Posted on 11/12/2018 2:50:53 PM PST by Ennis85
When I was in a liquor store not far from Thousand Oaks, California, a few months back, a guy came up to the counter with his shirt half over his head and what I perceived as a gun protruding underneath it. I'm slightly (insanely) paranoid, so I ran out with my daughter in her pram, leaving my purchases on the counter, and legged it across the street. My daughter was wondering why we didn't get her apple juice, and I was vexed I didn't have my Mexican beers after my ordeal.
You can't but be jumpy. There are up to a billion guns in the US, 400 to 500 million are owned by civilians. Most of them for 'personal protection from the enemy' who also has a gun. No matter how many mass shootings there are, around 310 so far this year, 13,000 homicides and 22,000 suicides by guns, there's a cognitive dissonance among Americans. I know many Americans are virulently against guns, so this isn't about them.
But others can't see that guns have anything to do with it, even though more people have died from guns in the US than on the battlefields of all wars.
In this era of fake news, migrant caravans and fear, there is a cartoonish idea of the enemy.
"Yeah, when they come, we're loaded up, they're not getting into my house. F***, no," I've heard people say to me, shaking their head. I'm like, "Who? We're at a hippie festival. What enemy?"
"We're not the problem. Legal guns aren't the problem. Its illegal guns." Only 250 gun deaths last year were by shooting the bad guy, because often when the enemy comes you're in a bar and you won't have access to your arsenal.
At least two-thirds of Americans have lived or live in a house with guns, and half of all white men own a gun; one third own up to five guns. "Yeah, but I'm not some lunatic who's going to start shooting people." Of course most Americans don't shoot people. They don't have the monopoly on loons, but loons have access to guns.
Ian David Long used a legally owned .45 calibre Glock semi-automatic handgun to kill people in the Borderline Bar, Thousand Oaks. In Facebook posts before the rampage, he wrote: "Yeah... I'm insane, but the only thing you people do after these shootings is 'hopes and prayers'...or 'keep you in my thoughts'."
Unfortunately, he knows the process.
"If people could legally carry a concealed firearm, it wouldn't have happened, someone would have shot him," my friend argued. So California's tighter gun laws were the problem? "In Arizona, you can carry a deadly weapon without a permit within the state." Great.
Two guns are better than none. It's about pride and freedom. Gun advocates insist "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," as per the Constitution of 1778.
When I was in college, American friends said they were buying a gun. Why? "What about buying a keg and a few bottles like a normal 21-year-old?" I love America. Americans are the friendliest people, they're open and non-judgemental - yet many have their flag outside their house and a gun inside.
The company that owns the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas where Stephen Paddock killed 58 people has taken legal action against the victims, stating it's not the hotel group's fault.
It's not, but the Mandalay Bay is a trigger-happy hotel, popular among NRA members, host to the annual Safari Club International convention, where 20,000 people gather to buy hunts, which kill precious animals around the world.
I made a point of boycotting it when I was there, getting a shiver as I passed by, and this was before Paddock's killing spree.
More Americans love guns than Americans who don't. "So what if you just get rid of guns altogether? And no one had a gun?" I asked innocently as we sat by a Californian campfire. "That's never going to happen," they said.
Sadly, they're right. You'll never take the guns out of America.
Sheep like Barbara scare me, may her chains sit lightly
on her bowed neck.
I don’t know why she would be frightened, I’m sure it wasn’t an old, white conservative at the counter.
I noticed that she had to get in her mandatory dig at white men.
Lady, California is the USA’s insane asylum.
Ignorant ditz can’t understand why hundreds of millions died after giving up their guns to governments they trusted or to governments that intimidated them into giving them up. That’s not a concern to her. But a wacko killing a handful of people is.
“so I ran out with my daughter in her pram, leaving my purchases on the counter, and legged it across the street. My daughter was wondering why we didn’t get her apple juice, and I was vexed I didn’t have my Mexican beers after my ordeal.”
So your daughter can drink apple juice while you get wasted? What a mommy you are.
When you say: “I love America-but....” You DON’T.
End of discussion.
Don’t feel safe?
Stay home in London.
Watch out for those long knives.
Exactly.
“I’m slightly (insanely) paranoid, so I ran out....”
Slightly? And of course you are certain that they guy had a “GUN” under his shirt and not his cell phone? Yes, if you didn’t actually SEE a gun, you ARE paranoid, more than slightly.
America’s attitude against totalitarian government is refreshing, not to mention rare. The 2nd Amendment protects the entire “free world” from totalitarian government.
Really? I keep having these canoeing accidents.
Mick
“And this person is who?”
________________________________
An emotional, clueless moonbat “woman.”
Without firearms, they left would exterminate us. I wouldn’t give the bastards the chance.
“But a million unborn American babies a year chopped up alive in the womb and flushed down the sewer bothers her not at all.”
Don’t worry, our dear friends South of the border are so concerned about us they’re sending us millions of babies.
Sorry Babs. It’s America’s attitude towards guns that causes me to love her. No asshole will ever be able to take away my freedom as long as I’m armed.
310 mass shootings as of 11/12(approx.)/2018? (I assume this was written a day or 2 B4 publication.) That sounds like a very inflated statistic -- how is it defined?
How many of those 310 were nutcases who we previously knew were nutcases? How many were drug related gang shootings involving "mass" casualties?
How many of the 13k homicides were by criminals who should have been in jail?
22k homicides IS a lot, and points to problems far deeper than the guns themselves...
“At least two-thirds of Americans have lived or live in a house with guns, and half of all white men own a gun..”
Fear the white man, Barbara McCarthy, fear the white man. The fearsome white man is not about to turn over America to a bunch of snowflakes. Spread the word, baby.
DAMN RIGHT so fek off and "get off my lawn" bint!
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