Once again, the god side defeats their own claims.
"We had AR-15s in the 1960s. We didn't have those mass school shootings … We actually had prayer in school during those days."
— House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) pic.twitter.com/NndUf3D5xb
— The Recount (@therecount) June 8, 2022
I’m trying to figure this out. So if you don’t compel your children to pray to your god, he will send a gunman to murder them in school.
Do they even realize that that is not a benign act? That’s the logic of a tyrant and the rationalization of a fool. It’s so much easier to recognize that this cosmic villain does not exist, but that wicked people use the threat of this monster to compel others to do as they want.
Counterpoint: here’s a teacher who prayed earnestly and sincerely while the gunman god sent to remind everyone to pray killed all 11 of his 4th grade students.
EXCLUSIVE: Arnulfo Reyes, teacher wounded in Uvalde shooting, to @arobach: “I will not let these children and my coworkers die in vain. I will not. I will go to the end of the world to not let my students die in vain.” https://t.co/QVFp3mciRo pic.twitter.com/ZkcioTBQ7W
— ABC News (@ABC) June 7, 2022
In this world of gullible prayers, a good god would grant Arnulfo Reyes wish and send Steven Scalise to hell. I think I know how this will turn out, and we should learn that if god did exist, he’s a motherfucking Republican.
We’ve only just started. Look at this Christian!
A Texas-based Christian extremist preacher is calling on the government to round up “every single homosexual,” put them on trial, convict them, and put them to death by shooting them in the head, which he falsely says Jesus Christ commands.
Dillon Awes of the Stedfast Baptist Church on Sunday also falsely claimed every gay person is a pedophile, every heterosexual pedophile is a “fag,” and “sodomites” are responsible for school shootings. None of those claims are factual.
Everything is only going to get worse.
Scalise is also making the “point” that we didn’t ban airplanes after 9/11.
Evidently he’s never heard of TSA screening and the No Fly List.
Or he thinks we haven’t.
FACT CHECK: That is actually what the Jesus voice in his head told him.
That last freak from TX makes a reeeeallly strong case for hate speech laws. I’m given to understand there are honest decent reasons for opposing hate speech laws, though I don’t care enough about that position to familiarize myself with them, but surely that sort of fucko puts those positions to the test.
I dunno, God does prescribe properly disciplining children. For example, in 2 Kings 2, 42 boys make fun of Elisha’s bald head. So God sends 2 bears to rip them to pieces. Now that’s the biblical morality we’re missing.
He can be investigated for connections to criminal activities and/or domestic terrorism. If that’s not a strong indicator, I don’t know what is. But the point is, him being able to say things doesn’t imply that we need to ignore what’s being said or that it couldn’t be used as evidence.
Does he realize the world is round?
Jesus H. Christ didn’t say anything about firearms.
@7 Reginald Selkirk
The H stands for howitzer. /s
He’s implying that children would perfect little angels if we just forced some good old Christian morality on them in the public schools and that it was the removal of mandatory prayer that started the school shooting trend. According the Bible-fuckers, It’s not enough to tell kids that killing one another is wrong, but you also need to believe in a cosmic hanging judge who will have you tortured forever for disobeying him.
Yes, there were AR15s sold in the ’60s. By one company, Colt, that sold them with a 5 round magazine. And to the best of my knowledge they weren’t marketed for self defense or to threaten the government with. I suspect they sold in low numbers. Things have changed. Dozens of companies make AR15s and variations, high capacity magazines are commonly available, and the marketing concentrates heavily on “Defend your home/Defend America!” imagery.
Regarding that “god protects the godly” hate preacher, I’d be willing to bet everything I own that he doesn’t go to bed without first locking his door. Also, I’d guess that guns were not being pushed back in the 60s as a necessary part of manhood like they are today. https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-guns-are-advertised-in-america-2012-12
“We had AR-15s in the 60s” sort of assumes that the Colt AR-15 is fundamentally identical to the AR-15 sold today. That’s just as valid as assuming that the current Ford Mustang is like a 1967 muscle-car Mustang because it’s visually similar and has the same model name.
The Colt AR-15 was a notoriously rotten weapon in dusty conditions (like Texas…), prone to both in-use jamming and rapid wear of the firing mechanism when dust got into it. The military analogs were upgraded several times during the M-16’s life as a primary infantry weapon system; the civilian “downgrades” followed right along. Just as a contemporary Mustang has, well, seatbelts and airbags (not to mention a radio that actually works and penetration protection in the doors and a fuel cap that doesn’t fall off — oops, contemporary Mustangs are all-electric…), comparing Scalise’s childhood toys to those on the market today is about as valid as talking about 60s apples from the supermarket as the paradigm of taste and nutrition.†
What I really want to know is what kind of training Scalise got before that eighteenth-birthday gift of an assault rifle. And you can unpack the layers in that however you wish.
† I feel very fortunate that “Red Delicious” is no longer the supermarket default.
Perhaps someone should tell Scalise about the Bath School Massacre in Bath Township, Michigan. That was in 1927 so there was plenty of school praying everywhere. There were no AR-15s, of course, but the perpetrator had bombs. He blew up the elementary school killing 38 children and 6 adults, and injuring 58 more. In a familiar pattern, he killed his wife before the blast, and he blew up himself.
Obviously the answer is to go back to the 1960s. I was too young for the drugs and sex would be happy to give it a try.
The benevolent god?
I am reminded of a cheesy 50 years old horror film where wossname capten Kirk challenged a gang of devil worshippers and they brought forth a red-painted Ernest Borgnine shouting “who summons me from the pit?”
Robro @ 13
Yes but that was in 1927, the year when the eevil secular scientists went to Switzerland and hammered out the foundation for quantum physics.
This whole thing where we focus on the dramatic mass shootings is pretty silly. Mundane shootings kill a couple orders of magnitude more people every year. Banning assault rifles is a plenty good idea, but it accounts to only a minority of gun deaths; handguns are where it’s at.
If y’all could get your act together it might also reduce the number of illegal guns flooding into Canada and Mexico, too.
Republican politicians aren’t the only ones who fail to grasp quantitative arguments, but they strike me as the worse offenders. “We had AR-15s” is meaningless until you ask how many were in circulation. Unfortunately, I can’t find good date on AR-15-style weapon production since the 1960s, but the graph in this Vox article shows an increase in production of about 4x (eyeballing it) between 1986 and 2001. It goes up and down a lot in this time period but the trend is increasing.
Anecdotally, the weapons I remember my neighbors actually owning in the 70s were hunting rifles for deer, 0.22s, and probably shotguns. The insane popularity of this kind of semi-automatic weapon is a recent phenomenon. I assume lying Scalise knows this and doesn’t care. But I also think that his quantitative reasoning ability is such that he doesn’t even comprehend that he should care before writing such an asinine tweet.
Benevolent God? The fundies clearly believe in a vengeful deity, so that’s kind of besides the point. They love the story of the Great Flood. They think that’s how God is supposed to behave. A more interesting question is why their vengeful God would lay off all those other countries that have strict gun laws but aren’t praying in school either. Of course, that’s not hard to fit in either. He’s just given up on those commies and he’ll get to them when the rapture happens.
Jaws@12
But don’t you miss all the creative uses of aspic?
I have finally been catching up on Mad Men and I’ll pass on most of that time period, but I can honestly say that I’d buy a set of silver-rimmed roly poly glasses if I wasn’t at least a little worried about turning into an alcoholic.
birgerjohansson @16: The Solvay conferences (including the 1927 one) were in Brussels.
I suspect that Dillon Awes is a self-hating homosexual. You can tar-and-feather me if I’m wrong.
@15 The Devils Rain
Hard to believe how moronic these people are.
@21 Yeah, I wonder how long it’ll be before police arrest him for tap dancing in an airport toilet.
@23
Au contraire, nomdeplume, when they take no pains in trying to hide it, it becomes quite easily believable so much so as to make their moronicness, the default position unless proven otherwise.
Well. “You’ll know that they are Christians by their love” (of guns, apparently. Also by their homophobia and transphobia.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/08/ar15-prairie-dogs-thune-guns-republicans/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F370b31c%2F62a0c98a956121755aab0770%2F597776a69bbc0f6826c3fa0d%2F27%2F70%2F62a0c98a956121755aab0770
but I guess it’s different when Republicans are the ones getting shot at. Or potentially so. Kids–the postpartum ones anyway–are on their own.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/08/kavanaugh-threat-arrest-justice/
“I call on leaders in both parties in Washington to strongly condemn these actions in no uncertain terms,” Hogan said in the statement. “It is vital to our constitutional system that the justices be able to carry out their duties without fear of violence against them and their families.”
Hey Larry, how about kids and their teachers in schools? Is it vital that they be able carry out their duties without fear of violence against them and their families or to go about THEIR day without worrying that it’s going to be their last?
numerobis @17: Assault rifles are the firearms with the least justification for civilian ownership. High-profile mass shootings might not cause the majority of firearm deaths, but their visibility works as an effective motivation for people to support gun control laws. You may have noticed how hard it is to do anything about assault rifles, going after handguns or shotguns is a complete nonstarter. Let’s focus on the part of gun control where there’s a theoretical chance of actually achieving some sort of victory before worrying about any of the other parts.
Re; PaulBC @ #18…
Guns, anecdotally… Around 1960, I knew a guy who had a bolt action .30-06. No idea what–if anything–he did with it, but so far as I know it was in working order. A friend of mine (around my age, so his tale would have been early 1960s) had an uncle with a .600 Nitro Express “Elephant Gun.” The uncle let my friend (who was 14 at the time) fire it. His uncle stood partially behind him, caught the rifle with one hand (as it came up over him) and my friend with the other hand. My friend described the cartridge as being about the size of a banana.
Rob Grigjanis @ 20
Goddammit! I am mixing up my physics conferences.
.
I am trying to work out which god would be in charge of school shootings.
Vulcanus would be in charge of gunsmithing, but other gods are implicated in rage and madness. Nyarlahotep is always up for a horrible “joke” I suppose. The top guys in the Abrahamic religions seem just too stupid to do the planning.
Sending two bears to savagely rip apart teenagers is more their style.
Retroactively approving of massacres was Allah’s thing, but usually only when Muhammed did it.
@2,7 wtf?
That wasn’t Jesus, that was carburetor moonshine.
Does he do everything the voices in his head tell him to do all the time or only some of the time? Now I’m curious.
Also curious as to which Bronze Age firearms Jesus recommended. And how one keeps the barrel true, given how relatively soft bronze is. Maybe one of the Jesus miracles that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament? Was it Matthew, Mark, Luke or John who left that fascinating tidbit out?
@12 oh hell yes. The worst tasting apple in the supermarket. Prefer Cripps Pink myself. Or Granny Smith.
@19 NO. Quite happy aspic has mostly gone the way of the dodo. Ugh. All those disturbing 50’s and 60’s bad casseroles and gelatin dishes… [shudder] And I’m partial to the Couroc barware myself. The Monterey owl pattern.
@21 I’m sure Dillon and Milo Yiannopoulous will be forming a platonic threesome any day now. Now that Milo’s an intern for MTG.
@29
Have you by any chance seen A Murder of Gods episode of American Gods? (Starz original series.) Pity the series more or less came apart at the seams but that episode is one of my favorites of the series.
Spoiler: It would be Vulcan. The new, franchised Vulcan.
But I was already worried about the other parts…. You know, the very big parts like handguns and such.
I could see Democrats getting behind a plan like that, though: as little as possible, after convincing themselves they shouldn’t actually try do the right things when they have the power to do so, which is treated like a victory at least until the next election when they probably lose, and ignoring any complaints about it for a couple more decades after that.
Scalise’s timeline is off. School prayer ended in 1962. The first civilian AR-15 went on sale in 1964.
But I’m sure no one repeating this BS give a darn.
There were M-16 involved in mass shootings in the 1960s too. Over in Vietnam.
silvrhalide @ # 26: … how about kids and their teachers in schools? Is it vital that they be able carry out their duties without fear of violence …
You got it all backwards: we just need to issue each Supreme Court justice assault weaponry at their swearings-in.
Problem solved!
Ugh. Can we please not do this? As a gay man, I find it rather dismaying that every time there’s a report of some priest or politician raging against homosexuality, someone always pipes up to say that person must really be a repressed homosexual themselves. I mean, okay, it’s great that you straight people don’t want to count guys like that among your number, but we gays don’t want them either. Yes, obviously there have been high-profile cases when a vocal gay-hater was outed as secretly gay themselves, but that doesn’t mean that every homophobe is secretly gay, and insisting that they are implies that only gays are capable of homophobia, which… strikes me as sort of homophobic?
An acquaintance of mine once said he figured that all homophobes must be secretly gay because he couldn’t conceive of any reason they’d have such hatred if it weren’t directed at something inside themselves they were trying to deny. I replied that by that logic all racists must be secretly black…
Given how bizarre fundies behave at the best of times (Ham and Hovind) I’m not surprised that they’d advocate for sex based cruelty and violence! I have to blame Christian dogmas that should have been dumped over 100 years ago. Every one knew how seriously screwed up the Victorians were about sex.
whheydt@28 I’m sure you could do a lot of damage with an elephant gun, but it seems a little impractical for carrying out a mass murder.
Rant that follows is not directed at you:
What’s new isn’t that you can carry out a mass murder. Resourceful people can find a way. The unabomber made his own bombs in a shack in the woods. Somebody was mailing anthrax in the aftermath of 9/11. But we’ve now commoditized mass murder. Any idiot can get the idea that they want to kill a lot of people, go to the story and say “How much for that machine that kills a lot of people?” pay up and walk away with it.
Another thing that gets me about Republicans is that they don’t understand economics either. They claim they’re capitalists. No, asshole, I’m the capitalist. And I vote for Democrats.
There is a difference between a technological capability and a retail provider of that capability. Anthrax killings, or ricin killings for that matter, are uncommon not because a moderately clever person couldn’t look up the recipe but because there are easier ways. We literally have a mass-murder-ready consumer product. What was that line from His Girl Friday (1940)? “Production for use.” I thought it was far-fetched when I saw it, but right now I think it’s a brilliant observation. We’re producing these murder weapons. Should we be surprised when people use them?
A troubling thought: if the hate mongers who blame homosexuals and other groups get positions of absolute power, we get a new generation of Lt. Calleys and Oskar Dirlewanger clones.
You’re almost as anachronistic as Dillon Awes. Jesus did not live in the bronze age, and all serious weapons used in his times would have been made of iron or steel.
JSNuttall@36,
But don’t you see? It’s vital that we straights are able to blame everything bad on you gays, while still telling ourselves we’re not homophobic!
@ 7. Reginald Selkirk :
He did however supposedly sauy that thsoe wholiev by the sword die by the sword didn’t he?
Also he rejected capital punishment especially for percieved sexual offenses eg. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Oh and told folks to pray in private and pay their taxes and condemned hypocrites and liars among so very much else the Repugs & other Christianists ignore.
This is from Ausie ABC online news :
WARNING : Harrowing, confronting material and reality, gun violence, murder of children references.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-09/uvalde-shooting-survivor-testimony-congress/101137554
An eleven year old child smearing herself with her murdered schoolmates blood in order to survive in 21st Century United States of America. This needs to be stopped. Gun control measures up to and including the repeal of the 2nd Amendment are very long overdue.
Th e USA has had wars onpoverty and wars on drugs -isn’t it tiem itha d awar onthe NRA and gun nuts and Biden did absolutley everything inhis power including flat ut and publicly telling the Trump SCOTUS’es (SCOTii?) to reisgn (& /or lose their current state protection) and listing the NRA and other gun lobbyists including the Repug party as domestic enemies and terrorists and treating them accordingly. Then start making serious long overdue reforms to the political system and US culture.
@^ Typo fix for clarity The USA has had “Wars” on Poverty and Drugs and Terror – isn’t it time it had a “War on the NRA and gun nuts” now?
Biden shoudl amek thsi his issue and stand and do absolutley everything in his power including flat out and publicly telling the Trump SCOTUS’es (SCOTii?) to resign and jail them for contempt of Congress and Conspiracy / sedition along with the Federalist Society if they refuse.
@36. JSNuttall : Seconded. Truth well put.
@ 41
That’s because his Big Daddy will send her to Hell after she dies for breaking his special rules. The same can be said about his possible attitude towards gay. Sure, he cured the catamite at the Crucifixion, but I the implication was that the boy would still be damned to Hell if he ever sucked cock again.
I’ve grown truly sick and tired of listening to liberal Christ-scums whitewash their filthy religion’s 2000-plus year history of bloodshed and sexual tyranny by ignoring what their special book says and focus only on what a nice guy their Messiah supposedly was. I have never ONCE heard these “progressive” Christ-scums say that there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with homosexuality when their Bible commands their death. It always eventually all swing back to “we are all born with sin” or “that’s for the Lord to judge.”
Sergei Lavrov used exactly the same logic in claiming that Hitler had Jewish ancestry and that many of the worst antisemites were Jews. You’re in good company nomadiq, gijoel, silverhalide!
@33:
Not at all. The official approval of official school prayer in the US was sort-of blocked in 1962, but that certainly didn’t end school prayer. (It was supposed to have ended in 1948, with McCollum, but there was lots of pushback under cover of opposing the godless commies…)
The US Supreme Court just heard another case involving school prayer. The only apparent distinction is just how “independent” of officialdom/official policy it must be to be acceptable — and, of course, it must still meet the standard of being Christian or they’ll find another way to block it. (Can you imagine the outrage — less than 10km from a nuclear-submarine base — if the only difference at those Bremerton football games had been a prayer rug instead of a rosary?)
So now it’s school prayer led by individual authority figures and not the elected school boards. That’s sadly similar to the way they treat weaponry, but that shouldn’t really surprise anyone.
Awes: “every single homosexual”
So I take it he is for gay marriage – that will get rid of “single” homosexuals.
@40 I was going with the whole anachronistic theme. Jesus = New Testament, all the rules & regs & punishments (and homophobia–or at least the writings used to justify homophobia) are largely in the Old Testament, which, rather than being written by different authors over a period of time, was clearly written by Moses about 2,000 years prior to the birth of Christ, as dictated to him by God (apparently the Ten Commandments were a different publishing company/imprint) which would put the “commandment to shoot them in the head” at the tail end of the Bronze Age.
Also, the Earth, as per the Bible, is only about 4,000 years old and The Flintstones is a documentary.
Should have probably included the /s in the initial post but thought it was apparent. Sorry.
Let me guess. Everyone in the audience just sat there. Or did they cheer.
Remember, folks, that over 60% of all gun deaths in the USA are suicides. To me that gives away the game. In terms of action rather than talk, American gun culture is not about self-defense; it’s about self-slaughter.
@50, I must admit I’d forgotten Shooty McShootfaces are the main suicide method. Technically, it varies by both sex and age (Means of Suicide: United States 2020), with maybe the most notable variation being men are far more likely than women to use a Shooty McShootface, albeit that’s the most common method for both.
The startling relatively recent statistic is that starting in 2019–2020, Shooty McShootfaces (suicide or other) have been the leading cause of deaths of people under 20 years old (in the States). For decades, It was traffic accidents (which is now second), now it’s Shooty McShootface fetishism (Gun violence becomes leading cause of death among US youth, data shows).