lol. My roommate fought in Iraq and doesn’t own a gun. She’s of the opinion that it’s stupid to own a gun and if there’s massive civil unrest she will just take someone’s gun from them because most people wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger.
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Most runners aren’t even carrying their wallet or cards, I can’t think of many dumber targets to try and attack. Someone fit and unlikely to have anything valuable on them, what a great mugging suspect!
I don’t get why you jog with your gun at all. I know people with guns and none of them carry them all the time. Can you explain very briefly why you do?
The only valuable thing he’s carrying is…a gun.
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Women joggers are sometimes the target of sexual assaults. You’re not a target. Just run broke.
Liquored up… 
Yeah I’m sure I’ve mentioned that many times throughout this thread and while you’re making shit up why not add Cactus is racist you disingenuous rat who couldn’t make a salient point to save your lying soul
I don’t believe in gods, but if there were one, I’d pray that you’re all still laughing at me in a few months. Because if you’re not… Chances are you won’t be in good shape. I’d like to suggest at least learning how to be a prepper for those who don’t already know, but I’m sure that would go over about as well as responsible gun ownership. You’d soon ridicule me for having silly fantasies again. I don’t think anyone deserves misery and death, but being this level of ignorant on just how fragile civil society is, makes many here almost worthy if it happens. I truly hope I’m wrong, internet is still functioning and you’ll be enjoying some Jerry Garcia ice cream from the comfort of your air conditioned homes when I return in a few months for more ridicule
Have you not seen Psycho?
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Would explain why he doesn’t ever want to have to use it
In his imaginary world, when you were being attacked Cactus would have been jogging by at exactly that second with his Great Equalizer. With his Steely Jaw and Rugged Good Looks, he would brandish his potent phallic symbol and wave it mightily in front of the Black Guy, sorry I mean Bad Guy, saving the day.
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Yeah… Guns raise the stakes on a bad situation almost exponentially. That’s the big reason US police kill so many people.
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So I had a sales manager at a car dealership in my late teens early 20s die in a murder suicide… He was the shooter. He came home to his wife in bed with another man, so he killed them before turning the gun on himself. I’m absolutely certain three people would be alive today if he hadn’t had access to a tool for making humans dead. It was very a very understandable act on his part too. There’s no chance he could have done the same thing with a knife or blunt instrument either… He wasn’t a big dude by any stretch of the imagination.
I’m sorry Cactus but I don’t know anyone who would be alive today if they had just had a gun. Your gun is the single most dangerous thing in your home to yourself and your family. I know for a fact I don’t trust myself or my wife to have a device that makes dying an easy snap decision around. Our mental health just is nowhere near that good.
I’ll freely admit that my thinking on guns was largely shaped by that event and the numerous shootings that took place in the neighborhoods I grew up in because of the incredibly toxic combination of the war on drugs and the 2nd amendment.
Having a gun in a moment of extreme anger/fear is like having gasoline around a lit match. It’s true that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but it’s also pretty accurate to say that guns are a huge catalyst to violence being a heck of a lot more final. Humans are violent animals and making the act of taking a life so easy has major ramifications. It’s also got major ramifications when you feel sad and decide to kill yourself. The success rate on suicide attempts with firearms are massively massively higher than other methods. In fact if I ever get some painful terminal illness and decide to take the easy way out I’m buying a gun. A bullet to the head is a pretty humane way to go compared to the other popular suicide methods, and if I’ve really made up my mind to end it I don’t want to have to work up the nerve to do it a second time. Hopefully by the time I’m ready to leave we’ll live in a country humane enough to let me be put to sleep by an anesthesiologist. If not it’s a larger caliber steel jacketed exit for me.
I’ve posted in another thread about a moment in my life where I was angry and scared enough to try to really hurt someone. I guarantee you that if I had a firearm as a terrified 6th grader with murder in his heart instead of a brick that kid would have died.
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Well yeah but you’re clearly not as balanced as cactus. Dude is a model of mental stability
I basically agree with everything here. Guns turn altercations into homicides, and we bear the costs in ways beyond the victims themselves. I worked with a ton of people, often kids (12+) in maximum security who - minus two minutes of gun-adjacent impulsivity - likely could have lived productive lives. Now, as a college professor and private-practice clinician, I’m constantly fielding fears about school shootings and domestic violence.
Our graveyards, jails, hospitals, mental health clinics, and national debt are all victims of gun proliferation.
Not sure if this has been discussed as it could go in a few threads but since this one’s been active and I thought having a gun would allow you to defend yourself from the government here it goes.
Police barge in your house at midnight attempting to serve a warrant on a man that (1) doesn’t live there and (2) is already in fucking custody and (3) shoot and kill the woman living there. Her boyfriend thought someone was breaking into their house as it was after midnight so he grabbed his licensed gun and shot at the intruders. And to put the cherry on the cake the cops arrested the bf for attempted murder.
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1260167836724539392?s=21
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There are plenty of other countries with significant amounts of racism (although I’ll entertain the argument that we are worse on this, it feels unlikely to me… particularly wrt Europe) where police violence is drastically lower. It’s basically impossible to disarm the police without reducing the number of firearms in private hands down to licensed hunters basically.
I’ll agree that institutional racism is an aggravating factor on police violence, and I’ll also agree that the victims of police violence are disproportionately minorities, I just don’t know if it’s close to right to divert the conversation from access to guns when we’re talking about police shootings.
I strongly suspect that even if you took out every minority killed by the police US law enforcement would still be killing way more people per capita than other police forces. That’s because cops are trained to never not be worried the other person might have a gun and might kill them. That video that gets shown to cops in training of that traffic stop where that police officer was murdered wasn’t about minority suspects I don’t think. If anything Cactus is a poster child for why cops should be at least semi nervous around white males, they are often armed, and those that are armed often have deranged fantasies about armed confrontations running through their minds.
Per million population of the corresponding group. The bottom one is per million all groups. Whites aren’t present because they most likely are at below 1 per million of all races/ages… except probably for 20-30 year old white men.
Race and age cohort are the two things most predictive of getting killed by the police in the US. Probably the two most predictive things of being murdered full stop fwiw.
One of the things you have to remember about the US is that we basically still have apartheid here. It’s less extreme than it was in South Africa, but we also really never did much of anything about it.
I don’t think they left out any group on purpose but only included the top 5 groups based on the groupings they picked for their data. The graphic would be big if they include all groups especially since their data has a lot of different groupings. I didn’t search for the source but it does have a source on the image, looks like the image might be from an aljazeera article
https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1262826882980028416
Good old media doing its best to make murder victims the real criminals.