Republican asserts belief in unseen beings with magical powers, that can smite humanity on a whim...
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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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I knew I’d heard that name before:
On March 28, 2023, Burchett responded to the Covenant School shooting, where three 9-year-old students and three staff members were killed in Nashville, by telling reporters: "It's a horrible, horrible situation, and we're not going to fix it. Criminals are gonna be criminals. And my daddy fought in the second world war, fought in the Pacific, fought the Japanese, and he told me, he said, 'Buddy,' he said, 'if somebody wants to take you out, and doesn't mind losing their life, there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do about it.'" Burchett also said he sees no "real role" for Congress in reducing gun violence, other than to "mess things up".
I mean, he's kinda right though. If someone is set on committing a crime, they're going to do it. Whether they get the weapon legally or not, they're still going to commit that crime. The only way to truly stop crime is to stop people from having free will, which is impossible.
That's not to say there should be zero protections. But take gun control in the US for example, there already are gun control laws, California being the strictest. And there are still crimes committed with firearms every single day. Even if you somehow (by actual magic because it would be actually impossible) banned sales of guns and confiscated every firearm the ATF knew existed, there are still so many firearms already in the black market, or smuggled across borders, or even 3D printed, that the criminal will still have access to firearms, conceivably forever.
I mean, look at fireworks. Most cities in California have banned fireworks, but every 4th of July the night sky lights up like a rave party. Or hacking groups that constantly cyberattack literally anything they can, just because they can. If people want to do something, it doesn't really matter how much red tape you throw at them, theyre still going to do that thing.
the problem with your argument is that it's a relatively short road trip into states that don't have strict gunlaws, where criminal organizations are buying cash at gunshows (and without background checks. "legally".) and smuggling them into california relatively easily.
In fact, i would suggest your making an excellent argument that GUN CONTROL LAWS WORK!
Also speaking as someone whose been into 3d printing for ages, I can go to homedepot or lowes or whatever other hardware store, drop around $30-50 dollars on plumbing and hardware and make something that's fully automatic... . The fact that people are not doing- and haven't been doing so- suggests either that it is easier to just buy it.
WHICH IS ANOTHER ARGUMENT THAT SHOWS GUN CONTROL LAWS WORK.
I mean think about it. It's easier and less risky for them to do a day trip into arizona or texas, or wherever, and buy it, than it is to anonymously buy a printer and sell them. (or they're just too dumb.) So clearly, a federal law mandating background checks (and a reasonable holding period to get that to happen,) and closing loopholes around BGC's seems like a no-brainer solution that would ensure firearms aren't going into straw buyer's hands, right?
As for cleaning things up, you are technically right, we're past it. But that's an argument of defeat: any gun control law is better than known. the statistics comparing similar populations internationally compared to US statistics make it blatantly obvious; moreover there are a number of countries that were as bad or worse, that managed it.
But, republicans seem care more about their guns than they do their children. Until that changes, nothing changes.
The California example doesn’t quite work, because you can effortlessly bring a gun in from a neighboring state. So the legislation is much less effective than a national law would be.
Moreover, so much gun violence has proved to be opportunistic. Someone goes into a rage and because a gun is conveniently at hand, they can do an awful lot of damage. If a gun killing had to be premeditated and planned, as in many other countries, it’s a significant obstacle to such crimes.
If we banned guns sales today (something only an extreme minority are asking for, btw) and it took 100 years to filter them out of society to the point the death rate by firearm in the US was similar to the EU--it would be better than doing nothing.
Something the "guns are inevitable" argument always seems to miss is that changes to the law have more of an effect on society than purely the immediate physical result. Even without removing a single gun from society, passing legislation like that, which would likely require an amendment, would be a huge sign to the entire country that the US as a country is going to be thinking about firearms differently than in the past.
There's no magical solution, but doing nothing is the most certain to have no measurable impact.
Yeah, there's no absolute protection but it does help to put up barriers. I watch a lot of true crime, and a ton of spree killers and gun killers are just lazy or stupid and they would actually be deterred at certain points. Others, well, nothing's gonna stop them but getting caught. Of course, a guy who gets caught on his first try doesn't get to become a serial killer at least.
Come to think of it, if a guy gets caught violating a gun control law... then he doesn't even get to actually become a killer, does he? I've seen them run down a couple of cases including one where the Alabama Department of Investigation (I think?) GAVE BACK a gun to a guy who was under a protection order that in that state actually did restrict him from having a firearm. A law against domestic abusers having firearms would mean that a lot of them could be off the streets before they could kill their victims.
Check out other things he said, it fits. I wonder how people that stupid actually get voted into office. Shouldn't people vote for someone smarter than themselves to represent them? Or did they?
One of Dubya's biggest selling points was that he was "someone you could have a beer with".
So no, the people that vote for those kinds of people don't want someone smarter than themselves. They want someone like themselves.
That was actually a part of Hilary's trouble too: people just didn't like her on a personality level, so they didn't vote for her.
One of Dubya's biggest selling points was that he was "someone you could have a beer with".
Which is insane because W. went to a prep school and graduated from Harvard and Yale. His goofiness hid his incredibly privileged upbringing.
All that was an act. This gubernatorial debate between him and Anne Richards shows that the bumbling GW the rest of the U.S. came to know in 1999 is not the same person here in 1994.
It was an act, but coincidentally he actually wasn't that smart.
It's apparently illegal to have a beer with someone that's not a complete imbecile in the US.
Probably one of those old laws that never got repelled.
Many people also feel threatened by people who are smarter than them. Very not trusting.
"fly underwater"
I'm pretty sure I can fly underwater, too.
East Tennessee's Tim Burchett, a Republican, said he believes that aliens must have the technological capacity to "turn us into a charcoal briquette".
Humans have that technological capacity, also.
If I were an alien from another planet, I would definitely feed crazy, easily-dismissed people with some good information. That would make it way easier for me to fly under the radar.
to fly under the radar
it's more "flying under the sonar" underwater though, yeah?
I’m pretty sure I could build the tech to turn him into charcoal briquettes.
It’s not hard, really. The hardest part would probably be escaping the legal ramifications of having killed a US rep…. We’ve been making charcoal out of stuff for ages, after all.
I've seen so many UFO-related news during the last month, it's insane. From that whistleblower to various reputable sources coming up with different pieces of info here and there.
It's never aliens tho. What's going on?
There have always been a lot of wingnuts in the U.S., but at one time you could assume that if someone reached a position of power in the military or government, they probably weren't completely insane.
That time has passed.
Lead.
Chemicals in the water are turning the ~~frogs~~ humans ~~gay~~ stupid.
Lead.
Knowing how worn out so much of the US's infrastructure is at this point, I do wonder about all the modern contaminants - as well as all the lead in the air 40~ years ago.
It's all tinfoil-hat-talk until someone demonstrates the technology live and with reputable scientists present.
Edit: To clarify, any species advanced enough to come here from another star is going to be advanced enough to understand basic chemistry- chemistry, that we’ve been using for for more than 2000 years (at the very least.)
Such a hypothetical species would almost certainly also have the capability of doing spectral analysis to detect elemental composition in our atmosphere (JWST can do this,) and detect the radioactive fallout from our nuking ourselves- multiple times.
They would almost certainly be extremely careful in coming here. To be clear, the energy contained in a ship capable of reaching earth in any meaningful time frame, would be capable of wiping life out on Earth- far more powerful than any nuke ever detonated here. More importantly to them, such a space craft could conceivably be reverse engineered with enough capacity to attack them.
For comparison, the fastest moving space craft made by humans- the Parker solar probe- is traveling at 150 kilometers per second- the probe was designed to fall very close to the sun…it’ll be going about 190 km/s- it’s orbit was crafted to fly between the sun and Venus. It’s in its sixteenth of 24 planned passes.
190 km/s is about .04% the speed of light- or .0004 c. At those speeds it’ll take more than 10 thousand years to reach the nearest star (proxima centauri at 4.2 light years.)
And that’s assuming we don’t care about slowing down.
Any species to get here is going to be technologically advanced enough there’s no economic reason to come here. That leaves curiosity- specifically us. And we’re fucking psychotic enough to nuke ourselves.
Do i believe aliens exist? It’s probable.
Do i believe they come here? Not likely.
Fly underwater ? That is quite out there.
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