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by rswail 1489 days ago
On that reasoning, all of the "lockdowns" and "active shooter drills" and all the other bullshit that the US makes its children undertake in school are a complete waste of time.

Are you seriously trying to argue that school shootings don't happen often enough to try to stop them? Or that society can't do two things (reduce accidental deaths and reduce mass murder) at the same time?

The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.

For 99.99% of the population, guns are dangerous to have, not because someone might attack you, but because guns are dangerous to have in the home. They are misused, mistakenly left unsecured, and accessed by people (children, those with mental illness) that shouldn't.

Hell, you can't even agree on background checks because of some stupidity regarding having a "register" in case the "government" comes after your weapons.

The US is an empire in decline, and your internal division around this "culture" is a large part of the dis/mis-information exercise that has infected the body politic.

The NRA is a lobby group for gun manufacturers that has bought numerous politicians, while lying to its members about its purpose. The fact that so many actually believe the bullshit is a prime example of dis/mis-information.

2 comments

From what I can tell, Americans that are opposed to gun restrictions generally also think that "active shooter drills" are indeed a waste of time that just traumatize children for no real benefit other than the political gain of people that want to ban guns. So you're probably pushing against an open door with that argument.
Worth looking at the NRA's ties to Russian agent, Maria Butina, and this weird little trip to Russia in 2015: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/nra-2015-moscow-trip-wasnt-o...

The NRA are incredibly divisive, and it looks like help was offered to keep them doing that.

> The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.

This - the politics of guns and political violence in the US - is arguably a bigger factor than the guns themselves. The gun does not carry out a mass shooting by itself. And very few mass shooters decide purely on their own to do it; there's a radicalization pipeline. That is why the US has a higher mass shooting rate than other countries with lots of guns.