United States | News & Politics
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What? The 2A people have a way to prevent this: More guns! It's always more guns! If only this father had had a gun to defend himself from his armed attacker/son...
(/s, just in case)
My god.
Duke University
Texan Rick Roderick, Professor
"And sure enough I found someone in Durham who had been… you know, a lot of North Carolina people go to the war, I found a young pilot and he said oh, that no, it was very exciting and then he went on to explain to me how the sights that they used in order to, you know, fire their smart bombs were just like the games in the arcade that he grew up with. He said, you know, no way in the world could he have had better practice than he got in those arcades to fire smart bombs. I mean, it had passed him by that the real had happened even though he was really there.
I talked to a woman who had been on the ground, in a jeep for most of it. And she went “Oh the desert is so big and the sand…”, she said, “…but I really didn’t get a feel for until I got home and saw what my husband had taped”. Why? Because the little individual actors sink into insignificance compared to the damn spectacle of the thing. The spectacle of it. ... https://youtu.be/z0MUurcsVLs?t=1339 ... I mean, when humans were less important than God we could understand because he built everything. When we are less important than a Nintendo we get confused. That’s when we start thinking that we are under siege. It’s when Billy says “Oh yes, you can kill mum and dad but leave the Nintendo”, then we are rightfully upset.
The postmodern trajectory leaves us in a situation where drawing the line between the real and the unreal is no longer merely philosophical but a practical day-to-day issue. See, this is what I want to drive home. We are not off in some fairy land, this is a practical day-to-day issue of figuring out what’s a simulation and what’s not. Is this guy really an insurance salesman or is he here to rob me? You know, I mean… this is no longer Cartesian doubt that one has to conjure up in a meditation. This is a wide radical doubt about the very ground beneath our feet and the nature of whether it’s real or not."
Year 1993
Rick Roderick was one of the greats. The Self Under Siege and Master of Suspicion are like the greatest philosophy podcasts of all time, 15-20 years before podcasts were invented. Such a wonderful mind and tragic life.
It's crazy an 11 year old can figure out how to load and operate a weapon so easily.
"That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that being alive is a crock of shit."
Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake
I'm guessing now that you have never held a firearm. Guns are extremely simple machines. Every eleven year old has the brain power to figure out how one works. This 11 year old lived in a house with one, and was at very least aware of its existence, and knew that there was a safe, was willing to go through his parents' dressers already. That 11 year old also knows what that gun is going to do. 11 year olds know how to lie to try to protect themselves. They might not have a full sense of permanence, but everybody knows what a gun does at that age.
You really walked into this one, chief...
What's that, boss? Enlighten me.
I don't know what his problem is but my dad taught me how to shoot guns at 8, so I do think the assumption that he had to figure anything out instead of having prior experience is flawed.
I was 10 when my dad made me help him rebuild his .22 then "gave" it to me for Christmas.