The guy on the far right is about to be pointing the barrel of his rifle into the back of his friend’s knee. Friends don’t do that. [salon]
Meanwhile, the guy in the center is aiming at his own foot. These guys are not off-duty rocket engineers.
I’d like to assume the guns are not cocked and loaded, but they might be. In which case, they ought not be walking around with their sweaty little fingers anywhere near the trigger, because someone might bump into them or sneeze.
They’re not “gun nuts” they are particularly obnoxious cosplayers. Cosplayers who happen to support a particularly stupid ideology.
If they weren’t so obnoxious, I admit it would be fun to join them, wearing LARP-wizard, LARP-orc, and Star Trek cosplay. They’re ridiculous but they take themselves so seriously.
Me, in 1984, before we knew to call it “cosplay”:
I wonder how many of those guys served in any military or law enforcement capacity. I’m guess the answer is one. He just barely qualified for the shooting requirement in basic training, and spent his entire military career slinging hash.(Which is totally a legit military role, but not the kind macho dumbasses like these would admit to.)
In profile there you look an awful lot like you’re about to insult the English and discuss how much weight swallows can carry.
Tabby Lavalamp@#2:
In profile there you look an awful lot like you’re about to insult the English and discuss how much weight swallows can carry.
It’s not my fault that they smell of elderberries. Stuffy english kkkk-nighits!
Tabby Lavalamp @#2
African or European?
Remember the scene in A Christmas Story where the kid fantasizes about how, if he owned a BB gun, he would fight off hordes of masked “bad guys” swarming into his back yard? When I look at gun owners, that’s who I see. They’re basically playing a LARP, except it’s a larp where people might get killed.
I once had a student ask me, in all seriousness, “If you don’t have a gun, what will you do if there’s a zombie apocolypse?” That’s the kind of fantasy they live in.
“If you don’t have a gun, what will you do if there’s a zombie apocolypse?”
If the documentaries and instructional computer simulations I’ve seen are true, the more tooled up you are, the nastier and sooner your death. I’ll stick to the “comedy weapon that turns out to be surprisingly effective” thanks. ALWAYS pack a an alto sax
That photo does nothing but illustrate that an armed man is just as squishy and fragile as an unarmed one. Those helmets don’t look all that different from a bicycle helmet and while they probably cost ten times as much, they offer just as much protection. I.e. none unless you trip over your own rifle. Even the idea of a gun in public is backwards. It’s long range – anyone could walk right up to them, ask for a pamphlet and shove anything from fist to a brick or a knive in their face before they realised what was going on. What can you do about that? Shoot anyone who gets within 25 metres? (cops are always recruiting)
At any rate, Round Table Marcus is probably a lot safer than Commander Tactical and his crew, especially for the public. Although now I’m kind of curious what Blacksmith Marcus and his windy forge could make and how that might affect public safety…
Re: brucegee1962 (#5):
The correct answer, of course, is that you don your spike-covered chainmal, grab your mace and don’t stop swinging your mace until the horde thins out. Afterwards you and your comrades can have a good laugh at the expense of the poor fools who ran out of bullets three days into the apocalypse, whilst helping yourselves to their canned food.
@brucegee1962:
Just tell them you’ll follow the CDC guides if it ever comes up again. Probably healthier to tell them zombies don’t exist but if they’re that far in they won’t believe you anyway and they may as well learn some useful disaster survival techniques along the way. :)
The best way to survive the zombie apocalypse is to avoid going to football finals matches.
I think everyone needs to understand that in this context there are two symbolic meanings to the dress and weapons. The internal one is that the guns are props for their rapidly waning manhood and courage: ‘I need a weapon as a security blanket so I can feel strong and vital enough to go out in public and speak to people who frighten me’.
The second and external one: ‘We are old white farts who you would scarcely glance twice at but you have to take us seriously because we are the equivalent of two-year-olds holding loaded double-barrel shotguns with the safeties off. If you don’t placate us we will whine, cry, wet ourselves, and blow a holes in something or someone’.
The bad news is they are likely to get at least some of what they want. Unfortunately placating someone raising a stink is often cheaper, in the short run, than facing them down. Trump has a long history of profiting off forcing his way in as a middleman, fomenting chaos, and escaping out the back with the profits shortly before the whole deal collapses.
The good news is that some combination of mortality, age, mental infirmity, and legal restrictions of felons to carry firearms will markedly reduce their numbers in a few years. Something to look forward to, if we live long enough.
SImplistic analyses are not helpful. “Oh, they’re just a bunch of incels with mommy issues” or whatever is ridiculous and obviously wrong. If we continue to insist that the problem is simple, we’ll continue to buy simple solutions that don’t work.
I’m not particularly sympathetic to these guys, but they have been specifically targeted, for decades, by a very well run, very well funded, propaganda campaign. It would be astonishing if they *weren’t* wandering around Richmond showing off how little they know about guns. To unravel that work is going to be difficult.
@5 brucegee1962
“If you don’t have a gun, what will you do if there’s a zombie apocolypse?” That’s the kind of fantasy they live in.
Zombies are serious threat, it is just that researchers have started to develop tools.
“The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow zombies to be studied indirectly without risk to the interviewers”.
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/zombies.pdf
I dunno, but the men in that picture look like they’d wet themselves at the first sign of a zombie apocalypse. Did no one tell them that you’re not supposed to use real weapons doing cosplay or Larping or whatever they call dressing up and pretending nowadays? It’s only fun until someone gets hurt.
(You look a bit like Brave Sir Robin.)
I liked this comment over on the other blog, in the news aggregator thread:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/12/29/discuss-political-madness-all-the-time-13/comment-page-2/#comment-2027127
At some point someone will let off a bunch of fireworks at one of these rallies, and all these fools will shoot each other (and everyone else around)
dangerousbeans@#15:
At some point someone will let off a bunch of fireworks at one of these rallies, and all these fools will shoot each other (and everyone else around)
That’s what worries me too.
Note: the assumption is that by bringing their weapons, they make the place more dangerous than not. In their minds, since that sort of thing can’t happen, the world is exactly the opposite. They’re chucklefucks.
@Marcus #16:
Yeah… That’s because action films usually portray perfect situational awareness and assume a cool head under fire to such a degree that the only people who are ever portrayed as not having it are also portrayed as being nutters.
The films get this exactly backwards. The nutters are the ones who assume real life works like action films in those ways and I’ve met people who think that. And of course they like guns.
So in the real world, things are relatively peaceful here. Those people will have no call to use those weapons in an average year, much less an average day. And that lets them parade around and feel powerful with no immediate negative consequences in an environment with little danger to them. All while their actions and politics erode the relative peace they’re so keen to take advantage of.
To put it more bluntly: I feel like few of these posers and clowns would be volunteering to go into dangerous situations where they may need to use their weapons. The power trip aspect only works if you’re armed among a largely unarmed populace. The kind of bozos that walk around with assault rifles to make a point wouldn’t be too happy if they actually got their way and everyone had a gun.
@ Marcus
Yeah, especially guns. Guns are purely offensive weapons, you can’t use them in a defensive manner. So lugging one around is just saying “I intend to kill people”. That’s your only option if you intend to use it
lanir@#17:
To put it more bluntly: I feel like few of these posers and clowns would be volunteering to go into dangerous situations where they may need to use their weapons. The power trip aspect only works if you’re armed among a largely unarmed populace. The kind of bozos that walk around with assault rifles to make a point wouldn’t be too happy if they actually got their way and everyone had a gun.
Yes, they’d be the first to cry “foul!” if someone started sniping them with a high powered rifle from a distance. Their posturing is “The American Way of War” in a microcosm: they are trying to be scary and expect no resistance or that all their enemies are helpless. If it were otherwise, they wouldn’t be strutting around like that, nor would they be standing around in convenient groups (for very long). In other words, it’s a display of white privilege but there’s nothing behind it.
Perhaps some of the marchers have real military experience. But, if any of them do, I’ll bet a dollar that it’s the kind I described above: they’re going to be good at shooting helpless targets. Because anyone who’s ever fought someone who could shoot back, is not such a casual asswipe about weapons.
This is a point I’ve been thinking of a lot lately, and have not figured out how to approach it – but: during the civil war, white people had not only monopolized organized violence, they had monopolized the tools of violence and the techniques. As we saw during John Brown’s assault on Harper’s Ferry, the ex-slaves may have been enthusiastic, they were not skilled enough to make an effective fighting force. None of that pertains to the US, today. There are people of color who have killed more than that entire crowd of gun-toting dipshits, put together. They would not look at those assclowns and be intimidated, they’d shake their head and mutter “amateurs.” These white americans are living in a delusional world in which the situation is still 1861 and they don’t realize that world was literally gone by 1865. The post-reconstruction south tried to cling to its monopoly on violence but in fact, it was over. WWI, WWII, the Korean War, Vietnam, The Gulf War – all of those created cadres of people of color who were as experienced killers as their white counterparts. The white chucklefucks who dream of a race war don’t understand that the race war was going to be a debacle any time after Huey Newton made the Black Panther Party realize they could also access Mao’s source of power. You’ll notice that none of them are strutting around with weapons but that’s because they don’t like painting targets on their backs like these dipshits.
Marcus: Your comments inspired a response to a comment from Andrew Molitor above. I didn’t buy his argument. If anything, the propaganda he mentions goes the OTHER way in support of The Lost Cause. These are not libertarian rebels opposing The Man, as I read him as implying. They are racist clusterfucks offended that their race and gender no longer automatically guarantees them the status they think they deserve. They truly pine for 1877 (when Reconstruction was stabbed in the back with the help of conniving Northern politicians.
No sure I follow, bmiller@20. I didn’t say anything about the Lost Cause, and in general I was not referring to any specific thread of propaganda. Guns and gun right are a thoroughly propagandized issue in the USA, from all directions.
Andrew: I probably misinterpreted your main point, and Lost Cause was certainly my addition to the discussion. I thought there was an implication that these guys were all victims, and that is what I was reacting to. Of course, they are in a sense victims, but….
Are they victims? Well, I did not and do not have an answer.
They are surely the inevitable result of a well-funded campaign. While we cannot build Manchurian Candidates one-off, we can reliably produce a population of people who believe a certain thing, with pretty high reliability, as long as the “certain thing” lies within certain broad boundaries,
To what extent is a propagandized person complicit in their own damage? Not 0% but neither 100%, I feel confident asserting. How much, though, is a genuinely sticky problem, and one we have faced in the past without a good resolution.
I do think it worth noting that these people are the inevitable result of the NRA-led propaganda campaign, however much blame you wish to impute to them. I feel as if there is plenty of blame to go around, so we needn’t conserve.
Andrew:
Heh.
<snicker>
Either one is complicit, or is not.
John, your constant flirting is unseemly and fruitless. I am well satisfied with your mother, as she is with me.
Heh. Not only can you not dispute me, Andrew, you can’t even insult me.
(But sure, you’re into 87-year old women)
bmiller@#20:
They truly pine for 1877 (when Reconstruction was stabbed in the back with the help of conniving Northern politicians.
I doubt they are that thoughtful or educated. I’ve had some conversations with the local equivalents of those guys and their brains appear to be in ‘Neutral’ and they’re acting as a sort of circular pump for ideology: it comes at them, the swallow it, and shit it out, imparting a slight boost in velocity and a new vector. Nothing else happens.
I doubt they even know what “reconstruction” was; they just don’t want any commie gun-grabbers grabbing their guns because they have rights!
Marcus,
Black veterans were organizing before the Black Panthers. Look up Deacons of Defense and Justice.