Most people who aren’t conservative psychopaths actually like their families and want to help them when they can.

You inherently claimed to be a victim by claiming that people were attacking you. You’ve done an embarrassingly bad job of damage control today.

“Said” is past tense. Yesterday, when you were pretending to be an authority on historic rocks, you said it wouldn’t wash off. I didn’t see that thread and immediately understood what they meant.

They weren’t being even slightly dishonest, but it’s clear you are. Would you have admitted you were wrong if you weren’t called out by name? My gut feeling is “not a chance”.

What progressives? There’s about 3 of them in politics. They don’t have the power to stand in the way of anything because they’re hopelessly outnumbered by “neoliberalism but you can have crumbs and social things”.

People like you need to wake up. You’re not going to get “slow progress” out of the lesser of two evils, you’re going to get a negligbly slower slide into fascism. There is no protecting your comfortable bubble at this point.

Who do you think I am?

Charismatic, intelligent people don’t need fascism nearly as much as dumbfucks do but even for the few who get sucked in anyway, there’s easier and more self-serving ways to express it than a grueling, always-on position in the Republican party.

But ultimately the answer to both “why don’t they run someone actually good” questions is “because it would be a threat to neoliberals and their record profits”.

They accomplished the majority of it by simply showing up. They didn’t need their guns or elaborate criminal conspiracies, they just applied for positions of power (however minor) and used that power to push their agenda and support their dogshit friends doing the same.

Meanwhile, progressivism on the internet has been taken over nihilistic neckbeards that just sit back and watch it all happen, making worthless promises about how if it gets too bad, their for-profit firearms will bail them out.

We used to get arrested.

Bad news sells

So do lies and propaganda. That’s why pro-gun groups rely on imaginary threats, bullshit statistics and unverifiable anecdotes to justify a multi-billion dollar industry.

Drop the bullshit. You’re using short people and lone women as human shields for your hobby.

Are we really supposed to believe your dogshit gun laws are an act of feminism? You’ve put 100% of American women in more danger by arming criminals, rapists and domestic abusers and you want to claim it’s all worth it because the less than 20% of women who want to carry guns are possibly safer.

Which of course they’re not anyway. The moment they know a man is a “brandish your gun” level threat is when that man grabs them or pulls a weapon on them.

And you know what happens next don’t you Mr Action Hero? If the man is already in grappling distance, she gets disarmed and then probably killed with her own weapon. If the man has already pulled his gun, she gets shot before she can aim and fire her gun.

The best thing women can do to keep themselves safe is to avoid men who are walking red flags, like gun-owners that throw women under the bus for their own self-interest and awkwardly brag about martial arts training and being immune to stun guns.

While “find the worst photo of them for the article” is definitely a thing that happens, are you sure it’s happening here? He just looks like a normal person in a normal pose. It’s what people look like without makeup and studio lighting.

The right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental civil right in the US

The pro-gun community has wasted the last 20 years demonstrating that they’re unwilling or incapable of addressing gun violence and they use the second amendment to prevent others from addressing it.

Eventually, the people you’ve sold out will have no other choice but to repeal it. Pro-gun groups will throw an almighty tantrum but so what? They have no room left to escalate because we already have to listen to them endlessly bleat about guns, we already have to constantly fight them politically and we already live under the threat of being murdered by a far-right extremist with a gun.

access to the means of self-protection is a human right

Sure, if you can prove you’re not what we need protection from because you’ve been sold a gun. Nobody is opposing legitimate self-defense – that’s why they’re not banning door locks, burglar alarms and MMA classes.

But just because a weapon could be used in self-defense, doesn’t mean it should be sold in corner stores to anyone who wants one. Landmines could be used in self-defense but we all know they’d be used 1000 times for terrorism, arming cartels and killing the family members of reactionary idiots for every 1 “noble” use.

I think that correcting the underlying issues that lead to gang activity would have more benefits overall than trying to ban a constitutional right

Let’s take you at your extremely dishonest word and say that gun violence is 95% social problems and 5% access to firearms.

Well the overwhelming majority of the actual people you’ve grouped as “enemies” support both gun-control and social policies designed to combat inequality, which addresses 100% of the problem. It’s literally the progressive platform.

For you to actual have an argument, they would need to support gun-control but oppose progressive social policies – and those people simply don’t exist in significant numbers outside your imagination.

But what about your “allies”? Well the majority of them support neither gun-control nor progressive social policies, for a grand total of 0% of the problem fixed. This tracks with the last 20+ years of them not solving any of these problems. It’s literally the Republican platform.

However you’re happy to be dishonest so you pretend they all belong to a group that only opposes gun-control while still supporting social reforms. Sure, people like that do exist, but not only are they a clear minority of the pro-gun community, they’re still only fixing 95% of the problem

While gang activity exists in all countries, countries with fewer social problems and lower economic inequality have far less of a problem with gang activity.

All of them also have restrictive gun laws, making them far more closely aligned with gun-control advocates than pro-gun groups. They didn’t have to endlessly argue over exactly how much gun access, culture, poverty, mental health services and the media contributed to violence.

They just did it all and by your own admission, it worked.

You take your magic wand and make all guns disappear, people who want to harm others will turn to knives.

Which would instantly be a massive improvement. Americas crime rates are functionally identical to other wealthy countries, only with a massively inflated homicide rate thanks to sick, stupid and desperate people being able to buy all the guns they want.

When people try to raise money for cancer research, do you spit in their face and tell them “you’ll never cure all cancer and even if you do people will still have heart attacks and if you cure those too they’ll just die in car crashes”?

You don’t think it will ever be your life it saves, so you don’t give a shit.

Doctors treat symptoms while they treat the problem, they don’t just offer you thoughts and prayers. Even if the problem isn’t treatable, they still do everything in their power to control your symptoms.

Imagine you turned up to a doctor with every bone in your hand broken, only to have them claim “Sorry, we refuse to give you painkillers because the pain is just a symptom. If someone just spends 12 months reconstructing your hand, the symptoms should be mostly gone. I won’t do it (and I’ll staunchly oppose anyone that tries), but that’s the real solution”.

They wouldn’t just be considered a dogshit doctor, they’d be considered a genuinely evil person.

So stop with the apologist bullshit. No gun control advocates are stopping you from building your violence-free utopia that you insist will solve everything. The society we have today is fucked up and you need to stop selling them guns.

They wouldn’t wear a paper mask to save their own family. They’re not going to drop 100 pounds and die for their asshole king.

Would we even notice if they followed through? From the people who brought you domestic terrorism its… more domestic terrorism.

You can’t really expect logical consistency from any large group of people. It will always be trivial to find 2 people with conflicting views, so trying to paint the group as hypocritical is worthless.

But Republicans are indeed worthless shitcunts, so it’s never hard to find an individual being hypocritical. Unfortunately, the accusation means nothing to them. They don’t care if they’re hypocritical, immoral or bigoted, they only care about getting what they want – and there’s nothing they won’t say to get it.

Nobody in this thread has forbidden anyone from doing anything. If you want a soapbox for your irrelevant opinions, start a blog.

If you don’t want segregation, vote Republican but if you do want segregation, also vote Republican.

I don’t know much about the gambling industry

You can stop there. You don’t know much about the gambling industry, defending them was just an opportunity to tell us your opinions on “some people”, none of whom are actually here.

Sounds more like you just don’t know anything about the gambling industry. They run rigged games in predatory ways. They happily let organised crime launder money for a cut. They fight regulations designed to reduce problem gambling.

Nevertheless, nobody here is “forcing their way of life on others and taking away their agency over their own lives”. They’re just acknowledging that casinos have a long history of being absolute cunts.

Two neoliberal parties, each allowed to accept massive donations from lobby groups, without ranked choice voting to punish them. While they’ve built managed democracies the world over, nowhere gives them wet dreams like America.