Florida Men

Here’s another reason to avoid Florida: these idiots are on the road. Apparently there was a bit of a wrangle with one person tailgating, another person throwing a water bottle, and then this guy, Eric Popper, decides that the appropriate response is to fumble in the center well and pull out a gun, and proceeds to unload 11 shots sort of vaguely in the direction of his enemy.

I’m impressed. He shot up his own car door and window, dashboard, and windshield. He has his eyes closed and is just firing wildly. Tres macho.

Astonishingly, or maybe not since this is ‘Merica, this was the outcome.

According to the arrest report, both the victim and Popper reported the incident to the police. During the investigation, Popper told state troopers he believed he was shot at so that was why he began shooting. The other driver said he did not have a firearm but said he did throw a water bottle at Popper’s car. Surprisingly, there were no reported injuries. Both parties were released at the scene.

Were they given back their driver’s licences and allowed to get in their damaged vehicles and drive away? Neither of these guys should ever be allowed on the road again.

Despair

We had another mass shooting in a school in Michigan. It was carried out with premeditation by a dumb kid with gun nut parents; he got his gun from his father. This keeps happening, again and again.

There isn’t a plan by politicians to change our gun laws. This one isn’t even on the radar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have learned an important lesson from the last election: cheat more. They’re gerrymandering districts aggressively. In Wisconsin, for instance, they’re working hard to finagle the next vote in advance to lock them into guaranteed victories.

All is quiet in the Democratic party while they watch themselves get maneuvered into extinction. Some Democrats are just trying to gerrymander their own districts.

Meanwhile, our disgraced ex-president, the criminal and con man, is getting ready to run for the presidency in 2024. The coup isn’t over, it’s just getting started.

Hey, why isn’t the traitor who fomented an insurrection at least indicted, if not held in jail? I don’t know. There’s a strange lack of urgency or concern in the halls of power.

Meanwhile, the Republican plan to pack the courts is paying off. The Supreme Court was stuffed with right wing ideologues by the aforementioned criminal president, and now they’re poised to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Remember when there were all those hearings to review their appointment to the court, and they were all asked if they were planning to tear down a woman’s right to choose, and they all said “No sir, I’d never do that”? They lied.

The court shouldn’t have even heard that Mississippi case; that they did tells us all we need to know about their intent. What are the Democrats going to do? Nothing. The senate rules are stacked against them, but they’ll do nothing to change those rules.

This is all an awful, terrible trend, a slow-motion destruction of the country engineered by conservatives backed by billionaires. It’s being carried out in the absence of any significant, principled opposition by the other party. It’s the Senate Democrats who filled me with the most despair, though, with this insipid tweet:

Yeah? We did. What did you accomplish? Why should we vote for you again when you do so little?

There’s a point where being slightly less toxic than the other party is not good enough, and the Democrats seem to be happy enough to ride that line.

First you fondle your gun, then you worship it as your god

A Moonie splinter cult is now buying up property and using AR-15s as church accoutrements. These are not good neighbors.

Moon’s congregation, Rod of Iron Ministries, also known as The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, is a gun-centric spinoff of the much larger Unification Church, founded by his late father, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a self-proclaimed messiah and businessman whose followers were famously known as “Moonies.” The younger Moon, who also goes by “The Second King,” split from the main church amid a dramatic falling-out with his mother about who, between the two of them, was the rightful heir to his father’s empire.

In 2017, Moon founded his church in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, siphoning off hundreds of followers from the main congregation who were willing to make the seemingly radical leap of incorporating high-powered rifles into their spiritual life. He did this with the backing of his older brother, Kook-jin “Justin” Moon, the CEO of Kahr Arms, a gun manufacturing company headquartered nearby. In recent years, he’s made headlines for recreating the mass wedding ceremonies that his father’s church was famous for, with the addition of AR-15s.

I think a good part of the problem here in America is that we have a constitution that says you have freedom of religion, which is interpreted to mean that churches have complete freedom from any kind of regulation, rather than that individuals have freedom of conscience. Similarly, despite the word “regulated” in the amendment that allows people to keep and bear arms, we have interpreted that to mean we get to go crazy with guns. The constitution doesn’t say anything about capitalism, but similarly the parasites have decided that a “free market” implies a total absence of constraint.

Oh, well, we all know how this will end up.

(In case you’ve forgotten your trashy pop culture, that’s a scene from Beneath the Planet of the Apes, where the mutant humans worship a nuclear missile they want to use to destroy the world.)

“They aren’t shooters. They are poseurs.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been posturing again. And she has been caught.

I wouldn’t have noticed that. I know next to nothing about guns, and am not at all interested in learning more. There is a great deal of detailed gun knowledge out there, and serious people who can instantly see the deeper problems with that photo. The fellow who noticed that error went on at length about the foolishness of firing a .50 BMG. Here’s the conclusion; if you don’t do Facebook (you are brilliant), I’ve included Joohn Choe’s full comment below the fold.

Trashy weapon, threatening posture, and always, a thin veneer of Instagram “gun-bunny” posturing overlaying stark ignorance and rank mediocrity: that is Taylor-Greene’s other gun pic, that’s Boebert’s “guns to books ratio” pic from earlier this year, that’s Cawthorn, that’s Gaetz, that’s pretty much the entire Q caucus if you look back at them.
Read “threat” and “scary” into this behavior and you are, to some degree, falling into the trap they want you to; and it’s not even an accurate reading, because the truth of this behavior is even less flattering than being a threat.
It’s just crass, unoriginal posturing; it’s all show and no go.

Let’s get Taylor-Green and Boebert and Cawthorn and Gaetz out of congress, OK?

[Read more…]

What next, Iowa?

After all, they elected this guy.

It’s going to be fun times in Iowa. Maybe they’re going to remove the requirements that you be licensed to drive, or practice dentistry, in the near future, and it’ll become a libertarian hell-hole where anything goes. At least, that’s the way it seems to be going, now that they’ve stripped out any licensing requirements at all to carry a handgun.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) on Friday signed a bill that allows people to purchase and carry handguns in the state without a permit.

“Today I signed legislation that protects the 2nd Amendment rights of Iowa’s law-abiding citizens while still preventing the sale of firearms to criminals and other dangerous individuals,” Reynolds wrote in a statement.

“We will never be able to outlaw or prevent every single bad actor from getting a gun, but what we can do is ensure law-abiding citizens have full access to their constitutional rights while keeping Iowans safe,” she added.

You won’t need a permit or any safety training at all to carry a gun into any public spaces! It’s an NRA wet dream! She defends it as a 2nd amendment issue; why do the gun nuts always forget the “well regulated militia” part of the Constitution?

I’m feeling trapped. I’ve got the assholes of Iowa to the south of me, and the ignorant yahoos of the Dakotas to the west of me, and Senator Ron Johnson guarding the borders of Wisconsin to my east. I’ve still got Canada as a bulwark of relative sanity to the north, but I know one thing for sure: I won’t be visiting Iowa until they throw out their Republican governor and restore some competence to their government.

America the Insane

I’ve already heard the joke that the pandemic must be over, because we’re back to our regular routine of frequent mass shootings. They’re wrong. The pandemic is still ongoing, and during the latest insane murder spree in Boulder, some of the victims were shot while waiting in line for vaccinations.

All we know is that ten people are dead, that some kind of long gun was used by the scumbag, and that a bleeding person in cuffs was later walked out of the store by the police. Oh, and he was a white man, but there is absolutely no surprise in that. The police probably didn’t take him to Wendy’s afterwards, since one of the victims was a police officer.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that there will be nothing done. No change in the gun laws. No restrictions on the ready availability of murder tools. The demented crazies are already claiming it was false flag operation.

The NRA, without missing a beat, responded by quoting the 2nd amendment.


A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Fuck the NRA, and I hate to say it, but the 2nd Amendment has me thinking, fuck the US Constitution. What good is it if it’s going to be used to shield a corrupt organization’s continuing racket of poisoning the country with weaponry and defending murdering maniacs?

Gun-fondlers reach a new low

There exists a real group of gun nuts who virtue-signal to each other by posting photos of themselves holding guns to their crotches — loaded guns. I’m not sure why. It seems to violate basic principles of gun safety, for one thing.

The predictable event has occurred: one of these happy-go-lucky twits has shot himself in the testicles. Before you read the link, ask yourself what lesson the gun-ballers should take from this, and how the other participants in the “game” should respond. If you want to guess right, begin by assuming these people are already colossal idiots.

Yes. They made the victim of the self-inflicted wound the president of the group. After all, he shot himself in the balls with a .45, so he’s clearly presidential material. Very American. I am so proud to be a member of this species.

Brings back old memories

There was a shooting in Seattle yesterday, at 3rd & Pine, and I said to myself, “I know that place — that’s where I was shot at!” This was around 1978, and I was often catching a late night bus at 3rd & Pike. This one evening, there was an altercation on Pine; a sex worker (I was there so often I recognized many of the ladies working those corners) was screaming angrily at someone in a car, and I could hear it a block away. Then she pulled out a handgun and started firing away.

She didn’t hit the guy, she didn’t even hit the car. The bullets were coming my way — I’d see a flash and hear a little “tch” sound as they struck the sidewalk near me, followed by a faint “pop” from the gun. I scrambled to hide behind a lamp post, thinking this would be a really stupid way to die, as an unintentional target of an angry woman who couldn’t hit a car ten feet away from her. Honestly, though, it was some small caliber pistol, shots were all over the place — one did make a little “pok” sound when it punched through a store window — even if one hit me by chance, it was unlikely to be lethal. I don’t think her target was hit at all, and he just drove away.

So just like the shooting yesterday, in the same place at least. Except this time the shooter was a bit more heavily armed and went on a far more determined shooting spree: one dead, seven injured, including a 9 year old boy.

We can’t change human nature easily — there will always be angry incidents and violent responses, just as there were in 1978 and 2020. What we could control, if we had the will, was the availability of lethal technology. The shooting yesterday was a product of human nature amplified by deadly weapons that had no place on a civilized city street.

It’s time to recognize gun worship as a cult which has the second amendment as its holy text

Tony Perkins says that teaching kids about evolution leads to mass shootings.

Perkins said that teaching children about evolution is one cause of mass shootings.

“We’ve taught our kids they come about through chance through primordial slime and then we’re surprised they treat their fellow Americans like dirt!” he exclaimed. “It’s time we talk about the result of the left’s systematic march through our institutions, driving religious expression from the public square.”

Perkins complained that children are not being taught that they are “created in the image of God.”

“We’ve driving religion from our public life and we’re shocked that we no longer have morality and we no longer value human life,” he remarked.

As a totally godless human being who has been teaching about evolution for a few decades, I’ve noticed that I and my fellow biologists and atheists are less casual about taking life than our gun-totin’ Christian brethren in general. Evolution teaches that we’re kin to everything; it doesn’t bring us down, it elevates every living thing on the planet in our eyes. To claim that we have no morality is a lie. We have many of the same values that our fellow citizens do, we live quiet lives finding happiness in our families, our children, in service to others, in simple pleasures. Most Christians are the same way, except when their priorities have been distorted by misplaced fanaticism, which, unfortunately, the kinds of Christians who listen to Tony Perkins are fed constantly.

Take Representative Matt Schaefer of Texas, who has a similarly perverse and horrid idea of the “root of the problem”.

Godless, depraved hearts. That IS the root of the problem. Every person needs a heart transformed by faith in God through Jesus. May God be near to those suffering in Odessa and Midland, and everywhere that evil has struck a blow.

He is quite confident that the solution to everything is conversion to Christianity. Everyone must believe in Jesus to stop the mass shootings! As if no Christian had ever killed anyone senselessly.

The real root of the problem is this: that a fervently Christian legislator has decided that he must oppose all actions to restrict the “god-given” ownership of AR-15s. Apparently, the Christianity he wants us to convert to is the version that has all the followers of Jesus armed to the teeth. He’s going to do nothing but pray, and hand out more guns.

“Do something!” is the statement we keep hearing. As an elected official with a vote in Austin, let me tell you what I am NOT going to do. I am NOT going to use the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans. Period. None of these so-called gun-control solutions will work to stop a person with evil intent. I say NO to “red flag” pre-crime laws. NO to universal background checks. NO to bans on AR-15s, or high capacity magazines. NO to mandatory gun buybacks. What can we do? YES to praying for victims. YES to praying for protection. YES to praying that God would transform the hearts of people with evil intent. YES to fathers not leaving their wives and children. YES to discipline in the homes. YES to supporting our public schools. YES to giving every law-abiding single mom the right to carry a handgun to protect her and her kids without permission from the state, and the same for all other law-abiding Texans of age. YES to your God-given, constitutionally protected rights. YES to God, and NO to more government intrusions.

You know, the guy who went on a murder spree in Odessa and Midland doesn’t seem to have been either a vocal Christian or a vocal atheist — just another angry white man who loves guns. Maybe instead of trying to answer everything with stories about which religion they did or did not follow, we should be addressing the gun-worshipping cult that crosses boundaries between believer and non-believer.

One thing for sure, Matt Schaefer won’t be doing anything about that, because he’s a card-carrying member of that cult.