#everytown for gun safety

[scrumptious-finicky-illusion]

I'm finding it incredibly awesome that the only advertiser on the Onion's InfoWars site will be an anti-gun organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, for their debut.

While the Onion buying InfoWars is indeed extremely funny, very few of the posts I've seen commenting on the sale have mentioned that the families of the Sandy Hook victims apparently agreed to voluntarily reduce their lawsuit payout as part of a deal to ensure that the Onion would acquire InfoWars wholesale, rather than having the company broken up and auctioned off piecemeal, as the latter course could potentially have allowed some of those pieces to end up back in the hands of Alex Jones' cronies.

Like, yes, it is in fact very funny that InfoWars is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Clickhole, but the real props go out to the Sandy Hook families who saw the opportunity and willingly gave up the additional millions of dollars that could have been realised by stripping InfoWars for parts in order to make that happen.

[fuckyeahlegionm]

My Dead Friend Zoe wins Narrative Spotlight Audience Award at SXSW 2024!!!

[eugenesisland]

A stage full of morons, cheats and liars

Not a single useful human being in the bunch.

[action]

Donate now to Everytown to keep kids safe from guns

Source

[destielmemenews]

"The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and one first responder. It also will have an exclusive advertising deal with the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety."

source 1

source 2

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[knottahooker]

The satirical news publication The Onion won the bidding for Alex Jones’ Infowars at a bankruptcy auction, backed by families of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims whom Jones owes more than $1 billion in defamation judgments for calling the massacre a hoax. “The dissolution of Alex Jones’ assets and the death of Infowars is the justice we have long awaited and fought for,” Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie was killed in the 2012 shooting in Connecticut, said in a statement provided by his lawyers. The Onion acquired the conspiracy theory platform’s website; social media accounts; studio in Austin, Texas; trademarks; and video archive. The sale price was not immediately disclosed. The Onion said its “exclusive launch advertiser” will be the gun violence prevention organization Everytown for Gun Safety. “Everytown will continue to raise awareness on InfoWars’ channels about gun violence prevention and present actual solutions to our nation’s gun violence crisis, including bipartisan, common-sense measures and public safety initiatives backed by Everytown,” The Onion said in a statement Thursday. Jones confirmed The Onion’s acquisition of Infowars in a social media video Thursday and said he planned to file legal challenges to stop it.

There's more information in the article, but just posting this to say AHAHAHA GET FUCKED ALEX

[elfwreck]

Hello!

I'm not sure if this is a bit odd to ask, but I saw your post about living in rural arkansas as a teen- and the note at the end about gun rights, and how rifles are different than handguns in that legislation and all-

do you have any sources you could link so I can look into that more? I live in rural Kentucky so hunting is very ingrained into just how me and my family and our neighbors live. (also a poor county- I didn't actually know other cities had kids pay for their lunch because I was so used to everyone in my county getting a free lunch- it seems like such a basic thing).

I've never heard anyone mention not banning hunting rifles when they talk about banning guns-

The gun bans being asked for are assault rifles and semi-automatic pistols. Rapid-fire guns intended for military use against multiple human targets - not hunting rifles at all, and not the kinds of pistols that are good for self-defense. (...Not that pistols are good for self-defense in general. Shotguns are good for self-defense. Nobody's trying to ban shotguns.)

The NRA is invested in convincing hunting-rifle owners and pistol owners that the various proposed weapons bans are aimed at them, and not at the tiny number of people who want the ability to shoot up a whole bar or classroom in under a minute.

The NRA has also fought hard against any kind of gun safety requirements.

Bill from last year to ban/restrict assault rifles:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/25/text

The gun safety bill Biden recently signed:

Doesn't ban any weapons. Puts restrictions on who can get weapons - people convicted of most types of domestic partner violence will not be allowed to buy guns. It makes it harder for people under 21 to buy guns. It closes some loopholes about selling guns, so sellers will need to be registered and licensed. Sets up new funding for gun crisis intervention.

Doesn't do anything to restrict hunting, other than possibly adding to the bureaucracy for people under 21 getting new guns.

Most people in urban areas are oblivious to hunting as a Real Thing that People Actually Do For Good Reasons, rather than a kind of cruel sporting event. They are vaguely aware that hunting rifles are not assault rifles, are not semi-automatics, but only as an abstract concept. Might or might not be able to tell a hunting rifle apart from a semi-automatic if they saw them. (I am not sure I could; I am very much not a gun person.) (I have shot one gun, once in my life. It was loud and hurt my hand and I had no interest in doing it again.)

I don't know how much I think we need to ban or restrict certain weapons. I am absolutely certain we need to keep certain weapons out of the hands of certain people, because the current system of "I guess 10-year-olds should all get training on what to do if some teacher's ex-boyfriend decides to shoot up the school" is ridiculous.

Given how hard it is to identify the "certain people" who should damn well NOT have access to automatic weapons, I'm okay with "it gets harder for anyone to get them," because I don't see how heavy assault rifles are a "but I neeeeed it this weekend!" kind of thing. (Not sure I see that hunting rifles are a "need it now" kind of thing, either; seems like those are a hefty enough purchase that the buyer should be doing some planning in advance. So filing for it like you would for car registration - another expensive piece of tech that kills people if you use it wrong - shouldn't be too big a burden.)

The idiots who include hunting rifles in their talk about banning guns - I won't say there aren't any; all sorts of politics gets plenty of idiots - have no idea how those guns actually get used. And the people writing actual policies and trying to get the laws changed are not those idiots.

The "ban guns" movement has two main parts:

Remove general access to guns that can kill a dozen people in under a minute, and

Remove gun access from specific people who have a history of getting angry and violent, especially those who have a history of shooting other people when they're angry and violent.

Side note: Some of us want that second point to include cops. That faction is getting nowhere.

None of it is trying to remove access to hunting rifles or reduce the amount of hunting in places that need it. (Basically, all of the South; I am near San Francisco and nobody anywhere near me "needs" to hunt; I don't care what they do with hunting rights in the greater SF Bay Area).

The focus is on preventing gun violence, not preventing gun use. And that means restricting access to guns that have no purpose other than anti-human violence, and restricting access to all guns from people who are likely to use them as weapons instead of tools.

[petewentzisblack1312]

something people arent really mentioning about the we didnt start the fire cover is that as part of it fall out boy are giving away a trip and vip backstage tickets to their boston show, and to enter you have to sign a petition asking for support of the lgbt community or donate to one of three organisations, including the bands charity fund, the human rights campaign and everytown for gun safety. so i dont think its that bad.

enter here

[socialjusticeinamerica]

“Ben Collins, chief executive at The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said on social media that Infowars was bought with the blessing of the Sandy Hook families affected by Jones’ misinformation campaign. The new Infowars, he said, will be relaunched by employees of The Onion and eventually look like a parody of itself — to include ads by Everytown for Gun Safety, an anti-gun violence nonprofit launched after the Sandy Hook shooting.”

😂🤣😂

[alex51324]

Finally, some good fucking news!

If you need a reminder of the players here, The Onion is the long-running satire site, known for such articles as "God Angrily Clarifies Don't Kill Rule," "No Way To Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens," and, recently, "America Defeats America."

Alex Jones is the far-right crackpot known for such conspiracy theories as "they're turning the frogs gay," and telling Sandy Hook parents that they're crisis actors and their dead children never existed.

Jones lost a lawsuit to Sandy Hook parents and first-responders about two years ago, and has been dragging his feet about paying the $1.5 billion he owes them ever since, eventually filing for bankruptcy to get out of paying. As part of the bankruptcy, all of Infowars' assets were seized--the studio, equipment, domain name, everything--and put up for auction.

Jones's supporters attempted to buy everything so that they could re-hire him to keep running it. In order to prevent that outcome, several of the Sandy Hook families, and the gun control group Everytown For Gun Safety, teamed up with The Onion to outbid them and take Infowars off the air.

One bereaved parent described the outcome as "The justice we have long awaited and fought for."

The Onion joked,

The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” said The Onion CEO Ben Collins. “Or Bitcoin. We will also accept Bitcoin.

They haven't said exactly what they plan to actually do with the purchase, except that Everytown For Gun Safety will be the "exclusive launch advertiser" when they put the site back up in January.

[jkottke]

Actually not an Onion article: The Onion Says It Has Bought Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy. They’re going to relaunch the site as “a parody of itself” with Everytown for Gun Safety as an advertiser.

[mitchipedia]

The Onion bought Alex Jones' Infowars

Hadas Gold, CNN:

The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and one first responder. It also will have an exclusive advertising deal with the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety….

The purchase acquires the company’s intellectual property, including its website, customer lists and inventory and certain social media accounts, as well as the production equipment used to put Jones on the air. The amount of the bid was not announced.

“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” said The Onion CEO Ben Collins. “Or Bitcoin. We will also accept Bitcoin.”

In order to make the bid work, the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success,” the families said in a statement.

“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’ hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” said Chris Mattei, attorney for the families and partner at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder.

Jones condemned the deal and said it’s unconstitutional because in MAGAworld, the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean.

[joe-england]

- If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon! -

Part 1

Part 3

Bonus Stage

This turned out to be surprisingly popular on Twitter!  So far it hasn't attracted many new patrons, but it's still very nice to be seen.  I hope everyone here is enjoying it too, though it's a passion project stealing time away from my original work!  But like I said, it's good practice for Witch Warp.

Footnotes:  Anne’s feet.  Maybe it’s taboo, but it’s my AU, so I figured I’d have my druthers regarding Anne’s famous footwear (specifically, that she's canonically disheveled and always missing a shoe).  Her new boots are based on a design by a storyboard artist.  Mr. Applegate says he drew them on a lark, but I liked ‘em.

Speaking of body parts, the conditions which the Calamity Trio receive here are based on a fan theory which became popular prior to the show’s completion.  In my version, each wound flowers from a previous trauma - Anne’s clobbered arm, Sasha’s scar, and Marcy’s spinal injury.

Anyway, thanks for being patient while I humor my muse.  I'll get back to my own shared universe soon!

(Part 2 of 3)

Tab for a Cause

Everytown for Gun Safety

Top-Rated Charities for Ukraine

The Trevor Project

National Abortion Funds

RAICES

- Joe

[cookingwithroxy]

Right now, there is an anti-gun organization called 'Everytown for Gun Safety'.

Some people have called it a conspiracy theory to claim that it's former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's personal attack program to destroy gun ownership.

But he founded it, is the primary funder of it, and manages it.

When a person directly backs political activism, it can be stated that they have a personal interest in that activism. It's the whole reason WHY campaign contributions are so heavily watched in politics, BECAUSE that money is literally being used to buy influence.

If a major source of money comes from one person, you will want to do what makes that person happy, in order to make sure that money continues to come in.

This goes far past Bloomberg, of course. Many people buy influence in this way. Charitable funding becomes a legal loophole where you can give money to support your personal agendas and sometimes even get to write that money off on your taxes, escaping having to pay tax on the very money you use to influence social issues and buy political influence.

This WAS A known thing. Why is this treated as so unbelievable now?

[newrww]

Men are insufferable and I have references to back this assertion: “There’s evidence in humans that, just as in animals, testosterone is responsive to male-male competition.”

[…] Which isn’t to say that we can’t rapidly adapt to the modern-day manifestations of our violent past: McAndrews’s work demonstrated that one surefire way to raise a man’s testosterone level is to allow him to handle a gun.

“Antisocial behavior disorder” or psychopathy/“sociopathy” is moderately heritable and more common among males (Hicks et al., 2004). Family studies consistently show that the presence of a substance dependence or antisocial behavior disorder in first-degree relatives greatly increases a person’s risk of eventually developing the disorder.1

Though I can’t vouch for this statement because it’s not sourced I’ll list it anyway:

As much as 3.6 percent of adults in the United States, equal to about 7.6 million, have antisocial personality disorder. The disorder is known to affect men more than women.

According to the 2015 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, sex differences in aggression is one of the most robust and oldest findings in psychology. It also found males tend to engage in more unprovoked aggression at higher frequency than females.[28] source

An estimated 10.5 per 1,000 children living with only their fathers were harmed by physical abuse in 1993, which is more than two and two-thirds higher than the incidence rate of 3.9 per 1,000 for children living with both their parents. Children in mother-only families were not statistically different from those in both-parent households in their risk of physical abuse under the Harm Standard.” Data from the Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect, put out by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

What I did find is the most recent report by the US Department of Justice, which found women suffer 805,700 physical injuries at the hands of partners each year, compared to 173,960 men. Moreover, the injuries suffered by women were more than twice as likely to be considered “serious”, defined as including sexual violence, gunshot and knife wounds, internal injuries, unconsciousness, and broken bones. To put that another way,partners inflicted 104,741 serious injuries on women, compared with less than 9,400 inflicted on men, a greater than 11:1 ratio.

[…]new Mother Jones analysis of 22 public mass shootings confirms that—but it’s not just domestic violence—it’s a more general hatred of women. The 22 mass shooters in the analysis killed 175 people between them, and injured another 158. And yes, 86% of them had histories of domestic abuse, but, additionally, 50% targeted women and 32% had histories of stalking or harassment. The 22 shootings Mother Jones analyzed account for more than a third of the public mass shootings since 2011.

[…]HuffPost’s Melissa Jeltsen writes “In America, the eternal subtext of acts of mass violence is toxic masculinity.” And the Washington Post’s editorial board pointed out after the Stoneman Douglas shooting that “Mass shooting in the United States are carried out, overwhelmingly, by men with a history of domestic violence.” That’s no exaggeration. The majority of U.S. mass shootings are related to domestic or family violence, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, which also found that 54 percent of mass shootings included the murder of a partner or family member.

Psychologist and professor Mark van Vugt, from VU University at Amsterdam, Netherlands, has argued that males have evolved more aggressive and group-oriented in order to gain access to resources, territories, mates and higher status.[19][20] His theory the Male Warrior hypothesis explains that males throughout hominid history have evolved to form coalitions or groups in order to engage in inter-group aggression and increase their chances of acquiring resources, mates and territory.[19][20]Vugt argues that this evolved male social dynamic explains the human history of war to modern day gang rivalry which is under a process of male on male competition in order to gain resources and potential mates.[19][20]

[...]Wilson & Daly (1985) and Daly & Wilson (1987) noted the preponderance of young males in all kinds of criminal violence. They called it the "Young Male Syndrome". Ignatieff noticed that most nationalist violence, too, is committed by a small minority of young males (some of whom may be psychopathic; most, however, are perfectly sane). Apparently not everyone abhors or fears violence. Presumably, it is deeply pleasurable and satisfactory for young armed males to have the power of life and death over other people; to fanatically assert themselves at the cost of others and to escape from insignificance; to rebel against and disrupt the deeply resented order of the state; to massively rape; to psychologically and morally and phylogenetically regress (see Bailey, 1987, for the theory of phylogenetic regression). Wrangham & Peterson (1996) note that the underlying psychology is no different for urban gangs, pre-state warrior societies, and contemporary armies: Bands of males "sight or invent an enemy 'over there' - across the ridge, on the other side of the boundary, on the other side of a linguistic or social or political or ethnic or racial divide. The nature of the divide hardly seems to matter. What matters is the opportunity to engage in the vast and compelling drama of belonging to the gang, identifying the enemy, going on the patrol, participating in the attack" (italics added). Tiger (1969) had already formulated a similar idea: "Put a group of males together and, once dominance order is established, the group will either split into competing coalition units or seek some exterior object for collective 'masterful' action... While legal systems deal with the individual as the unit for guilt and innocence, it is really the group which is at the heart of all but a small proportion of criminal proceedings".

[…]Marx and Engels said that the patriarchal family, private property, and the state arose together. Though their understanding of the societies that preceded “patriarchy” was flawed, their intuition that patriarchy is connected to private property and to domination in the name of the state was correct.  It has long seemed to me that patriarchy cannot be separated from war and the kings who take power in the wake of war.  Many years ago I was stunned by Merlin Stone’s allegation that in matrilineal societies there are no illegitimate children, because all children have mothers. […] The system I am defining as patriarchy is a system of domination enforced through violence and the threat of violence.  It is a system developed and controlled by powerful men, in which women, children, other men, and nature itself are dominated.

I disagree with her notion that it’s not in men’s “nature” to dominate through violence because the propensity towards it is fueled by lack of empathy, first and foremost and a drive to dominate and control, and this appetite for violence is legitimized by “malestream” media through films, games etc., etc. Culturally constructed gender norms condition women and girls to tolerate male toxicity and propensity towards violence, something which also creates a need for the male ‘protection’ which women and girls are promised as inherent to their subordinate status. After all, as the “weaker” sex, it follows that one must be constrained (for their own good!) and sequestered  to the ‘woman’s’ sphere, right? Leave the important matters to the men while you slavishly provide more subjects to perpetuate male dominance or be corrupted by it. This is the woman’s value and dignity. What a joke.   And a desire to dominate can manifest itself in more socially acceptable ways and it does, but that also doesn’t make it any more justifiable.

Male Testosterone Linked to High Social Dominance but Low Physical Aggression in Early Adolescence

Hormones don’t necessarily make men violent, but they do cause them to seek social dominance

[...]The responders given testosterone were not only more likely to give greater punishments to those who gave unfair offers—they were also more likely to give greater rewards to those who gave generous offers (compared to a placebo control group). In this experiment, testosterone seems to amplify men’s tendencies to punish and reward others. “Our findings flatly contradict a simple link between testosterone and male aggression,” the researchers conclude. “Instead, we find that testosterone’s effect on male behavior depended on the social context, and we show in a single experiment that testosterone can enhance both reactive aggression and generosity.”

[…]“Books, film and television often portray men who are bold and self-assured with women as being high in testosterone. Our results suggest that there is a kernel of truth to this stereotype, that naturally circulating testosterone indeed is associated with men’s behaviors when they try to woo women.” Although many animal studies have shown that testosterone is associated with dominance when males compete for mates, none-until now-have demonstrated this association in humans. “These findings highlight an important difference between humans and animals,” said Slatcher. “In humans-unlike animals-explicit, conscious motives can affect how a hormone such as testosterone shapes behavior. Our findings indicate that testosterone is associated with dominance behaviors and success when men compete for the attention of an attractive woman, particularly when men also have a strong conscious desire for social dominance.”

[…]Men also expressed more sexual interest overall than women, consistent with a large body of research that finds men tend to be more open to casual sex with strangers. x

[…]Vrangalova told Pacific Standard that people who rate high on the sociosexual scale are generally “extroverted” and “impulsive” men who are more likely to be attractive, “physically strong,” and “more sexist, manipulative, coercive and narcissistic” than their peers. The people on college campuses who are the most likely to engage in casual sex—and to reap its benefits—are also dudes who are high in social status and low in character. x

Various anecdotal evidence + several surveys illustrate how frighteningly common coercion is from men:

A French online survey with 100,000 respondents showed that 70% of women had had unwanted sex without coercion from their partners.

And women get longer sentences for killing their abusers!

The average prison sentence of men who kill their women partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their male partners are sentenced on average to 15 years. This is despite the fact that 86% of female offenders The average prison sentence of men who kill their women partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their male partners are sentenced on average to 15 years. This is despite the fact that 86% of female offenders kill in self-defense, while males are most likely to kill out of possessiveness (82%), abuse (75%) and during arguments (63%). Women are eight times more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner.

Fact Sheet on Battered Women in Prison

59 UK women have been killed in ‘consensual’ violent sex. In the last 5 years the ‘rough sex’ defence was successful in nearly half of the killings that went to trial.

We Can’t Consent To This was a response to the short sentence of 3 years 8 months given in Dec 2018 to the man who killed Natalie Connolly.  He claimed that many of her injuries were due to consensual rough sex.

In addition to the autopsy that revealed 40+ injuries (including fractures), the toxicology report also said that she was extremely intoxicated. A woman who was black-out drunk had the bones in her face broken, a bottle of caustic chemicals inserted into her vagina, bleach sprayed in her face, left to die at the bottom of a staircase over night while the killer went to bed, the paramedics reported that he was completely blasé and nonchalant about her being dead, and was remorseless and unemotional at the trial.

Taking all that into account, this was declared a consensual sexual encounter, and the killer was believed when he said that she was the one who requested the “activities” that resulted in those 40+ injuries? His only crime was that he was too careless in ‘carrying out her sexual requests’ and not calling an ambulance soon enough? A woman requested to have bleach sprayed in her face and get an orbital fracture as part of sexy roleplaying, all while extremely drunk, and that was believable? - @science-side-of-me​

lundy bancroft

[asokatanos]

This is the funniest possible outcome, particularly because The Onion is in partnership here with Everytown for Gun Safety. This chucklefuck tried convincing people that Sandy Hook was a hoax and now The Onion will be pushing the other end of misinformation (satire) to those very same idiots along with gun control ads