this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Every gun owner I’ve talked to on the internet claims they do this to protect themselves from the US government. Every gun owner I’ve talked with on the internet doesn’t have an answer for when I discuss the massive firepower the US has in comparison to their pew pew sticks.
edit: I should qualify this a little. There are responsible gun owners, and I have talked with some on the internet. There sure are a lot of vocal irresponsible gun owners as well, and those are the ones I have spent far more time arguing with online. You know the ones - they buy the gun and expect it to do all the work for them.
The other 95% of us gun owners, such as myself, who DON'T broadcast it to the world and make it our entire personality, have guns as a hobby or as tools to use on the farm. And give zero fucks about whatever the hell the feds or Texas is up to...
Wait, so you don't buy whipped cream and take instagram photos with your pistol?
Obviously we do.
We just don't post it.
That's for private use.
Nope! The only photos I have of my guns are either records of the serial numbers and attachments for insurance value purposes, or of me and my friends together on range days once in a while.
Not even just a little whipped cream?
Nooe, sorry to disappoint. It's bad for the mechanisms. Stickyyyy 🤮🤮
Sad uwu
I know. I am a disappointment to all weaponkind 😔
It's good to look back on those memories fondly, after that unfortunate accident on the boat where every single gun fell overboard. Lost forever. The shame! :(
Lol
"What will your response be to an AGM-114 Hellfire missile?"
"Well I'll shoot it of course."
Gun owner here: that's a stupid mentality. Putting aside the fact that I rather like the federal government, the best you could hope for in a war against the feds is an indefinite insurgency. You'll suffer an abismal casualty rate, and you'll really only be able to "win" if you saturate the government with sympathizers. If that happens, well, "you" won't be doing the winning, it'll be the people who got themselves into established positions of power.
It’s a very stupid mentality born out of fear. I had a conversation with someone on reddit once in the comment section for a news article about a child (5 year old) finding a gun in the bushes. Her reply as a gun owner was “I’d rather live in a world where 5 year olds can find guns in bushes than live in a world where they cannot”.
It blows my mind. These folks are going to end up killing their children in a case of mistaken idenity if they’re not careful (and they aren’t careful).
I know someone whose son killed himself with a gun he found in Daddys night stand.
Daddy was a broken man afterwards and had to force himself raising his daughter until she had a job, a fiance and left the house. The next day Daddy shot himself with the same gun as his son.
Such a sad story. Dad wanted to be at the ready for a home invader which never came. Kid was too young to understand and/or a curious small human learning about the world. What’s worse is that stories like this get written off as “anti-gun / anti-2nd amendment propaganda”. The reason the person I was arguing with wanted to live in a world “where a kid can find a gun in the bush” was, as they explained: because any argument or statement that can be construed as for gun control is a threat to our right to bear arms - they would rather live in a world where we have so many guns that they are showing up in bushes where children can find them, than live in the only other option, which is a world in which no guns do not exist in any sense of the word.
It’s wild, really. Protecting yourself makes sense, but a world where guns are accessible to literal children is not a world most folks want to live in. And it’s the world americans live in.
Handle doesn't check out lol. Your points are very well-reasoned. The saddest part for me is that education goes a LONG way with these things, but the issue is now so heavily politicized it's hard to make any headway with anyone.
In school districts you're often up against zero-tolerance hoplophobes and panic parents who are just plain terrified that guns exist (understandably), and would rather just pretend they didn't instead of educating themselves and their kids. (Irrationally)
Then sometimes you have the ones wanting to teach these classes having some ulterior gun-worship political motive...
But for real:
We teach kids not to play around moving cars or trains or downed power lines, but having "If you find a gun..." safety talks with children doesn't happen as often as it should, and they're way smarter than we give them credit for.
I stash mine securely, and if my nephews saw me cleaning one they'd be curious and staring. I'd always kindly tell them like it was:
"This is a dangerous tool. This is a tool to defend from someone attempting to kill you. It can seriously hurt or kill people. This is not to be played with. What do you do if you EVER find something that looks like this?"
"Don't touch it. Go tell an adult."
"Good boys."
They need to know they can trust the grownups in their lives to teach them instead of punish them for curiosity. Then these things stop being taboo and fascinating.
Finally you have owners who, as the tragic story said, just keep it in a nightstand. No lock or anything. Wow. Proper home security and an emergency preparedness plan with your family should buy you more than enough time to safely retrieve a securely stowed weapon to protect yourself from a very determined attacker.
The people who think they'll just wake up one night and suddenly find themselves having to mag dump into a ninja make me sad.
Lol sorry for the rant.
Kids are way smarter than we give them credit for, absolutely! I’m the kind of guy who would rather not live in a world with guns, or violence for that matter. I’d be willing to ban lots of weapons for this purpose. I’m that guy who gun advocates hate to deal with in that respect. The only reason I’ve carved a small niche for “responsible gun ownership” is because my dad was very open about getting one. He told us he got it, he explained why, he took a firearms class, got a concealed carry permit, would clean maintain it regularly even though I’ve never seen him fire it. He told me stories about how gun owners would be too quick to react when hearing a home intruder and accedently shot a family member who was coming home late. He showed me how to hold the weapon, but that was about it. That small bit went a long way.
Well it kind of already happened. The Confederacy lost but their ideology somewhat retained and now a sizeable chunk of the elected government officials are sympathetic to it.
And Republicans have been demonstrating for decades now that saturating the government with sympathizers works just fine without an armed rebellion.
As a gun owner, guns are for hunting and defending against these drooling idiot, neo-nazi seditionists who are trying to forment civil war.
Here's your answer.
All the bombs, missiles, planes, and tanks are how the US got a decisive victory in Vietnam.
Were the Vietnamese fighters morbidly obese, middle-aged men with no training who wouldn't even tolerate a paper mask to save their families?
I think the people of Vietnam had a lot less fucks to give than your average Texan. I don't see Texans building and living in an underground tunnel system that they themselves dug out. I dont even know how those idiots survive without a chick fil a within driving distance. Guerilla warfare involves some terrible living conditions for the guerilla fighters, and Yall Qaeda is not strong enough to live that way.
I'd like to see them attempt the CNN-monkey-bars thing to posture though. Just for laughs.
And Afghanistan.
4 presidents, 20 years, and trillions of dollars, and we successfully replaced the Taliban with...the Taliban.
A perfectly bipartisan effort, too! A true symbol of what we can do if Republicans and Democrats work together
Aww, did you delete your reply? That's not very big, brave gun owner of you. Thankfully, it still arrived in my inbox.
While I'm all for people changing their deeply stupid beliefs, it's still surreal that for at least a few minutes, you thought that a good argument was "Our guns will be all we need against an actual military because we can use them for domestic terrorism targeting pregnant white women".
I reconsidered because I thought someone would misrepresent/ misconstrue my meaning. Congrats.
If the shooting starts, it won't be the old scooter patrol on the front lines on the Texas border. It will be a guerilla war and the targets won't be pregnant women. People who lack critical thinking skills or haven't studied history think bombs and tanks matter in that sort of war. Hurr durr, no one can stand up to the military. Lol
Leaving the union: All social security, Medicare, Medicaid disappear immediately. Who is fighting the U.S. Navy for the oil wells? All imports stopped. All exports stopped. The companies who drill the oil and lobby the politicians are going to choose to sell to the U.S. instead of a single entity that won't be able to pay. Now there is no fuel for vehicles.. workers aren't at the power plants, electricity failing more often than already overloaded grid they failed to maintain. It's 100+ degrees in Texas how often?
People dying, starving, traveling back in time... Do they still think they are better than the immigrants coming over to offer work and pay sales taxes?
Maybe brokering a deal to figure out immigration policies where they are processed cheaper, documented and turned into workers paid for by the the entire U.S. won't sound so bad then... Maybe they will even think assisting other countries so the people don't leave will be so bad either.
To be fair if we're talking Texas this part is kindof a moot point and might not be felt.
They're one of like 11 states (don't quote me haha) that rejected free money for Medicaid expansion, so you need to be making like $1,900 a YEAR to be eligible for any kind of aid...unless you're an individual and not a family, in which case, they want you to either suddenly get lots of money or die in a ditch.
Edit - there's a source so I wasn't being intellectually lazy lol. https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/medicaid-expansion-benefits-legislature/
And to add to all the rest of your very good points:
With their power grid, if they actively became hostile we'd just have to wait til the extreme weather crumbles their utilities infrastructure again.
Agreed, it would be a fucking mess, particularly if some of the states that are supporting Texas join in secession. But if there isn't a border, there isn't a country. And 2 million a year is beyond sustainable, and with zero vetting is beyond stupid and beyond dangerous. Who is coming in? MS13, Hamas/ ISIS? Trafficked children? Or is every single one just looking for a better life.
We have immigration laws, and the Biden administration isn't following them. They are in fact, actively ignoring/breaking them.
Why?
Crazy. Almost like it's just hollow self-aggrandizing so they can pretend they're a hero.
I always bring up resources management. They probably won't go full hog in an armed uprising on US soil. Every bridge bombed is a bridge needed to rebuild. A carpet bombing of Texas will hit non-combatant citizens. A preemptive point against this would be the first civil war. Sherman's march ( the goat ) was different because the largest militaries decided to be neutral during the conflict. A crippling of an armed uprising will also cripple defense against China or Russia if they get froggy. Or if the damages could be justified. Like say a critical bridge was one of the MANY bridges that are on the verge of collapsing. Bomb it now and make Texas pay for it call it Biden's bridge etc. Or a track of land being used by rebels is prime railroad land/oil/etc.
Every gun owner on the internet seems to be 100% on board with using their guns to install a fascist US government.
A simple scroll on this thread alone seems to indicate against this statement. Plenty of good non-fashy-non-tankies who understand the problems with disarmament of the people.
They're just also not loud and obnoxious. =\
Look, I wouldn't mind having a gun personally, I get that they're fun, but societally speaking, I am very fucking happy basically nobody has them here. Theoretically.
If that works for your locale and you personally, that's great. No argument. It's a complicated topic for sure.
From a perspective here, unfortunately here in the U.S, they're many times necessary for personal protection, especially out in the boonies, because the territory is just so dang BIG you simply can't rely on a police service to protect you from skullduggery at all times. (And then, yeah, police are a contentious topic too lol...I digress)
My only nudge with your comment was "Every gun owner on the Internet seems..."
The vast majority of us are on the Internet, quiet, responsible, and really hope we're never forced to sling lead at another human being, and we're just as embarrassed as you are about the ones you're talking about.
If anything, those types' out of control posturing and dangerous toddler antics will end in screwing us all over once they've "othered" every single potential ally the responsible folks could have had.
I hope maybe in some way it can help you feel like the world is a little less crazy when people on "the other side of the issue" are all too happy to agree with you on how out of hand it's all gotten.
I think a huge core of it is that arms companies need to stay in business by putting more product in exponentially more hands every quarter, and they'll use every astroturfing, lobbying, culture-warping trick in the book to create a never-ending "gun fandom."
That can't be good for anybody.
Thanks for putting in the effort for a good reply.
I think the way I see it is this:
https://www.iflscience.com/an-artist-placed-goldfish-in-blenders-and-asked-visitors-to-turn-them-on-they-did-63638
Briefly, artist put a live goldfish in a blender as an art exhibition, connects blender to a big red button for any attendee to press. If they want. They did.
The thought being, sooner or later, it doesn't matter, given time, some bumfuck is going to press it. And they did. Plenty of people did (I think all the goldfish died, there were ten blenders like this, I think the artist even knew that 1 wouldn't be enough and that 10 might perhaps drive the point home even more).
If you give people the option to select between life and death for someone else, people are going to die, a lot. It doesn't matter that it was perhaps one in five hundred who pressed the button for whatever reason, the fish still got massacred.
You get what I'm saying?