I agree in that context but I was thinking more along the lines of Chauvin's co-defendants. In that sense I do believe they have a duty to tell the firemen there's a fire in the building. And if the firemen tell them they're waiting on the keys, I think they have a duty to convey the urgency of the situation.

Same with command. They knew wounded children were in there and that time was of the essence or "should have." And while they couldn't force the cops to risk their lives, they certainly could have and maybe legally "should have" given the order to breach sooner (as would most reasonable officers?).

And that sort of "should have" could extend to some of the cops on the perimeter holding parents back, depending on what they knew.

We'll see. As I said, it wouldn't surprise me if they did.

Well when people (the non-1%) never consider themselves the obligee that's easy to overlook. Nor does it help matters when the government does finally send the people the bill and they line-item it as inflation.

One example of a society that could handle these levels of gun ownership is the US, before our values went down the shitter and we became a degenerate society of self-serving narcassists.
I mean, we can argue the influence of statistical per-capita gun ownership over time but its always been ludacrously high here but we weren't seeing the sorts of extreme anti-social nonsense we do now, back when we were a much healthier civilization.

Its not 'revisionist history' to point out this painful fact: The number of households that own firearms has been steadily decreasing over time...



.. yet the amount of ridiculously anti-social incidents involving firearms has been clearly on the rise. I'm just barely old enough to have caught the outside edge of 'the old US' as a kid and don't think for a second that our culture doesn't reflect who we were, and what we are.

This culture didn't create monsters who shot up schools, even though per capita gun ownership was higher.



For some inexplcable reason, this culture DOES create said monsters.



Now clearly the reason for this is what academia says: it's obviously institutional racism and the intersectionality of unequal access to hot school lunches and epigenitic stressors caused by urban police abuse, but some people think the answer is much simpler. This is a point that you can bring up in an apolitical context without making any specific charges towards one party or the other and amusingly watch those on the political left get instantly defensive, becuase deep down, they know the world they've been pushing for and are quite desperate to dodge the part of the conversation that addresses social consequences of their "long march" cultural successes.

Oh well. At least weed's mostly legal, and we FINALLY have a four star admiral who is transgendered.

Because when you think of American culture from 1973-2010, Frank Sinatra is for sure the guy you think of.

You failed to comprehend there.

In 1975 America was all about the Rat Pack. Couldn’t wait for the next Sinatra record to smash the pop charts!

Sinatra had a song hit #2 on the Billboard charts in 1975. Is that really the best you could do?

Why he’s practically synonymous with 1970’s America.

I do like that weve found yet another way to blame mass shootings on transgender people. This place is a real innovator in finding ways to smear that community.

Most people who own guns for self-defense are not persuaded by the idea that that such ownership makes it more, rather than less likely, that they or their family will be shot or harmed. Because even if that is true it doesn't take into account the FEELING of security whether it is rational or not that some people obtain from that gun. It is similar to why some people will drive 500 miles rather than fly, even if they know the stats. The drive alternative eliminates nervousness and given the miniscule chances of a serious car accident it is a legitimate factor. Anti-gun people have to figure out a way to deal with that.

But the above words were only written to distinguish that concept from my actual point. Which is that animal hunting for pleasure should be illegal. If it was, fewer people would have guns. And unlike guns for self defense, the upside of owning them is not to eliminate nervousness but simply a bit of pleasure. I think it is a despicable way to get pleasure and that hunting is immoral but even without that attitude, the mere elimination of some guns that might fall into the wrong hands is reason enough.

Also being responsible and careful make a huge difference to how safe it is. Many think they are the responsible/careful ones and so think it's not as dangerous for them as the average suggests. Some of them are correct.

Because its a bullshit argument from the word go.
Statistical averages that don't account for specific circumstances might be an appealing basis for life-decisions to those with (severe) Aspergers, but everyone else makes rational personal decisions based on rational personal circumstances. Some people make decisions to not own firearms because they recognize that someone in their home, or themselves, are incompatible with responsible firearms ownership. This is actually quite common and comendable.

Some people make a half-assed decision to own firearms and ultimately come to personally represent whatever failure-rate is associated with 'statistical gun ownership'- they accidentally shoot themselves, or they commit a rash act of domestic violence, or whatever. Uncommon, but not statistically insignificant. They're real.

Tens of millions of people own firearms responsibly, handle firearms responsibly and have done so for generations and are a threat to no one. The presence of a firearm to such people represents absolute no downside with only potential upside.

This is a distinct argument from the 'civilization level' argument re: allowing widespread gun ownership, but the genie is totally out of the bottle there, 300,000,000+ unregistered firearms in the United States, so you'll find that the people who posit 'change' on the issue never have a workable or even realistic plan and always have to appeal to idealogical abstractions, since the scale of the problem cannot be resolved without first banning guns en masse, and then undertaking the sorts of decisive enforcement actions we would not have the stomach for (and probably wouldn't even be legal).

Guns in the United States have become tantamount to bitching about the weather.
You can't do anything about it.

Actually, we could. We just don't.

The degree to which transgender people live completely rent-free in the conservative mind is almost without precedent. Like 0.5% of the population who want nothing more than to not be misgendered and they’ve triggered a complete meltdown.

They don't live rent free in anyone's heads.
You'll find some people on the right using them as a political pawn, since they're a classic example of the Newt Gingrich rule on the political left: Start off with a valid premise, and take it WAY too far.

"See, all they want to do just just be treated with dignity! To prove our high degree of tolerance, the Childrens Library will host Drag Queen story hour for kids aged 3-5.."



Only the intolerant (x)ist (x)phobes would be against something like that.
Its because they're ignorant, live in trailers, sex with cousins, etc.

LGBT people and book reading, the two things Republicans hate the most!

What could be do that's realistic and wouldn't create more problems than it solves?

That's one way to make excuses for a terrible idea.

First of all our founders thought black people and women were property.
So...your premise is silly and based upon the propaganda they teach us all in 2nd grade.

But more importantly, even if our founding fathers did want more than to run their own aristocracy without having to give the king a cut, it wouldn't have been possible to imagine that an economy could provide enough food, shelter and clothing for everyone. So the idea would have been a non starter.

As I said, it's been an eventful couple of hundred years. Times have changed even if conservatives haven't.



I'm going to walk that back.

Your point is solid. It's just that I was comparing the rights that US citizens grant themselves with rights other more modern countries grant themselves.
So you've correct but it's like when lag tight reminds us that the US is a democratic republic. It's not actually useful information in the context of the discussion.

So when the slave patrols were rounding up runaways ?

Trolly gonna troll.

Back to trolling, I see. It's really a shame, because you usually make a lot of sense when you're not trolling.

IN MY OPINION!

When someone embeds a chart in a thread devoted to a social issue, that post has a 50% chance of being terrible.

When someone embeds a youtube video, that post has an 80% of being terrible.

And strangely enough, when someone embeds a picture, the post has a >90% chance of being terrible.


It's a strange phenomenon.

Sorry, let’s get back to our very serious conversation about how trans people ruined our extremely hetero-normative and not at all gender-bending pop culture of the 1970s-80s.

When do you suppose this time was when Americans had the morals to play with guns and not cause any harm to innocent people ?

Type A. if it was before it was fashionable to smoke and drink on the moving picture screen.

Type B. if it was after.

Can we make "...but slavery!" some sort of formally codified fallacy that can be instantly discarded, so we don't have to waste time with the horseshit argument that everything in the past was bad/worse because some bad things were allowed to exist?