Uh...Is A Bigger Body Count Than Columbine Worth Mentioning?
Feb 25, 2018 17:41:08 GMT -5
poetinahat, Zhivago, and 1 more like this
Post by nighttimer on Feb 25, 2018 17:41:08 GMT -5
Says you. When people cry and moan and groan, they don't change anything. They just sit there soaked in a puddle of tears. It's not until they get mad as hell at the inequities of the world that they get off their asses to change it.
Being quiet and passive doesn't solve problems either.
When you demonize the NRA, you're including in every gun owner and telling them they're responsible for the deaths of children, and by the way, work with us on a solution?
As far as including every gun owner who happens to be an NRA member (and most gun owners are not NRA members) in the responsibility for the deaths of children, that's certainly a possibility. What about it?
If we're this angry at the NRA, who didn't kill a single person, why aren't we livid at the FBI, or the local cops who had it would seem 4 armed deputies stayed outside while the shooter was killing. There's a video, I saw it on twitter and can't seem to source it, but it's of a teen who ran in to save his girlfriend, saw a coach run in, unarmed, while the people with guns stayed outside.
And so does the NRA for making it so easy for 18-year-old killers to kill.
But yes, let's continue to demonize the NRA as a whole and then wonder why those who want to keep their 2nd amendment, and see each call to 'do something' as a personal attack why it's not while attacking them. Like I said, it's worked so far, right?
The NRA isn't demonized. It's demonstrated itself to be a fringe and extremist organization which foisters extremist, fringe fears of evil government agents confiscating the guns of the citizenry to leave them helpless in the face of a socialistic takeover. It's utter horseshit, but for the paranoid, the fearful and the extremist fringe, they feed on the horseshit as if it were fine cuisine.
We complain that we've had so many school shootings, and nothing changes. Why not change the tactic which looks for changes. There's nobody out there that believes these school shootings are good or acceptable. Have a conversation that includes everyone, not a witch hunt.
The NRA believes school shootings are acceptable as does anyone who suggests the solution to gun violence in schools is to arm teachers and hope like hell they don't kill themselves or students while shooting it out with a spree killer. It is a logical fallacy that the NRA and gun control groups want the same thing. They don't and they never have. There's a certain insanity to even suggest the wolves and the lambs need to work their problems out together. It presumes they're both acting out of a similar set of interests and they're really not.
Oh, and the NRA? They're a little dicey on the whole race thang too.
After Hurricane Sandy struck New York City and other parts of the East Coast in 2013, LaPierre was criticized for writing an op-ed in which he falsely claimed that “looters ran wild in south Brooklyn” and fearmongered about “Latin American drug gangs.” Conservative commentator Joe Scarborough described the claims as “so laced with racial overtones.” Progressive commentator Touré pointed out that LaPierre “spoke of supposedly rampant crime and murder in some place he called South Brooklyn. … Put aside that no reporting bears that out. I live in Brooklyn, I have for a long time, and there is no place referred to as South Brooklyn, but I think it’s safe to say that when he says that, much of the country envisions a place clogged with black people.”
During the NRA’s 2015 annual meeting, LaPierre referenced the end of the Obama administration and told the crowd, “Eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.” Reacting to the comment, Pulitzer-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote, “LaPierre traded his dog whistle for an air horn.”
During a 2014 speech, LaPierre adopted conservative media’s racially charged claims about the (nonexistent) “knockout game” phenomenon -- in which black youths supposedly assault unsuspecting, mostly white, victims on the street for fun -- to hype gun ownership.
Activists and some gun owners castigated the NRA for its feckless response to the fatal shooting of Philando Castile, a black, law-abiding gun owner, by a Minnesota police officer in 2016.
Despite its purported hyperfocus on terrorism, the NRA’s news show was silent after a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a group of anti-racist demonstrators, killing activist Heather Heyer and wounding 19 others, during a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, VA, in August.
NRATV, one of the NRA’s media outlets, recently hired conservative commentator Bill Whittle, who has a long track record of making race-baiting comments. Whittle has promoted discredited theories that posit black people are less innately intelligent than members of other races and claimed that African-Americans commit voter fraud on behalf of Democrats as a condition of ongoing slavery. Whittle also once said that people in inner cities are “unemployable -- unemployed and unemployable -- they’ve been on assistance their entire lives, they’ve never had to work before,” and that these people should get jobs because a job “beats the laziness” out of people and “disciplines” them into “civility.”
While appearing on NRATV, Whittle claimed there is no “genuine black oppression as there was in the past” and that President Barack Obama “set race relations back 100 years in this country.”
Another recent NRATV hire, Grant Stinchfield, who anchors the NRA’s “news” show, once wrote on social media concerning gun violence: “Blame minorities killing each other not law abiding conservatives.”
Following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory, Chuck Holton, an NRATV correspondent who is a daily guest on the gun group’s programming, wrote on Twitter that the “party’s over” and it's time to scrub “Obama’s mocacchino stain off of America!” using a term for a chocolate coffee drink.
In 2016, Holton claimed on an NRA program that white privilege is “just simply the culture that we have created, that our fathers and grandfathers have worked hard to create,” before saying that it would be nice if blacks joined whites in “respecting authority and taking responsibility for your own actions.”
In July, Holton warned on NRATV about the prospect of Black Lives Matter members committing mass murder and rape against whites in the United States.
Long-serving NRA board member Ted Nugent devoted an entire 2015 column at conspiracy website WorldNetDaily to praising the word “nigger,” including its use as a racial slur.
In 2016, Nugent posted a racist meme on Facebook about a fake moving company called “2 niggers and a stolen truck.”
Nugent attempted to smear Philando Castile on social media by promoting a false report that Castile was a suspect in an armed robbery implying Castile did not have “enuf brainmatter (sic)" to avoid being shot.
Nugent responded to a critic on Facebook with a Spanish name by calling the man “beanochimp.”
Amid controversy over Nugent’s labeling of murdered black teenager Trayvon Martin as a "dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe,” Nugent made racist claims in several media interviews, including saying people should profile African-Americans in the same way members of a community might profile a breed of dog that was biting children, that African-Americans could solve “the black problem" if they were more honest and law-abiding, and that the African-American community has a "mindless tendency to violence" and an inability to "read or speak clearly."
Nugent infamously called Obama a “subhuman mongrel” in 2014.
The NRA did not publicly condemn or dispute any of Nugent’s comments, and he was re-elected for another term on its board in 2016.
NRA News, the prior name for NRATV, attempted to rewrite the history surrounding a series of incidents after Hurricane Katrina in which white residents in the Algiers neighborhood of New Orleans shot at least 11 black people in racially motivated attacks.
In August 2016, the NRA told its supporters to read a “laugh-out-loud funny” newsletter that was published by the late Jeff Cooper, a former NRA board member. Called “Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries,” the newsletter frequently defended slavery, often featured racial slurs, and compared black South Africans to orangutans.
A leaked 2006 NRA graphic novel was filled with racial overtones including via images of “illegal alien” gang members included to promote gun ownership.
In 1996, an NRA researcher attempted to blame race rather than gun availability for high rates of gun violence in the United States, leading then-Rep. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to respond, "The NRA has consistently refused to admit the obvious: The number of guns on our streets increase the number of murders of police, children and others. Now they are going to a new extreme. To say it's not guns, but the genetics of race, is a tawdry and evil form of race-baiting."
The NRA broke its records for election spending in 2016, giving more than $30 million in support of Donald Trump.
Sooooo, the NRA is not exactly populated with paragons of racial progress. Martin Luther King never attempted to have a conversation to include George Wallace, Lester Maddox, or Bull Connor. Probably because he recognized it would only be a complete waste of everyone's time to even try.
Same thing here. Why should I want to sit down with a racist prick like Ted Nugent or a vile troll like Dana Loesch who smears the media with talk about crying Black mothers in Chicago and what has the NRA done about gun crime in Chicago? Not a damn thing. There's nothing to discuss with anyone who exploits the deaths of Black people to further their own political agenda.