I’m with dvaut on this one. If you think the fantasies at the gun range stop with home invading “thugs”, MS-13 gangs rushing the fence and door busting antifa, and don’t extend to kneeling football players, shrill politicians, and pink hat wearing libs triggered about gender assumption you are trippin.

Go read the comments from when BLM was blocking traffic ffs.

Re dvaut1's point.

On the one hand I think it's a tiny minority who actually think they would do anything along those lines, but on the other hand I think 5 years before any giant genocidal rampage few people imagined that they would take part in or support such a thing. We're part way through a recipe for some kind of disaster, but from inside it's impossible to tell how far along, exactly what is being made, or if it's too late to stop.

A unsung catalyst in these scenarios are the people who will support it without participating. Also, those who oppose it but won’t do anything about it out of fear of losing comfort or safety. Sadly, that includes many more of us than we like to admit and THAT is more in line with the trope of defending America that Chris mentioned.

Relevant:

Some of this is probably just harmless chuffing, but I think it’s pretty naive to assume there aren’t a whole lot of MAGA chuds just waiting for a pretext to open fire on some brown people.

This. Like the crisis actor people, where the unbelievable part is not so much a Western government targeting its own civilians for political ends as them bothering to fake it.

John Dingell is not ****ing around:

I Served in Congress Longer Than Anyone. Here’s How to Fix It.
Abolish the Senate and publicly fund elections.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.the...rticle/577222/

What am I missing about liberals publicly advocating for court packing while the president and Senate are controlled by the GOP?

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-...203-story.html

Looked up epstein's island on google maps. place looks pretty sweet. I only wonder what he's got on bill clinton and trump

JFC is that true? It's like $250 every other year in NY and that seems absurd already to me.

Inevitable once they used this philosophy to hamstring unions.

Of course at least in FL's case, the state supreme court ruled long ago that in order to practice law in FL you must be a member of the florida bar, so I'm not sure how that works. They can still force you to be a member but can't force you to pay maybe?

So is the entire concept of licensing professionals in jeopardy?

i just got my letter for my state. its like $135. i also have a county bar that requires dues, but they provide some CLE's for free so it becomes worth it.

yeah. the whole cause of action is about some ND lawyer not wanting the bar association to support some state question he didnt like.

It's $430/yr in CA with no section memberships (e.g., IP law), which are like $100 each, so I pay like $630/yr. The CA bar recently reorganized in some funky ways (made sections "unofficial", and the official bar assn has been reorganized around things like investigations). This may have been partly in response to this issue bubbling up.

If you aren't a member in good standing, you cannot legally practice law. If you don't pay your dues you are placed on the "inactive" list.

I find that practice so weird. In NY you are licensed to practice law by the court system. That makes a lot more sense to me.

I'm not arguing mass genocide will happen tomorrow or is even inevitable. It's not. My point was more that deplorables and their pretentious, theatrical flaunting of their guns and the way they've brought gun fetishization into the right-wing mindspace and make it nakedly ideological is both to intimidate their opponents and is a precursor to their potential use. I think ChrisV speaks to the more dominant explanation in our political culture (e.g., they're naive saps, duped by the NRA and they're genuinely afraid of having their guns confiscated, or it's just macho cosplay). I'm not dismissing that; there's surely some merit to the idea these people are just trying to enhance their masculine credibility or might really be afraid gun control will limit their access to guns.

But I think my explanation is actually both more obvious (they wave guns and talk about how much they cherish them as political instruments to make their opponents think they will shoot them, with the hopes their opponents will meekly submit) and actually maps closer to how deplorables talk internally among themselves and externally to us. Liberals and the left dislike that explanation because of the implications and so I think we've workshopped into more abstract psychological explanations (e.g., anxious masculinity) that are actually unnecessary and a form of comforting bull****.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Think about the underlying assumptions there: the only thing separating themselves from a violent race war where they would be under assault are welfare checks. Then consider what the very same people say about the state of the federal budget and who they vote for and what their political priorities are.

Of course it doesn't run deeper than that, but consider the totality of "hey we're just over here predicting the imminent collapse of the welfare state and/or the dollar, in fact we're voting straight ticket for the party that's dismantling the welfare state, and we predict that in the absence of the welfare state there will be a violent retributive race war, and we are arming ourselves for that day." The only fair reading is that the way they "just think" about preparing themselves for the day when the welfare checks stop while voting again and again to stop welfare checks is that arming themselves is actually a core part of their political project.

This isn't even controversial, at all, it's exactly what they say, I'm merely suggesting we take them both seriously and literally and stop assuming they are compensating for their small dicks even if they have small dicks and they think a big gun collection can compensate for it, and/or that they are hapless victims of NRA propaganda and genuinely fearful of gun grabbers in Washington, even if they are afraid of that.

I take them seriously. I just can't see most of them actually mobilizing and putting their lives on the line to fight the govt. Nor do I think that enters their minds much.

What does enter their minds is defending their homesteads against the unwashed hoardes - Night of the Living Dead style.

Could they be mobilized here or there to intimidate or carry out violence against unarmed civilians? Yes. That is my biggest fear and maybe what you're getting at I dunno. But if there are actual bullets flying, I predict 98% of them want nothing to do with it.

Uh, a whole bunch of them mobilized and headed to the border to shoot the caravaners, were it not for the military and border patrol guys I’m sure some of them would take potshots at kids.

But the real threat at this stage is probably not organized groups mobilizing so much as the routine terror attacks committed by lone-wolf MAGA chuds like the kind that we’ve been seeing.

Edit: appears NSFW even though not what it looks like.

I've had more than a couple people give, "Well what if I get a change to use it and I don't have it?" as a reason for why they want guns, then they'll outline some incredibly detailed fantasy about someone trying to break into their home or car or mess with them in public and how great it would be to get to shoot someone. It's weirder than most people think.

As a gun owner with neighbors in close proximity , mine are not ever loaded (I live in the Midwest so hunt ldo) and I have a knife by my bed.

I actually had some other redneck neighbors in my building shoot through the floor of their place into my other neighbor's apartment "showing their friend their AR-15". **** wasted drunk obviously. The bullet ended up embedded where my neighbor's dog usually sleeps. Dip****s.