So this mass shooter hit enough people that he got an accurate representation of the town’s population.
If the left was as cutthroat as Trumpers, social media would be filled with images of the Highland Park shooter highlighting his support of Trump.
They already are though?
Shockingly, conservatives are not convinced and media is reporting both that he’s a trumper and a leftist like in ~all of these high profile shootings.
It’s not showing up for me on Twitter. Instead, I see a lot of people saying his name shouldn’t be mentioned and all media buried, which I think is a misunderstanding of what drives people like this.
There’s tens of thousands of posts of him draped in a Trump flag and at Trump rallies just as there are tens of thousands of posts calling him Antifa. This happens every shooting. It is not a winnable social media propaganda war, people will find support for their beliefs no matter what.
It doesn’t help that conservatives feel absolutely no need to stick to reality based posts.
Right, nor that low information readers get flooded with info from both sides and just decide either truth in the middle or everyone lying. But main point is just like yeah, that already happens on social media and progressive politicians like AOC have been screaming these guys are Trump offshoots for months. All screaming it does is hold serve.
Yeah the false alarm panics that make people scramble with no actual shooter are probably the best thing that can possibly happen to us on this issue. It scares the shit out of a bunch of people, who get as close of a simulation as possible to the real thing, but no lives are lost and very few injuries - bumps, bruises, skinned knees, maybe a few broken wrists/ankles from falling down or getting stepped on.
The only way this ever changes is when so many people are affected by it that there’s a mass of outraged people that is big enough to battle the mass of outraged NRA members and gun nutters.
Note I said if, not when. We’re doing like double digit actual mass shootings on summer holiday weekends now. It’s a matter of time, but it could be decades, and we may not have a democracy anymore.
no change can happen when 30%+ of the electorate would gladly send their kid to school in kevlar with armed teachers rather than a cloth face
mask
Much of the world population has to deal with the threat of violence at any time. Much of the US population has had to deal with the threat for ~ever, with a meaningful portion of that violence coming from state actors. We aren’t that special, this is probably just the way things are going forward.
The point isn’t to change the minds of conservatives, it’s to increase polarization by inflaming non-conservatives.
The public is already overwhelmingly anti-gun, you don’t really need to waste time convincing them than teenagers shouldn’t have AR-15s.
Nah, “THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS HAS GONE LITERAL!”
If anything is going to move the needle, you’d think attacks by non-left wingers on apple pie and cheeseburger, Americana style events would do it. But nothing’s going to move the needle.
Non-conservatives aren’t inflamed because they are being flooded with both Crimo is a Trumper and Crimo is an ANTIFA. The fact that you didn’t think this was happening on Twitter is a testament to how little this is going to accomplish.
The public is overwhelmingly for Roe v Wade.
The public is overwhelmingly for at least a public option for health care.
The public is overwhelmingly for higher taxes on corporations and super-rich people.
And yet here we are.
I don’t think it’s quite correct to think of them as Trump off-shoots. At their core, a lot of them seem to be deep anti-establishmentarians who have latched onto Trump as the most viable vehicle for their angst and rage.
The issue isn’t convincing people of the proper policy here, it’s:
A) Convincing them to vote on that policy as a priority
B) Making them mad as hell about it until they do A
Like my father thinks our gun laws are stupid, thinks it’s obvious that assault weapons should be banned and there should be enhanced background checks, would be fine giving up all guns to make this stop even though that’s not like his #1 choice, but he’s undecided and leaning Republican this fall. He’s more concerned about inflation, the economy, and having a divided government to put a check on the leftys. He gets off on voting in divided government in the midterms.
When this came up after Uvalde I flat out told him that having the right views on this is completely useless if he doesn’t vote accordingly. Like, sorry, you’re not getting brownie points from me anymore for telling me you’re for banning assault weapons then voting for the party that wants to hand them out to teachers like candy. You’re just admitting you know what’s right and that other shit is more important to you than little kids getting shot to hell in school.
That led to awkward silence and a subject change to sports.
Largely describing my parents as well. Especially that last sentence.
The type of gun used in the Highland Park July 4th parade mass shooting that killed six and wounded was a high-powered rifle “similar to an AR-15”, police said at a briefing on Tuesday.
Continues to seem weird (but maybe only to me?) that they won’t be specific about this. Maybe it’s just similar to weird.