#us gun violence

[amarguerite]

Listening to Sondheim’s Assassins due to current events and it is… so strange and so fascinating to me that we have known for a very long time (and had some of the country’s greatest cultural critics point out) that the easy availability of guns is a huge problem not just for individual citizens who suffer the consequences of an angry and entitled person failing to mesh their own reality with objective fact… it’s a deadly threat to the person our country agrees should be THE MOST protected and immune from this kind of violence. But theres a sizable enough minority in key positions of power that gun violence just… kind of became a fixture of American culture even while the majority of the country does not want that. No solutions! Only thoughts and prayers.

[triscribe]

So y'know what is scarier than a single shooter in a school?

A group of teens deciding they're gonna work together to kill as many people as they can.

Thankfully, in this particular instance, they were reported by a third party, so the boys involved who separately brought bullets and at least one gun to the school where my mom teaches were caught and arrested over two days. But fuck, word's going around they were planning to pull the fire alarm, fill the main halls, set up on the second floor balcony and just... hnn.

I took her some lunch today, got to see the lingering police presence, and unintentionally stuck around long enough to hear her spiel to the handful of kids present in her fifth period. My mom's not the sort to sit quietly if shit's going down, that's for sure. She treated it like any other class activity, showing her students where the skinnier ones can go out a particular window to hide on the roof, and the bigger ones where she's arranged a chair and desk and bookcase by the wall so they can literally climb up into the ceiling. Make sure to close the window afterward, last person up pushes the foam tile back in place, have it look to anyone coming in like there weren't any students present at all. And she finishes this with "and see? the coat rack inside this closet comes loose. nice solid piece of metal here. worst comes to worst, I'm sending you all out, and putting myself next to the door. key rule of being in close quarters with a gunman, you go for the knees, then the head, and don't stop hitting until they stop moving."

One of her girls got overwhelmed at this point and began quietly crying. 15 or 16 years old, just. dismayed that this is something real. something they need to go over. Two thirds of that school's student body were out today, kept home by worried parents, and the ones who still came were pretty evenly split between laughing it off, and cracking under the fear.

None of them deserve being in that position. Not the kids, not the teachers, not the office staff or kitchen workers or janitorial crews. But most of all-

A grey-haired, overweight ornery woman in her fifties with a makeshift bat shouldn't be the last line of defense between teenagers and assault rifles.

[sepdet]

OK, I just tagged something "Microsquat shooting itself in the foot," so, in the spirit of "I'm not immune to the propaganda," I'm unearthing one of 500 half-finished rants from the drafts folder, where most rants belong.

Let's see if I can de-rantify it.

Audience: US Tumblr. The rest of y'all, feel free to chime in with, "What the fuck, US Tumblr?"

What set this off: A post saying we should give a gun to real Doge's owner to shoot Elon Musk (which I started to agree with before catching myself, remembering she's a schoolteacher who campaigns for pet adoption) — a post which I saw soon after one that joked the Ents were Tolkien saying we should give trees guns.

Both were jokes, and here I am taking them seriously. But the things people joke about tell us something.

And what that those jokes told me is that they had to have been made by US Tumblr— someone younger than GenX, because we grew up before school shootings, active shooter drills, and the whole teach-kids-fear-of-death-before-we-tell-them-where-babies-come-from dystopia that is modern America.

Not that we didn't have a dystopia like that, too. No, not the Cold War. A narrative.

We had "cigarette culture" and the Marlboro Man. Parents, bus and taxi drivers smoked while driving, restaurants and planes were hazy. TV characters smoked in every genre (even Starbuck and Boomer on Battlestar Galactica).

There were candy cigarettes, but new dads handed out cigars. Children doodled cartoon characters smoking or cigarettes on the lips of people in magazines, and mimed smoking with invisible cigarettes or rolled-up paper or twigs and toothpicks. I did it, even though cig smoke made me nauseous and gave me migraines.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Cultural zeitgeist gets into your head.

Which is probably why US Tumblr folks so easily imagine a gentle person like Atsuko Sato with a gun, in a culture where gun crime is extremely rare, and gun culture is nonexistent. And it's why a US fan would miss Treebeard's rants about Saruman [having] "a mind of metal and wheels; he does not care for growing things.” That conflict was nature vs. the machine, especially the industry of war.

So what?

My point is that people in the US under the age of 40-50 have been so acclimatized to gun culture we're liable to impose it on media whose authors do not share that culture. It's like drawing Studio Ghibli characters smoking cigars. Ok for a joke, but USians don't realize how odd it is.

So, maybe, those of us from the US should make a mental note to watch and see when we use gun metaphor or imagery (as if we don't have enough to worry about): am I letting my US gun culture show? Am I imposing GUN on somebody/something in another culture where GUN is not a place people's minds often go?

Because that's One Weird Trick we do.

[canadianabroadvery]

Tjeerd Royaards - Netherlands 

11 April 2023 

Twisted sense of freedom. The price of freedom in the US.

[callese]

Source

[a-continuous-cutting-motion]

Boy I sure do love living in America and hearing automatic gunfire from the crappy neighborhood across the river from me from time to time.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[animentality]

[canadianabroadvery]

America has had more mass shootings this month than there have been days. It's the guns.

[luimnigh]

I really didn't expect to see you entertain "he was framed, it's all a setup!!!" conspiracies. Thinking what he did wasn't wrong is one thing, but be serious, are you a fucking idiot?

I have reblogged posts that are reminding people of the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".

That's not a conspiracy theory, that's a part of a functioning justice system.

One of those posts does make mention of police corruption and how police in the past have chosen to frame people for high-profile cases. That's not a conspiracy, that's recorded history.

And it is relevant because Luigi Mangione is claiming that police planted evidence on him:

So maybe calm down and do some research before sending angry messages.

[myperfectvictim]

No no, keep that attitude, baby. Imma fuck you into shock.

[destielmemenews]

"Officials identified the man as 26-year-old Luigi Nicholas Mangione. He was born in Maryland and his last known residence was Honoloulou. He was arrested on firearms charges and taken in for questioning related to Thompson's death. He has not been charged with Thompson's killing at this time."

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[wildorcaaviation]

This post is VERY easy to look up and poke holes in...holy fuck!!! I mean this makes it seem like Australia JUST did this law change within 12 months, instead of 13 years...at the time of the original email. (2009...this was not recent!!)

Ooohh and I found that original email. On a website picking all it's LIES apart, one by one.

This is just pathetic. If you think that everyone owning guns will lead to less homicides, then you're fucked in the head.

I’m lifting this from Facebook

Australian Gun Law Update.. September 28

Here’s a thought to warm some of your hearts….

From: Ed Chenel, A police officer in Australia

Hi Yanks, I thought you all would like to see the real

figures from Down Under.  It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by a new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by our own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars.

The first year results are now in:

Australia-wide, homicides are up 6.2 percent,

Australia-wide, assaults are up 9.6 percent;

Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!

In the state of Victoria…..alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent.(Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not and criminals still possess their guns!)

While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady

decrease in armed robbery with firearms, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since the criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly, while the resident is at home.

Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in ‘successfully ridding Australian society of guns….’ You won’t see this on the American evening news or hear your governor or members of the State Assembly disseminating this information.  The Australian experience speaks for itself. Guns in the  hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding citizens.

Take note Americans, before it’s too late!

[canadianabroadvery]

[callese]