Amazing tweets I got from "Gun Rights" activists! (Regarding Gun Control)

Yesterday I decided to put out a tweet about what I thought about people that feel like they have to carry guns everywhere that they went. Some of my fellow liberals that tweeted me said that I may have gone too far with my tweet, but it's my opinion and I was not going to back down to pressure from the right wing.

The #OpenCarry nutjobs are all pussies and not man enough to fight with their fists. #GunControl #UniteBlue #p2
— Angel Rivera (@TheMadMan31686) July 8, 2014

This was the original tweet that I sent out yesterday, which got "gun rights" activists angry at me, and maybe it was for a good reason I did call them "pussies" however the reason I did this honestly is because I wanted to get a reaction from these people and for them to show me their true colors and they did show me their true colors for sure. They called me names and tried to offend me even though they failed to offend me, here are some of those tweets.

If only that were true. But it's not. You're scum. @TheMadMan31686
— Linoge (@wallsofthecity) July 8, 2014

Plus, I'd rather be considered a "pussy" by small-minded bigots than be dead. But that's just me. #guncontrol @TL671 @TheMadMan31686
— Linoge (@wallsofthecity) July 8, 2014

No, you made a blanket stereotype that includes disabled persons, and women for that matter. Way to go. #guncontrol #fail @TheMadMan31686
— Linoge (@wallsofthecity) July 8, 2014

These are some of the examples of what I was called through out the evening last night, I did not take any of their tweets seriously because these are the most foolish people in America. Now I want to show you the tweets that really just shocked me because of how stupid they are here are some examples.

Bullshit. You can kill more people easier w/ contents of your kitchen cabinet than a gun. @TheMadMan31686 @TorcerT @motoraderGP @dwneylonsr
— Linoge (@wallsofthecity) July 9, 2014

I have to write about this tweet because anybody with half a brain knows that it's easier to kill someone with a gun compared to any other tool that is available currently. This person seriously suggested that it's easier to kill someone with kitchen tools compared with a firearm. I could not believe it when I read this tweet, I thought he was joking but I realized that he was serious. It's got to be either one or the other, either he's a really bad shot, or he's delusional and he needs to be on medication. According to Slate since the Newtown Conn. shootings 12,042 people have died around the country. According to this person that tweeted me it's easier to kill someone with a knife than with a gun, what a joke. This is the reason why these gun nuts can't be taken seriously because of their willful ignorance. He's smart enough to know that guns kill people a lot easier than anything else, however he loves his guns so much that he can't admit to himself that guns are the problem. (The date of the article was September 16, 2013, so there are many more people that died since that date which makes it even worse for these people that argue to me that Kitchen cabinets contents.) Now I'm going to post a few more tweets that I got that I found to be interesting.

@TheMadMan31686 @wallsofthecity @TorcerT @motoraderGP Let me try small words. If you don't need guns to kill then it's no use banning them
— David W Neylon, Sr. (@dwneylonsr) July 9, 2014

@th3v0t4ry this has been going on all day. Here's a less scary gun for @TheMadMan31686. Happy? pic.twitter.com/sPUxeNf0TK
— Chris Magill (@cmagill) July 9, 2014

I’m so sorry to hear that @haplesspursuer. You must really worry about how much that scares @TheMadMan31686. @cmagill
— The Votary (@th3v0t4ry) July 9, 2014

My final thoughts are that these people are lack empathy and they do not care about their fellow man, and there is plenty of willful ignorance going around as well. Whether these people that tweeted me last night like it or not there is a major gun problem in the United States and we need to do something about it. Then someone from Australia tweeted me last night and he told me that Australia banned guns about fifteen years ago after a mass shooting that took place there. Here's the tweet that I'm talking about.

@TheMadMan31686 @janet_sistare hi, I'll never understand this gun love, we got rid of ours in only 3 months, never had a mass shouting since
— Warren 2.1 (@driestmartini) July 9, 2014

Is this realistic here in America? I don't think so, but that does not mean we should not try. What's more realistic is passing a assault weapons ban and increase spending on mental health and make it more difficult for people to guy and possess weapons. I also noticed a lot of fear from these people, it seems to me like they are scared of their own shadow, and it also seems like they can't wait to use their weapons and that is what scares me the most, some of the people that tweeted me last night could use the guns that they have on other people and more people will die. So my final question is how many more people have to die before we as a nation want to do something about our national shame? As long as we don't do anything about our gun deaths in this country than we can't call ourselves America the Beautiful anymore, our country is drenched in the blood of the innocent.

 

Slate Peice: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html

Fox News blames Video Games once again!

As we all know on Monday there was another mass shooting, this time it was  at a Naval Yard  in Washington D.C. and the shooter was Aaron Alexis, he was 34 years old and according to reports he some psychological issue because he claimed that he heard voices in his head and he two incidents with guns in the past. What amazes me is how easy it was for Aaron Alexis to get the shotgun in order for him to do the shooting. To me this is another example of why we need some comprehensive gun reform in the United States. However of course here comes Fox News to the rescue of gun manufacturers and their profits. Yesterday on Fox News, the newest host of Fox and Friends Elisabeth Hasselbeck claimed that “the left” was trying to make Monday’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard about “gun control,” when what the country really needed was a registry to track video game purchases." Hasselbeck is a perfect fit at Fox News she is a right winger. Either she is really an idiot or she is propaganda pusher that wants to push Republicans talking points. Now she also said that “You know, certainly, this topic has already taken a turn again, the left’s already making this about gun control,” Yes it's about gun control, we need gun control in this country not let every person in the country buy and own guns what's the matter with these Fox News fools? Brian Kilmeade the moron also said that “But you talk about this guy's background, as we look into it, “He's got a friend, who said, yeah, he had an obsession with video games, shooting video games. In fact, he would come over and he would be playing so long — these video games, these shooting games — we'd have to give him dinner, we'd have to feed him while he continued to stay on them." Alexis was obviously obsessed with video games and he played a lot, however that does not mean that video games lead him to buy a shotgun go to the Navy Yard and shoot 13 people to death. That does not make any sense and I don't know how the Fox News audience can believe that. Even with our research, common sense would tell you that this does not make any sense.



Now Hasselbeck claims that “Are more people susceptible to playing video games? Is there a link between a certain age group or [demographic] in 20- to 34-year-old men, perhaps, that are playing these video games and their violent actions?” I saw the segment that Fox & Friends did on this and they did not present any facts to back up their claims that video games cause men in the age group of 20 -34 to go out and commit mass shootings. (I'll be posting the video of this segment at the end of this blog post.) Unlike Fox & Friends morons I do have research that shows that video games are not tied to violence in high-risk youth. The article is called "In New Study, Video Games Not Tied to Violence in High-Risk Youth" This piece was published on August 27, 2013 just a few weeks ago. The first part of the piece says that "In a debate that has been raging for nearly two decades, the latest research suggests the impact of violent video games has been overstated." The piece also said that "In the new study, Drs. Christopher Ferguson and Cheryl Olson discovered violent video games such as ‘Mortal Kombat,’ ‘Halo’ and ‘Grand Theft Auto’ did not cause high-risk teens (those with symptoms of depression or attention deficit disorder) to become aggressive bullies or delinquents. In fact, in the study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, researchers found that the playing the video games actually had a very slight calming effect on youths with attention deficit symptoms — and helped to reduce aggressive and bullying behavior." So according to research just published a few weeks ago video games have the opposite effect that Fox News claimed video games had. I know that this is just one study, but Fox News did not provide any research to back up their claims, they just had a bunch of questions and they did not provide any answers.

In this last paragraph of this post I would like to talk about myself and my own experiences with video games. I'm in the age group that Hasselbeck claimed that there was a link between video games and violent actions, (I'm 27 years old) and I've been playing video games since I was five years old and I've been play violent video games since I was eight years old, I've played all of those violent video games like "Mortal Kombat," "Halo" and "Grand Theft Auto" and I've never had to urge to go out and buy a gun and go to a public place and shoot a bunch of people. The argument that Fox News makes is ludicrous because video games do not make you do anything that you don't want to do. If a person goes out and shoot other people in a public place, just because they play video games like Alexis did that does not mean that video games made him shoot those poor people at the Navy Yard. Video games at worst can be a factor if the person is mentally ill like Alexis was, however that does not mean that video games is the only reason why Alexis shot those people. There are other factors like how easy it was for Alexis to buy guns, and his mental illness. There are too many factors here to blame just video games like Fox likes to do every time there is a mass shooting in this country. Hasselbeck also said that we need a video game registry in order to track how money video games each person buys. How come we can't have a gun registry? That way we know who owns what guns and how they are using them. I think that's fair, let's fight for that.  

Link to research piece: http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/08/27/in-new-study-video-games-not-tied-to-violence-in-high-risk-youth/58934.html

Gun Violence Costs Taxpayers too much Money!

Another day, another blog post I woke up this morning and went on my laptop as I usually do and I came across a piece, which pissed me off. I know that it I get pissed off a lot but this is something that not only progressives but conservatives should be pissed off at as well. This piece came from the Huffington Post and the piece was called "Taxpayers Shoulder Bulk Of Gun Violence Health Care Costs: Study" Just reading the title should upset any taxpayer in the country no matter if you conservative or progressive. I can't say that I'm surprised because it seems like taxpayers pay for a lot of things that we should not pay for. Tax cuts for the rich and corporations that cost us billions and billions of dollars as an example. I don't understand the gun culture that this country has. We don't need guns to protect ourselves and to the people that think that you need a gun or hundred guns to protect yourself then you are a coward and you are trying to compensate for something that you don't have either a backbone or balls excuse me for being or crude but it's the truth, or at least my opinion which is good enough since this is my blog. Just kidding, this first paragraph shows how pissed off I am but this needs to be written because I'm sick of what our gun culture is doing to our country.

The Huffington Post was quoting a study which was done by the Urban Institute which was released today. By the way all of the numbers that are going to be quoted are from the year 2010. The study was 16 pages long and I read the study and I found it to be credible and very well done. According to the Huffington Post "About 80 percent of the cost of treating victims of gun violence in 2010 was borne in part by taxpayers, according to an analysis of hospital and insurance data by researchers at the nonpartisan think tank. That means taxpayers paid for victims' care either through government programs like Medicaid or through publicly-funded programs that subsidize hospital care for those who don't have insurance and can't afford to pay." According to the study the estimated total that was spent by hospital was $628,928,222 (pg.4) and according to the Huffington Post the Medicaid cost alone are $327,000,000. That's a lot of money that the tax payer has to pay just because people get shot with guns and to me that's an outrage. Embry Howell, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute said that “The victims are concentrated among young, poor males,” and “This is the population we're talking about and their costs are very high. It's one group that is heavily uninsured." Howell also said that Lawmakers could significantly shrink these costs by making firearms less widely available “This is a preventable cost. If more could be done to prevent these firearm incidents, then the cost will go down,” she said. “Society is paying for this, very few of these people have private insurance.” And that cost us the tax payers even more money and this one of the many reasons why we need some sensible gun regulation or we need to ban guns it's costing too much money and lives. In my opinion the cost is way to high in lives and money and it's time for our lawmakers to step up and do something about this serious problem. This graphic down below shows the cost in 2010 by insurance status:

However according to the Huffington Post the true economic cost of gun violence is much worse "The true economic cost of gun violence is much larger that what hospitals are spending on care. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that gun violence deaths cost the U.S. economy $37 billion and gun injuries $3.7 billion in 2005, the last year the public health agency conducted an analysis. In addition, taxpayers often end up footing the bill for social services for gun violence victims, as well as building the expensive hospital trauma units needed for their treatment." I understand that these numbers are from the year 2005 however these numbers are startling to me, because that's a lot of money that is lost and our lawmakers don't do a damn thing about it and it's sick that they would rather take money from the NRA and other lobbying groups in order to make it easier for Americans to buy guns then to stand up to the NRA and say no enough is enough.

The last point that I want to make in this post is that why do conservatives go crazy when anybody tries to pass background checks? I don't understand why, the second amendment through out history has been understood as a collective right or only applying to militia not an individual right. According to Jeffery Toobin in his piece for the New Yorker it says that "For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon" In other words through out American history the second amendment has only applied to the militia or as Toobin called it "the militia clause" Then in 2008 the Supreme Court ruled in the case District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment. This is a crazy ruling in my opinion but Scalia opinion just made the whole case even dumber he wrote that “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.” This is like saying that if one day in the future if Americans decide that the most popular weapon for self-defense was a nuclear weapon then Americans should be able to have that weapon. That is the dumbest argument I've even heard for why the second amendment should be a individual right.

PS: I know that this is a long post today and I'm sorry for that but this had to be written and I'll try to keep my blog post shorter for now on...but I can't promise anything I hope that everyone has a great weekend.

Link to Huffington Post piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/taxpayers-gun-violence_n_3915434.html#slide=2323553

Link to New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html

The Voters In Colorado were screwed by the NRA

Sen. Angela Giron & John Morse

Before I start to write this post, I want to say today is the 12th anniversary of the September 11th 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, The Pentagon, and the plane that crashed in Shanksville PA. I will take the time and write two post to my blog today and I will be talking about 9/11 and my thoughts in my details in my next post coming later today. Now moving on to why I'm writing this post. Yesterday was the recall elections in the state of Colorado of two Democratic State Senators named John Morse and Angela Giron and I was on Twitter last night and I was shocked when I found out that these two brave Senators lost the election. At first I was mad because I thought that these voters just were against these gun restriction laws and just voted these Senators out of office, I even thought that these people are morons. Then I wake up this morning and I was reading the Huffington Post and read that piece and it changed my mind on what happened in the recall election in Colorado. I will be providing a link to the piece at the end of this post.

Now in my personal opinion I think that the NRA and the Koch Brothers stole this election and then they had the nerve to say that freedom won. I will provide quotes from the piece to show why I formed this opinion. Some background information first "Morse and Giron both voted in favor of the legislation, signed into law by Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) in March, which requires background checks for all firearm purchases and bans ammunition magazines over 15 rounds." I'm honestly not surprised when I read that all of the outrage is because of background checks. All this law says if you buy guns you need a background check that's it, I personally would have gone much further then that, what are these gun lover so afraid of? I don't get it, what are they so scared of? Are all gun owners criminals? That's what is seems like to me, because they are afraid of some background checks.By the way I don't think all gun owners are criminals I was just trying to make a point. The problem is that most sensible gun owners are not against background checks most of the polls show that. However the problem is that NRA and the Koch Brothers are against anything that may hurt the profits of the gun manufacturers. This is another reason why we need to regulate how Political Action Committee or PAC's spend their money because the piece also said that "The NRA spent heavily on the recall effort, reporting at least $360,000 and funneling unspecified dollars through its nonprofit arm. The billionaire conservative Koch brothers also entered the fray, using their advocacy group Americans For Prosperity to target Morse and Giron. Due to the organization's nonprofit status, AFP also did not have to report its spending to the Federal Elections Commission." Our Politics is run by money and in my opinion that's the reason why we are losing our democracy to these billionaires and corporations and my fear is that politicians will learn the wrong lessons from this elections and not fight for sensible gun regulations because they are afraid of the NRA. Most politicans are all cowards so they will not fight for sensible guns regulations.

The piece lists another example that the NRA and the Koch's stole this election from the people "A get-out-the-vote canvasser for Giron, who requested anonymity out of safety concerns, said gun rights activists also engaged in "extreme voter intimidation" at polling centers in Pueblo on Tuesday."We had to call the police on a van of four huge guys staking out our staging location, the canvasser told HuffPost. "Volunteers are being followed, threatened, having their pictures taken and yelled at. We're now being told that it's bad enough to call 911 immediately." This is according to someone that was there at the time and I'm not saying that the NRA or the Koch Bothers sent these nut jobs out there in order to intimidate potential voters, these people could have done this on there own but these people that did this are anti American and they missed the whole point of our great nation. "A Quinnipiac poll released last month found that 82 percent of Colorado voters supported expanded background checks for gun sales. But respondents were split down the middle on the 15-round magazine limit." Most people in a favor of background checks and gun manufacturers oops I meant the NRA don't give a damn what the people say about that.

What made me mad was the NRA then released a condescending statement about their "victory" and it said that "The people of Colorado Springs sent a clear message to the Senate leader that his primary job was to defend their rights and freedoms and that he is ultimately accountable to them -- his constituents, and not to the dollars or social engineering agendas of anti-gun billionaires" the anti-gun billionaires is in reference to Michael Bloomberg the mayor of NYC and I don't agree with Bloomberg on everything but I do agree with him on this issue. So what do we progressives do about this issue? Do we give up? Or do we keep on fight the NRA and the Koch bothers? If you've been reading my blog for a while then you already know the answer to these questions. We need to keep fighting in NRA if we don't then the whole country loses because we will be flooded with more and more guns and more and more Americans will die because of gun violence. Come on progressives keep up the good fight, we need to win this fight!

Link to the piece: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/10/colorado-recall-results_n_3903209.html?utm_hp_ref=politics