In 2021, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a “constitutional carry” law permitting anyone 21 years and older to openly carry a handgun without having to apply for a license.
Where are the 1,200 Christian churches in Nashville on this insane gun legislation?
Silent - just like they are with Nashville's 1,200 payday loan sharks - one on every block all over town.
Nashville is a wretched, racist, booze-saturated sewer, crawling with bedbugs selling itself as tech-savvy "Music City"....A Bible-thumping redneck hell. Where are Nashville's 10,000 songwriters who might shed some light? 9,999 of them are trying to get a cut on Toby Keith's next album where he'll sing about the glory of getting legs blown off in Iraq, padding his billionaire bank account to finance his health-wrecking restaurants and their deep-fried, chocolate-covered alcohol-infused twinkies. If you want to buy groceries in Nashville you're never far from a Dollar Tree - stocked with 10,000 items all containing liver-killing obesity-generating High Fructose Corn Sweetener. Go to a Walmart in Middle Tennessee and watch 90% of the customers waddle around with 200 extra pounds of fat if they are not draped onto a motorized wheelchair. Tennessee isn't the Third World - it is The Fourth World where all the Capitalists are slowly killing their customers. Thump that Bible Tennesseans - you've been worked.
Well. I can attest to culture shock a few years ago seeing a half-pound chocolate brownie on a dessert listing. Ice cream on the side. As outsiders we were appalled by how many people were obese before middle age. A striking contrast with beach photographs with people in swimsuits taken in the ‘60s.
Personally I suspect that immigrants with healthier eating habits and tasty cuisines haven’t reached the South in significant numbers yet. The traditional cuisine is heavy on fats, salt, and sugar. ( My mother knew many delicious ways to use sugar, but she associated garlic with foreigners from the wrong countries.)
I stand by my statement made after your first article on the Tennessee school shooting: We have turned into a nation that kills its children. We can no longer blame this just on those who support Trump. We had a ban on assault guns under Clinton in 1994. Ten years later, Congress refused to renew the ban. And, the ban worked.
The staggering hypocrisy, the staggering selfishness, the staggering stupid stubbornness of clinging to guns under a gross misinterpretation of the right to arms in the constitution, Republicans prove over and over they have no business ever anywhere making laws for this country, not at any level of government. I grew up in gun country in the country in Alabama in the 40s and 50s. Apparently we didn't have this new special insanity and my brother and I knew as little children DO NOT TOUCH THE GUNS. I remember the warning to this day and I know well how to use guns. This is never going to end. I'm glad I'm old and have no children. I am however sad to the maximum degree just the same.
I grew up down a dirt road and got access to the family firearms when I was 13 or so. I'd have loved an AR-15 (if they'd been invented yet) or a Browning M1919 medium machine gun or a girlfriend, but I couldn't get any of them. I was reduced to drooling over the gun ads in sporting magazines and soft-core porn in other "sporting" magazines. And I kept real quiet about all of it because the adults in my life regarded such fascination as proof of punk adolescence and I didn't want to be regarded that way. And then I grew up and had the money to buy a Weatherby rifle - but didn't even think about it - and spent the money on my girlfriends. So I get the fascination and the sexiness and the desire to own and shoot, but I profoundly thank the adults who thought my sweaty hands were better employed caressing a shovel handle than a gunstock.
I would be willing to bet you are a whole lot younger than I am. Guns were everywhere in rural N. Alabama, of course. Everybody had one and the kids had them after they were well trained in all the rules. I know some of the boys as they got older kind of wanted to have the best one, but it wasn't an obsession until years later. I feel like I grew up in a simple storybook time now. Everything was safe and easy because everybody always knew where we were at all times and there was no pressure. Gone forever that time.
I'm 76 and grew up rural in extreme NE Ohio, the least populous part of the state. Every family had tools - axes and pitchforks and shotguns and shovels, hammers and saws and rifles and wrenches and hunting dogs. Some things needed to be nailed and some things needed to be sawed and some things needed to be shot - no big deal over any of it. I didn't get into any trouble because we were so isolated there was little trouble to get into, and the nearest police were twenty miles away. My parents did not always know exactly where I was when I wasn't working, but then I seldom went more than two miles away because I was on foot and wanted my meals. io9809o-ppp
Oh, my goodness. I love you!! I am 79 so we're of the same vintage, just different parts of the country and our mindsets apparently very similar. My little friends were scattered all over on farms. We lived in town. 200 people. My father had the drug store, a farm and us. You are right, guns were for hunting food and there was no waste. We did not just go kill things for fun. It was never fun to me anyway but I grew up in a culture of hunters so I did understand it. If you lived in those isolated rural communities, you knew how to do a lot of stuff because you needed to know how. There weren't plumbers and electricians and handymen all over the place. You needed to be somewhat self sufficient and if you weren't, people wondered what was wrong with you.
I didn't grow up with guns (as I've attested to and why) but my husband did..and he could never understand how anyone could use guns this way. He used to say, "When I was growing up, there was one rule I was taught and had drummed into me: NEVER point a gun at another human being." He was brought up to respect a gun and its' power, and when we did have guns, he treated them with a lot more respect than some of these shooters have. He hunted with them, and I even went with him on one occasion-but he didn't get a deer. (I was bored silly.)
He knew what guns can do, and these people just watch TV and think "I can do that too!" because they're never taught to respect another human being.
This was EXACTLY my childhood experience. When I was old enough and big enough physically, my dad taught me how to hold it, how to pull the trigger, when and where it was appropriate and the Major Number 1 rules was NEVER POINT A GUN AT A HUMAN BEING. I had a little 410 and then he handed me his powerful rifle and it kicked my shoulder so hard and left such a bruise, I never wanted to pick one up again. I shot one animal one time and felt like a murderer. Not for me but I do know how to use them. With great respect and seldom. I think it's good to learn as a young person the destruction they wield. They kill things. And our guns were never locked up. They didn't need to be.
Exactly the same here - was taught to never point a gun at another human, loaded or unloaded. And yes, they have absolutely no use except to kill things. When I quit hunting , I quit guns.
Sadly, you can be sure that none of these bills will be stopped or even slowed by today's tragedy. Just watch, the next bill will mandate arming teachers, if not school children. Because good guys with guns and all that bullshit.
It seems republican congressman Andy Ogles is the representative for that district and his 2021 Christmas card featured his family all holding guns. On a Christmas Card for crying out loud.
Now. of course, he's giving out the standard Republican mantra-thoughts and prayers. These oafs never get the message.
The gun business in America is a blood-soaked racket driven by blood-soaked money. (Mostly) Republican legislators have proven over and over again that they are totally capable of turning off their imaginations, putting their tiny hearts in liquid nitrogen, tuning out the suffering, blather blather thoughts and prayers, and just taking the money, taking the money, taking the money. Until voters rebel en masse, see these pro-gun legislators as an integral part of the butchery machine, and start throwing them out of office, the horror of gun violence will continue. Personally, I think it's time for someone to get hold of some genuine AR-15 crime scene photos and silently line the streets around the private homes of pro-gun pro-AR-15 pro-child-slaughter legislators, silently holding color enlargement with signs like "Your neighbor Rep/Senator Grisly Bastardo voted for more of this."
Emergency room physicians may not be able to tell you how many grains of propellent are in any given bullet, but they can tell you quite a lot about what the slugs do to human flesh and bone.
Hugh - you _should_ be spared the pictures, and so should I. But we aren’t the people who need to see those horrifying images, because we can already imagine the damage that these weapons do, well enough. It’s the stubbornly closed-minded pro-gun Republicans who really need the direct shock of an up-close, vivid confrontation with the horrible pain and real human destruction these weapons cause. They should not be allowed to turn away from the slaughter they enable. They need to be confronted, up close with no escape, with what happens to children’s and adults’ bodies when *they* are trapped up close with no escape, with a deranged person who walks into a school, church, workplace, store, music festival, or other location, with a loaded AR-15 he or she was able to obtain *because* those lawmakers voted for lax gun laws, and against sensible regulations to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, or failed to ban the sale, manufacture, and possession of assault weapons.
i have no idea what republicans are obsessed with except that they are b*tshite crazy, in my humble opinion. i suggest they move, maybe afghanistan where women seem to fill the roles that most republicans want women to fill (silent, not seen, barefoot and pregnant) and where they can have so many guns they'll need a large garage. and just think, everyday they can play shoot em up. a sane nation will be better off without them. i remember in the 60's it was "america love it or leave it" well turn about is fair play. republicans, love america or leave it...
Well, one Marcia Blackburn is now asking for prayers so I am sure the parent# of the dead kids will be comforted and, likely to continue voting for Republicans who seem more committed to preserving gun rights than human ones. And, if any of these parents might disagree they need to be reassured “sacrifices are necessary” right?
Yes, I agree with you. It looks like home schooling is becoming the only choice for school children to learn and remain safe but to most working Americans this is not an option. The irresponsibility and hubris of the Tennessee governor is shocking but sadly his views are the views of many red states legislatures and others.I used to think that eventually something could be done about these school massacres like I thought about how Big Tobacco was eventually reckoned with but now I don't know. This has gone on for so long that the only way I can think of it slowing down is if people don't go out, children stay home, less money is spent out of the home and the country suffers economic damage.
Let the AI’s take over. They’ll do a better job than the humans. If, as in Cameron’s first “Terminator”, they decide that the situation would be improved if the humans were eliminated, at least the AI will have thought it through.
I watched a news program shortly after this happened-there were two women being interviewed-one of them had been in a mass shooting before, and beside her was a friend from another country who was simply irate-
"In NO OTHER COUNTRY does this happen. My friend has already been involved in one mass shooting-we're traveling and now she's witness to another here. How many people have done this? Why does your country allow it?"
Goddamn good question.
Why does our country allow it?
By now we're approaching having had as many people killed in all the wars as mass shootings and other gun violence.
The Onion just updated their headline again: with the name of the latest mass shooting:
It says something when more kids are killed by guns than car accidents.
The “bold step” of banning assault rifles brought down the number of deaths in mass shootings, but not gun deaths overall, so that convinced some that they “didn’t work,” and should not be renewed. Which suited gun manufacturers.
I think what happened here was a group of pranksters loaded up all the GOP legislators in busses and took them to the local insane asylum and then took all the residents from the insane asylum and inserted them as legislators. But in all seriousness how did these fanatics get elected in the first place? Did they pretend to be normal when campaigning? But if elected by voters that wanted to see these types of law passed then they deserve what they got. I just feel sorry for the normal voters that want nothing to do with this madness.
I guess so, Judith, well when people have guns in stores, restaurants ans bars (especially bars) minor disagreements and scuffles will result in deaths. It will be the wild West all over again but with AR15's instead of six shooters. .Although in the real wild West the visitors to many towns had to check their guns at the edge of town and pick them up when they left I guess the city authorities had more sense than they do today.
If there remains any doubt that modern America is living through a national psychosis, and I don’t think there is any doubt, it’s this gut-churning latest school shooting in Tennessee juxtaposed on the guns-for-everyone everywhere bills going through the legislature. Obviously, all the paranoia and fear being stoked by the reichwing has infected the brains of the deplorables, especially in the legislature. It’s now more important to make sure everyone can defend themselves against the evil government rather than guaranteeing children their childhood and lives. The children are obviously disposable to that greater cause. Add Tennessee to that list of no-visit states.
Where are the 1,200 Christian churches in Nashville on this insane gun legislation?
Silent - just like they are with Nashville's 1,200 payday loan sharks - one on every block all over town.
Nashville is a wretched, racist, booze-saturated sewer, crawling with bedbugs selling itself as tech-savvy "Music City"....A Bible-thumping redneck hell. Where are Nashville's 10,000 songwriters who might shed some light? 9,999 of them are trying to get a cut on Toby Keith's next album where he'll sing about the glory of getting legs blown off in Iraq, padding his billionaire bank account to finance his health-wrecking restaurants and their deep-fried, chocolate-covered alcohol-infused twinkies. If you want to buy groceries in Nashville you're never far from a Dollar Tree - stocked with 10,000 items all containing liver-killing obesity-generating High Fructose Corn Sweetener. Go to a Walmart in Middle Tennessee and watch 90% of the customers waddle around with 200 extra pounds of fat if they are not draped onto a motorized wheelchair. Tennessee isn't the Third World - it is The Fourth World where all the Capitalists are slowly killing their customers. Thump that Bible Tennesseans - you've been worked.
Well. I can attest to culture shock a few years ago seeing a half-pound chocolate brownie on a dessert listing. Ice cream on the side. As outsiders we were appalled by how many people were obese before middle age. A striking contrast with beach photographs with people in swimsuits taken in the ‘60s.
Personally I suspect that immigrants with healthier eating habits and tasty cuisines haven’t reached the South in significant numbers yet. The traditional cuisine is heavy on fats, salt, and sugar. ( My mother knew many delicious ways to use sugar, but she associated garlic with foreigners from the wrong countries.)
I'll worry about what drag queens are wearing when I see one wearing an AK-15.
And using K-Y Gun Oil - slicker than Hoppes.
I stand by my statement made after your first article on the Tennessee school shooting: We have turned into a nation that kills its children. We can no longer blame this just on those who support Trump. We had a ban on assault guns under Clinton in 1994. Ten years later, Congress refused to renew the ban. And, the ban worked.
Problem is, we are significantly more polarized now than then. 😡
The staggering hypocrisy, the staggering selfishness, the staggering stupid stubbornness of clinging to guns under a gross misinterpretation of the right to arms in the constitution, Republicans prove over and over they have no business ever anywhere making laws for this country, not at any level of government. I grew up in gun country in the country in Alabama in the 40s and 50s. Apparently we didn't have this new special insanity and my brother and I knew as little children DO NOT TOUCH THE GUNS. I remember the warning to this day and I know well how to use guns. This is never going to end. I'm glad I'm old and have no children. I am however sad to the maximum degree just the same.
And angry. I am very, very angry.
I grew up down a dirt road and got access to the family firearms when I was 13 or so. I'd have loved an AR-15 (if they'd been invented yet) or a Browning M1919 medium machine gun or a girlfriend, but I couldn't get any of them. I was reduced to drooling over the gun ads in sporting magazines and soft-core porn in other "sporting" magazines. And I kept real quiet about all of it because the adults in my life regarded such fascination as proof of punk adolescence and I didn't want to be regarded that way. And then I grew up and had the money to buy a Weatherby rifle - but didn't even think about it - and spent the money on my girlfriends. So I get the fascination and the sexiness and the desire to own and shoot, but I profoundly thank the adults who thought my sweaty hands were better employed caressing a shovel handle than a gunstock.
I would be willing to bet you are a whole lot younger than I am. Guns were everywhere in rural N. Alabama, of course. Everybody had one and the kids had them after they were well trained in all the rules. I know some of the boys as they got older kind of wanted to have the best one, but it wasn't an obsession until years later. I feel like I grew up in a simple storybook time now. Everything was safe and easy because everybody always knew where we were at all times and there was no pressure. Gone forever that time.
I'm 76 and grew up rural in extreme NE Ohio, the least populous part of the state. Every family had tools - axes and pitchforks and shotguns and shovels, hammers and saws and rifles and wrenches and hunting dogs. Some things needed to be nailed and some things needed to be sawed and some things needed to be shot - no big deal over any of it. I didn't get into any trouble because we were so isolated there was little trouble to get into, and the nearest police were twenty miles away. My parents did not always know exactly where I was when I wasn't working, but then I seldom went more than two miles away because I was on foot and wanted my meals. io9809o-ppp
Oh, my goodness. I love you!! I am 79 so we're of the same vintage, just different parts of the country and our mindsets apparently very similar. My little friends were scattered all over on farms. We lived in town. 200 people. My father had the drug store, a farm and us. You are right, guns were for hunting food and there was no waste. We did not just go kill things for fun. It was never fun to me anyway but I grew up in a culture of hunters so I did understand it. If you lived in those isolated rural communities, you knew how to do a lot of stuff because you needed to know how. There weren't plumbers and electricians and handymen all over the place. You needed to be somewhat self sufficient and if you weren't, people wondered what was wrong with you.
I didn't grow up with guns (as I've attested to and why) but my husband did..and he could never understand how anyone could use guns this way. He used to say, "When I was growing up, there was one rule I was taught and had drummed into me: NEVER point a gun at another human being." He was brought up to respect a gun and its' power, and when we did have guns, he treated them with a lot more respect than some of these shooters have. He hunted with them, and I even went with him on one occasion-but he didn't get a deer. (I was bored silly.)
He knew what guns can do, and these people just watch TV and think "I can do that too!" because they're never taught to respect another human being.
This was EXACTLY my childhood experience. When I was old enough and big enough physically, my dad taught me how to hold it, how to pull the trigger, when and where it was appropriate and the Major Number 1 rules was NEVER POINT A GUN AT A HUMAN BEING. I had a little 410 and then he handed me his powerful rifle and it kicked my shoulder so hard and left such a bruise, I never wanted to pick one up again. I shot one animal one time and felt like a murderer. Not for me but I do know how to use them. With great respect and seldom. I think it's good to learn as a young person the destruction they wield. They kill things. And our guns were never locked up. They didn't need to be.
Exactly the same here - was taught to never point a gun at another human, loaded or unloaded. And yes, they have absolutely no use except to kill things. When I quit hunting , I quit guns.
Sadly, you can be sure that none of these bills will be stopped or even slowed by today's tragedy. Just watch, the next bill will mandate arming teachers, if not school children. Because good guys with guns and all that bullshit.
They will find a new disgusting and amazing level of cravenness to aspire to and it will only make this worse.
It seems republican congressman Andy Ogles is the representative for that district and his 2021 Christmas card featured his family all holding guns. On a Christmas Card for crying out loud.
Now. of course, he's giving out the standard Republican mantra-thoughts and prayers. These oafs never get the message.
Republicans cry about the war on Christmas every year, but continually forget it’s the birthday of the Prince of peace.
The gun business in America is a blood-soaked racket driven by blood-soaked money. (Mostly) Republican legislators have proven over and over again that they are totally capable of turning off their imaginations, putting their tiny hearts in liquid nitrogen, tuning out the suffering, blather blather thoughts and prayers, and just taking the money, taking the money, taking the money. Until voters rebel en masse, see these pro-gun legislators as an integral part of the butchery machine, and start throwing them out of office, the horror of gun violence will continue. Personally, I think it's time for someone to get hold of some genuine AR-15 crime scene photos and silently line the streets around the private homes of pro-gun pro-AR-15 pro-child-slaughter legislators, silently holding color enlargement with signs like "Your neighbor Rep/Senator Grisly Bastardo voted for more of this."
I'm happy to be spared the actual pictures. But if you want to understand more, look at this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-damage-to-human-body/?itid=co_enhanced_ar15_4
Emergency room physicians may not be able to tell you how many grains of propellent are in any given bullet, but they can tell you quite a lot about what the slugs do to human flesh and bone.
Hugh - you _should_ be spared the pictures, and so should I. But we aren’t the people who need to see those horrifying images, because we can already imagine the damage that these weapons do, well enough. It’s the stubbornly closed-minded pro-gun Republicans who really need the direct shock of an up-close, vivid confrontation with the horrible pain and real human destruction these weapons cause. They should not be allowed to turn away from the slaughter they enable. They need to be confronted, up close with no escape, with what happens to children’s and adults’ bodies when *they* are trapped up close with no escape, with a deranged person who walks into a school, church, workplace, store, music festival, or other location, with a loaded AR-15 he or she was able to obtain *because* those lawmakers voted for lax gun laws, and against sensible regulations to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, or failed to ban the sale, manufacture, and possession of assault weapons.
i have no idea what republicans are obsessed with except that they are b*tshite crazy, in my humble opinion. i suggest they move, maybe afghanistan where women seem to fill the roles that most republicans want women to fill (silent, not seen, barefoot and pregnant) and where they can have so many guns they'll need a large garage. and just think, everyday they can play shoot em up. a sane nation will be better off without them. i remember in the 60's it was "america love it or leave it" well turn about is fair play. republicans, love america or leave it...
Oh, Reptilicans love America - just ask them. It's other Americans they can't stand.
Well, one Marcia Blackburn is now asking for prayers so I am sure the parent# of the dead kids will be comforted and, likely to continue voting for Republicans who seem more committed to preserving gun rights than human ones. And, if any of these parents might disagree they need to be reassured “sacrifices are necessary” right?
The bodies are just "collateral damage" in the oh-so-necessary culture war. It's nothing personal - just business.
Who believes the god Marsha prays to is worth worshipping?
The NRA.
Exactly! I muted the television when I heard a TN spokesperson offer his "analysis": "we have to figure out how to make schools harder to get into."
This is going to be my candidate litmus test moving forward: do you want to ban guns or books?
Yes, I agree with you. It looks like home schooling is becoming the only choice for school children to learn and remain safe but to most working Americans this is not an option. The irresponsibility and hubris of the Tennessee governor is shocking but sadly his views are the views of many red states legislatures and others.I used to think that eventually something could be done about these school massacres like I thought about how Big Tobacco was eventually reckoned with but now I don't know. This has gone on for so long that the only way I can think of it slowing down is if people don't go out, children stay home, less money is spent out of the home and the country suffers economic damage.
Let the AI’s take over. They’ll do a better job than the humans. If, as in Cameron’s first “Terminator”, they decide that the situation would be improved if the humans were eliminated, at least the AI will have thought it through.
I watched a news program shortly after this happened-there were two women being interviewed-one of them had been in a mass shooting before, and beside her was a friend from another country who was simply irate-
"In NO OTHER COUNTRY does this happen. My friend has already been involved in one mass shooting-we're traveling and now she's witness to another here. How many people have done this? Why does your country allow it?"
Goddamn good question.
Why does our country allow it?
By now we're approaching having had as many people killed in all the wars as mass shootings and other gun violence.
The Onion just updated their headline again: with the name of the latest mass shooting:
https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-r-1850269373
Let's take a bold step, starting with banning automatic assault weapons. We can update with more types as we go along.
We're simply insane. There is no other way to describe this. I've given up trying to figure it out.
The people in the Tennessee legislature should be thrown out of office.
There are no more words I can say that aren't curse words.
It says something when more kids are killed by guns than car accidents.
The “bold step” of banning assault rifles brought down the number of deaths in mass shootings, but not gun deaths overall, so that convinced some that they “didn’t work,” and should not be renewed. Which suited gun manufacturers.
I think what happened here was a group of pranksters loaded up all the GOP legislators in busses and took them to the local insane asylum and then took all the residents from the insane asylum and inserted them as legislators. But in all seriousness how did these fanatics get elected in the first place? Did they pretend to be normal when campaigning? But if elected by voters that wanted to see these types of law passed then they deserve what they got. I just feel sorry for the normal voters that want nothing to do with this madness.
These gun nuts were elected by majorities in their districts -- people who AGREE with their stances and policies!
I'm tempted to repeat the observation that we get the government we deserve - but the children of America don't deserve this.
I guess so, Judith, well when people have guns in stores, restaurants ans bars (especially bars) minor disagreements and scuffles will result in deaths. It will be the wild West all over again but with AR15's instead of six shooters. .Although in the real wild West the visitors to many towns had to check their guns at the edge of town and pick them up when they left I guess the city authorities had more sense than they do today.
If there remains any doubt that modern America is living through a national psychosis, and I don’t think there is any doubt, it’s this gut-churning latest school shooting in Tennessee juxtaposed on the guns-for-everyone everywhere bills going through the legislature. Obviously, all the paranoia and fear being stoked by the reichwing has infected the brains of the deplorables, especially in the legislature. It’s now more important to make sure everyone can defend themselves against the evil government rather than guaranteeing children their childhood and lives. The children are obviously disposable to that greater cause. Add Tennessee to that list of no-visit states.