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Protests are nice to look at, but they paint free targets on everyone who participates. Conservatism/fascism has never been defeated by pacifism.
If you are motivated to resist fascism/conservatism, arm yourself and train appropriately. Take classes, join left-leaning gun clubs, survival groups and prepper classes. Exercise and learn to fight.
Conservatives have been prepping for years for a war they insist is necessary. They have decided you are their enemy. You cannot change that by protesting.
As a liberal gun owner, I agree.
I want a world without mass shootings.
But right now, the majority of mass shootings happen against the most vulnerable people. And the majority of hate crimes is happening because a bunch of fucktards are pushing violent messages. And the worst part is nobody in power really gives a shit.
When I was growing up in school there was only one mass shooting at the time and that was Columbine. Kids would drive to school with guns in their racks because they planned on hunting later. The notion to shoot people wasn't even a consideration. What we have isn't a gun issue, we have a mental health crisis like nothing we have seen before and we are far too unequipped to handle it. We need better mental health programs and ways for people to more easily use them from a young age.
The Columbine shooters did not use hunting guns. We have better access to mental health care than in the past. We also have greater access to more deadly guns. Countries with strong gun control do not have our problem with mass shootings. Implementing strong gun control has been proven to stop mass shootings. A lot of money has been spent by arms dealers to convince you the the problem is your fellow humans, and not the largely unregulated flow of machines of death supplied for capitalist profit.
Should we have better access to mental healthcare, and intervention programs? Sure. Funny, though, how the people insisting it's all about mental illness and not about the gun profiteers also usually oppose any public spending on mental healthcare as well.
we have a gun issue and a mental health issue.
There are a LOT of people in America that own, or have easy access to fire arms, that shouldnt be allowed within 2 miles of one.
This is an inadequate summation I am afraid. Most of the world right now is experiencing a mental health crisis. A lot of the countries with similar populations and cultures to the US with primarily English speaking approximations - Australia, UK, Canada and the nordic nations... All of them are experiencing massive mental health and economic issues on a systemic level. There is something unique to the United States... The guns. Not just the lack of public safety measures to control guns but the culture of entitlement to weaponry and maintaining the fantasy of utilizing them against other humans in some sort of nebulous future extralegal event when some sort of universal concensus is reached that war is declared on the US government by it's rag tag highly individualist citizenry.
Unfortunately you cannot divorce the mental health issue from the gun issue in the States but neither can you solve the issue without actually addressing that guns at that level of saturation are a nightmare that causes a unique presentation of crisis. Calling for it to be addressed strictly as a mental health issue will go no where... And it's designed to go no where because as long as we are having this debate of whether it's a gun or a mental health problem neither get addressed... And quite frankly there are simply not enough mental health professionals in the field to address that demand. The burnout rate is real amongst professionals.
There were also mass school shootings before Columbine. The Ecole' Polytechnique massacre for instance in Canada had 22 victims in 1989 and was committed with a semi automatic weapon and it spurred a massive surge in gun regulation and restrictions for automatic weapons and maximum clip size capacity. The US is unique in that it is the only country to experience these mass shootings and yet refuse any wide ranging gun control reforms at a federal level in response.
The problem also spills over borders. 85 percent of weapons found to be used to commit crimes in Canada have been traced to purchases made in the US.
It is not a mental health crisis. At all. It is a radical fascist mediasphere crisis. Centrists have constantky defended the right of radical fascists to spend all day on the airwaves edging the audience to kill for their sponsors.
I actually agree with what you are saying, but I don't believe it's so black and white. I also believe the media realized the profits in outrage and terror so that's why we are constantly hammered with it.. which is likely a contributing factor in mental health issues of the country/world.
Columbine was one of the biggest ones ever at the time and a media field day, but definitely not the only school shootings around that time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)
Apartheid in South Africa was solved politically. The Troubles in Northern Ireland were solved politically. The Berlin wall collapsed and the Cold War ended without violence.
Nelson Mandela was accused of being a terrorist because he was one. The ANC mostly killed civilians, "civilians" that just so happened to be key figures in apartheid politics (well, that was their goal, anyways, and it worked well enough)
Also, just how myopic do you have to be to point to the collapse as the Soviet Union as being "solved politically" while ignoring several decades of proxy wars and an attempted coup?
Shit, it didn't even resolve that well other than independence for the satellite states, it just left Putin in charge in the end to get a million people killed himself.
Yeah and Northern Ireland involved lots of actual terrorism as well. I didn't claim these were good people. I didn't claim the results were a perfect world.
The point is the violence, or the threat of violence, is what forced people to negotiate in the first place.
War is diplomacy when all other means have failed. The same is true for revolution and resistance id say.
Violence isn't the only resort. It's the last one. And often unnecessary. Though not always.
"War is the continuation of policy with other means."
-Carl von Clausewitz
Each side has labeled the other as the enemy, it isn't just conservatives. It's just a way for the people in power to make the citizens waste their energy on each other rather than focus on the real enemy. Both the right and the left are just tools to sperate everyone. If the citizens are fighting each other then who's going to fight the corruption in our government?
BoTh SiDeS
More enlightened centrism bullshit. Then difference is that one side wants people dead for who they were born as.
And the reality is that there really aren't these nicely defined "sides" for the majority of people.. but there is definitely large groups of people who chose their "team"
I’m trans. I was happy to view those on the right as “just people who I disagree with”…until they started pushing to eliminate people like me.
Start with the talk show hosts who promote this shit
Voting is a better means of enacting change than protesting. If ethnonationalists control government and you try to actively resist then you get crushed. If liberal-progressives control government and they resist then they get crushed. Defend yourself to the fullest extent if the law but voting is more important than protesting. If the excrement hits the rotating assembly of air moving blades then you want those sympathetic to your ideals at the wheel not those hostile to your ideals. The three most important things in real estate is location, location, location and the three most important things in representative government is vote, vote, vote.
Voting has not worked. At all.
You can make the argument that it maybe hasn't worked enough but it's just intellectually dishonest to say it hasn't worked at all. If it didn't work at all then we would have made zero progress - EVER. Yesterday this article was published about how a school board was flipped after Republicans started banning books. The only reason voting doesn't work is because not enough people are doing it.
It has worked great for the fascists. Maybe more non-fascists should try it.
Can we name the resistance Rainbow Riot?
Pride boys?
I like that one, too. Maybe East Coast and West Coast factions?
The Allies
I'm not clear on what situation I'm supposed to anticipate in which shooting people is the preferred resolution.
I hear they call it the "boogaloo."
[Sarcasm] Don't worry, though, there are plenty of minorities to sacrifice to appease them. [Very sarcasm with extra pointyness] If you just throw us all into a meat grinder for their amusement they'll surely never do anything bad!
Downvoted by 22 doormats so far