Quite possibly the most astute thing I’ve seen on 4chan.
Green texts that reach the outside are usually pretty astute, political comment, alternative humor or sharp social commentary. See !4chan@lemmy.world
Exactly, no one is sharing the deranged off the wall shit on here because anything that doesn’t fit the dominant narrative on Lemmy is pretty quickly downvoted.
That said, I did upvote this post lol
Also Republicans: “this violence is the result of us not beiing Christian enough as a nation”
Also also Republicans: saying the above while being from a state in the union that’s both one of the most Christian and most violent in the nation.
American terrorists are Christians. No matter what evangelicals and other say. They’ll tell you about the terrorist, “he wasn’t a REAL Christian” but he was. Instead of fixing the cancer in their religion, Christians will brush away every bad person as “not real” so they can keep ignoring the problem.
The shooters are commiting the same sins that their church leaders commit. Pride, greed, wrath.
I’ve heard “good Christians” hand wave their responsibility for bad behavior by saying things like “we’re all sinners” or “I’ll have to confess later!”
I guess that latter one is Catholic, but it’s all the same.
Religion was a necessary framework for transmitting moral knowledge in a time when people didn’t have a stable foundation. Centuries ago. It’s absurdly flawed and grows communities that are extremely vulnerable to corruption and radicalization.
It’s time to move past religion.
Ah but you see, statisticians are part of the conspiracy. Anyone with an education who can actually read and interpret trends is just in on it! I haven’t personally experienced a mass shooting, therefore my state is the safest in the nation!
Either that or we simply aren’t Christian enough to ban all other religions yet and God tests his most faithful, yadda yadda
God bless America everyone!
In Germany we have on average more privately owned guns than most US states. Still… we had just TWO mass shooting in 20 years.
Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08GbT5ZEs08
In short: You have to qualify to own a gun. Assholes don’t get guns. And by fullfilling the laws to own a gun you actually earn respect in your community.
I am member of a German gun club where the local population, the regional police and a couple of NATO soldiers train. It took me nearly one year before I even was allowed to touch a loaded gun, all through my 14th year I was basically just taught how to clean and repair my rifle, how to handle it, how to NOT use it, only then how to use it. And after ten months I was finally given a single bullet.
I am now 30. Nowadays my family owns and shares a Sig Sauer 200, locked inside the gun club. Everyone except my Mum shots around 25 bullets per month, once a year the whole gun club repeats basic training which includes mental health checks.
And after basic training we have special events. For example six years ago a local NATO garrison was massively downsized and so they offered us to use up their overaged surplus ammunition. I got to shot pretty much anything from 9mm to 7,62mm for basically free - we collected money for the victims of a local house fire so I put €50 into the collection.
Did I ever shot a gun outside the gun club?
Actually: Yes. When I was in the US I joined my Uncle on duck hunt. He was like “ok, hold the big rifle while I show you how to shot a duck using 12gd bird shot.” - he misses, I aim and shot the duck mid-air with a .308. I didn’t know ducks could explode, but yes, they can. I paid with a badly aching shoulder, I wasn’t used to those powerful cadridges any more. He looked angry at me and grumbled the plan was to eat the duck not turn them into fine mist. The other three ducks he left for me to shot and wondered where I had learned to operate a gun like that.
When I told him a US lieutenant taught me to operate exaclty the same rifle in my gun club he was like “WTF?”. I might mention the lieutenant immediatelly settled down in my town after his duty was over because he liked Bavaria so much and wanted his kids to grow up in a less crazy nation.
I appreciate your perspective on this. What you describe is about more than just ‘assholes don’t get guns’, although that is a crucial aspect. The way your family owns just ‘a’ gun, trained for a long while before shooting, respect for following gun laws. This is the opposite of the usual experience around guns in the US. We as a culture in the US are careless and wanton with guns in general from what I’ve seen.
I was shown how to use a gun when I was 6 years old, my parents were responsible though so it was only an air pistol, but heavy duty, not airsoft. We had a shotgun, 9mm pistol and a .22 rifle in the house never locked up, didn’t even have a safe to lock them if my dad wanted to, and the shotgun was often stored loaded. When people here get together to shoot, it’s not odd to hand a loaded gun to someone that has never been to a range or even seen one fired before. Plenty of people are much safer than this, but I would guess my experience is the more common from what I’ve seen.
From what I can tell, most gun safety training in the US is a single sentence: Always treat it like it’s loaded, and keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
What is the penalty if you are caught with a gun you are not qualified to have?
Edit: “Not Qualified” is not the right wording. Because Qualification only plays a secondary role. It is all about the licence.
In Germany carrying a gun without the right licence would be illegal possesion of a firearm.
But wait, even if you have a licence you can get fined for illegal transport and handling of a firearm.
Carrying a conceiled small sidearm without a special permit is big trouble. Transporting a firearm without a locked enclosure and not seperated from the ammunition is also a serious offence. At home you need a locked container. All in all it got so complicated that my Dad stopped storing guns at home. He sold one and put the other into the gun club. The club is really helpful, we can lend legal transport containers and for guns which we are not allowed to move in public they offer transport services for a small fee, usually that means a police officer moves the gun in his free time using legal transport containers in exchange for a beer.
Classic case: Someone dies and you find a loaded pistol in his inheritance. You bring it to the police. You did three offences: Carrying a conceiled firearm in public, carrying a firearm without proper container, carrying a loaded firearm. The legal way would have been: Calling the police to retrieve the firearm. To be honest, the state attourney usually closes those cases rather quick as “minor incident without criminal intent” but you still get a serious talk.
There are some exceptions for old historic muzzleloaders which are often fired at historic events without bullets. We don’t have those so I don’t know barely anything about those rules.
Absolute bullshit, nobody is shooting a duck mid-air with a rifle. Your story is fake and lame.
I’d be surprised if it could even happen legally, there’s no reason to have a rifle with you to duck hunt. If DNR caught you you’d get a ticket for poaching ( you have a permit for ducks but you are out with gear to hunt deer ) and they’d keep the guns. Yes, even on private land.
You shot a 308 round into the air? Isn’t that unsafe? If you missed the bullet could go anywhere.
There have been at least 2 mass shootings in Germany since March a simple Google search reveals. 🤔
Shouldn’t “mass shootings” include “mass”?
I mean a shooting with 0 dead surely doesn’t count as such and three people from a youth gang isn’t exactly a typical mass shooting either.
If you’d actually received as much safety training as you claim, you never would have taken a shot at an elevated target with a center-fire rifle.
The target wasn’t elevated. We were elevated. I tried to explain that the duck was just taking speed to take off but honestly I don’t know the right English word for that maneuver. And as I hinted, I had fired the exact same rifle two years earlier at our gun club several times. Also, I paid with an aching shoulder for my recklessness.
Wow, it’s like the third recent green text where anon is talking about real world stuff in a grown-up way.
So anon turned out all right in the end?!
While we should have better access to mental (and physical) health care, that’s probably not going to fix the too frequent “Someone knocked on my door so i shot them” murders that happen too often.
It also won’t solve the “and then the police shot him” murders.
There are a lot of things wrong with the US and its dominant culture. I’d say most of the blame and the blood is on conservatives. Which makes a kind of sense - if you have a shitty system and you are fighting to keep it as is, you’re probably a shitty person with shitty takes making the world worse.
If someone just thanos snapped away the conservatives, or at least the authoritarian subset of them, many problems would vanish overnight.
Healthcare is unobtainable for most, housing is now a pipe dream for most, prosperity falling apart, working until you die. “We need to incarcerate all the drug addicts and kill the crazy people”.
If only the mass shooters would just target the rich instead of the general public, but I agree with you. A Thanos snap on a good chunk of the conservatives would fix a ton of shit.
Healthcare is unobtainable for most,
What do you mean?
housing is now a pipe dream for most,
What do you mean?
I guess it’s not technically unobtainable, it just puts you into financial ruin to utilize healthcare. I call that unobtainable if you’re trying to be financially responsible.
When I look at housing and I see that it has to consume %50 or more of people’s annual budget, that means young people need to earn around 115-150k/yr in order to become homeowners, and that’s only after banks have shifted the goal posts. Young professionals are also much more likely to be saddled with 30-65k of student debt.
When you combine that with the inflation spike that happened last year, and the rising rents, there’s many people earning only $25/hr but rent is $2k/month.
Just fucking good times. The next spike will probably be the suicide rates.
The “funny” thing about the police shooting people for having guns is that it essentially means Americans don’t actually have the right to own/carry guns. They only have the right to buy them.
Even if you don’t have a gun it’s a problem, if you are are stopped by police for a random check^1. You are asked for your license and registration papers. You move your hand 1 cm to get it, cop suddenly realizes you could theoretically have a gun, then decides to shoot you first because self defense.
The possibility that literally everyone can have a firearm makes living there so much more dangerous compared to not having the option of shooting back whenever it would be needed for actual self defense.
^1 probability for random police checks has an inverse proportionality to the whiteness of one’s skin color.
Police cannot shoot you (legally) for carrying, now whether they follow the law is a different matter
They just claim they feared for their life and now they’re declared not guilty. There is no specific law saying they can just shoot you for having a gun, but there’s plenty of other laws, precedents etc. making it absolutely legal for them to shoot you for having a gun.
We all know if that happened the democrats would fuck it up. They’d stop everything they were working on and set up conservation efforts for conservatives. They’d have musicians raise awareness of the unprecedented threat the conservatives are under and tell everyone where they can donate to those left griftless. The real shitty thing is that without the Republicans around to fuck it up it’ll probably actually work.
Oh I long for the day we can tour a historical conservative town reenactment.
“Over here, notice the giant American flag, and even more prominent Trump 2024 flag. On the other side, a comically large truck requiring a ladder to enter, believe it or not, these were often chosen for low fuel efficiency and modified for extra pollution. Up ahead we see a teenager who has just been kicked out of their parent’s house for being gay, a house containing a meth lab, six churches, and a neighbor wielding an AR-15 ‘just in case’.”
