From a question on Quora about guns...
Like much of public debate and politics in the US, a small fringe element, with support from a willing press, tries to control the narrative by making extreme statements. Sometimes this gets picked up worldwide and it 1) is a successful coup by the fringe group to drive the direction of the dialog and 2) it leaves the remainder of the world with a distorted perception of American society. Most Americans, like 99.9999999%, have no desire for teachers to be armed.
The idea of a kindergarten teacher "packing iron" to save her students makes little sense except to someone who has never had children and has lived under a rock for twenty years.
There are "certain things in everyday life that have gone terribly wrong" in the US, this is not one of them. Declining "civil" discourse, increasingly invasive government and corporate data collection, and wealth disparity are signs of things going terribly wrong. The gun control debate is a sideline issue used to divert people's attention from the real issues that are impacting their lives.
Excellent point and it makes me wonder...perhaps the whole gun debate is a distraction that pushes liberals away from accomplishing the bigger things.
8 comments:
The issue of guns is clearly used by the right to wrangle support from people who would not otherwise care about certain issues.
For example, do gun nuts really give one whit about abortion? Or contraception? Or prayer in the schools? Or teaching evolution in science classes? Your average redneck gun-toter thinks it's just fine to shoot anyone who looks at him cross-eyed, so it's hard to believe he's all exercised over the fact that poor black women have a higher abortion rate than rich white women. Or that he really cares whether god created the earth 6,000 or 6,000,0000,000 years ago. These guys just don't care about anything other than themselves and their toys.
These people may oppose abortion, but the motivation is to exact punishment from poor women for having had sex (remember Rush Limbaugh and his tirades about Sarah Fluke?). Not because they truly care about the sanctity of life, or believe that life begins at conception, because they clearly don't care about life, in light of the 20,000 suicides committed annually with firearms and the woundings and deaths of thousands of innocent children and passersby from inept handling of firearms in homes and in public.
Single-issue groups such as anti-immigrant closet racists, gun nuts and anti-abortion folks have banded together not because their beliefs are compatible (though certain individuals certainly hold all of these beliefs), but because they simply don't give a damn about other people losing their rights as long as they get what they want.
Yes, there is some overlap (the closet racists want to have guns and laws that let them kill anyone they're "afraid" of), but for the most part the only thing that links these groups together is their selfishness.
For a while it looked like the Libertarian wing with Ron Paul was going to split from Republicans in a major way, but with Rand Paul's desire to run for president, he seems to be selling out and changing his ideology to make it more palatable for the Republican base, especially in regard with the Republican penchant for constantly starting foreign wars and giving Israel billions of dollars to undermine American interests in the Middle East.
Your average redneck gun-toter thinks it's just fine to shoot anyone who looks at him cross-eyed
Must be why there are hundreds of thousands of murders committed every year by people with no criminal record at all.
Oh, wait.
I swear, sometimes I think you two are a put-on of liberal stereotypes - a false flag run by fiendishly clever conservatives.
the whole gun debate is a distraction that pushes liberals away from accomplishing the bigger things.
Pushes? If so it's a self inflicted push.
If liberals would quit 'starting' the 'debate' over and over again - then it would happen at all.
Nikto, Nikto, Nikto. Calm yourself down. You're supposed to pillage and rape those straw men before you dismember and burn them, remember? That keeps you from getting your mighty dick blistered by the flames of self-created idiocy.
Dammit. Messed up the link. Retry:
But not everyone is as fuckwitted as Marxie and Nikto: Gun Clubs Popping Up at Area High Schools. Some things are getting back to normal, at least. I remember a time when many schools had rifle teams. I know, I was on one. Funny thing, those rifles must've been defective. Nobody was ever possessed by the evil spirit inherent in inanimate objects and shot anybody.
For all his railing against religion, that makes me wonder if at heart, Nikto's really a primitive animist at heart?
Hmm, cops really aren't that smart: Clay deputy's son, 2, accidentally fires father's gun inside Wendy's
This guy (with a special dusting of government-authority pixie dust) most likely wasn't using a proper holster, either. Otherwise it's very difficult to imagine how this could happen.
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