I don’t like being lectured by children . . . because they’re dumber than I am, less experienced than I am, and have nothing interesting to say. (With rare exceptions. John Stuart Mill, for example.)
You might not object to Greta Thunberg being terrified and programmed for political advantage because you like the positions she’s espousing, but it would be just as easy to program a child to espouse positions that you find abhorrent and then what would you have to say? Whoever is doing this does not have the child’s best interests at heart, in my opinion.
President Trump responded to the Thunberg speech via Twitter and was widely condemned for mocking a child.
She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see! https://t.co/1tQG6QcVKO
If you put a 16-year-old girl in front of the UN to espouse provocative opinions, I think you forfeit the option of responding to pushback by saying “Oh my god, he’s criticizing a 16-year-old girl! It’s beyond the pale! Is there nothing these people won’t stoop to?”
Again, someone (or a collection of someones) seems to have genuinely terrified this girl for no reason at all other than political theater.
Here’s a phrase I’m hearing a lot of lately: “AR-15s and AK-47s.” As in “We’re going to take away your AR-15s and AK-47s.”
It really doesn’t make sense to talk about those two weapons together. I’m not a gun expert but among media people reporting on gun issues and especially among politicians presuming to legislate gun issues, the level of ignorance is really appalling.
The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America. It’s a semi-automatic rifle, meaning the action will automatically cycle a new round after each shot, but the shooter must release the trigger and pull it again to fire another shot
Granted, the AR-15 looks a lot scarier than older rifles favored by Buffalo Bill and George Armstrong Custer, but the principle is the same: only one round is discharged with each pull of the trigger.
In fact, the AR-15 looks like an M16, the military version of the AR-15 that is capable of fully automatic operation. This leads to AR-15s being called “military style” weapons. But a “military style” weapon is not a military weapon. It’s a deceptive term meant to suggest that an AR-15 is a battlefield weapon capable of fully automatic operation, which it isn’t.
The AK-47 is a fully automatic assault rifle capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute. You can’t in the US own a fully automatic weapon manufactured after 1986, so supply is low and prices are prohibitively expensive.
The mention of AK-47s together with AR-15s is again intended to suggest that the AR-15 is some kind of fully automatic machine gun.
Anyone using the phrase “AR-15s and AK-47s” is either incredibly ignorant about guns, or presumes that you are incredibly ignorant about guns, or both.
Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on “global warming” predictions that have even less foundation?
What is the goal of background checks? To prevent murders? The Odessa shooter, to cite one example, couldn’t pass a background check, but he got his hands on a gun anyway.
If you’re trying to get a gun for the purpose of murdering one or more persons, why would you care about passing a background check?
Has anyone ever said “I was planning to go on a murderous rampage but I didn’t want to do it with an illegally obtained firearm.”
So for Odessa, charges would include seven deaths, 19 wounded, plus illegal possession of a firearm?! Is that a deterrent?
Condolences to the victims but do six deaths in a country of 320 million people really represent an “outbreak”?
Also, “vaping-related deaths” is bullshit as the article itself says in the first paragraph:
The Trump administration is preparing to ban flavored e-cigarettes as federal health officials call for restrictions to combat an outbreak of a mysterious lung disease . . .
“Mysterious lung disease.” In the headline, vaping is flat-out killing people; in the article it’s a mystery disease.
I’ve read specifically about three of the deaths. One was here in Southern California, in Los Angeles County. The deceased was described as an older adult male, at least 55 years old, with chronic health conditions.
A woman who died in Kansas was older than 50 and had a history of health problems.
In Minnesota, the state’s “first known vaping-related death” was a person over 65 years with a history of lung problems.
The pattern seems to be that a not-young person in poor health dies and the death is attributed to vaping.
It’s not possible. It’s not possible to say what caused an illness in one particular person.
A heavy smoker gets lung cancer. Did smoking cause the lung cancer? There’s no way to know that. Because non-smokers also get lung cancer.
Not as often as smokers but they do. We can look at a population and say that smoking strongly correlates with lung cancer, but for one person, there is no way to know.
Symptoms of the “mysterious lung disease” include shortness of breath, fatigue, chest pain and vomiting, all of which existed before the invention of vaping and have a long list of potential causes.
So what? I was jerking off while my dad died of a heart attack.
No, I made that up. The point is, life goes on. Did you stop fucking your secretary just because your sister was in the hospital? Of course not. There was nothing you could do for her, just like there’s nothing Trump can do about the hurricane.
Before swinging a refrigerator door shut over the top of your bare foot, make sure the door has enough clearance to actually go over the top of your foot.
You don’t know his name, but you know who he is. He’s one of three people in the foreground of one of the most famous photos in American history.
Leavelle is the man in the light-colored suit escorting Lee Harvey Oswald through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.
Notice the difference in the position of Oswald relative to Leavelle in the photo below, before the gunshot. Leavelle, who was handcuffed to Oswald, said when he saw Ruby with the gun, he tried to jerk Oswald behind him, but Ruby was so close by that time that all he was able to do was turn Oswald sideways.
Arresting some knucklehead on a weapons charge and saying you “thwarted a mass shooting” is a speculative fantasy.
Meanwhile, since El Paso there have been 25 actual unthwarted mass shootings (per Mass Shooting Tracker), which don’t make the news because they don’t fit the preferred narrative.
For example, four of the shootings occurred in Chicago, where in each case the shooters fired into a crowd of people. By my count, about half the victims were women.
I can’t find any reporting on this in Mother Jones, which is pretty shocking given their obvious interest in mass shootings.
They’d rather report on imaginarymass shootings by white males than on the actualmass shootings of Chicago residents .
The Mass Shooting Tracker defines a mass shooting as “an incident where four or more people are shot in a single shooting spree.”
The FBI definition of “mass murder” is three or more people murdered in one event. The FBI doesn’t have a definition for “mass shooting.” You have to actually die for the FBI to take notice of you.
As of this writing, of 75 mass shootings in 2019, where the race of the perpetrator is known, 22 were white, 39 were black, 8 were Latino, 3 were Asian, 2 were American Indian and 1 was Arab.
Many of the 2019 mass shootings are currently unsolved, thus the race of the shooters is not known, but they often took place in black areas and claimed black victims.
Mass shootings of black citizens is not generally considered newsworthy, possibly because media have written inner cities off as unsalvageable, so what happens there is of no interest; or possibly because these cases don’t fit the preferred narrative of mass shootings being the exclusive province of white males.
El Paso is the worst mass murder (22 deaths) in the U.S. in 2019. Second worst: DeWayne Craddock, a black man, murdered 13 co-workers in Virginia Beach, VA. Relatively speaking, how much more coverage did El Paso get? Ten times as much? 100 times? I know it was a lot.
Because this crime hits not one but two media hot buttons — gun violence and homophobia — if not for the fact that Robinson is not white, it should have been a national topic for weeks, and then been adapted into a movie, a play and a miniseries.
As it is, you’ve probably never heard of Deroy Robinson.
TL;DR: Mass shootings happen every day but they largely go unreported. With more than four months left in 2019, there have already been 320 mass shootings (per Mass Shooting Tracker). White males are not the only perpetrators, and in fact are are not even close to being the majority of perpetrators.
Even in cases of actual mass murder, as in the Craddock and Robinson cases, the volume of news coverage seems to be much lower for non-white shooters.
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