled this list.

1.) Your Reagan-era “trickle-down economics” strategy of tax breaks for billionaires that you continue to employ to this day has widened the gap between rich and poor so much that most of them will never be able to own a home, much less earn a living wage.

2.) You refuse to increase the federal minimum wage, which is still $7.25 an hour (since 2009). Even if it had just kept up with inflation, it would be $27 now. You’re forcing people of all ages but especially young people to work multiple jobs just to afford basic necessities.

3.) You fundamentally oppose and want to kill democracy; have done everything in your power to restrict access to the ballot box, particularly in areas with demographics that tend to vote Democratic (like young people and POC). You staged a fucking coup the last time you lost.

4.) You have abused your disproportionate senate control over the last three decades to pack the courts with religious extremists and idealogues, including SCOTUS—which has rolled back rights for women in ways that do nothing but kill more women and children and expand poverty.

5.) You refuse to enact common sense gun control laws to curb mass shootings like universal background checks and banning assault weapons; subjecting their entire generation to school shootings and drills that are traumatizing in and of themselves. You are owned by the NRA.

6.) You are unequivocally against combatting climate change to the extent that it’s as if you’ve made it your personal mission to ensure they inherit a planet that is beyond the point of no return in terms of remaining habitable for the human race beyond the next few generations.

7.) You oppose all programs that provide assistance to those who need it most. Your governors refused to expand Medicaid even during A PANDEMIC. You are against free school lunches, despite it being the only meal that millions of children can count on to actually receive each day

8.) You are banning books, defunding libraries, barring subject matter, and whitewashing history even more in a fascistic attempt to keep them ignorant of the systemic racism that this nation was literally founded upon and continues to this day in every action your party takes.

9.) You oppose universal healthcare and are still trying to repeal the ACA and rip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans and replace it with nothing. You are against lowering the cost of insulin and prescription drugs that millions need simply to LIVE/FUNCTION in society.

10.) You embrace white nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and other groups that are defined by their intractable racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. You conspired with these groups on January 6th to try to overthrow the U.S. government via domestic terrorism that KILLED PEOPLE.

11.) You oppose every bill aimed at making life better for our nation’s youth; from education to extracurricular and financial/nutritional assistance programs. You say you want to “protect the children” while you elect/nominate pedophiles and attack trans youth and drag queens.

12.) You pretend to be offended by “anti-semitism” while literally supporting, electing, and speaking at events organized by Nazis. You pretend to hate “cancel culture” despite the fact that you invented it and it’s basically all you do.

13.) Every word you utter is a lie. You are the party of treason, hypocrisy, crime, and authoritarianism. You want to entrench rule by your aging minority because you know that you have nothing to offer young voters and they will never support you for all these reasons and more.

14.) You’re so hostile to even the notion of helping us overcome the mountain of debt that millions of us are forced to take on just to pay for our post K-12 education that you are suing to try to prevent a small fraction of us from getting even $10,000 in loan forgiveness.

15.) You opened the floodgates of money into politics via Citizens United; allowing our entire system of government to become a cesspool of corruption, crime, and greed. You are supposed to represent the American people whose taxes pay your salary but instead cater to rich donors.

16.) You respond to elected representatives standing in solidarity with their constituents to protest the ONGOING SLAUGHTER of children in schools via shootings by EXPELLING THEM FROM OFFICE & respond to your lack of popularity among young people by trying to raise the voting age.

17.) You impeach Democratic presidents over lying about a BJ but refuse to impeach (then vote twice to acquit) a guy whose entire “administration” was an international crime syndicate being run out of the WH who incited an insurrection to have you killed.

18.) You steal Supreme Court seats from democrats to prevent the only black POTUS we’ve ever had from appointing one and invent fake precedents that you later ignore all to take fundamental rights from Americans; and even your “legitimate” appointments consist of people like THIS (sub-thread refuting CJ Roberts criticisms of people attacking SCOTUS' legitimacy).

19.) You support mass incarceration even for innocuous offenses or execution by cop for POC while doing nothing but protect rich white criminals who engage in such things as tax fraud, money laundering, sex trafficking, rape/sexual assault, falsifying business records, etc.

20.) You are the reason we can’t pass:—Universal background checks—An assault weapons ban—The ‘For the People/Freedom to vote’ Act or John Lewis Voting Rights Act—The ERA & Equality Act—The Climate Action Now Act—The (Stopping) Violence Against Women Act—SCOTUS expansion.

21.) You do not seek office to govern, represent, or serve the American people. You seek power solely for its own sake so you can impose your narrow-minded puritanical will on others at the expense of their most fundamental rights and freedoms like voting and bodily autonomy.

22.) Ok, last one. You are trying to eliminate social security and Medicare that tens of millions of our parents rely on and paid into their entire lives. And you did everything to maximize preventable deaths from COVID leaving millions of us in mourning.

Source: https://imgur.com/gallery/e8DBZLH

[kendallwa]

“Save the Children” now on Spotify + streaming! Fun fact, got banned from using the original artwork (above) on the single cause of the NRA logo. 🙄

More stuff soon! Videos and collabs from my favorite artists who y’all shouldn’t sleep on cause they’re the truth!! Support the arts and choose love every time. Kong out ✌🏽

[tomorrowusa]

The Biden White House slapped down extremist House Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson for idiotic comments on the latest mass shooting.

The Biden administration hit back Friday on Speaker Mike Johnson’s recent comments that placed blame for mass shootings in the United States on Americans’ “hearts,” calling the remarks “offensive.” In a statement, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the administration “absolutely” rejected “the offensive accusation that gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because of Americans’ ‘hearts.’” “Gun crime is uniquely high in the United States because congressional Republicans have spent decades choosing the gun industry’s lobbyists over the lives of innocent Americans,” Bates added.

The NRA-Republican efforts to put military grade assault weapons in the hands of the unhinged is the base cause of these mass shootings. For all practical purposes, the NRA is little more than Hamas in suits.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

BY AMANDA MARCOTTE

Republicans know exactly what they believe is the greatest threat to American students: books.

In Florida, the possibility of a student choosing a book to read was deemed so threatening that teachers were ordered to lock up all the books until they could be — slowly, painfully — combed over by censors. Now, as the censors make their way through the books at a snail's pace, word of what has been officially banned from shelves thus far is starting to trickle out. Unsurprisingly, in a state controlled by a retentive fascist like Gov. Ron DeSantis, the books deemed too dangerous to read mostly involve ideas like "gay couples exist" and "there was once a civil rights movement." As Tom Fontaine of Trib Live reports:

"PEN America, a New York-based nonprofit that works to defend free expression, reported the district had removed at least 176 titles from classrooms. They include works such as ‘My Two Dads and Me,’ ‘My Two Moms and Me,’ ‘Celebrating Different Beliefs,’ ‘The Gift of Ramadan,’ ‘The Berenstain Bears and the Big Question’ and books about Rosa Parks, the Underground Railroad and Japanese internment camps during World War II.

Also removed was ‘Roberto Clemente: The Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates,’ a 2005 book by Dormont's Jonah Winter.

The 32-page book references racism Clemente sometimes endured."

Republicans are also deeply worried that a child might enjoy a drag queen story hour, in which drag performers use their skills at entertaining a crowd to get kids excited about reading. The threat that a funny person in a flashy costume might make a child happy is such that Republicans in state legislatures are considering bans so draconian that they could criminalize merely being a trans person in public or wearing makeup on a stage.

Of course, considering the Republican hostility to children reading, the "story hour" may be as offensive to them as the "drag" part.

The nation woke on Tuesday to familiar news that doesn't get any less disturbing, despite being painfully common. There was another mass shooting, this time at Michigan State. A gunman left three dead and five more critically injured. This is in a year where there has been an average of more than one mass shooting a day. At least one of the survivors of this latest shooting also survived a mass shooting 14 months ago at Oxford High School.

At this point, the Republican callousness to the carnage is so baked in that it barely feels worth remarking upon. Nor is this just a matter, as so many claim, of Republicans being too "afraid" of the NRA to stand up for meaningful gun safety laws. As I've written about before, there's plenty of reason to believe that the reason Republicans block most efforts to prevent mass shootings is that they benefit politically from both the feelings of helplessness and social decay that such shootings sow in the public.

"Please don't tell me you care about the safety of children if you are not willing to have a conversaion about keeping them safe in a place that should be a sanctuary," Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin, who represents the Michigan district the shooting happened in, said during an emotionally raw press conference Tuesday morning. She didn't need to elaborate on who claims to "care" about children but certainly does not.

We've been subject to a yearslong effort to ban books and gut the rights of LGBTQ people, all justified by GOP claims to be "protecting" children. The College Board, under pressure from DeSantis and the larger Republican establishment, has even gone so far as to remove books by renowned writers and poets like bell hooks, June Jordan, and Ta-Nehisi Coates from an African-American studies course. The excuse is that the fragile self-esteem of white students cannot withstand learning about the realities of racism.

But while Republicans fret and moan over the supposed damage done to students' minds by learning that racism happens or LGBTQ people exist, the much more real danger that comes from a bullet tearing through a body is not considered a priority. In the Republican imagination, a high school or college student is too delicate to read about the Holocaust or slavery, but should also be tough enough to stand up to an armed madman mowing down kids with a semiautomatic weapon. And if such kids do survive the kind of graphic violence that Republicans believe they're too sensitive to read about, then such kids are also expected to be tough enough to endure members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., denying the violence ever happened and harassing those who survived it.

After last year's shooting in Uvalde, Texas — which left 19 kids and two teachers dead — a handful of Republicans decided it was becoming politically untenable to maintain the "thoughts and prayers, but nothing can be done" position that has characterized the party for so long. So 15 Republican Senators crossed the aisle to vote for a gun safety bill last June. The Beltway media, longing for a narrative of bipartisan comity, swooned rapturously over this supposed evolution away from sociopathic disregard towards gun violence towards something more humane.

But, at the cost of sounding overly cynical, the whole thing was probably more of a ploy to get people off their backs than anything else.

For one thing, for every Senate Republican who did vote for the bill, there were more than two who refused. Second, while there were some good items in the law that President Joe Biden signed last summer — especially closing the "boyfriend" loophole that let domestic abusers buy guns — the legislation stops well short of what's needed to keep guns out of the hands of unhinged people who want to shoot up nightclubs, schools, and shopping malls.

To make it worse, what little Republicans are willing to do in Congress is in real danger of being dismantled by Republicans in the federal courts.

The same week Congress passed their watered-down gun safety bill, the six Republican Supreme Court justices overturned a New York state law that is over 100 years old, which restricted who can carry guns in public. As Slate's legal expert Mark Joseph Stern wrote at the time, the decision rests on "a maximalist opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that renders most of the nation's gun control laws presumptively unconstitutional."

Sure enough, other Republican-controlled federal courts took note. Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit used Thomas's decision as a pretext to rule against a law barring domestic abusers from owning guns. This law not only protects the lives of women who are being stalked by former partners, but it's useful in preventing mass shootings. Over half of mass shooters had a known history of domestic violence. Sadly, many of them were able to commit their crimes by taking advantage of the pro-gun, anti-woman views of local Republican politicians, who won't enforce existing gun laws. That appears, for instance, to be the case in the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in December. The suspect had been previously arrested after a reported domestic violence incident involving his mother, but the right-wing sheriff who had bragged about being a gun rights absolutist did not enforce a law allowing the government to take the shooter's guns from him.

When faced with the carnage that their gun fanaticism inflicts on our nation, Republicans will often pretend that their hands are tied by the constitution. The GOP cowards who rule against the ban on wife beaters owning guns used this excuse. The court claimed there is no "historical tradition of firearm regulation" regarding domestic violence and that therefore they are forced — forced I tell you! — to believe the Second Amendment's language about a "well-regulated militia" somehow covers unregulated, non-militia wife beaters.

This feigned constitutional absolutism is ridiculous on its face. It's even more obviously a lie in the context of GOP enthusiasm for book banning. Unlike the Second Amendment, which puts strong limits ("well-regulated militia") on the right to bear arms, the First Amendment grants Americans expansive rights to free speech. It very clearly states that there should be "no law...abridging the freedom of speech." That's without caveat, unlike the Second Amendment. And there are certainly no exceptions for "unless it offends the bigoted sentiments of Ron DeSantis."

Most of all, of course, this exposes how Republicans are only interested in controlling students, not protecting them. The threat of the targeted books is not to students, who will only benefit from learning more about the world around them. The threat is to the fragile egos of the right-wing bigots who make up the Republican base. This focus on control also explains the GOP's disinterest in doing anything to save students from mad gunmen. They may be saddened by a dead child, but they aren't threatened by them. A murdered child, after all, is unlikely to think for themselves, much less grow up to vote against Republicans. And ultimately, that's all the GOP is really worried about when they talk about "the children."

[neotrances]

this is the same person that made that comment but it’s like. i get this. i understand that. but we cannot afford to just not support self defense. in a perfect world guns wouldn’t even be an option for anyone but we don’t live in a perfect world, so u covering ur ears and going ‘ lalallallalal i don’t like guns’ is not helpful, would u react this same way to the black panthers ? idk why i’m even asking that u would, and the kicker is this person is white, again showing a lack of intersectionality in their politics, we no longer have the choice to remain peaceful when the oppressor does support guns and actively goes out to kill us every single day, i personally like guns, i don’t like the way they’re so accessible, i don’t like the way the nra is set up, i could go on and on about what i don’t like about them but the reality is, it doesn’t matter what i don’t like, bc someone with a gun can and will and does kill one of us every single day, and that is not something i can just ignore, i don’t have the luxury to do that

[socialjusticeinamerica]

2 parishioners brought guns to mass. A child was hit in the crossfire and remains in critical condition. More senseless gun violence from a failed third world red state.

[sordidamok]

Turns out the organization that bribes Senators to keep gun violence going are corrupt. Who'da thunk?

[tehjleck]

@staff Why the fuck am I seeing this nra friendly ammosexual bullshit?

Those shirts seem pretty fucking right wing gqp to me...

[mg549]

final post on the matter: the whole “good guy with a gun” argument is overdone nra bullshit like. do you seriously think theres no better way than to make it so EVERYONE can kill anyone at any time. instead of. making it so that... less people can shoot ppl. like. ppl pretending legislation will not fix anything are so ignorant imo like. the countries with established gun control laws: 

like how can you be like it doesnt work. how do you explain other countries not having the same gun violence problems. how do you explain school shootings as an american phenom and be unable to correlate that to the fucking nra propaganda and legislation and bs lone ranger superhero individualistic culture. like the reason the propaganda works so well is bc they have the very easy to swallow message of “the world is scary and out to get you but if you have this gun you can save yourself and everyone and Be A True Hero” and in a time where ppl feel increasingly little control over their own lives it makes them feel important and revolutionary. even when in reality 99% of gun owners have never had to use their gun in a random situation. it also acts like the only way to stop someone with a gun is with another gun. which simply is just not the case. it also reveals such an underlying bloodlust ingrained from that conquistadoran colonizer mindset of “the world is mine and anyone against me is free game to kill”

and then theres the whole faux-leftist talking point thats been floating around lately like “gun control is just going to give the government all the guns and we’ll have nothing to defend ourselves with” like. 1. cops shoot ppl regardless of if they actually even have a gun or not. do you genuinely believe you’de have time to draw aim and fire before they react. and theyre already wearing bulletproof vests like. even if you did kill a cop youre going to jail forever after that youre not going to be the head of the glorious revolution like stop playing murder dressup pretend be real. and 2. the main point which is rly the most obvious answer. I AM ALSO FOR THE DEMILITARIZATION OF THE POLICE. i do not dream of violence!!! i do not want for blood!!! armed civilians are not going to lead to the cops getting LESS guns. LIKE.......... I DON’T THINK COPS SHOULD HAVE GUNS EITHER. WHY are some ppl’s takes so deeply ingrained in the idea that violence is not only necessary but should be actively pursued like. and none of them are actually organizing any revolutions either bc theyre all so wrapped up in their chosen one most communist twitter user ever fantasy. and when asked to defend their points theyre jst like “well im from the conservative south and-” and yeah me too bud. your experience was not universal. any actual counterpoints? how many dead children will you let there be or is it all just a “necessary sacrifice” to keep living your fantasy?

[magxit]

My answer to why nations are supporting Israel is 1. Money & power. I hope this doesn't come off antisemitic, but Jewish people in US do run this country. AIPAC one of the biggest pro-israel organizations funds many of those in congress. I feel like just like the NRA, AIPAC has a chokehold on many law makers and no one pays attention. The media is run by pro-Israelis, they'll show what they want to show.

2. It's Muslim vs. Jewish. Racusm, Islamophobia and just hatred. The world views Muslims as terrorists and negative people, they don't like Arabs so. Even with 1 million kids in a hostage situation, they won't due anything.

I know nothing of AIPAC but I will say this there are people who have invested interest in the USA political climate and spend time and money to get the outcome they want.

I just started reading up on all of this so I am not going to act like I know much of anything but I do see how many countries have invested in Israel and want to make sure the money keeps flowing.

Regarding the death and destruction of Palestine and no one caring just proves the point that brown lives don't matter in the end. Just look at Ukraine. When the war started 'everyone' (white people) could see themselves in the war but when looking at the millions of people killed in Syria and Sudan no one bats an eyelash.

Also let's not use phrases like 'Jewish people in US do run this country' it just breeds stereotypes and division.