GlamorousBunchberry

GlamorousBunchberry t1_j9vcr11 wrote

You're opening a can of worms there.

For example, what deconverted me from being a gun nut myself was noticing that nobody actually supported 2A rights for black people: in effect they supported them for "everybody," by which they meant "law abiding" people, but whichever black person was in the news at the moment was somehow never "one of the good ones." I rubbed elbows with open-carry types who never spared a moment's thought for the fact that a black man open carrying was enormously likely to be shot on sight by police, and when that actually happened all these OC types would jump on the line that "he was no angel."

All that to say, it's perfectly rational to refuse to vote for the party that consistently supports policies with racist outcomes.

The catch is that the alternative is a party that's at best all talk and no action. Our current president is literally to the right of Ronald Reagan. So voting blue is a bit like screaming into a hurricane.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_j9vbsbj wrote

>It's kinda funny 2a people are even upset because of how insignificant it is.

In that sense it's a bit like pat-downs in the airport: it's kind of infuriating to know that not only is this chungus feeling me up, but also that it's doing absolutely nothing to make anyone even a little bit safer.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_j9v9wum wrote

It's obviously not an infringement of the 2A. Folks who get outraged about this are reacting not so much to the tax itself as to what they perceive as the legislators' motives. If hypothetically they'd set the tax at $5 per round, I think it would be easy to see their viewpoint.

For comparison, machine guns are still legal to own in most of the US. The National Firearms Act of 1934 decided to tax them instead of banning them. The tax, $400, is negligible today, but at the time it was the equivalent of over $4K in present-day dollars. It was ample to keep poor and minorities from owning these guns, while it was barely an inconvenience to the wealthy.

* And they went the taxation route because they believed at the time that a ban would have been struck down as unconstitutional. They were explicitly trying to reduce ownership of machine guns without ever resorting to a ban.

** What really cut down their availability was the 1986 ban on manufacture or importation of machine guns for civilian use. All machine guns in circulation today were manufactured pre-1986.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_j1br2ed wrote

If grammar actually interested you, I’d tell you seeing about the process by which phrases are regularly reanalyzed as single units. In this case I’m treating “facts and logic” as a single collective noun, because pseudo intellectuals have rendered it a meaningless cliché. Thus “so much rice” or “so much facts and logic.”

But also I’m mocking the previous commenter because… wait a minute. Once again, I’m bitten by the asymmetry of bullshit. I’ve already put about 10,000x more thought into this question than you have or even could.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_j19q3vw wrote

Ain't nobody learnin' empathy at your home, lady...

* The bit about Catholic school is a nice touch, though! I was bused to a kindergarten in the projects of Danbury about the same time that a young feller name of Joe Biden spoke out for "states rights" and against "forced bussing." I remember specifically how folks were flocking to Catholic schools because they didn't want their kids going to school with no blacks. Ah yes, good times. Something something empathy at home.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_j19pv06 wrote

Go ahead -- tell the story about the kids sh!tting in litter boxes. That one always kills me! You right-wing nutjobs are the best free entertainment around.

* Schools actually do keep litter boxes for the kids... to use in the event of an active shooter lockdown. For which they have you to thank.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_j19ozy3 wrote

I attended a private middle school, and most of my compatriots went to Choate. Imagine my reaction when I found out that a teacher there had been molesting students for decades. I knew that tuition higher than my daddy's annual salary bought some perks, but I hadn't considered that one.

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GlamorousBunchberry t1_iz501m8 wrote

We should still shoot for universal vaccination, but what this result suggests is that eradication was probably never in the cards. If there's a pool of mammals for it to live in, it can always jump back to humans at some later time, even if we'd achieved universal vaccination when we should have.

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