Another Fucking Mass Shooting At US School

[Loren Pechtel]

Honestly, I think it is 50-50 whether Greene actually cares about transgenders at all or if they are merely a ploy that she (and the alt-right) uses for access to power. Stefanik and DeSantis weren't alt-right 10 years ago. But they shifted there when the winds blew in that direction. Greene could fear or hate transgenders, but at least that would be honest bigotry, instead of dishonest fear mongering.

I think she's stupid enough she's fallen for their own propaganda. The ones behind it are using it as a ploy but I think she's a puppet, not a puppet master.

 

[lpetrich]

'Guns don't kill...transgender terrorists do'—the latest in culture war opportunism

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter: "How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?
Everyone can stop blaming guns now." / Twitter
and
J.D. Vance on Twitter: "We're still learning about the horrific shooting in Nashville. But if early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school, there needs to be a lot of soul searching on the extreme left. Giving in to these ideas isn't compassion, it's dangerous." / Twitter
and
Charlie Kirk on Twitter: "Instead of banning "assault rifles" we should ban gender affirming care for kids." / Twitter
and
Charlie Kirk on Twitter: "Unfortunately what happened yesterday fits a trend: The nastiest, most vile people in America are part of the Alphabet Mafia. They call for violence and want revenge against people who oppose their agenda." / Twitter

Almost one in three of Republicans say violence may be necessary to ‘save’ US | Republicans | The Guardian - "Troubling statistics show the post-election rancor that led to the US Capitol attack on 6 January is still very much in place"

 

[lpetrich]

Meet the queer people who practice shooting to defend themselves from hate groups : NPR
then
Pro-Gun Tucker Carlson Pumps Brakes on Armed Transgender People

When it comes to transgender people arming themselves in light of the threat of harassment or attacks from hate groups, firearm advocate Tucker Carlson is skeptical, he made clear Thursday, insisting that doing so is “not the exercise of the Second Amendment” but rather “political hysteria.”

Such an excellent description of right-wing politics.

Carlson called attention to a recent NPR interview with gay and transgender people in New England who practice shooting as a self-defense measure. He then mocked the notion of white supremacist groups in that region, because, as he put it, “every state is blue.”

Except that there are plenty of right-wing Republicans there, even if they are outvoted by large margins.

“Just to be clear: We are not against people—American citizens—carrying firearms,” Carlson continued. “We support it—including trans people. It’s fine. But what you’re watching here is not the exercise of the Second Amendment. What you’re watching here is political hysteria: fear ginned up on purpose with maximum dishonesty in order to get people in a state of agitation—armed people in a state of agitation. It doesn’t matter if they are trans or not, whatever that is.”

“It’s the same template always: scare the crap out of your voters, tell them that their lives are at risk, [and] encourage them to get guns,” said the Fox host, who once fretted that gun buybacks are “an incitement to violence” and would bring about “civil war.” “How do you think that ends?”

Then,

“You have to kind of wonder, like, what’s the limit to this?” he asked.

“So if trans people are in fear for their lives, and [if] every region of the country including New England…is crawling with Nazis now, why wouldn’t we be arming them as we are, say, Ukraine’s trans army? And there are famously trans people in Ukraine; they are very, very proud of that. So why stop with AR-15s? I mean, why not F-35s or tanks?”

Finally, “We’re as for guns as you could possibly be, but this seems like an incitement.”

 

[Jarhyn]

The goal is to proclaim trans people dangerous, and take their guns so they can't defend themselves and their homes if the government comes to erase us.

It's a DARVO, an attempt to disarm their outgroups before moving against them.

They fear the fist of the person that stands up to the bullying.

They are in the act of antagonizing the trans community until there is no reasonable course but to fight, and then using that as an excuse to crush the community entirely.

When they use the term 'trans mob' it is about time to start preparing as a trans person for the actual lynch mob to come through the door.

You stand up in the courtroom, you don't initiate violence even if they are out of line.

The wise person does not initiate, as you say... But they prepare to respond to the lynch mob either way. Lynch Mobs are not known for fair trials.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Most mass shootings are overwhelimingly commited by men. More mass shootings have been commited by incels than trans persons. About half of male mass shooters have had legal problems with violent abuse of significant others. Many have a history of mental illness. Yet the NRA and like minded progun groups oppose red flag laws.

They're right to oppose red flag laws--the problem is the laws are basically guilty until proven innocent, generally with no way to prove your innocence. Make a red flag law that's fair to the falsely accused and you'll get a lot more support. The concept is good, the implementation is not.

The trouble is that buying weapons that can be readily used to kill a decent number of people in America is so simple, that unless red flag laws are as you note, they'd be effectively useless.

But I get your point, saving the lives of a small number of people isn't worth the cost of restricting access to guns to people that might not be in the right mind to own them.

 

[Jarhyn]

Most mass shootings are overwhelimingly commited by men. More mass shootings have been commited by incels than trans persons. About half of male mass shooters have had legal problems with violent abuse of significant others. Many have a history of mental illness. Yet the NRA and like minded progun groups oppose red flag laws.

They're right to oppose red flag laws--the problem is the laws are basically guilty until proven innocent, generally with no way to prove your innocence. Make a red flag law that's fair to the falsely accused and you'll get a lot more support. The concept is good, the implementation is not.

The trouble is that buying weapons that can be readily used to kill a decent number of people in America is so simple, that unless red flag laws are as you note, they'd be effectively useless.

But I get your point, saving the lives of a small number of people isn't worth the cost of restricting access to guns to people that might not be in the right mind to own them.

More, they want to wait until they figure out how to make a law that lets them have guns and doesn't let others.

This is why they tried the mental health angle, so that they could consider being LGBT, enjoying weed, etc as psychiatric conditions.

It's much like the drug war: if they cannot engineer it to attack people they dislike they won't try.

You can guarantee that it's going to be different in certain states. They are going to declare being trans a mental health issue and declare being a spouse beating violent shit to be "nothing to see here", same way as they use ID requirements to shop for voters based on which demographic has which type of ID.

Then, certain well-defined and well-agreed conditions could probably serve to be explicitly banned: those who have committed a violent crime involving the use of a weapon.

A weapon here would be any tool which has been modified or designed with intent explicitly to present danger of harm to some party along some dimension of it's use.

For example a gun has been designed explicitly to present danger of harm to some party along the a cone calculated from the walls of it's barrel, relative to a firing pin.

If I were to remove the firing pin of a gun and go on to commit a violent crime, ie. striking someone with the barrel, this would not be sufficient to trigger the law, as envisioned. It has been designed or modified to not explicitly present real danger of harm. The intent was clearly to intimidate and not harm, even if they happened to have a heavy object.

Let us contrast this with striking someone with a belt wrapped around a fist. This would be sufficient to trigger the law, as the fist has been modified with the belt to present an explicit danger of harm through the dimension of repeated punches, made repeatable by the presence of the belt, which enhances the hardness of the knuckles. It involves the active modification in real time. Wrapping a hand with a belt takes an effort pulling out a gun that is immediately at hand without the firing pin does not.

This is set up this way because it goes into a calculus of whether the person is one who seeks weapons for use in the commission of a violent crime. Gun crimes are exactly terrible because the person seeks out additional danger to present to folks, and this mindset IS the red flag, not the violence, but the improvement of it through active weapon-seeking measures.

This is the form of law that protects gay people, and autistic people, and black people in their right to own guns, and will take guns from wife beaters, child beaters, and people who brandish actual loaded weapons at others on the street.

Red flag laws cannot, must not be made more complicated than that, because if they are, they will be overly vague and useful against minorities.

 

[TSwizzle]

I believe there is such a thing as bigotry but made up words like "transphobia" are dog whistles for radicals to get behind

So you believe opposition to trans rights is fueled by intentional bigotry, not irrational fear?

1. I don't believe there is any opposition to "trans rights".
2. I doubt there is such a thing as a phobia of "transgender" people in the same context as say arachnophobia or acrophobia. What you describe is a "transphobia" is probably garden variety bigotry where something like that exists. And standing up for women's rights is not bigotry either.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I believe there is such a thing as bigotry but made up words like "transphobia" are dog whistles for radicals to get behind

So you believe opposition to trans rights is fueled by intentional bigotry, not irrational fear?

1. I don't believe there is any opposition to "trans rights".

Oh, is this one of those "gay marriage" is a special right sort of no opposition?

2. I doubt there is such a thing as a phobia of "transgender" people in the same context as say arachnophobia or acrophobia. What you describe is a "transphobia" is probably garden variety bigotry where something like that exists.

Good point, should be called transphobes.

And standing up for women's rights is not bigotry either.

LOL! Opponents of Title IX all of a sudden caring about fairness in women's sports. HAW!

 

[Jarhyn]

I believe there is such a thing as bigotry but made up words like "transphobia" are dog whistles for radicals to get behind

So you believe opposition to trans rights is fueled by intentional bigotry, not irrational fear?

1. I don't believe there is any opposition to "trans rights".
2. I doubt there is such a thing as a phobia of "transgender" people in the same context as say arachnophobia or acrophobia. What you describe is a "transphobia" is probably garden variety bigotry where something like that exists. And standing up for women's rights is not bigotry either.

You yourself oppose trans rights, unless you accept the right of a person to access blockers at the onset of puberty, and to start on whatever hormones they wish once they are 18, and to modify their gonads in whatever way is necessary to reduce complexity or total need for ongoing treatment.

We have already discussed "transphobia" as explicitly treating trans folks and those who wish to transition, as a class, with suspicion, violence, or derision.

Seeing as you have repeatedly argued against letting people have autonomy over those choices, particularly on the basis of  suspicion of bad faith reasons for transition, you are explicitly satisfying the definition offered of "transphobia".

The fact is that there is no special right to only at sports with "people who manufacture eggs". Indeed this is offered as the scientific definition of female. That's as much work as "female" does.

It doesn't say "this person lacks a 'penis'"

It doesn't say "this person lacks testicles"

All it says is "this person has ovarian tissue".

If you want to maintain fairness in sports you will demand that those who are not exposed to testosterone not be asked to compete with those who have been within some reasonably long timeframe.

This is because the difference in sports is actually driven, physiologically, by that chemical, not by "eggs".

By maintaining rhetoric against trans folks in sports, people replace "steroids" inappropriately as a concern with "penis", and "vagina".

It's inappropriate and fucking stupid. Stop it.

Every time you try to bring up fairness in sports, I'm going to bring up the actual science of what drives fairness in sports on the dimension of electable performance enhancement. It's not a difficult barrier to measure, but it's also not a difficult barrier to cross.

 

[lpetrich]

'Guns don't kill...transgender terrorists do'—the latest in culture war opportunism

Jonithan, guns don’t kill children, transgender terrorists do. US President Biden confirmed his disconnect from reality when the 80-year-old began joking about his preference for chocolate chip ice cream before commenting on yesterday’s mass shooting at a Nashville Christian charter school that left six people dead, including three children. Biden concluded his comments with an obligatory condemnation of constitutionally mandated gun ownership designed by the Left to disarm US citizens. Neither the transgender terrorist killed by police, nor the killer’s radical left manifesto in what was an anti-Christian hate crime motivated by radical left gender ideology was mentioned.

Finally an exception to gun-rights absolutism that right-wingers like. Something like how armed Black Panther militants provoked the California state legislature to enact gun-control laws around 1970.

I think that many right-wingers look at many school shooters and think of them as people like them. Thus claiming that mental-health resources are inadequate, though right-wing politicians who claim that have a very bad record of funding such resources -- they don't even brag about how they wanted to fund such things.

Author JMS Pearce:

The same approach is often taken when trying to pin some misdemeanor on race. In the UK, there is often the claim that there is a knife crime epidemic. It is worth mentioning here that the epidemic would be a whole lot worse if guns were available to those using knives, but that is another discussion.

In London, being a large urban center, knife crime is consistently in the news. We often hear, and usually from those with a certain political persuasion, that this is predominantly “Black on Black” knife crime. This is a “Black problem.”

Except Glasgow, in neighboring Scotland, in the 2000s, was labeled the murder capital of Europe with higher per capita knife crime than London.

Yet not a single person called these crimes “white on white” knife crimes, or labeled this a “white problem.”

 

[lpetrich]

JMSP then quotes Akala from "Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire":

Given that the historically most violent regions of the UK had virtually no black population at all and given that working-class youth gangs stabbing and shooting people had existed in Britain for well over a century – who do you think the gangs attacking our grandparents when they arrived were? – you can imagine my shock when I discovered that there was, in the UK, such a thing as ‘black-on-black’ violence. None of what occurred in Northern Ireland had ever been referred to as ‘white-on-white’ crime, nor Glasgow, nor either world war, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, nor any conflict or incident of murder, however gruesome, between humans racialised as white. Despite hundreds of millions of ‘white’ people killing each other throughout European history, witch hunts, mass rapes, hangings, torture and sexual abuse, and despite the fact that the two most violent regions of Britain in the 1990s were almost entirely white, there was no such thing as white-on-white violence.

...
This is, after all, what the phrase ‘black-on-black crime’ is designed to suggest, is it not? That black people are not like the rest of humanity, and that they do not kill as a complex result of political, historical, economic, cultural, religious and psychological factors, they kill simply because of their skin: their excessive melanin syndrome. The fact that yellow-on-yellow crime, mixed race-on-mixed race crime or white-on-white violence just sound like joke terms but black on black violence has ‘credibility’ speaks very loudly about the perceived relationship between blackness and depravity in this culture.

 

[Toni]

And yet you are so sure it could have nothing to do with frenzy the trans mobs have got themselves and other useful idiots worked up about.

Unlike you, apparently, I have an open mind on what drove her to that insane act. I didn't know that there was such a thing as a "trans mob", but I can understand your fear of them. You make them sound like a real threat. You seem to think that the trans mobs had something to do with her act. I don't consider it at all likely.

Maybe in the fullness of time there will be some light shed on the motive but I don't think the "motive" of these unhinged people is particularly important or useful.

I have no fear of "trans mobs" but other people do and have reason to fear them. And by "trans mobs" I means the idiots that run around screaming TERFS or whatever and sending death threats to the likes of J.K. Rowling or assaulting women at women's speaking events.

I agree with you that the motive isn't important. What is important is that they have such easy access to weapons of mass murder.

From a discussion I had with a firearms enthusiast (to put it mildly) on Reddit, the easy access doesn't matter. The guns are not the issue. No, the real problem is mental health. We do not have a gun violence problem in the US. We have a mental health problem.

Someone dies by a gun? Mental health. Always.

Mass school shooting? Mental health problem.
Workplace shooting? Mental health problem.
Drive by in East St. Louis? Well that's just mental health right there.
Jim Bob shoots his neighbor in Arkansas over a domestic dispute? Not the gun. Mental health.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to spend the next several hours searching the websites of the NRA and a few of their pet Congressmen to find this comprehensive plan to finally address the rampant mental health problem in this country...

Well, yes, mental health is a root cause. But guns are the weapon used here. Obviously we need to do a much better job helping people overcome mental health challenges. But those are not very often dangerous to anyone other than the sufferer without guns.

We need to eliminate gun violence and start with banning guns.

 

[ZiprHead]

Biden was in the Senate then and the Senate voted for it so it’s not inappropriate to associate Biden with that legislation.

She's still wrong because they bill was passed after that incident, and the law allowed for authorized people to still have guns on school property.

Attributing the law to Biden is still misleading, as if it were especially up to him when it passed nearly unanimously.

 

[Copernicus]

I believe there is such a thing as bigotry but made up words like "transphobia" are dog whistles for radicals to get behind

So you believe opposition to trans rights is fueled by intentional bigotry, not irrational fear?

1. I don't believe there is any opposition to "trans rights".
2. I doubt there is such a thing as a phobia of "transgender" people in the same context as say arachnophobia or acrophobia. What you describe is a "transphobia" is probably garden variety bigotry where something like that exists. And standing up for women's rights is not bigotry either.

Now you seem to admit that transphobia would be a valid concept if there really was bigotry against transgender people, but then you seem to deny that there really are transgender people. Hence, the concept is misleading. What about people who are born with male and female genitalia? I am specifically thinking of General  Casimir Pulaski, the Revolutionary War hero who founded the US Cavalry. Would that convince you that it is possible for someone to be transgender?

 

[ZiprHead]

Bodycam footage has been released.

Unlike Uvalde, these cops have balls of steel.

Warning: Graphic.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Most mass shootings are overwhelimingly commited by men. More mass shootings have been commited by incels than trans persons. About half of male mass shooters have had legal problems with violent abuse of significant others. Many have a history of mental illness. Yet the NRA and like minded progun groups oppose red flag laws.

They're right to oppose red flag laws--the problem is the laws are basically guilty until proven innocent, generally with no way to prove your innocence. Make a red flag law that's fair to the falsely accused and you'll get a lot more support. The concept is good, the implementation is not.

The trouble is that buying weapons that can be readily used to kill a decent number of people in America is so simple, that unless red flag laws are as you note, they'd be effectively useless.

But I get your point, saving the lives of a small number of people isn't worth the cost of restricting access to guns to people that might not be in the right mind to own them.

So you're fine with shitting on the Constitution if it's to accomplish something you like?

And it would be possible to make a red flag law that didn't have the problem. We have a decent model of how to handle it: same as we do with restraining orders. Red flag should be akin to a temporary restraining order, a case must be made in court to extend it. And if not, the guns must be returned without cost or damage.

 

[repoman]

 

[Rhea]

The trouble is that buying weapons that can be readily used to kill a decent number of people in America is so simple, that unless red flag laws are as you note, they'd be effectively useless.

But I get your point, saving the lives of a small number of people isn't worth the cost of restricting access to guns to people that might not be in the right mind to own them.

So you're fine with shitting on the Constitution if it's to accomplish something you like?

And it would be possible to make a red flag law that didn't have the problem. We have a decent model of how to handle it: same as we do with restraining orders. Red flag should be akin to a temporary restraining order, a case must be made in court to extend it. And if not, the guns must be returned without cost or damage.

I for one am fine with not making the constitution do something it was never meant to if it saves our children from being murdered.

It is not “shitting on the constitution” to say that you have free speech, but you can’t defame someone and make them lose their business over a lie.

It is not “shitting on the constitution” to say that you have free Religion but you can’t stone adulterers.

It is not “shitting on the constitution” to say that you have private communication with your lawyer, but not if you’re asking your lawyer to cover up your crime.

It is not “shitting on the constitution” to say that you have free Press but not if yu are knowngly spreading lies and calling them news.


And it is not “shitting on the constitution” to say that you have freedom to bear arms, but not when you are a danger to society, and not the kind of arms where the only use is a danger to society.

 

[Politesse]

He grabbed her chest, and she shoved him. I would, too.

Is the argument that right-wing loonies should be able to assault whoever they like, and if they fight back they are bad people?

 

[IIDB Staff]

Please try to stay on topic regarding the school shooting. While discussing related issues, such as trans rights, is reasonable, let's try to avoid derailing the conversation too far from the main focus.