I get your point entirely and don’t want to detract from it, but she didn’t even call her ugly at all.

Saw this posted on a Reddit thread called r/liberalgunowners:

I am wondering if people see any truth to this, especially the gun control piece. Would Dems do better if they gave up on gun control altogether? Many of the people in that forum seem convinced that Beto would have won Texas if he stayed away from guns as an issue.

Perhaps this subreddit is a self-selecting and very small group, but I wonder if the Dems are shooting themselves in the foot (so to speak) by not ignoring guns and focusing exclusively on economics and healthcare?

No. That’s stupid.

Fwiw here is the thread. I am from NJ and have never even held a gun much less owned one, so I can't relate. But I can't imagine that it might not hurt some candidates in rural areas of the south and midwest.

https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalguno...reddit-android

Gun
Control
Is
POPULAR!

Something like 60k people die every year due to guns. I wouldn't mind a compromise that allows hicks to keep guns, but they tend to kill people, especially people who own them (mainly through suicide), in higher density areas.

Because people make any arguments about guns, they should have to recite, "165 people will die from gun violence today, just as they did yesterday, and just as they will tomorrow. There are more guns than people in the US. So, obviously, teachers should also have guns...."

Just because 35% of the people in the nation are idiots does not mean that the rest of us have to bow to them.

For the most part it wouldn't matter. No matter how pro-gun a Dem is they will automatically be thought of as a gun grabber.

The guns thing is, like virtually everything the deplorable base does, a symptom of their anxiety over loss of power and status. To be clear, I'm not talking about the love of guns, but specifically the conviction that people are coming to take their guns away.

We will give up on our obviously correct policy preference and also give up on saving 50,000 lives annually because maybe then the idiots who oppose us will...magically not be idiots who oppose us anymore even though they have demonstrated there is no set of circumstances where they will be anything other than idiots who oppose us.

At this point, anybody who suggests any sot of right wing appeasement tactics is either completely ignorant of recent history or is a god damn moron.

Last I checked, dems ran the table in the midterms campaigning on gun control.

Milo is apparently has 7 figures of personal debt

That's funny, I thought he was well in the blacks.

Racist ban?

**** me

They are not circles. They're concentric rings of alternating black and white boxes.

Sigh.

Anyway - I just discovered that Chiefsplanet has a "Romper Room" which is a sort of purgatory where posters who misbehave are banished for arbitrary lengths of time.

But even more interesting, within there is a "mod transparency thread" which lists who's been banished, restored, or perma-banned. And contains gems such as this:

These ObamaBros are almost useless. They spend most of their time sucking Obama off and view him as a part of "the good old days". They don't get the fact that rules, traditions, and institutions are now irrelevant. The Republicans will destroy them all in a quest for indefinite political power. Democrats need to play their game to protect whatever is left of democracy in America.

Letting only rural people keep guns would probably be both popular and a good way to help them die off faster

Reminder:

Related, and just expressed differently, what QAnon and PizzaGaters get hilariously wrong isn't the idea that the global elite engage in systemic and persistent abuse both personal and abstract but that there's like some course correction coming from shadowy insiders. I admire their optimism, but there will be no accountability.

I used to think this, and surely it's a little true, but in the Trump Era I think we owe it to ourselves and them to actually just take what the deplorables say at face value. And this is maybe a distinction without a difference: but I think you are not giving enough credit to the idea that they actually harbor fantasies of using these things in the imagined race and civil wars playing out in their head, once brought to life. I'm starting to come around to the idea these aren't merely dick totems of brash masculinity nor reflexively purchased out of fear someone might someday take away their ability to buy them.

There's some of that of course, but if you listen to these people talk ("watch out Dems, yall keep running your mouths and kneeling at the anthem and cheering on antifa and I might have to use this thing I've been stroking"), I absolutely think there's a ****ton of Americans arming themselves for the express purpose of intimidating and if it comes to it shooting their political opponents. I think we need to take seriously the idea that the left is too clever by half, crafting ornate pop psych explanations for deplorable behavior where simpler explanations exist that they are in some sense incredibly forthright about. And rather than grant that guns are bred out of their fear over losing status, we should absolutely give credit to the idea these are people stockpiling arms and ammo for aggression and vengeance. Of course you can't separate that from fear but I think the common liberal / left trope is like an "oh how naive these people are, they think we're going to take their guns?" instead of a healthier "no these people are actually legit workshopping fantasies of mass murdering black people and Jews, took Step 1 and are just waiting for the cops to stand down and let them have a go at it" which I think is far closer to the mark.

I mean what is Tucker Carlson, AM radio, the NRA, etc. -- tons of right-wing media schtick -- what is it but riling up the hoi polloi with these sorts of fears and revanchist thoughts about uppity blacks, illegals and the left, crafting the idea for their audience that they are under extreme duress and attack from subversive forces, and expressly tying their audience's political agency to their guns, and then letting events naturally transpire from there.

For some reason we watch all THAT play out but then assume the fears are coming from us and the threats to take away the guns, which is subtle but deeply aggrandizing, makes us feel better our pleas for gun control have any effect at all. Instead we should watch all that play out and see the forest through the trees and what's really happening, the deplorable base clings to their guns because they really want to act on what they're being told to do, and they want to be prepared if not eventually take the fight to their political enemies. The basic structure is pretty transparent, and in fact effective, that the authoritarian right is absolutely ginning up violent fantasies among their audience, all but telling them guns are fundamental to the pitched ideological battle, and effectively laundering the battle to street goons and the mentally ill and the front line solider ideologue types.

I mean, again, put differently:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ome-addresses/

Like I beg us all, don't for a moment think the guns are incidental or accidental or happenstance or just tough-guy cosplay stuff, and treat them like the political tools of intimidation they're sold and marketed and amplified as, it's sort of an important truth to recognize. I mean again, if the right showed up to public political events with a noose and a burning cross, we'd all be like "ohh hot damn look at what these guys are trying to say, it's obvious!" but they instead show up armed with guns and in military fatigues and we're like oh how quaint, these dainty men think we're going to gun grab instead of the equivalently obvious political message they're communicating by waving their guns around at everyone.

I think there's something to that but you're missing an important element to the fantasy, which is that they're brave defenders of an America which is under attack. That's an important part of their self-image in this ego trip, I mention it because it limits the kind of ways they can be incited to act. Like, I don't think we're anywhere near gunning down liberals, because the sense of being literally under attack isn't there. But do I think people could be incited to, say, shoot people trying to get over the border? Oh, totally.

Edit: Same thing with people coming to take away their guns. They like this issue for two reasons: 1) it's a cathartic expression of their inner anxiety about loss of power and 2) it's an excuse to engage in their fantasies about how if these ****ers come to take their guns, they're going to fight to the last goddamn bullet! But I definitely think this "IF they do this, THEN that's a red line they shall not cross" is an important part of the fantasy, because these people are all basically pussies. For a lot of them the goalposts of when they will resort to violence will just be infinitely moved back. For some percentage of them it won't though, I definitely agree with that.

Except liberals are actually being gunned down, run over, etc.

I've talked to some of these people. Most of the just think there's going to be a race where when the welfare checks stop, and they want to be prepared. It doesn't run much deeper than that.