Engage With Reality

From thunderclapnewman at TPM:



Everybody knows that since July 1, Kentucky has open and concealed carry everywhere NO PERMIT REQUIRED, right?

Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Because Bevin Is A Stone-Cold Racist

And don't be stupid by pointing to his adopted non-white kids.  That is a classic racist move: adopt black kids to prove both that White Supremacy is best for everyone, and that you can't possibly be a racist - you have black kids!

Joe Gerth in the Courier asks "Why didn't Bevin order state flags lowered for the two black victims of the Kroger shooting."

On Thursday, Gov. Matt Bevin ordered the state’s flags to half-staff to honor the 12 people who were killed in last week’s shooting at a California bar.

He did the same thing in the days after a gunman walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing 11 worshipers.

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But the question is, why didn’t Bevin order the state’s flags to half-staff to honor the two people who were shot and killed at the Jeffersontown Kroger grocery store just a couple of days before the synagogue shooting?

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This was more troubling than even the shooting two years ago on Thanksgiving weekend at the Juice Bowl at Shawnee Park. That's because the Kroger shooter appeared to have chosen his victims purely because they were African-American.

“Whites don’t shoot whites,” the shooter allegedly told one white man he encountered during his spree.

And before he went and killed black people at the Kroger, Gregory Bush apparently tried to get into a predominately African-American church — where he would have found more potential victims — but couldn't get beyond the locked doors.

You want a racist governor? Go on, keep voting for the motherfucker.  But don't pretend that you can vote repug and claim to not be a racist.  You are.

America: The Exceptionally Immature Nation

Maybe that's why repugs are so hysterically frantic about bombing everybody everywhere forever: they are trying desperately to compensate for their infantile attachment to guns.

When the world's other frontier nation calls you a bunch of muzzle-sucking babies, it's time to grow up.

Think Progress:

In 1996, a gunman opened fire at a popular tourist destination on the Australian island of Tasmania. Using a semiautomatic rifle, he killed 35 people.

Australia responded by reforming their gun laws. High powered rifles and shotguns were banned and uniform gun licensing requirements were imposed for the guns that remained legal. The country also implemented a buyback program which resulted in the destruction of more than a million firearms.

In the last 19 years, there have been no mass shootings in Australia, defined as five or more people being shot.

The effort in Australia was not particuarly partisan. It was led by John Howard, Australia’s very conservative Prime Minister. Rather, the gun control measures were seen as a matter of basic humanity and common sense.

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After a string of gun massacres over the last 3 years that have left hundreds dead and thousands injured, the United States has had a much different response. America has done nothing.

In the wake of Oregon mass murder, Australians are disgusted and perplexed by the American response.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Michael Pascoe blasted American society as immature and unable to take basic actions to save lives:

In his very fine speech this morning, full of sorrow and frustration, President Obama made a mistake: Australia is not like the United States. We decided not to be.

We decided to grow up instead and become a more reasonable, rational society that explicitly values human life and prefers to think the best of people, rather than the worst.

The US is too immature a society to be allowed to play with guns. It has never shed its Wild West mythology. Americans still use their courts to kill people, which sends a message in its own way… It’s a country that values property more than life.

An editorial in Brisbane Times castigates America’s inaction on guns:

At Oregon last week, four guns were recovered – three pistols and a semi-automatic rifle. Did Mercer have the right to bear those arms? Yes, he did. From that question and answer flows the grim crimson tide. And from that flows, as always, the arrant nonsense from the NRA, and those of like mind, that guns are good, that guns are not the problem, that the president is politicising the issue. He should be, indeed he has been, with limited success. However, such is the web of lobbying, money, political support and sway, interconnected with the myriad legal jurisdictions, that we despair of seeing radical progress.

Yet we must condemn. America prides itself on being a light in the world for democracy and liberty. Yet within its borders it is armed to the teeth. This is a tyranny, borne on a historical anomaly, that must end. Surely, if the phrase “land of the free” stands for anything, it is the embracing of the freedom not to have to live in fear of the gun.

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The disgust is not limited to Australian shores. The New York Times struck a similar note. “Mass shootings have become an unsurprising part of American life, with lame public rituals in which politicians express grief and then retreat quickly into denial about this scourge,” the paper’s editorial board wrote Friday.