you are saying that discrimination is a reason to arm yourself. people are being discriminated against. therefore, you are saying people should arm themselves. what about this is so hard to understand?

sigh

Alright, what WAS I supposed to take from your post if not “minorities should arm themselves”?

I will also note that you did not initially deny that you had been making such a recommendation.

You heavily implied that people of color, at least, should purchase firearms.

What? When the government tells you what your rights are that’s good and normal, but when a random person tells you what your rights are that’s fascism? Nothing about that makes any sense at all.

God. If you’re this deliberately dense, there’s no point in arguing with you. Enjoy whatever this shit is rattling around in your brain. Blocked.

My recommendation for people to arm themselves isn’t going to encourage to or dissuade anyone from doing so.

Then literally why say it?

they have a right to own them

Yeah, and maybe they shouldn’t. There’s lots of dangerous shit you have no right to possess. Guns should be in that category. And for the record, I don’t believe the government should be sending armed people to enforce shit either.

You sound like my mother.

Smart woman.

Yeah, if I’d literally said, “I speak for us.” All I said was, “You don’t speak for us.” Which is true. I never claimed to be speaking for anyone but myself.

I mean, obviously that’s not ideal. But even stopgap measures are better than doing nothing, and “let’s all just sit around until the socialist revolution and take no other measures to make things better” does not sit well with me.

Did I say I spoke for the entire class of people?

Because when you recommend that people arm themselves, you are talking to us too. Mental illness is much more common than you think, and becoming even more common as late capitalism exacerbates the conditions which produce some forms of mental illness. Moreover, mental illness can hit at any time. Someone who showed no symptoms of mental illness before can snap one day and commit suicide or murder their family. When you recklessly recommend that people buy guns, you are increasing the likelihood that someone will commit suicide or homicide, due to mental illness or otherwise.

I didn’t say they weren’t a vulnerable person, merely that even if they were they did not speak for us.

To be clear, it wasn’t “you have to do literally any paperwork” that stopped me. It was the sheer amount of paperwork and hoops you have to jump through in my state to get a gun.

If anyone is lying here, it’s you. Literally just google it.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2763812

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9715182/

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M21-3762

This is not about terminal illnesses. I too support euthanasia. This is about mental illness. The fact is that if more guns are purchased, more mentally ill people will die.

As someone who has attempted suicide many times, I have no idea what you’re talking about. The fact is that if you want to end your life reliably and quickly, guns are your best bet by far. As part of being suicidal, I did intensive research into what the best way to kill myself was. The universal conclusion was guns. My other attempts did not work, obviously, and not for lack of trying. It is much, much harder to kill yourself than most people realize. Besides, statistics show that having a gun in the home significantly increases the likelihood of suicide.

Gas stoves used to be a popular method of suicide. Do you know what happened when they stopped being made? Suicides went down. So yes, the method of suicide IS responsible for suicides. It’s not true that people will just find another method of killing themselves. Suicide is often undertaken on a whim and people who survive attempts often never wind up killing themselves.

As the kind of person who is targeted by rising fascism, I would prefer you did not speak for us. I am firmly against gun ownership. The statistics show that having a gun on you makes you less safe, not more.

People are numbers. Thinking you will be the exception to statistical realities is a fool’s errand. And it would be all well and good if the only people who suffered from the myriad gun deaths in this country were the people who bought the guns, but that’s not the case. They are also endangering their families and neighbors. It is just objectively true that you and the people around you become less safe, not more, the moment you buy a gun.

As someone who nearly killed myself with a gun and was only stopped because I was too depressed to fill out the paperwork to buy one, my life was directly saved by gun control. If I had lived in a state where buying a gun was easier, I would be dead. If I had still been living with my dad who owns guns, I would be dead. And I am part of a hated minority, just like the people you seek to protect. The statisical reality is that people like me are still more likely to kill ourselves with guns than to be killed by bigots, and moreover, that having a gun on you does not protect you from bigots. It only gives them something to take from you and use against you. Adding a gun to a situation only ever benefits the most violent and unhinged person in that situation.

You are statistically much more likely to–accidentally or intentionally–kill yourself with a gun than successfully defend yourself against an attacker. Arming minorities will just result in more dead minorities.

if MODERATORS are landed gentry, what the fuck does that make rich bastards like him?

tag yourself, i’m crisis actor

I already said that not everything Palestinians do to fight back is good or justified. I believe attacks on the Israeli government and military are at least potentially justified, but no, random Israeli citizens should not be killed. But even unjust violence on the part of the Palestinians does not change the position of victim and aggressor here, any more than the brutality that some Native American tribes exhibited against European colonists did. And what do the actions of surrounding nations have to do with Palestinians? Besides, I’d say the oppression of Palestinians goes far beyond what anyone could possibly consider reasonable safety measures. Frankly, you sound like an American conservative talking about the “invasion” at the southern border.

Genuine question, because I literally don’t know this: Is the green in Israeli-occupied territory natural green that comes from good tending, or is it artificial green like all the grass in Las Vegas? Should it be there or is it a massive waste of water turning a desert into an unnatural and unsustainable oasis? And if it’s the former, could the lack of green on Palestinian soil be because of the bombings and destruction of infrastructure/social frameworks that could support greenery?

And none of that matters even one single iota to a Palestinian child who’s just been shot in the chest. Go ahead, go up to a grieving Palestinian family and tell them, “Well, I’m oppressed too.” So what? So fucking what? Having been displaced and oppressed doesn’t magically make it okay for you to turn around and do the same thing to others.

I don’t have a problem with Jews living in Palestine if they don’t displace the Palestinians. But that’s exactly what they’re doing. Jews, like anyone else, should be free to live absolutely anywhere on Earth without fear. But they have no right to inflict terror on others. No amount of oppression could possibly justify that.

As for why recency of claim matters, I don’t think it’s necessarily that important, but I was making a point. However, you could make the argument in the case of Native Americans that they’re still quite tied to the lands they live(d) on and often care for those lands in a way colonizers don’t, and therefore their presence is important for environmental reasons. You can’t really make the same argument for Jews and Israel.

Hahaha, what? Native Americans don’t have anyone calling for their extermination? They’re literally still subject to a genocide, like many racial minorities in the US. They were involuntarily sterilized up until the 1970s, and they’re still treated brutally by the government (and especially police).

Why does any of that matter? Why does any of that make it okay to displace the people who currently live in a place? It’s their homeland, too. They have at least as much a right to it as Israelis.

Shit, I’m for landback for indigenous Americans, and even I don’t think non-indigenous people should be kicked off the land they currently live on and relocated. And Native Americans have a much more recent claim to American land than Israelis do to Palestine.