In the late 1950s, Eugene Stoner, a World War II veteran working at Armalite, a small engineering firm in Hollywood, Floridainvented what he called the Armalite Rifle, Model 15. The Armalite Rifle Model 15 - AR-15 - was different from other military rifles, which used big, heavy rounds. Designed to meet the Pentagon’s desire for a lightweight weapon to match Soviet rifles such as the AK-47, the AR-15 fired small bullets at very fast speeds. The higher velocity meant the tiny projectiles became unstable when they penetrated a human body, tumbling through flesh to create devastating wounds. In military terms, the effectiveness as a “wounding weapon” was more important. A dead soldier can be left behind on the battlefield; caring for a wounded soldier will take at least three others - the corpsman to save the wounded soldier and two litter carriers to carry him out of harm’s way - out of active combat. An internal Pentagon Report called it “An outstanding weapon with phenomenal lethality.”
Fuckers. I usually refrain from such language but it’s the only way to describe those immoral bastards who proclaim their beloved, and wrongheaded, Second Amendment rights.
I feel like I should apologize for not reading your detailed history tonight, but I can’t. I can’t read it right now and I won’t apologize because I’m too sick at heart. Tomorrow is soon enough.
Right now I’m watching Rachel Maddow’s reporting on today’s mass shooting atrocity, airing details about journalists whose kids were at the school; a woman who was in Nashville on vacation who had a family member at the school and who survived a mass shooting on a vacation 4 months prior; young people who are experiencing their second mass shooting. Then Rachel interviewed the mayor of Nashville who talked about thoughts and prayers, mental health problems, blah blah blah. I can guess his political party.
ENOUGH! ENOUGH!! ENOUGH!!!
What kind of civilized society accepts this madness? Only ours is twisted enough to allow this ongoing atrocity.
Oh, crikey! One of the commercials before Rachel’s next segment, brought to Seattle viewers from the Master Builders Association, is suggesting that trees stand in the way of affordable housing. This tree hugger is going to switch from wine to vodka. Tonight I despair. Tomorrow I take action - for my sanity. After I recover from my hangover.
This is the heart of the matter - the attraction of these guns is all the result of a marketing campaign that would be the envy of the advertising industry except for the body count..... And for the record, the vast majority of these high capacity semi-auto rifles and pistols are merely toys - most people have no practical use for them at all. Many states do not allow hunting with semi-auto rifles or limit you to 3-5 rounds in the magazine. In New York, the 3 round limit on magazine capacity for semi-auto rifles meant that the M1 Garand WW2 rifle has to have special 'en bloc' clips made with only a 3-round capacity because it ts impossible to load a normal 8-round clip with only 3 rounds in it. Many other states do not allow the AR-15 to be used for hunting deer (the most common game hunted) because the 5.56mm round is not considered powerful enough to take a deer without making the animal suffer. Almost all the videos you'll see on Youtube are of people just plinking or showing how "military" they are having the rifle. A subset of videos is of AR-15s converted to functional machine guns using special triggers - again as toys. But somehow, far-right men have come to equate ownership of these military style weapons as proof of their "manhood"......which explains the fury at any attempt to stop the illegal use of these things. They should have been controlled in the beginning when they were rare, but that was not done, and here we are..... A bit of a soapbox for me, because Congress could fix a lot of this but won't. In fact, there are campaigns among the gun crowd to have existing gun laws declared as unconstitutional (and this SCOTUS, with Clarence Thomas, could well do that). The fact is, a US soldier on the front line in Iraq or Afghanistan was less likely to be shot than the average American citizen, up to the present day. All of this is on the people who could not bother to vote in 2016......
And the strange thing is that I am not a rabid anti-gun type..... Guns are merely tools, but they are extraordinarily dangerous tools. I do not have a problem with people owning guns with responsible controls and regulation. I have a gun collection myself because I write about military technical history and my collection is for reference. Most of my collection are replicas that do not shoot live ammunition because my interest is WW2 weapons. Many of them are machine guns, and they are so expensive these days that only the wealthy can afford to buy them - one German FG 42 paratroop assault rifle sold at auction for $327,000. My replica FG 42 was $1500. But I am a lawyer's kid and I do not like the way so many in the pro-gun community push the boundaries by deliberately skirting the law with home-made silencers sold as kits, and the special triggers I mentioned elsewhere. We either have the rule of law or we don't.....
I think there is a cockeyed relationship between the availability of military style weapons and the steep decline in actual military recruitments in recent years. Young men are now fantasy soldiers rather than actual and militarily trained ones who learn not just the how, but the when, why, and where.
Just for grins, here is an AR with a "forced reset trigger", a device that skirts the letter of the National Firearms Act law to allow anyone who can get an AR rifle to own a functional machine gun, as seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uCoj92PUnI This is a legal semi-auto rifle anyone can buy in a store, with a currently legal special trigger.....
Yee ha! At this point in time - that little demo makes me afraid for my grandchildren who are in elementary school. Especially after the 3 nine year olds who were slaughtered in Tennessee. Anyone who gets "joy" from that shouldnt be allowed NEAR a gun!
The mindset of anyone who needs or must have that kind of a weapon lacks description.
But, but....they won't feel like "real men" if they can't have these guns..... The ATF really screwed the pooch when they approved those special triggers as with the earlier "bump" stocks. The reason they did it is that the National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a "semi-automatic" firearm as one that fires only one shot for each pull of the trigger, while a "full-automatic" firearm will fire more than one shot for each pull of the trigger. With the bump stock, the rifle was free to move back and forth in the stock, so the shooter could brace the stock against the shoulder, and then fire the rifle by pulling the trigger while pulling forward on the front hand grip or stock. What this did was allow the rifle to reciprocate (back and forth) on the stock while the shooter's finger was braced against the trigger. As the rifle moved, the trigger finger pressed the trigger to fire as the shooter's forward pull on the rifle pulled it forward, and then released when the rifle fired and recoiled to the rear. This cycle could continue until the magazine emptied, simulating the speed and function of a machine gun - but by the logic of a Philadelphia lawyer, the rifle fired only one shot for each pull of the trigger. Then you have the special triggers - two of them..... The first is called a "binary" trigger, and functions by firing a rifle when the shooter pulls the trigger, and then fires a second time when the shooter releases the trigger. Again, the ATF approved this by the narrowest of technical definitions - the binary trigger does fire one round for each pull of the trigger, but they ignored the fact that it fires a second round when the trigger is released, and you have to release the trigger to fire another round. So the binary trigger does fire more than one round for each pull of the trigger - no idea why ATF approved it. The final exhibit is the "forced-reset" trigger. This trigger operates by forcing the trigger finger forward and resetting the trigger to fire the next round automatically, allowing the weapon to fire as fast as a machine gun and just as easily (no bump stick manipulation required, no trigger finger fatigue from rapid fire with a binary trigger). Again, by the narrowest technical definition, the forced-reset trigger fires only one shot for each pull of the trigger, but it is the action of the weapon firing that resets the trigger, so it is the next best thing to an illegal machine gun. The MAJOR error the ATF made was in approving these devices without considering how they would be used. ALL three of these things, the bump stock, the binary trigger and the forced-reset trigger, were developed for one purpose only - so people could convert legal semi-automatic rifles into rump machine guns without the more stringent controls and requirements for machine guns in the National Firearms Act, such as the detailed background check, fingerprints and the $200 transfer tax to acquire one of those restricted weapons. All in all, a shoddy performance by the ATF..... There oughta be a law.
These devices are what I was complaining about earlier how people in the gun community keeping pushing to find ways to skirt or get around the laws that govern firearms. And what is the result? Look at that Youtube video I posted - do you really want that immature clown to have a machine gun? REAL machine guns, the ones covered by the NFA and regulated are very expensive and now are the purview of the wealthy - the cheap ones are priced like used cars and the expensive ones are priced like houses. My solution is to put all high capacity semi-automatic rifles and pistols under the National Firearms Act as "paramilitary weapons" and control them just as machine guns are controlled. You can have them but they will all be registered and you as the owner will be vetted as for owners of other restricted guns. Not in my lifetime, but some day.....
Really good description of how the bump stock works - never heard it before and somehow the ATF approved this? Sort of cutting off the nose to spite the face? I have to question how much influence the ATF has about anything.
The glimpse of MTG preventing them from doing their job & seemingly getting very little backlash from it - because shes such an important politician?????????????
I once asked my father why we didn’t have a gun in the house and he said that if you ever saw the damage that bullets can cause to the human body, you wouldn’t want anything to do with guns. He was a WW2 draftee and had qualified on the M1 Garand which is a quaint popgun compared to the firepower of an AR-15/M-16.
There are an estimated 433,000,000 firearms, over 20,000,000 of them AR-15 style weapons, circulating in our country of about 322,000,000 people. Where can we possibly go from here?
When I was growing up in suburbia in the 1950's the only man on our street who was known to have a handgun was a city detective. My father had a Remington deer rifle which was regularly lent out to other fathers on the street who had opportunities to go hunting. Those were the only two known about on our entire street. Nearly 70 years later we've reached the oversaturation point that you've highlighted, so much so that six year-olds are taking guns to school to shoot their teachers. No one bothers to improve himself to overcome adversity, rather just kill your adversity, whatever or whomever it may be.
thanks for all this research, Tom. it amazes me that you didn't puke a coupla times while you were working on it. or am I assuming too much?
the story is a horrible one. it'd be a horrible one if it happened anyplace. but it's an AMERICAN story. in fact, it could ONLY be an American story, which is what makes it so much worse.
any wit I might have been able to summon fails me.
this, as we all know, a national scandal. and, whatever occasional "optimistic" moments may occur, we know that (as of NOW, at any rate) it's going to continue, and continue and continue.
this time, the shooter was a woman. a TRANS woman. I don't really wanna see what the scumbags are going to make of this fact, but they sure are gonna try SOME shit, because that's what they do.
in the meantime, this shit in Georgia leaves me speechless as well.
there are some excellent lawyer/writers here who are certainly going to weigh in and have a lot more knowledge about these things than I do. but it sure feels like a Big Moment. I assume it's going to be appealed and I can't imagine that even THIS SCOTUS is going to be cool with it. but what about NOW?
changing the subject yet again, I actually KNOW David Pecker (named so appropriately!). for years, I'd attend the end-pf-year Communications Chapter dinner of the CCNY Alumni Association (full of aged NYT guys from the '30s, young guns from the current NYT and the East Bronx contingent (Dan Schorr, the Kalb boys, all of whom went to Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton--famous as the place you went if you wanted to write--with my dad...actually, Schorr was older). James Baldwin, Richard Avedon, Paddy Chayevsky were at Clinton at the same time, and it was quite a lively scene. even then, Baldwin was a megastar.
but getting back to Pecker...he'd sit at the table, poking at the rubber chicken and complaining bitterly that he never got any respect. people would ask him why, he'd tell them and all any of us could do was just...shrug.
The NRA and the Repugs entered into a devil’s pack years ago. The Repug insistence that half the wording of the 2nd Amendment could be ignored, allowing any and all to carry a weapon --including the military-grade, NOT-FOR HUNTING rifles--has opened a flood gate of arms on this nation. Let’s get one thing straight: The Republican Party platform DOES NOT STAND FOR MORALITY, FAMILY VALUES NOR PATRIOTISM. It is all about GREED and the sort of power that allows them to be BULLIES--Even MASS MURDERERS. None of them are “state’s organized militias” meant to protect citizens--NONE. QUITE THE OPPOSITE--the goal of Crime Syndicate known as the Republican Party is SEDITION, TREASON and CREATING CHAOS TO SUBVERT GOVERNANCE.
I am heartbroken and angrier than hell. The repubs are despicable. They have proven to not care about children but certainly to use them in the guise of protecting them from books, drag queens, factual history or anything else that might make them “uncomfortable”. They are not protecting the children. They are using them to create the dystopian Christo fascist world they want. And they don’t care about the safety and welfare of children. For them the children are just collateral damage in their quest for obscene wealth. While the repubs live in the NRA’s and gun manufacturers pockets, the sick gun loving culture they helped create and support continues on. I am sick.
you're sounding like me. try to get over it because the feelings engendered by acknowledging this fact are pretty shitty to sit with for more than, like, three minutes.
This was such a depressing story. It is necessary information, of course, and a lot more actionable than thoughts and prayers. But still, a major downer. The greed and quest for power is just awful. And now that it’s all tied to political identity it gets mixed up with all the other pathologies of the GQP: the racism, the fear, the distrust of democracy, etc. And there’s no sure way to protect yourself and your children from it. Like living in a death lottery. Although staying out of red states probably helps somewhat.
Fuckers. I usually refrain from such language but it’s the only way to describe those immoral bastards who proclaim their beloved, and wrongheaded, Second Amendment rights.
You go, Mary!
I never refrain from such language and feel much better for it. just saying...
Well then, fuckety fuck fuck FUCK! Couldn't touch that little heart shaped thingy that makes for a like, nopety nope nope NOPE.
Yes!
Republicans: Ban books not guns ... they’re fostering murder and hatred.
And ignorance.
I feel like I should apologize for not reading your detailed history tonight, but I can’t. I can’t read it right now and I won’t apologize because I’m too sick at heart. Tomorrow is soon enough.
Right now I’m watching Rachel Maddow’s reporting on today’s mass shooting atrocity, airing details about journalists whose kids were at the school; a woman who was in Nashville on vacation who had a family member at the school and who survived a mass shooting on a vacation 4 months prior; young people who are experiencing their second mass shooting. Then Rachel interviewed the mayor of Nashville who talked about thoughts and prayers, mental health problems, blah blah blah. I can guess his political party.
ENOUGH! ENOUGH!! ENOUGH!!!
What kind of civilized society accepts this madness? Only ours is twisted enough to allow this ongoing atrocity.
Oh, crikey! One of the commercials before Rachel’s next segment, brought to Seattle viewers from the Master Builders Association, is suggesting that trees stand in the way of affordable housing. This tree hugger is going to switch from wine to vodka. Tonight I despair. Tomorrow I take action - for my sanity. After I recover from my hangover.
"trees stand in the way of affordable housing"???? Any builders assn. that would suggest that should remove the people responsible for it! Stupidity!
IF I still drank - yeah vodka sounds like a good choice.
The mayor of Nashville has a D by his name. I was astonished by his "thoughts and prayers".
Me too, I cringed
This is the heart of the matter - the attraction of these guns is all the result of a marketing campaign that would be the envy of the advertising industry except for the body count..... And for the record, the vast majority of these high capacity semi-auto rifles and pistols are merely toys - most people have no practical use for them at all. Many states do not allow hunting with semi-auto rifles or limit you to 3-5 rounds in the magazine. In New York, the 3 round limit on magazine capacity for semi-auto rifles meant that the M1 Garand WW2 rifle has to have special 'en bloc' clips made with only a 3-round capacity because it ts impossible to load a normal 8-round clip with only 3 rounds in it. Many other states do not allow the AR-15 to be used for hunting deer (the most common game hunted) because the 5.56mm round is not considered powerful enough to take a deer without making the animal suffer. Almost all the videos you'll see on Youtube are of people just plinking or showing how "military" they are having the rifle. A subset of videos is of AR-15s converted to functional machine guns using special triggers - again as toys. But somehow, far-right men have come to equate ownership of these military style weapons as proof of their "manhood"......which explains the fury at any attempt to stop the illegal use of these things. They should have been controlled in the beginning when they were rare, but that was not done, and here we are..... A bit of a soapbox for me, because Congress could fix a lot of this but won't. In fact, there are campaigns among the gun crowd to have existing gun laws declared as unconstitutional (and this SCOTUS, with Clarence Thomas, could well do that). The fact is, a US soldier on the front line in Iraq or Afghanistan was less likely to be shot than the average American citizen, up to the present day. All of this is on the people who could not bother to vote in 2016......
And the strange thing is that I am not a rabid anti-gun type..... Guns are merely tools, but they are extraordinarily dangerous tools. I do not have a problem with people owning guns with responsible controls and regulation. I have a gun collection myself because I write about military technical history and my collection is for reference. Most of my collection are replicas that do not shoot live ammunition because my interest is WW2 weapons. Many of them are machine guns, and they are so expensive these days that only the wealthy can afford to buy them - one German FG 42 paratroop assault rifle sold at auction for $327,000. My replica FG 42 was $1500. But I am a lawyer's kid and I do not like the way so many in the pro-gun community push the boundaries by deliberately skirting the law with home-made silencers sold as kits, and the special triggers I mentioned elsewhere. We either have the rule of law or we don't.....
I think there is a cockeyed relationship between the availability of military style weapons and the steep decline in actual military recruitments in recent years. Young men are now fantasy soldiers rather than actual and militarily trained ones who learn not just the how, but the when, why, and where.
Just for grins, here is an AR with a "forced reset trigger", a device that skirts the letter of the National Firearms Act law to allow anyone who can get an AR rifle to own a functional machine gun, as seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uCoj92PUnI This is a legal semi-auto rifle anyone can buy in a store, with a currently legal special trigger.....
Yee ha! At this point in time - that little demo makes me afraid for my grandchildren who are in elementary school. Especially after the 3 nine year olds who were slaughtered in Tennessee. Anyone who gets "joy" from that shouldnt be allowed NEAR a gun!
The mindset of anyone who needs or must have that kind of a weapon lacks description.
But, but....they won't feel like "real men" if they can't have these guns..... The ATF really screwed the pooch when they approved those special triggers as with the earlier "bump" stocks. The reason they did it is that the National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a "semi-automatic" firearm as one that fires only one shot for each pull of the trigger, while a "full-automatic" firearm will fire more than one shot for each pull of the trigger. With the bump stock, the rifle was free to move back and forth in the stock, so the shooter could brace the stock against the shoulder, and then fire the rifle by pulling the trigger while pulling forward on the front hand grip or stock. What this did was allow the rifle to reciprocate (back and forth) on the stock while the shooter's finger was braced against the trigger. As the rifle moved, the trigger finger pressed the trigger to fire as the shooter's forward pull on the rifle pulled it forward, and then released when the rifle fired and recoiled to the rear. This cycle could continue until the magazine emptied, simulating the speed and function of a machine gun - but by the logic of a Philadelphia lawyer, the rifle fired only one shot for each pull of the trigger. Then you have the special triggers - two of them..... The first is called a "binary" trigger, and functions by firing a rifle when the shooter pulls the trigger, and then fires a second time when the shooter releases the trigger. Again, the ATF approved this by the narrowest of technical definitions - the binary trigger does fire one round for each pull of the trigger, but they ignored the fact that it fires a second round when the trigger is released, and you have to release the trigger to fire another round. So the binary trigger does fire more than one round for each pull of the trigger - no idea why ATF approved it. The final exhibit is the "forced-reset" trigger. This trigger operates by forcing the trigger finger forward and resetting the trigger to fire the next round automatically, allowing the weapon to fire as fast as a machine gun and just as easily (no bump stick manipulation required, no trigger finger fatigue from rapid fire with a binary trigger). Again, by the narrowest technical definition, the forced-reset trigger fires only one shot for each pull of the trigger, but it is the action of the weapon firing that resets the trigger, so it is the next best thing to an illegal machine gun. The MAJOR error the ATF made was in approving these devices without considering how they would be used. ALL three of these things, the bump stock, the binary trigger and the forced-reset trigger, were developed for one purpose only - so people could convert legal semi-automatic rifles into rump machine guns without the more stringent controls and requirements for machine guns in the National Firearms Act, such as the detailed background check, fingerprints and the $200 transfer tax to acquire one of those restricted weapons. All in all, a shoddy performance by the ATF..... There oughta be a law.
These devices are what I was complaining about earlier how people in the gun community keeping pushing to find ways to skirt or get around the laws that govern firearms. And what is the result? Look at that Youtube video I posted - do you really want that immature clown to have a machine gun? REAL machine guns, the ones covered by the NFA and regulated are very expensive and now are the purview of the wealthy - the cheap ones are priced like used cars and the expensive ones are priced like houses. My solution is to put all high capacity semi-automatic rifles and pistols under the National Firearms Act as "paramilitary weapons" and control them just as machine guns are controlled. You can have them but they will all be registered and you as the owner will be vetted as for owners of other restricted guns. Not in my lifetime, but some day.....
Really good description of how the bump stock works - never heard it before and somehow the ATF approved this? Sort of cutting off the nose to spite the face? I have to question how much influence the ATF has about anything.
The glimpse of MTG preventing them from doing their job & seemingly getting very little backlash from it - because shes such an important politician?????????????
They've been gutted for years.
I remember reading or hearing that their record keeping isnt up to snuff - maybe not completely computerized? Am I wrong?
I once asked my father why we didn’t have a gun in the house and he said that if you ever saw the damage that bullets can cause to the human body, you wouldn’t want anything to do with guns. He was a WW2 draftee and had qualified on the M1 Garand which is a quaint popgun compared to the firepower of an AR-15/M-16.
Very informative. A keeper document on American businesses screwing everyone. Created demand off tragedies. So sad.
There are an estimated 433,000,000 firearms, over 20,000,000 of them AR-15 style weapons, circulating in our country of about 322,000,000 people. Where can we possibly go from here?
When I was growing up in suburbia in the 1950's the only man on our street who was known to have a handgun was a city detective. My father had a Remington deer rifle which was regularly lent out to other fathers on the street who had opportunities to go hunting. Those were the only two known about on our entire street. Nearly 70 years later we've reached the oversaturation point that you've highlighted, so much so that six year-olds are taking guns to school to shoot their teachers. No one bothers to improve himself to overcome adversity, rather just kill your adversity, whatever or whomever it may be.
Yup - thats all "adversity" means to these numnuts.
This entire post is plagiarized from a long investigative story in today's Washington Post without a shred of attribution. Read it and compare: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-america-gun-culture-politics/
thanks for all this research, Tom. it amazes me that you didn't puke a coupla times while you were working on it. or am I assuming too much?
the story is a horrible one. it'd be a horrible one if it happened anyplace. but it's an AMERICAN story. in fact, it could ONLY be an American story, which is what makes it so much worse.
any wit I might have been able to summon fails me.
this, as we all know, a national scandal. and, whatever occasional "optimistic" moments may occur, we know that (as of NOW, at any rate) it's going to continue, and continue and continue.
this time, the shooter was a woman. a TRANS woman. I don't really wanna see what the scumbags are going to make of this fact, but they sure are gonna try SOME shit, because that's what they do.
in the meantime, this shit in Georgia leaves me speechless as well.
there are some excellent lawyer/writers here who are certainly going to weigh in and have a lot more knowledge about these things than I do. but it sure feels like a Big Moment. I assume it's going to be appealed and I can't imagine that even THIS SCOTUS is going to be cool with it. but what about NOW?
changing the subject yet again, I actually KNOW David Pecker (named so appropriately!). for years, I'd attend the end-pf-year Communications Chapter dinner of the CCNY Alumni Association (full of aged NYT guys from the '30s, young guns from the current NYT and the East Bronx contingent (Dan Schorr, the Kalb boys, all of whom went to Junior High School and DeWitt Clinton--famous as the place you went if you wanted to write--with my dad...actually, Schorr was older). James Baldwin, Richard Avedon, Paddy Chayevsky were at Clinton at the same time, and it was quite a lively scene. even then, Baldwin was a megastar.
but getting back to Pecker...he'd sit at the table, poking at the rubber chicken and complaining bitterly that he never got any respect. people would ask him why, he'd tell them and all any of us could do was just...shrug.
"...it's an AMERICAN story. in fact, it could ONLY be an American story..." ✅
This article from the Atlantic is a detailed history of just how the AR-15 was developed and the hubris of the US Army.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/on-the-military-and-civilian-history-of-the-ar-15/622310/
Yeah, that's very good.
The NRA and the Repugs entered into a devil’s pack years ago. The Repug insistence that half the wording of the 2nd Amendment could be ignored, allowing any and all to carry a weapon --including the military-grade, NOT-FOR HUNTING rifles--has opened a flood gate of arms on this nation. Let’s get one thing straight: The Republican Party platform DOES NOT STAND FOR MORALITY, FAMILY VALUES NOR PATRIOTISM. It is all about GREED and the sort of power that allows them to be BULLIES--Even MASS MURDERERS. None of them are “state’s organized militias” meant to protect citizens--NONE. QUITE THE OPPOSITE--the goal of Crime Syndicate known as the Republican Party is SEDITION, TREASON and CREATING CHAOS TO SUBVERT GOVERNANCE.
Share this !📣
List of legislators receiving NRA donations. Jordan is #1. All Repubss. NO Dems.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/national-rifle-assn/recipients?id=d000000082
Worse than the tobacco murderers and the Big Pharma murderers; the politicians who have supported these cretins need to be exiled to another planet.
I am heartbroken and angrier than hell. The repubs are despicable. They have proven to not care about children but certainly to use them in the guise of protecting them from books, drag queens, factual history or anything else that might make them “uncomfortable”. They are not protecting the children. They are using them to create the dystopian Christo fascist world they want. And they don’t care about the safety and welfare of children. For them the children are just collateral damage in their quest for obscene wealth. While the repubs live in the NRA’s and gun manufacturers pockets, the sick gun loving culture they helped create and support continues on. I am sick.
Succinct, accurate and devastating. I have no idea how we recover from this madness.
you're sounding like me. try to get over it because the feelings engendered by acknowledging this fact are pretty shitty to sit with for more than, like, three minutes.
This was such a depressing story. It is necessary information, of course, and a lot more actionable than thoughts and prayers. But still, a major downer. The greed and quest for power is just awful. And now that it’s all tied to political identity it gets mixed up with all the other pathologies of the GQP: the racism, the fear, the distrust of democracy, etc. And there’s no sure way to protect yourself and your children from it. Like living in a death lottery. Although staying out of red states probably helps somewhat.