As you know by now, there was more disappointing news on Monday regarding the attempt to sensibly regulate gun purchases in America. As Democratic Senator Bill Nelson said, “The NRA won again.” Well, I like what Senator Chris Murphy, who led a Democrat filibuster that got Democrats the ability to even vote on gun restraint, said about the whole sorry episode:
We’ve got to make this clear, constant case that Republicans have decided to sell weapons to ISIS…That’s what they’ve decided to do. ISIS has decided that the assault weapon is the new airplane, and Republicans, in refusing to close the terror gap, refusing to pass bans on assault weapons, are allowing these weapons to get in the hands of potential lone-wolf attackers. We’ve got to make this connection and make it in very stark terms.
I like that statement because not only is it true, it allows me to heap a whole lot of orange excrement on war-hero-turned-asshole, John McCain.
Not only does McCain support the racist, xenophobic, misogynistic Trump—even after His Orangeness slandered McCain and other POWs last summer and recently slandered President Obama by suggesting he secretly sides with ISIS—but days ago the Arizona Republican actually blamed Barack Obama for the mass killing in Orlando. He said, three freaking times, that the president was “directly responsible for it.”
Directly. Responsible.
Now, should any future assault rifle-toting terrorist decide to kill innocents, we can use McCain logic and say that John McCain—the sluttiest NRA whore in Congress—and his Republican friends in the Senate (plus Democrats Heidi Heitkamp and Jon Tester) are directly responsible for it.
Directly. Responsible.
The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance 
Tige Gibson
/ June 21, 2016If you really want your country run by special interests, you actually need a dictatorship, nothing less. Control of the media and gerrymandering will only take you so far and eventually lose traction as the people being served lose touch with the real demands of political power. It puzzles me how much bloodshed is required before people stop the “ho-hum, we can’t pass any legislation” apathy.
People don’t remember that the first assault weapons ban started because Reagan, a Republican, was shot, but couldn’t pass until Bill Clinton was president even though Reagan himself supported the ban. The important issue in putting such legislation back up is not allowing it to have a sunset provision. What kind of insanity is the assumption that people will forget what assault weapons wreak in ten years?
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R. Duane Graham
/ June 21, 2016It may be too late. The damn things have been selling so fast now that it would take several generations for a ban to be meaningful. That’s fucking sad. And depressing.
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Tige Gibson
/ June 21, 2016I mentioned before that a friend of mine has the same attitude, but if you are confident that nothing can be done you are only proving yourself right. The fact is idiots can’t help but flout laws they disagree with, resulting in their weapons getting confiscated in the first wave. That’s what actually happens in Canada anyway, dumb people get pulled over and lose their improperly secured guns. Gun fondlers think they’re the good guys and won’t shoot at police for enforcing the law even though they disagree with it. The only way banned weapons could be kept is by hiding them away where they won’t hurt anyone, in a locked cabinet or at the range not at McDonalds, which is the actual point, and yes those weapons could eventually be used by a nutjob but that is far less likely and far between.
The point of legislation is to empower police to reduce gunfights on the street, not to foster fallacies and phony pretenses. Gun fondlers want everyone to embrace their own fallacies: that they’ll be disarmed when confronted with real crime so they’ll be helpless and won’t be able to respond. People should actually feel that their chances of survival are far better if there isn’t a hail of bullets flying between two groups of gun nuts shooting at each other and one of those groups often ends up being the police because they have no other choice but to deal with armed people on the street on equal terms. In other words, when average Joe isn’t armed with assault weapons, the police won’t need to be either. In some places police don’t even need to carry guns.
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R. Duane Graham
/ June 23, 2016You said, in Canada, that “Gun fondlers think they’re the good guys and won’t shoot at police for enforcing the law even though they disagree with it.” Hmm. Wish we could count on that here in the U.S. Not so much anymore, I fear.
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Jim Wheeler
/ June 22, 2016Of all people, one would think that John McCain, a true war hero, would understand not only war but the immorality of politically engaging in wrongful wars. But he doesn’t. Apparently he can’t bring himself to admit that the Vietnam war was wrong, that it was a trumped-up falsity intended to prop up a corrupt dictatorship in pursuit of an erroneous hypothesis, the domino theory. But that’s what it was. Jet-jockey hubris. He should retire. He’ll be 80 this August.
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R. Duane Graham
/ June 23, 2016Speaking of jet-jockey hubris, let us not forget that by his own admission, McCain, at least once, was “daredevil clowning” with his plane. That was in Spain and he was flying so low that he “knocked down some power lines.” Some believe that there were other times that his recklessness was to blame for accidents, and that his daredevil mentality–or his need for medals to rise in the ranks–may have led to him getting shot down in Vietnam.
As for retirement, I believe there is a reason people like him will not retire. I’m just not qualified to intelligently discuss it.
Duane
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Herb Van Fleet
/ June 22, 2016A kid picks up a rock on the playground and throws it at another kid. Upon seeing this, the teacher gave each kid a rock. She reasoned that the only way to stop a bad kid with a rock is a good kid with a rock.
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Tige Gibson
/ June 22, 2016What does the teacher do when one kid builds a nuclear bomb?
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Herb Van Fleet
/ June 23, 2016The kid gets an A+ in physics.
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R. Duane Graham
/ June 23, 2016What if there weren’t any rocks on the playground to start with? I think I know what the NRA honchos would say to that: Well, if there weren’t any rocks, then the bad kid would find a stick. And if there weren’t any rocks or sticks, the bad kid would go get his AR-15 out of his cute little backpack and start shooting. Thus, all the kids need AR-15s. There. Done. We sell more AR-15s, which is the point of the NRA.
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Herb Van Fleet
/ June 22, 2016McCain has a bad memory. It is George W. Bush who is directly responsible for the mass shooting in Orlando. Directly. Responsible.
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R. Duane Graham
/ June 23, 2016Using McCain logic, you are absolutely correct. But also using McCain logic, he himself is directly responsible for ISIS, since he voted for, then later pushed for an escalation of, the war in Iraq.
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Herb Van Fleet
/ June 23, 2016Well, I suppose ISIS was inadvertently created by the members of something called a “Combined Review and Release Board.” According to Wikipedia, Al-Baghdadi (who formed and led ISIS ), “was arrested by US Forces-Iraq on 2 February 2004 near Fallujah and detained at Camp Bucca detention center in Iraq under his name Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badry as a ‘civilian internee’ until December 2004, when he was recommended for release by a Combined Review and Release Board. In December 2004, he was released as a ‘low level prisoner’”. And the rest, as they say, . . .
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R. Duane Graham
/ June 24, 2016I guess I would say this: ISIS, and other such groups, are created by people whose minds have been poisoned by a nasty form of fundamentalist Islam. Sure, there have been contributing factors, like our sticking our nose, and our troops, in the Middle East. But the bottom line is that fundamentalist religion always, and I mean always, poisons the mind. In that sense, Saudi Arabia, which has for years funded a nasty fundamentalist revival, is more to blame than anything.
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