Political Memes

stupid sexy Flanders

Black Panthers in California were famously armed, until Ronald Reagan signed the NRA-supported "Mulford Act" which prohibited them from carrying loaded weapons.

There were similar racial motivation behind the wave of legal prohibitions on concealment in the late 19th century. The thinking was that only "criminals" needed to hide the fact that they were armed; "honest" and "law abiding" people had no need to hide their weapons from other "honest" and "law abiding" citizens or the police. The supporters of these laws didn't make it a secret that their intentions were to disarm former slaves, who would certainly draw unwanted attention from racists if they attempted to carry openly as the law allowed.

Before the emancipation proclamation, the only restrictions on guns were based on criminal conviction and race, specifically, the disarmament of "Negroes" and "Indians".

What I've always thought would make an interesting alternative-history story would be if the Native Americans (or aboriginals in any place really) had something akin to a modern compound bow.

I've been shooting bows since I was six. I've also fired matchlock smoothbore guns. The matchlock is more powerful, but less accurate, slower to fire, noisy, it takes some setup before you can fire it the first time. Compound bows are crazy accurate in the right hands, and some can launch an arrow weighing 40-50 grams at 100 meters per second. Add a sharpened tip and it will penetrate a lot of armor, too.

Hi Gay, I'm dad. I mean daddy 😈

penis mightier than the sword

Title of my sex tape.

That takes me back to SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! One of the best recurring sketches in their entire 48-year history IMO!

As a side note, it's not every day you get to share a clip that starts with "I hate you" 😂

Gunowners don't like licenses because if the goverment can decide who owns guns, then they'll use it to keep guns out of the hands of people they don't like.

New York City abuses its may-issue system to prevent anyone from obtaining a license to carry concealed, unless you pay high bribes to the police (or are police).

Most gun laws disproportionately affect the poor. Polities such as New York State require people undergo a certified training course before they can purchase a handgun (police excepted of course). I see people complaining that a single day of voting is insufficent, that their hourly job doesn't leave them a window to go vote. This is much worse with a carry course, where you have to perfectly attend multiple classes that you're paying hundreds of dollars to attend. It's a steep cost to exercise a right.

These are addressable problems: all handgun licenses should be shall-issue if you meet the requirements, mandated training courses should be free and people should be compensated for their time like jury duty.

As for the "you shouldn't even talk about gun laws unless you can tell a .45 from a 9 mm in the dark" part/is that really so unreasonable, minus the hyperbole? When Republicans use phrases like "If it's a legitimate rape, the body has ways of shutting it down" and then try to claim that life starts when the heart does, is it OK that they are wildly wrong about the human body and are trying to legislate it?

The US doesn’t have a problem with fully automatic or select fire weapons. They exist, sure. But given they’ve been banned since 1986 and are prohibitively expensive to own, requiring multiple tax stamps and hoops to jump through, they are almost assuredly not used in violent crime. Or for anything other than hobbyist activities.

What seems to garner the most attention here are semi-automatic rifles with removable magazines. There is almost nothing mechanical differentiating an AR-15 or similar rifle from a common hunting or farming rifle like the Ruger American Rifle. They’re often mislabeled an “assault weapon”, a term without a concrete definition, or worse an “assault rifle” which does have a concrete definition that aligns to the very guns you call out as not having practical use. Namely, to qualify as an assault rifle, it must be capable of select fire or fully automatic fire.

Ironically, most acts of violence committed using a firearm are done with pistols, which outside of demonstrably ineffective magazine limitations have gone widely untouched by proposed or enacted gun control efforts. Which is especially ironic considering that the NFA was enacted in 1934 primarily focused on handguns - this is why the US has restrictions on ownership of short barreled rifles and shotguns, because the impetus was to focus on weapons which could be easily concealed. By the time the law was passed, however, pistols had been exempted, but the weird language around SBRs and SBSs was left intact.

Broadly, though, gun control in the US has been primarily motivated by class and racial division. Most of the FUD you hear about guns is directly the result of Reagan’s gun control policies as Governor of California in response to not wanting the Black Panthers to have legal access to firearms - which they were using to protect their neighborhoods from violent crime that police wouldn’t respond to. Criminalizing certain weapons gave police the ability to profile and discriminate against minorities under the guise of public safety, and we’ve been treading that water ever since.

The solution to America’s perceived gun problem is universal basic income and universal healthcare. Ending the war on drugs would help too. Without the stress of being impoverished and without having to worry about being able to afford medical care, people tend not to commit crimes. Most gun violence in the US is gang related, and US policies today systemically and disproportionately see the incarceration of people of color for violent and non-violent crime alike. Our penal system is geared for punishment, not rehabilitation, so a person who is now a felon is left with very few options to make an honest living. People turn to gangs to make money, because without income you cannot live in this country.

Eliminate the poverty, decouple healthcare from employers, and stop criminalizing drugs - subsequently arresting and incarcerating so many people for non-violent offenses - and you dramatically reduce the likelihood of a person being left in desperation with few options outside of a life of crime. In turn, gang violence and gun crime overall will plummet.

We’re just too busy picking a team and rooting for the other team’s destruction to actually attack the root of the problem, because doing that might make people realize that it’s all been set up like this to keep us from looking at the class division more closely.