Because We Can’t Control Stupid …

Veep Joe Biden says he will have recommendations for gun control measures this Tuesday. The Veep said yesterday that he’s seeing a lot of support for a universal background check law. No more gun show loophole. Limiting magazine capacity also appears to be popular.

You might have heard there was another school shooting yesterday, in California. The shooter, a 16-year-old, had a 12-guage shotgun. One student was severely wounded but is still alive as of this morning. Another student and a science teacher were slightly injured. The science teacher was able to talk the boy into putting down his gun.

There is speculation, but no confirmation that I’ve seen, that the school had an armed guard.

We’ll never know, but it’s possible that if the young man had been carrying an AR-15 semi-auto military rifle with a 30-round magazine instead of the 12-guage, there would have been many more casualties. This is assuming the shooter had a standard or even a pump-action shotgun — meaning he would have to do something between rounds to make the gun work — and not one of the newer auto-loading types.

There’s a push to start using the phrase “gun safety” instead of “gun control,” in an effort to win over some of the second amendment absolutists. The theory is that the absolutists are afraid of the word “control” but are likely to feel all warm and fuzzy about “safety.” I suppose it won’t hurt, but remember who you are dealing with. Don’t expect it to work.

In other wingnut news, we see that algebra is a liberal plot. Fox News host Eric Bolling learned that students are being asked to solve distributive property problems in algebra class and assumed this was some kind of socialism. One does wonder if this crew is bright enough to find their own butts.

25 thoughts on “Because We Can’t Control Stupid …

  1. Hummmm…
    I wonder when FOX will catch on to the fact that Al-Gebra is a Muslim plot to take over the western world via making Americans feel hopelessly stupid and distracting them with unsolvable “problems”.
    Find “X”, indeed!

  2. erinyes,
    Yes, of course Al-Gebra is a Muslim plot.

    And CA–lculus is a Liberal West Coast plot, to make Americans feel even MORE hopelessly stupid!

  3. Gun “safety.”
    Yes!
    Finally, we Liberals are starting to get what Conservatives have known for decades:
    “Framing” an issue, and “semantics,” let you control the conversation about the issue!
    After all, isn’t pretty much everyone, “Pro-life?”
    Who’s “Pro-death?”
    And “Pro-choice” just doesn’t sound right. It sounds lame. Like a choice of what, Balsamic, French, Russian, or Blue Cheese dressing?

    That was why, if you remember back in the Little Boots years, I kept harping on people for calling them “Wars,” when the actual wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were over in a matter of a few days/weeks – we were in “Occupations,” “occupying” other people’s lands.
    Framing and semantics are important. And we Liberals need to use them more, and better than we have. We constantly allow the Conservatives to do that first, with things like, “Death Panels!” – ZOINKS! – and we come back with, “ACA.”
    ACA?
    And we had to settle for that, after fighting for it, because no one who wasn’t an avid reader of Liberal blogs, knew wtf “Single-payer” meant – and so, no one argued for it with their Congressional representatives.
    We should have called “ACA,” “Medicare For All,” or “Right to LIVE – Healthier and Happier.”

    And, if we want to get low-wage workers some “Sick Time,” stop calling it that. Call it, “Don’t Get ME Sick Time,” or, “Don’t Sneeze or Hack on MY Super-sized Meal Time.”

  4. Abc news says armed guard didn’t come in that day because he was snowed in at home. Also that shooter had been bullied for over a year by his victim, possibly because shooter is small statured and victim is sports hero/ player. Shotgun was used, not semiautomatic. Also teacher was “grazed by stray bullet.”

    Not the same kind of shooting. Still not great but not insane to want to hurt your bully- er.

  5. I just looked at the worksheet and it’s a bad thing. The guy has a point about the clip art and title used. I wouldn’t use it in a classroom. Of course, it was developed by a liberal, Marxist teacher type.

    My husband just said, ” it’s easy to get teachers to be less liberal. Pay them a whole lot of money.”

  6. A bit more on that Bolling idiot, from HuffPo:

    Bolling made one last appeal to parents to check their children’s textbooks, particularly their history books. He said he was once looking through his child’s history textbook and read a section on the war in Iraq. “They were very, very liberally biased, saying George Bush went in there because he heard there were weapons of mass destruction and they were never found. It was a very liberal bias to the history books,” Bolling said.

    “…saying George Bush went in there because he heard there were weapons of mass destruction and they were never found.” Yeah, simple statement of fact has a liberal bias. Wah, wah, wah.

    I see this is the Fox show with Dana Perino as co-host. Gads, that must be a brain-sucking black hole of a program.

  7. joan,
    It would be.
    If those brains weren’t already sucked-out from years of watching the Fascist/Conservative /Religious/Corporate swill and War P*rn on FUX.

  8. Finding x is a piece of cake for those of us who are adept in abstract reasoning..Try finding the hidden Imam if you really want to test your mental abilities. I found him.

    Glen Beck was able to uncover a Stalinist plot to infiltrate the United States simply by studying architectural motifs in Rockefeller Center. The Point being…It takes a lot of extremely focused mental energy to penetrate the esoteric world of nomes, faeries, and subversive liberal plots but it can be done…especially if you have a rune or two in your possession.

  9. Do you think the armed guard at the school was giving them a snow job by saying he was snowed in?

  10. I have to say I kind of envy the folks at Fox News. How liberating it must be to live one’s life devoid of integritry or shame.

  11. There is a commutative property in math, too! Or there used to be. It may have been renamed. If Faux hears about that, it is only a short way to eliminating multiplication and division in order to get to the root of the problem.

  12. No, Maha, Calculus has something to do with a dental hygenist, er, hygenisist or something. It’s the crap they scrape off our teeth.

  13. “Nutsy Fagan” Jones has an epic meltdown in a video at HuffPo:
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/11/alex-jones-youre-in-danger-huffpost-live_n_2459055.html

    What’s kind of amazing, is, like a stopped clock, he’s occasionally right about what he’s spouting – at least about our losing our rights, and banks not paying taxes.
    The rest is stuff he says, it’s as if he’s audiotioning for an updated verion of “Network,” only with more, and even worse, left-over brown acid from Woodstock.

  14. “Modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety
    you could end up the only one
    Gentleness,sobriety are rare in this society
    at night a candle’s brighter than the sun

    ‘Takes more than combat gear to make a man
    ‘Takes more than a license for a gun
    Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can
    a gentleman will walk but never run

    If manners make a man as someone said
    then he’s the hero of the day
    It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
    Be yourself, no matter what they say”

    Ain’t that cool?
    Sting / An Englishman in New York

  15. I heard on hardball today that the state of Tenn revoked the concealed carry permit of this yeager fellow. With that in mind , it now seems the revolution will need to start at yeagers house so he has a right to fire the first shot.

    Here is my hope. Given this information, I hope if the next shooter has a concealed carry permit , whatever state it is issued in gets the crap sued out of them. When states are forced to start defending their actions and they have to find the funds to defend their actions it may make them take a second look at how these permits are issued.( although I think the fact that they see they issued a permit to at least one nut job SHOULD have been enough to make them rethink the process). EVERY state should be required to look at every single person they have issued a permit to. If for no other reason than to protect their own liability.

    And speaking of liability. Is there any liability to states when a nut job ” passes a back round check”? I want the state to actually have a stake. If there is nothing at risk to them they will care a lot less who gets passed.

    And more liability. There is a lot of talk about “responsible gun owners” but that is just a load of bullshit. Ask any gun person what happens when they leave their guns laying around the house and they get robbed. Ask them if they should be held responsible if their gun is then used to kill someone. They will tell you, it’s not their problem. Well that is not responsible. IF you want to buy a weapon then you are responsible for it for it’s life. PERIOD. If you are not “responsible” enough to keep it away from potential bad guys then you should be criminally liable. If your gun kills someone then YOU go to prison. I have a car. I would be negligent if I just left the keys in it and someone got hurt as a result, but a gun? hell just leave it anywhere, if someone gets hurt it wont be on me. Cars are not even made to be weapons that kill, guns are.

    But ask a gun person if they feel it is fair that they would be criminally liable and you would think one had asked them to shove their gun into their backside and fire. They think it is an outrage. It’s simple. They can avoid the outrage by choosing not to own a gun. IF you don’t want the responsibility that comes with the weapon you can’t have one.

    The police tell me I can’t have a joint in my home- and they will raid your house in a second to make sure you don’t have one. I am not going to kill anything with a joint except a bag of cheeto’s. Yet if a child broke into a home with drugs and used them the home owner would be spending a lot of time in jail, if the kid took the homeowners gun, on the other hand and capped a whole class room of kids the homeowner washes their hands innocent. Whats wrong with this picture?

  16. I distinctly remember in math class that we learned about BI-nary number. Bisexual numbers – just what you’d expect from liberals! Now throw in classes that teach evolution and the global warming hoax, and it’s obvious that you’ve got the New World Order indoctrinating your kids to be bisexual Muslim atheists.

    Fortunately, every good conservative knows that the solution is home schooling. I’m sure that the average Fox News viewer is fully qualified to teach his/her kids about math, science and history.

  17. I sincerely hope that Mr. Yeager is just your garden variety blowhard and not really as close to a psychotic break as he sounds. I think the problem here is “stochastic terrorism”. As the misinformation pokes the anger meter, out of the millions of well armed citizens out there, there are a few, who are gullible enough and stressed enough to take people like Yeager at their word. There are those lonely fellows with a ‘72 Pinto and $50K worth of weaponry and ammunition, who are starving for some adventure and comradery. The misinformation and hatred are sown wholesale and of the millions down wind, some will fall over the edge. In the article about unleaded gasoline, Karl Smith talked about vectors, “If it spreads along the line of communication, the source is information.” That about sums it up for me.

    If you have a dark room with a bucket of gasoline somewhere and you start tossing matches in, sooner or later you’ll have a fire. Einstein, said “Infinity makes the possible the inevitable.” We have a very large pool of crazy people in this country, the odds of finding one crazy enough to commit a terrible crime are pretty good. It happens with some frequency.

    The other thing Yeager brings to mind is a study that found people who are hallucinating tend to act appropriately to the faulty sensory information that they perceive. The idea that a Kenyan usurper has come to take everyone’s guns, crush opposition and Stalinize the country began as the result of confirmation bias. People who didn’t like Obama and didn’t vote for him were willing to believe he was bad. They wanted to believe that their misgivings were validated. The narrative was hyped and amplified relentlessly until the bias became a fervent belief, in fact the central belief of the whacko worldview. These people are living in a world about to topple into a totalitarian state with the Antichrist at the helm. They are in the Endtimes with only their guns between them and the nightmare.

    Now, I am getting kind of scared myself.

  18. I am not a gun law expert, but in Florida there were guidelines for transporting guns. As I recall the gun could not be loaded or concealed and it could not be directly accessible. You couldn’t have and automatic pistol and a loaded magazine within reach. you could carry the gun in a box or in the back of the car and the magazine in a separate location. In other words, you don’t have to live in an “open carry” state or have a CCW permit to legally transport a gun. So losing a CCW permit doesn’t mean you can’t legally transport a gun with the intent to do something illegal.

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