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People are what matter.
6 years ago
Karno's Rare-Because-He-Never-Has-Time Blather:
We're looking for one more person to ride shotgun with us Tucson Mobbers to Texas Furry Fiesta:
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9080348/
Buzz Fragman if you figure you have the time and spine for such a road-trip. The more, the merrier, and all that sort of thing.
Speaking of people mattering....Y'all hear about the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand? Some Australian oxygen-waste murdered a bunch of refugees in their mosques. Yeah, repeat me that line about how Australia instituted nationwide gun confiscation, and now there are no more mass murders in that region.
Yeah. Because it's not the tools that matter. It's the people. Doesn't matter if the creep(s) are killing people with trucks, guns, poison gas, bombs, fire or whatever. Humans are ingenious tool-using animals, and that is not going to change.
The key factor is that some people think that committing mass murder is an acceptable tactic, even heroic. As long as the jihadis think killing the Unbelievers is admirable, as long as white supremacists think killing refugees (or fellow citizens of a different skin color or religion) is necessary - as long as any culture tells it's members that mass murder of the "other" is acceptable - horrors like these will keep happening.
Before the 1934 National Firearms Act, there were essentially no controls on guns in the USA. If you had the money, you could order machine guns thru the mail. But there were no school shootings!
But now that we have over twenty THOUSAND gun laws, mass shootings happen every year. So what does that mean, gun laws cause mass murder?
No, obviously not. There were no school massacres back then because the culture was different. And if we want to eliminate such tragedies in future, we must change our culture to one where committing mass murder does NOT make any worthless douche famous (or even admired!).
But changing a culture is a Herculean task, you whine. Passing laws against inanimate objects is SO much easier! Yeah, but that's the thing. Inanimate objects. Without people to use them, they just sit there, quietly gathering dust. Again, it is the people that matter.
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9080348/
Buzz Fragman if you figure you have the time and spine for such a road-trip. The more, the merrier, and all that sort of thing.
Speaking of people mattering....Y'all hear about the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand? Some Australian oxygen-waste murdered a bunch of refugees in their mosques. Yeah, repeat me that line about how Australia instituted nationwide gun confiscation, and now there are no more mass murders in that region.
Yeah. Because it's not the tools that matter. It's the people. Doesn't matter if the creep(s) are killing people with trucks, guns, poison gas, bombs, fire or whatever. Humans are ingenious tool-using animals, and that is not going to change.
The key factor is that some people think that committing mass murder is an acceptable tactic, even heroic. As long as the jihadis think killing the Unbelievers is admirable, as long as white supremacists think killing refugees (or fellow citizens of a different skin color or religion) is necessary - as long as any culture tells it's members that mass murder of the "other" is acceptable - horrors like these will keep happening.
Before the 1934 National Firearms Act, there were essentially no controls on guns in the USA. If you had the money, you could order machine guns thru the mail. But there were no school shootings!
But now that we have over twenty THOUSAND gun laws, mass shootings happen every year. So what does that mean, gun laws cause mass murder?
No, obviously not. There were no school massacres back then because the culture was different. And if we want to eliminate such tragedies in future, we must change our culture to one where committing mass murder does NOT make any worthless douche famous (or even admired!).
But changing a culture is a Herculean task, you whine. Passing laws against inanimate objects is SO much easier! Yeah, but that's the thing. Inanimate objects. Without people to use them, they just sit there, quietly gathering dust. Again, it is the people that matter.
Then again, it didn't prevent the 1927 "Bath School disaster" committed by a guy who lost a public election and was told the bank was foreclosing on his farm.
I can still see a better world, I just can't see it happening anymore. Not for a very long time.
New Zealand's gun laws have been described as "relaxed"* but now there is interest in stricter regulations, just like there always is after the media covers something horrific.
*(By who? I'll admit I'm not certain.)
Yes, their gun laws are the way ours were before the Port Arthur Massacre.
They now realise that they've paid for it, and are getting semi automatic off the streets asap.
So yes all this gun control debating that follows after literally every shooting that gets in the media is playing directly into that fascist fucker's hands.
Also, do you have a link to his manifesto? I'd be interested in reading it for myself.
He was an insane idiot who attacked innocent people in a different country on the other side of the globe hoping to force a fantasy plan that wouldn't have worked, even if here were in the US.
https://katana17.wordpress.com/2019.....oter-mar-2019/ <- If you really want to. The comments are full of white nationalists that are calling him a hero soooo don't read the comments.
This guy was truly one of Gods VERY VERY "special" children!!!
It's almost as if people like the cretin understand that an armed society can rebel against their totalitarian aspirations, so they want to delegitimize gun ownership while stockpiling weapons themselves so that they can establish dominion over all with no one being able to challenge them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_.....s#19th_century
other than the Bath School Massacre McClaw mentioned.
This is kind of the same argument as saying there was no autism before 1938... sure there was, it just didn't make the national news and thus didn't enter into our current data.
"Doesn't matter if the creep(s) are killing people with trucks, guns, poison gas, bombs, fire or whatever."
*sigh* this is a bad argument man. Compare the number of deaths from truck attacks, poison gas, fire, and bombings to the number dead from guns. It isn't even a competition. There's a reason you don't go hunting using your truck man, it isn't as easy or as efficient as a gun. Pretending guns aren't easy to use and really effective at killing things is silly, why else would they exist if they were equally as good as bombs, poison gas, trucks, etc?
Here is the problem: "Doesn't matter if the creep(s) are killing people with trucks, guns, poison gas, bombs, fire or whatever."
And you're wrong here man, it really REALLY does matter.
Think about it like this: when your neighbour goes nuts, do you want him to come after you and your family with a rope or an M134?
What if your neighbour was building an atom bomb on his property? Just straight up getting the government to ship him enriched uranium and the tools to build a core. Say he wants it just in case someone from the city ever decides to infringe his right to have atom bombs.
Would you be cool with that? What if he had to get a background check and wait 2 weeks before he could get the first shipment, would you feel better about him playing around with something that dangerous? Or would you think "Shit, if this guy cracks up my whole neighbourhood could be atomic dust, doesn't matter how normal he seems, he probably shouldn't have access to something that dangerous"
I think we just disagree on scale. You think nukes are too dangerous for people to have safely and I think a lot of guns are too dangerous for people to have safely.
And on a final note: no one person's opinion has ever mattered Karno, but the opinions of groups have weight.
For what it's worth, I care about your opinion, insofar as you represent a view of the world I just don't grok. I wouldn't be here talking about your opinions if I didn't care about them
Yes, there are problems connected with the USA's high rate of gun ownership. But confiscating them - in practice, stealing them from millions of law-abiding people and stacking them up in the hands of Donald J. Trump's goon squads (as if that were even possible without sparking a bloody civil war) - is a much worse arrangement than our current one. Can we agree on that?
1: the government isn't trustworthy. They could pull a Hitler at any time (assuming whoever is in charge has the backing of the military).
On this, we agree. I think you guys were pretty close snatching all those children anyway, so full bore Hitler can't be too far from the public consciousness. We disagree on where you go with this though:
2: therefore, the power difference between the state's military and the combined military power of the citizenry can't be allowed to slide too far apart (confiscation) or we risk things getting all Hitlery.
Here, you're comparing the power differential between the citizenry and the US military. To my mind, you've already lost that race. They have tanks. If the military wanted to take over or Trump wanted to be king forever and somehow got the military on his side, it'd be over. Your populace just doesn't have the kind of firepower needed to counteract that AND if you did, madmen would be driving around in tanks when they cracked and killing hundreds, not tens of people.
That being said, mass confiscation doesn't work anyway. Most people just wouldn't bring them in or claim they're lost or something and then bury or hide them when inspected. But the solution also can't be (to steal from another cartoonist) "carry on, carry on, just this way, until we’re all rowing home on rivers of blood."
In between those two extremes there are probably some good solutions that limit the average person's ability to murder scads of people.
POSSIBLY, not probably. If the solution involves giving the government more power, I do believe I already pointed out how governments are the most prolific mass killers of all?
As for the notion that the US military can easily conquer the people from which it's soldiers are recruited, no, that's not how it works in the real world:
https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6927468/
You're not the first to think that "If we can just control the behavior of (fill in the name) group of people, everything will be fine!". The attempts have been ongoing since the first caveman waved a club and demanded obedience from his fellow protohumans. The systems of rule that work now-adays still are usually based on violence/the threat of violence, and tend to end badly.
But let's get past this point. I understand that in your worldview, the ability for civilians to own efficient killing tools is a deterrent against their elected government using it's killing tools against civilians. I just think two men holding guns to each other's heads isn't a great goal to steer society towards.
To your last point: I don't think I've made myself clear, I'm not trying to control a certain group of people or their behaviour. I'm trying to suggest that a maximum line for how much danger an individual can be to the rest of society would be a good thing to set. I think people are complex chemical machines and, statistically speaking, a certain percentage of any given population will crack every year and decide murder is on the menu. When that happens, I would rather it be hard for individuals to cause mayhem than easy, that's all. There will always be someone who will machine his own gun out of steel stock, manufacture his own ammunition and mix his own chemical explosives. But these things take expertise, time, and skill. They aren't EASY.
Imagine you had discovered, by epiphany, a chemical explosive that could be constructed from household chemicals in the right proportions and, when detonated, could level several city blocks. It's stupid simple to make, cheap, stable, and undetectable. You have only two options: release the recipe on the internet and put this power in the hands of every person in the world OR burn the formula and never speak of it again. There is no third option. Which do you choose?
No, they don't. Soldiers are as immersed in social media as the rest of us, these days.
"I'm not trying to control a certain group of people or their behaviour."
Yes, you are. You want to change the behavior of mass murderers - specifically, to make them stop killing people. I agree that would be great, but how is it to be done?
"Imagine you had discovered, by epiphany, a chemical explosive that could be constructed from household chemicals in the right proportions and, when detonated, could level several city blocks. It's stupid simple to make, cheap, stable, and undetectable. You have only two options: release the recipe on the internet and put this power in the hands of every person in the world OR burn the formula and never speak of it again. There is no third option. Which do you choose?"
Of course there's a third option. I patent the formula, and start mass-manufacturing the stuff for commercial blasting companies and the military. Explosives are a big market. And what you propose is not as hypothetical as you might like - it IS possible to mix explosives from household chemicals, and the formulas for such ARE available on the Net.
The point of having only two options is to force consideration of the core issue: namely that either there should be reasonable limits to the damage individual members of society can cause their fellows or there shouldn't. Pick one.
If you agree that there should exist some reasonable limits on an individual's freedom to decide who lives and who dies around them, then we're just disagreeing on scale.
I mean, not to be too confrontational but if your personal rules around the "how" of limits is "no limits on citizens that increase government power" what options does that leave? Where else are those limits going to come from?
I guess there's nothing for it but to keep viewing mass shootings as natural disasters. All you can hope for is that it hits some other town and not you or anyone you love.
Cross your fingers.
New Zealand, however, does not have our gun laws. It is a totally different country thousands of miles away.
Hovever, 24 hours later and they are all banding together to get all semi-automatics banned.
Go you kiwis!
And I suppose the next mass-murderer will have about as much respect for the semi-auto ban as they have for the ban against murder. But it feels good to pass gun bans, yes? It's almost sorta like you're doing something useful, and don't we all like to feel useful?
I have had 2 kids grow to adulthood in this country now. and at no point ever was there a thought in my mind that they might get shot. Just not even on the radar of possibility. That's a good way to be living right there. Freedom, if you will!
I regularly draw cartoons for the J.P.F.O. newsletter - Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. They are keenly aware that human nature has not changed one whit since the Holocaust. An armed populace, ready to put up violent resistance to pogroms, is a brake on politicians' dreams of genocide. And while you wait for such a politician to show up, plinking is fun.