With officials in South Carolina now forced to remove the Stars & Bars from their statehouse grounds (Charlie Baker notwithstanding) and Mississippi thinking of doing the same in the wake of the mass murder in Charleston, maybe, just maybe, it’s time to rethink our absurdly lax gun laws. If you need any proof of how out of step we are here in the U.S. with respect to gun laws, take a few minutes to look at this YouTube video. Comedian Jim Jefferies, an Australian, gives Bostonians his view on what Sarah Palin would no doubt call “American exceptionalism.” Note: the language is NSFW.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL8JEEt2RxI
Please share widely!
It is the Confederate (Southern) Cross rather than the Stars and Bars that controversially flies at the SC Capitol. I’ve actually wondered whether reaction to the latter would be less visceral, especially since it closely resembles the Union flag (which incidently was a key motive for changing the design since it was hard to tell the difference from across the battlefield through the smoke of gunfire).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/06/23/every-state-flag-is-wrong-and-here-is-why/
Because their state flag has the Confederate flag imbedded in it.
So maybe it’ll come down too.
what common sense gun control advocates have been arguing for the past 15 years. Absolutely brilliant. It should be required viewing for every member of Congress.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
where he says that the second amendment was written so that citizens could overthrow the US government. That Rambo fantasy is deep in many gun nuts.
This is one of those provisions that shows how fresh Rev. War memories were. The impetus in this case was the British trying to seize munition stores such as in Concord, the prevention of which was a key reason for the famous Midnight Ride.
Would be president if the 2nd Amendment meant what the gun nuts think it means.
The new Constitution to replace the Articles was motivated at least in part by this very event.
Where do they stand?
behind Wayne LaPierre.
I am strongly in favor of gun control, but it is just one of the many pieces of the puzzle we aren’t even allowed to put on the board until money is taken out of politics for good. It all circles back to that, and having a real educational campaign on that issue putting it front and center is my main reason for backing Sanders, even if his voting records on guns is eccentric and less than stellar. But I bet the NRA fears a real populist like Sanders since he won’t be bought.
Whenever you see someone on TV talking about banning guns, it’ always a 1%er.
And is part of a politics where special interest groups funded by millionaires have more influence than broad based mass movements of people. I would much rather see labor, a modern poor people’s campaign, or advocates for social services get the same treatment and access to policymakers and politicians that Tom Steyer gets on the left and so many others get on the right. We are drowning in money, and a reasonable gun control policy, one favored by the majority of the electorate, will never get a fair hearing until the NRA and all lobbyists are thrown out of our temple of democracy.
because they have the disposable income to fund things.
The electorate owns guns. The 99% owns guns. The NRA isn’t worried that populism will lead to guns being banned when 1/3-1/2 of Americans have a gun in their homes.
I don’t see the Australian solution flying here. It’s going to be in the middle. But as I’ve said, people are very concerned about the slippery slope that you can go down on that path, and extremism is the buffer to it. For good or ill.
I get what you are saying. I think grassroots support for gun ownership is obviously a right populist issue in rural parts of the country, and I think Bernie has explained his own center-right stance in the past as part of that. Basically, Vermonters want to be left alone and the state has never had the issues other places had.
The Australia solution is an interesting one since it was met with similar political resistance and has a similar gun culture due to it’s own frontier past and rural character. More so than the UK, where gun ownership was always the purview of the upper classes and never ensured as a right by law. Getting Australian sportsmen or farmers to comment on how the regulations affected them might be a wise tactic, anecdotes speak louder than data for most voters.