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Gun Legislation, Crime, and Events


Tigerbomb13

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1 hour ago, Motown Bombers said:

I think the Buffalo shooting would have been worse if everyone was armed. Untrained people firing aimlessly and in a panic probably results in more people dead. Now if the guy was only armed with a knife, a bunch of people could have simply got shopping carts and rammed him and thwarted him. 

It's also a heck of a lot easier to run away from someone with a knife or blunt object than it is to try and evade someone with a gun, so those who wanted to escape could have done so easier. I always imagine in massive, chaotic situations like this, that if you had everyone or significantly more people armed, as the gun fanatics on the right want, you'd turn situations like this into a shootout and you might not be able to identify who the real shooter is.

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On 5/15/2022 at 2:59 PM, Kacie said:

Do you realize there was an armed security guard at the store who fired at the assailant, but the extensive body armor he had made it impenetrable?  The security guard was murdered, as was an off duty police officer.  So STFU about being armed being the answer.

Yes, Bunker has always realized that.

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I was watching a network newscast while relaxing in my hotel last night. A story about the Russian takeover of Mariupol was introduced, and the news presenter warned that the story would contain disturbing images.

The only images shown that could have even come close to fitting the description of "disturbing" was of a guy being carted off on a stretcher with his face blurred, and some destroyed ordnance and cityscape. No bodies or blood or anything like that was shown.

At first this got me wondering how we Americans had become so soft that we need a trigger warning about a blurred face on a stretcher.

But then it occurred to me: maybe this is being done on purpose to keep people shielded from the real damage that weapons do to people.

 

Some of us remember the images on the network newscasts of yore of dead American soldiers, and of their caskets being shipped home from Vietnam. We know that the networks showing that on their newscasts was a key turning point in support for that war: viewers were so horrified by what they saw that they changed their minds about supporting their government's war.

The networks have never shown anything like that since. They know that doing so would have cratered public support for all those more recent wars in the Middle East. The networks knew that showing dead soldiers in the Kuwaiti desert and on the streets of Baghdad which would have pissed off the government, perhaps resulting in the withdrawal of network access to insiders in Washington, or even regulatory pressure from aggrieved parties there.

That's why we will never, ever see images of dead American soldiers or caskets ever again on American news networks. The networks have a business to protect, after all.

Perhaps the same principle applies to gun violence in America.

 

You know the old TV news phrase, "If it bleeds, it leads?" Have you ever noticed that whenever your local newscasts run a story about some shooting in your city, they never show any actual blood, or the dead victim lying on the ground, or the spot where the shooting occurred even after it's been cleared away? Instead, all they show are close-ups of yellow tape strung up far from the scene, and a bunch of cops milling about. That's always the entire video, right there.

So much for leading with bleeding.

So I wonder whether this might be a key to why so many people are indifferent to gun control: we viewers are being shielded from ever seeing the effects of actual gun violence.

Maybe showing the actual effects of gun violence on the TV news would finally change people's minds about controlling access to guns, at long last.

I'm not talking about the 2A absolutists, the "the more guns we have on the street the safer we'll be" people. They are completely gone and can't be reached. And those who are already horrified by the very thought of gun violence are already on board.

I'm talking about the great majority in the middle, the people who hardly ever give any thought to gun violence, because they are never confronted with the reality of it in any capacity. Certainly not on the TV news.

I would bet that if ordinary everyday people tuning into the TV news saw at least one dead body—a real person, not a video game villain—riddled with bullets on every newscast they saw, they would be completely horrified in the same way their parents and grandparents were when they saw dead American soldiers on the nightly newscasts of half a century ago.

I feel certain that would change a lot of otherwise unengaged minds, because ordinary everyday people would be so shaken by seeing the actual gun violence they've been shielded from for so long that they would demand true effective gun control, just like their parents and grandparents were so shaken by images of dead soldiers that they demanded the end of the Vietnam war.

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On 5/17/2022 at 2:46 PM, Motown Bombers said:

I think the Buffalo shooting would have been worse if everyone was armed. Untrained people firing aimlessly and in a panic probably results in more people dead. Now if the guy was only armed with a knife, a bunch of people could have simply got shopping carts and rammed him and thwarted him. 

That's not how it works in cowboy movies.  

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19 minutes ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

Detroit Free Press: Records: Oxford school shooting suspect hoped massacre would get Biden impeached

The fundamentalists on the right are now raising fundamentalist kids who are being radicalized and shooting up schools in the hopes of having Joe Biden impeached.

Biden Impeachment started on the left.

Sincerely

Cucker Tarlson

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2 hours ago, oblong said:

I don't think it's nefarious.  Just overly cautious news directors who don't want to get flooded by an extremely small batch of Karens who didn't want their little snowflake kids to see that.

 

 

That’s part of the equation. Where were the Karens of the 1960s when it came to making decisions about what to show the American news viewer regarding Vietnam? Nowhere, because Karen is a modern social phenomenon that is not just a purveyor of snowflakery—she is a product of snowflakery as well. Karen was born and grew up during the sanitizing of the Middle East wars on TV newscasts, and that’s as back when the nightly network news really mattered.  

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2 minutes ago, chasfh said:

That’s part of the equation. Where were the Karens of the 1960s when it came to making decisions about what to show the American news viewer regarding Vietnam? Nowhere, because Karen is a modern social phenomenon that is not just a purveyor of snowflakery—she is a product of snowflakery as well. Karen was born and grew up during the sanitizing of the Middle East wars on TV newscasts, and that’s as back when the nightly network news really mattered.  

I'm of the age now where our kids have graduated HS and you'd be surprised how many of the helicopter parents who were Karens and the emptiness they now feel as their kids are out free.   A few of those kids struggled, like many others do as well, in college, because mom wasn't there to look over their shoulder for every assignment and detail.  

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3 minutes ago, oblong said:

I'm of the age now where our kids have graduated HS and you'd be surprised how many of the helicopter parents who were Karens and the emptiness they now feel as their kids are out free.   A few of those kids struggled, like many others do as well, in college, because mom wasn't there to look over their shoulder for every assignment and detail.  

So now they’ll do the next best thing and get elected to the school board so they can rid the neighbor’s children’s schools of every last CRT-infested math book. 

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7 minutes ago, oblong said:

I kid you not, some of them drug test their adult children for pot.

 

I had some friends in college that had their parents do this to them.  Completely backfired as they just started doing coke instead.   That only stays in the system for a few days.  

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