He's fucked.

Fuck this guy. He's basically David Duke with a better cover.

Jesus Christ.

Tell me why pleas for cross-aisle understanding didn't happen when it was Gabi Giffords who was shot.

What does that have to do with anything?

What are you even referring to?

After a political spree shooting refraining from "well, it's a good start" is a long way from a plea of cross isle understanding. I think that's bottom of the barrel decency.

I'm sure people celebrated Giffords attempted murder. What kind of people would wager they are?

Maybe Democrats really are entitled and full of shit. We lose power after an election and our discourse starts sounding like it's from a back woods militia.

Mark my words - there will be a somewhat publicized book burning event in the next 2 years - possibly on a campus. I promise.

If you're willing to publicly state that you have no respect, regard or goodwill for the most vulnerable members of our society, in fact, you're willing to legislate punitively and treat them as a blight, then the least you can do is be perfectly content to take a bullet for your unpopular opinions. Welcome your martyrdom, summon it to you.

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Oh, you mean Snapped Hat?

Get with the program, 15th!

Do you mean me? I can see why you'd be worried; I really do hate baseball.

I always though of JHM as a character with the sense to invest in a better caliber than 7.62×39mm, at least stick an oil filter on as silencer, and fire from the back door of an unidentifiable white rental van.

I feel like the reality would be disappointing.

Rand Paul ( a witness to the event apparently ) previously offered up this quote w/ respect to the second amendment.

"Why do we have a Second Amendment? It's not to shoot deer. It's to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!"

I think Steve Scalise is arguing the same point here, he's pretty clear it's not about sport hunting.

I'm struggling to understand why high level government officials would argue such a thing.

They assumed all the gun nuts were on their side.

Meanwhile in other nations such as Switzerland everyone and their grandma owns a gun and they somehow magically don't have the gun violence problem we do.

Guns aren't the problem, and making it to where only the rich and powerful can obtain them isn't the solution.

Switzerland requires a permit to own a gun. No criminal record or history of mental illness.

also, despite what your local NRA propagandist preaches, the Swiss do have problems with gun violence, even if it isn't on the same scale as America.

Switzerland is governable, America is not.

It'd be nice too if the media didn't report on violence like a tweaker's fever dream. Can't do much about that legislatively though.

But, yeah, I share pretty much the same opinion.

I'm surprised that guns, like other things aren't kind of tiered. Like extremely short ranged home defense weapons and 2-3 shot hunting rifles are relatively easier to get, while high powered stuff and handguns would require permitting and stricter background investigations. People could still get whatever they want, essentially. Just a few more speedbumps that may slow down the occasional nutcase or someone in a fit rage.


I have a buddy in Texas that mentioned you have to get a permit for fully automatic assault rifles, so once again Texas is on the forefront.

"but the real tragedy is that the shooter was nominally linked to progressive activism"

He wasn't "nominally linked" to progressive activism; he was a confirmed volunteer for Bernie's campaign. That is more than "nominal". (Jeremy Christian was an avid Bernie supporter too. From his Facebook page: "Bernie Sanders was the President I wanted. He voiced my heart and mind. The one who spoke about the way America should gone. Away from the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes.")

It's unfortunate, but both guys were unquestionably on Team Bernie.

I think the lesson is, maybe we do better NOT trying to appeal to traditional Republican voters. Bernie promised to be able to win Republicans over to his side with his economic arguments, and I think the question we all missed was, what happens if he succeeds? It sure looks like he succeeded with these two guys.

Maybe we do better trying to increase voter turnout on the Left, rather than compromising on principles to win back the sort of people we drove away with the Civil Rights Act and the mildest restrictions on gun ownership.

Bort you're not going to learn many insights about campaigning for office looking inside the mind of a mass shooter.

Here was a Facebook post by a diehard Bernie fan I know, the day before the shooting:

"I found this a very concise perspective on the divide between many of us "progressives". And why I don't believe my liberal friends actually want change - but rather status quo.
"Liberals believe that the economic and political system is a machine that has broken down and needs fixing. Leftists believe that the machine is not “broken.” Rather, it is working perfectly well; the problem is that it is a death machine designed to chew up human lives. You don’t fix the death machine, you smash it to bits."


In response to "Don't you think there's a more reasonable way to fix the system we have?"

" Things are always shit. That's the problem with the status quo. These small social issues that get pushed forward into law, meanwhile things like Occupy happened under Obama, rioting over police violence happened under Obama because systematic oppression never dies under capitalism...having a Democrat in office does not magically change anything. Then, also under Obama we saw the stripping of our privacy rights and the broadening of executive branch powers so that we may have someone like Trump taking advantage of his swollen powers..."

Anyone with any sense knows that the Sanders personality cult, like any other personality cult, has a lot of fringe characters in it.

I'm not talking about a bunch of fanboys who latched themselves onto a politician who has some good ideas and some less good ideas, I'm talking about progressive activism You know, that thing that goes back to the late 19th century?

That thing the Bernie Sanders fandom is nominally associated with?


The fact that you immediately equate "progressive activism" with "hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters" perfectly demonstrates my point.

Also, this entire passage is pretty much 100% correct:

"Occupy happened under Obama, rioting over police violence happened under Obama because systematic oppression never dies under capitalism...having a Democrat in office does not magically change anything. Then, also under Obama we saw the stripping of our privacy rights and the broadening of executive branch powers so that we may have someone like Trump taking advantage of his swollen powers...""

"Anyone with any sense knows that the Sanders personality cult, like any other personality cult, has a lot of fringe characters in it."

I'm glad you correctly identify it as a cult.

Beyond that is the problem that it's not a cult that respects democracy or allows for the possibility of losing fair and square. Sanders' droogs were famous for harassing people online for committing the sin of not being supporters. Sanders basically worked to justify the death threats after Nevada. Sanders never made any real effort to rein any of them in. I say the fact that Sanders attracted violent nut jobs, and Hillary didn't, has everything to do with his stirring up anger and hatred while doing nothing to keep his idiots under control.

Without fail, every single Sanders supporter I know who spouts that both parties are the same and voting can't change anything, does not vote.

Calling for violent revolution without even exhausting such a basic recourse is so retarded it's not even worth addressing, let alone attempting to appeal to.

That Obama paragraph perfectly exemplifies the cult of Bernie. They complain about the expanding of executive power while at the same time expecting the president to be an emperor who rules by decree. Everything not become perfect while Obama was in office? It must be because he didn't will it so!

The Bern victims with enough brain cells to realize that the legislative branch matters? We get BrandNewCongress.

That's not even getting into the LOL factor of people too apathetic to spend 20 minutes voting every 2 years thinking that they can somehow organize and carry out a revolution.

With all due respect to the Bernie bashers: can any of you gentlemen find me a clip of Bernie, or any other Democrat, vigorously arguing for the assassination of government officials? Because I have already found this clip, and the Paul link in about five minutes of searching. It's hardly a fringe belief at this point, it's a mainstream conservative view. Steve Scalise and his associates are terrified that if they publicly buck this view they will lose their jobs in a primary loss.

I feel very strongly that the Democrats need to address the Elephant in the room at this point. There needs to be an open discussion about whether political assassinations are constitutionally protected actions, as the Republicans forcefully argue, or whether they are abhorrent to democracy, as Bernie Sanders just posited. Until we have this discussion, this problem will only worsen.

"With all due respect to the Bernie bashers: can any of you gentlemen find me a clip of Bernie, or any other Democrat, vigorously arguing for the assassination of government officials?"

No, you won't find Bernie actively saying to assassinate anyone. However, do you want to read a document where Bernie buries one sentence of very tepid disapproval over his Threaters in a screed where he passionately defends them?

https://berniesanders.com/press-release/statement-nevada/

"Our campaign of course believes in non-violent change and it goes without saying that I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals. But,"

Oooh, it's absolutely spine-tingling how he denounces the death threats his people committed en masse, just before launching into a "but" and an extended explanation of why their anger was justified. I'll teal deer Bernie's point for you: "while I of course have to formally say that death threats are wrong, y'all had it coming".

Wonkette has fun with it:

https://wonkette.com/601971/nice-grandpa-bernie-sanders-gonna- burn-your-sht-dowwwwwn

Let's face it, hatred is no longer a bug of Bernie's support base, it's a feature. The recent People's Summit even held a Two Minutes Hate against Hillary, with Sanders in attendance. I don't know that it was literally two minutes but then again the year isn't literally 1984 either; and the point is that Sanders does nothing to try to tone that shit down.

i saw the video and thought "bort is probably gonna write an essay about how bernie sanders was responsible for this because the 2016 election permanently fried his brain"", and i was not disappointed

Bernie is not responsible for these guys being murderers.

Bernie IS responsible for making them feel welcome on his team.

Absolutely. A rational, well researched and implemented system of gun control should be so obvious it's hard to imagine how anyone couldn't understand it. Gun control should be aimed at minimizing harm to individuals and communities, and giving victims of gun violence the legal tools they need to be appropriately compensated.

NRA "we need free access to guns all the time to protect our industry profits sovereign rights from the clutches of Cobra Commander hoo bloo bloo" is just he lowest form of cynicism at best and completely delusional at worst.

"We need to ban all civilian ownership of guns everywhere under all circumstances because every gun is a mass shooting just waiting to happen and my son literally got cancer because he played with a kid whose brother owns an air rifle a hoo bloo bloo" accomplishes nothing but keeping non-owners ignorant, frightened and less likely to know how to safely engage with a situation in which they might, say, find an unregistered machine gun abandoned in their basement (like they found at my last apartment a few months before I moved in) and pushing the responsible majority of gun owners toward the NRA brand idiocy, which leads to fewer regulations, fewer people complying with the existing regulations, and ultimately more guns reaching the black market and getting into the hands of people who are actually likely to hurt someone with them.

Basically, liberals treat gun ownership the way conservatives treat drug abuse and in both cases the end result is greater social harm, and we need a major legislative overhaul toward harm reduction in both cases.

That said, if forced to choose the lesser of two evils I'd easily choose the one that overregulates guns rather than the one that underregulates.

But then I live in a city where the only time you see a gun is when someone pulls one out of their wheel well to shoot back during a driveby (and even that's not very often, in a decade here I've been around for only two or three gunfights, depending on how strict you are with the definition of "fight" - one was just a couple of shots fired, no real engagement). If I lived someplace where guns were comparable to fishing poles I'd probably think differently (my personal distaste for sport hunting notwithstanding).

I asked myself the same question. The Onion ran a pretty great headline:
'Virginia Shooting Somehow Proves What Every Single American Has Been Saying All Along'