Given the attitude on display here I’m not convinced that was a bad thing. People are in here trying to give you legitimate life saving advice and you’re telling them all to go fuck themselves. Gun ownership is not for everyone. Hell I’d argue it’s not for most people. That’s why I don’t own one, but I know how to use them and I’m very up to speed on firearm safety.

First guy was being an asshole but had one good point about training, because the majority of gun owners have a rifle or a pistol locked in a closet and they’ve never fired a round out of it. That is a recipe for disaster in one of several ways.

It’s not my place to insist that you shouldn’t have a firearm, and I’m not going to do so. I will say that your attitude surrounding the subject has been very poor and alarming. A simple “I know what I’m doing, thanks” would have sufficed but instead when faced with well meaning advice your response is to immediately start calling everyone names and telling them to go fuck themselves. If someone in my community had a firearm and this attitude alongside it I would feel extremely unsafe around them.

I also admit that when responded to in such a manner I also became a bit of a jackass and you have my apology for that. I shouldn’t have taken the bait. But this whole exchange has not been a good look for you. I’m not going to press this any further though.

GoFundMe has already removed several listings for this

Following you around Lemmy… Bro this is a comment from yesterday that YOU replied to. Nobody followed you anywhere, you did this.

Truly an appropriate attitude for the owner of an unsecured firearm

Oh, how did you get this photo of my childhood?

I bought it so it can sit in the rear window of my truck and make me look tough, obviously. get stolen out of my truck and used in a crime that is then traced back to me

This is really important knowledge to know about yourself. I wish more people were this self aware.

But a war requires a lot more than just soldiers. Even if we end up in a hot shooting Civil War 2 there are still many things you and other nonviolent folks could do for your fellows to keep them safe. Safe shelter and food mean even more than guns and bullets in a conflict like that.

I hope with every bit of my heart that we don’t have to go there. But if we do, you are not useless. Soldiers may fight a war, but logistics wins one. And in this hypothetical situation a lot of us are going to be very charged up with hot tempers and someone with a cooler head and an aversion to violence will be important to keep things from falling to chaos.

Don’t sell yourself short, Squid. A coward with a good head on them is a good person to have on your side in a fight. A coward knows how to prevent that fight that might not have been otherwise necessary.

He is 100% a jackass but in this particular point he is right. Please learn and practice with your rifle. Untrained gun owners are a huge danger to themselves and others and they usually don’t realize it. And owning a gun doesn’t do you any good if it gets taken out of your hands in the first 5 seconds of an altercation.

For your safety and others this is actually legitimately good advice.

You watched the news even once in the last ten years? What the fuck do you think the BLM and Antifa movements were about, planting daisies?

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant. I took that to mean they had previously announced an update and then rolled it back, which would be news to me.

When had this ever been an issue?

Those trucks get like six miles to the gallon, they’re a massive liability on American finances. If the average price of gas changes by a cent that’s something like nearly a million dollars difference. This isn’t maximizing profit, this is just being petty to own the libs.

Numbers are a very large part of that particular game.

Please don’t actually get out of here though we appreciate you

In fact, there are particular reasons behind this that are influenced by Japanese culture and history.

Warning: this video is an hour and a half long

This worked once because it was so heinously stupid that nobody was expecting it, and they almost certainly still cracked a few eggs to make this omelet. The next guy to try this is going to have a bad time. The next next guy might have a shot.

The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system,

Right. So what’s your plan for doing this then?

…

Oh, right, you can’t do it because $200 Billion are leveraged against you being able to do this.

Violence is the authority from which all other authority is derived. We respect laws and governments because we have ceded them the right of violence to maintain and enforce those laws. Governments and corporations do not respect us because governments (and by America’s extension, corporations) hold the monopoly on violence.

Therefore, the credible threat of violence is required for a fair and equal negotiation. We don’t need to go in and gun down every C-level executive in the country, the same way the cops don’t need to arrest every single person in the country to impress upon the rest of us what they are capable of. The opponent merely needs to think that you might do it in order to fear and respect the prospect appropriately.

This assassination hasn’t solved any problems directly, not in the least, but what it has done is hand us a bargaining chip that is now ours to squander. We have proven that we, citizens as a block, are capable and perhaps willing to exercise the authority of violence, and the corpostate no longer holds the monopoly. This has the corpostate immediately scared, and puts us in a position to negotiate to prevent more of these, or even for someone else to wield us in their own negotiations (think some politician in a back rooms talk with insurance reps, “look do you want the citizens to keep taking pot shots at you forever or do you want to actually do something about it?”)

We, the people, don’t want violence. It isn’t ours to wield. We gave it up intentionally when we wrote the laws of our lands. But it is the last tool left to us when all others are taken away. The lesson that should be learned here and the real solution we should be looking for is to return to us the other tools we had for negotiation, so that violence isn’t the only remaining way for us to voice ourselves. When corporations were busy union busting and warping tax code and shrinkflating and lobbying down the minimum wage, they forgot that the reason all those things existed was to keep the people happy so they don’t rise up. We already had a corpo hellstate in America once before, and by the end of it, companies gladly instated all these worker benefits after mass general strikes and the third or so time all their corporate offices were firebombed. Skip a few generations and they’ve either forgotten why those policies existed, or they’ve ignored it completely in some show of demented grandeur.

But if I’m being honest I fully expect this opportunity to be thoroughly wasted and for us as a whole to generally learn nothing. It is possible that I will be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not really holding my breath for anything these days.

Look, okay, we need some sort of identity. This is how people become American gun nuts in the first place, is searching for an identity. If modern American identity is going to become “yeah we were getting fucked over by corporate leeches so I shot one of em in the face” - I mean, it’s not my first choice, but I can think of worse things.

They’re working on bringing that beloved export back home for the American people to enjoy

There are a few channels that will run 8-10 hour Sunday morning cartoon compliations with commercials included. For some reason I really like those even when I hate almost all other ads.