westfailia:

commune-or-nothing:

The former pacifist pumped a shotgun at the firing line.

Lore McSpadden never touched a gun before the Trigger Warning Queer & Trans Gun Club started this past year. Now McSpadden is among the shooters routinely yelling, “Pull!” and blasting at clay pigeons angling over a mowed field near Rochester.

Trigger Warning members are anxious about armed and organized extremists who seem increasingly emboldened. Their response has a touch of symmetry to it: They started a club to teach members how to take up arms.

“It’s a way to assert our strength,” said Jake Allen, 27, who helped form the group. “Often, queer people are thought of as being weak, as being defenseless, and I think in many ways this pushes back against that. And I want white supremacists and neo-Nazis to know that queer people are taking steps necessary to protect themselves.”

Trigger Warning members meet once a month to shoot still targets and saucer-shaped pigeons. The 18 dues-paying members are all LGBTQ, many just learning about guns.

“I identified as a pacifist really through most of my life,” said McSpadden, 37, who has attended a self-defense seminar and now owns a 20-gauge shotgun.

“Is an arms race what we really want?” asked Scott Fearing, executive director of Rochester’s Out Alliance. “What we know in any arms race is that it’s never good for anybody, and death and destruction and harm and hurt can come when so many people have arms and weapons.”

death and destruction and harm and hurt are already there he’s talking about it like it’s a hypothetical possibility, not something LGBT gun clubs like trigger warning are reacting to, that are happening for real, right now.

fuckyeahanarchistposters:

“The question is not: who has the guns? But rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next year, the power whose authority they recognise will take away the guns which they failed to use against it.”

When insurrections die - Gilles Dauvé

wetwareproblem:

scapegrace74-blog:

fgsshinyhoard:

consivanqueen:

A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths

You know when the last mass shooting was in the UK?

2010.  Because we made handguns illegal and you need to pass a pretty severe test in order to qualify for owning a rifle, which is only mandated if you are a police officer or a gamekeeper.

You can’t even train in the Olympics with shooting here, you need to go offshore for that.

@contrivedcoincidences6  And to rebut a common argument that “the bad guys will get the guns anyway because they’ll slip into the country illegally”, I would hold up my home country of Canada.  We have the longest unmanned border in the world dividing us from the most gun-enabling society in the world, yet our gun crime rates are a small fraction of the U.S. (178 gun-related homicides in 2015 in a population of 36 million).  If gun control laws truly favoured the illegal purchase of firearms from neighbouring countries, Canada would be a perfect litmus test, and yet it doesn’t bear out.

Actually, Canada is not the best litmus test - because there are a lot of fucking guns here already. But that just strengthens the argument, no?

That begs the question as why do countries with large percentages of gun ownership like Canada, Serbia, Sweden, and Finland not have high crime rates? Why are they not as inherently violent as America? 

Everyone is saying that America should be more like Japan, the UK or Australia. America is not an island nation with a homogeneous population and and a history of disarmed peasants. Australia is an outlier because it does have a gun culture. The ban after Port Author Massacre was only on semi-automatic and pump action long arms (rifles, carbines, shotguns, etc.), meaning that pistols, revolvers, and manually operated long arms (bolt action, break action, lever action, etc.) are still legal. 

Japan never had a gun culture because no emperor, shogun or prime minister ever wanted the people the kept down to be armed. Lest their class society come apart. 

And everyone talks about how the cops in the UK don’t carry guns and the public are disarmed. Not so, since the cops in London routinely go on patrol armed with submachine guns and assault rifles because the crime is so bad. And, let us not forget that Northern Ireland is part of the UK, where the British Army and the Ulsterman loyalists regularly have it out with the IRA. Tough gun laws don’t stop militias on both sides from obtaining guns. In Belfast, the police still go on patrol in convoys of Armored Personnel Carriers and armored Land Rovers. 

On top of that, these countries have a lot more that the US does not. A public health service that includes mental health. Lower levels of poverty and inequality. A great sense of community, with none of the Ayn Rand nonsense that Americans are taught. This, with other factors, contribute to a lower crime rate. 

If suddenly there was a universal gun ban in America, it would not be like the UK or Japan. America would be more like Mexico. A place where the people are disarmed and the rapacious police and narcos are heavily armed. America already has a problem with crime and people who should not be cops running around shooting everything that moves. 

A lot of people who dictate to the working class how to live, particularly if they should be allowed to be armed, are usually rich bourgeois elites. They live in walled, gated communities, they can afford private security and the police exist to serve them. Of course they do not want the working class or middle class to be armed. Its just another way to bring us under heel. 

Its up to us to protect ourselves and each other. I know the terror of having someone trying to break in to my house and one in the morning. He could have been in my house in seconds and the cops were minutes away. Having a pistol in my hand gave me peace of mind. The idea of taking another human life makes me sick to my stomach. But, though I don’t want to kill, I sure as hell don’t want to die. 

Here are some quotes to think about. 

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws” -Plato

“Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.“ Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party

“The Workers must armed and organized” -Karl Marx

I am a gun owner, but no, I am not a paranoid nut that thinks there is going to be a universal ban. I passed a back ground check to prove I am not a criminal and not a threat to myself and others. I know that this will not be a universal ban, but for fuck’s sake, stop trying to disarm people who obey the law and do not harm anyone, Yes, we need to keep them out of the hands of sick, dangerous people. but they don’t obey the law in the first place! 

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

“Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment.

“If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it’s off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with.”

- Comrade Huey P. Newton

ambris:

redhead4eyes:

paper-storm:

Australian comedian Jim Jefferies points out the ridiculousness of American pro-gun arguments. x x

Welp

EXACTLY

This is actually a very weak argument. 

Australia never banned all guns. They only banned semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, and pump action shotguns. Theses guns can still be obtained with a special license. For example, a license for animal culling. 

Also, this is always the argument that “why isn’t the US like island nations with smaller populations, lower levels of income inequality and a more homogeneous population that have always had low crime rates and more reasonable laws regarding drugs and incarceration.” 

Because we are not.  

But America could be like countries that have large numbers of guns per person like Canada, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and Finland. First-world countries with large numbers of guns. But, they also have lower levels of income inequality, mental illness, unemployment, crime and also with humane laws and criminal justice systems. Low inequality and humane laws lead to lower instances of crime and mental illness. 

But a universal gun ban would make America more like Mexico. Private citizens cannot own guns but that does not stop the narcos from getting them. In Mexico, only the drug gangs have guns as do the crooked politicians and police forces that are in the gangs’s pockets. After all, the 43 Iguala students were rounded up by the police to be murdered. 

I am not a Republican or a Democrat. They are two halves of the same party. And this comedian is proof that rich liberals are the same as rich conservatives. A bunch of rich bastards that live in gated communities that are always patrolled by the police because they don’t have to work that hard while serving the class that they have always existed to serve. They never have to deal with the harsh realities that face working class people.

Its not just the 2nd Amendment that makes me believe that I should be able to own my old World War II era rifle and my two pistols. Karl Marx himself said that the working class should be armed and organized, and if the government, bought and paid for by the oppressive bourgeois ruling class, should attempt to take these weapons away, they should be resisted with all force. Of course, Brother Marx took it a step further and extended that right to artillery. 

As a working class American living in a working class neighborhood, I know the terror of having some weirdo beating on your door at 1:30 in the morning. Knowing that the police are minutes away and that door might only last seconds against a determined assault. I have had meth heads approach me in the parking lot of stores. I have had psycho red necks threaten to kill me for being bi sexual. I have the right to protect myself and anyone else I know from being beaten, raped and/or murdered. 

If the fucking Ku Klux terrorists can have guns I want one too so I can give them the fight they think they will win. 

When I got my concealed-carry permit, I had to prove that I had no overt mental illnesses on my medical records and that I had no criminal record. I proved that I could safely and sanely use, store and maintain a firearm. And that I knew the laws of the state I live in and that the permit and the second amendment are NOT a licenses to kill. 

I don’t want to kill anyone, but I sure as hell don’t want to die. Just the idea of having to take another human life even in the defense of my own makes me sick to my stomach.   

micdotcom: