“Even now as I type the words ‘gun law,’ I instinctively know someone is saying “What about Chicago?” — a place of strict gun laws and rampant gun violence. This person is not really asking about Chicago’s well-being with respect to gun violence. Such a query would suggest that this person cared about the answer.
“They are saying it because it’s a knee-jerk rebuttal to a challenge about guns. But it is void of concern — an invocation of a place struggling with violence for a raft of complex reasons. But such a response is used as way to fend off any real discussion of the problem of guns in our country. Do we want to find an answer?
“Sadly this is America: comfortably numb.” – LZ Granderson in Don’t try to sugarcoat the horror of Jacksonville [via cnn.com]
The usual from the left. The only answer acceptable to them is the complete elimination of firearms in civilian hands. They don’t really want a “discussion”, unless it accomplishes that goal. They want complete surrender. Screw them.
Which is why I challenge them on their thoughts about the police in America. They want to ban guns from non government workers yet complain that government workers with guns are racist, murderous, fascist Nazis. Maybe their vision of police would be an all female department who identifies as communist.
The “void of concern” cracks me up. 2.5 million crimes are prevented by civilian gun owners each year. We are concerned about lowering violence, and more firearms does exactly that.
it is the CNN commentator who has the “void of concern’
We have yet another instance of a confirmed nutjob with a documented history of mental illness getting hold of a gun and shooting people, but sure, Granderson; you tell us all how turning my guns in is gonna fix everything.
We have yet another instance of a confirmed nutjob with a documented history of mental illness getting hold of two guns in one of the most restrictively anti-gun states in the country and shooting people in a gun-free zone in another state
FTFY
You just can’t make this shit up. Yet here is this doofus pretending we should “consider” his lunatic so-called “common sense solutions”, while the only *actual* solution goes completely ignored by him and his accomplices; arm yourself, and stand ready to defend yourself. Just like a man would.
They have a solution. In the long run it is a final solution.
We are “comfortably numb” to mass shootings by medicated Democrats in gun free zones and are reasonably confident that other liberals will call for more gun control to be imposed upon law abiding citizens and then will attack the NRA, whose members have NEVER been involved in a mass shooting.
Even if an event has a 0.001% chance of happening, with a population of 350 million that is 3500 possible events.
It’s amazing it doesn’t happen more often.
Except it is not 0.001% but way way lower rate.
So instead of answering the question of “What about Chicago?”, the snowflake instead diverts the conversation to the tireless opinion of “feelings and concern”.
This is why we are winning. Unlike them, we do address “all” of the issues surrounding violence, and we do this without anxiety, anger, phobias and bias.
The mental health of the progressive liberals defines why they do not carry guns and exactly why they never should. They are inside and out, unstable!
All about the feels.
“They are saying it because it’s a knee-jerk rebuttal to a challenge about guns. But it is void of concern.”
Have no counter-argument? Impugn the motives of the other side and ignore the argument.
Exactly. This is THE go-to play for Progressives.
As Ben Shapiro so eloquently described, Progressives constantly accuse their political enemies of being stupid, crazy, or corrupt in a desperate attempt to prevent anyone from even considering what their political enemies are saying.
I usually hear: racist, sexist, homophobic, bigot, Nazi. There is a few more words. Obviously, they are all words to dehumanize the other. No different than what the Republicans did when George Bush was president.
That’s because it is Granderson’s ‘bruthas’ who are rampaging thru Chicago; so no need for criticism for Persons of Politically Correct Pigmentation.
How dare you judge how I feelz!
‘…a place struggling with violence for a raft of complex reasons.’ – So even in his mind, the ‘gun problem’ is only a small part of a ‘raft of complex reasons’ for violence, but he doesn’t want to talk about the rest of the ‘raft’ but only g un control.
I am called a racist on this site by some commenters when I talk about certain people having a tendency to do certain things. Imagine how someone who mentions certain tendencies from certain people would get treated by the CNN crowd if those people you were talking about weren’t the evil, straight, white male.
Only some people are allowed to wield the sword against a particular people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chP_xFklSjQ
I think they antis are just depressed due to the fact that no anti gun legislation will be passed on a national level for at least the next 40 years. Every time I read something like this I just think about that and laugh. I guess they like to piss into the wind.
I don’t think it’s so much that we’re getting desensitized to mass shootings as much as getting tired of the same old attacks on our second amendment right & how it’s the first thing MSM (& others) jump on when tragedies such as this happens. Sure, it’s becoming a talking point in the defense of the RTKBA but the horror of the incident(s) is/are every bit a tragedy in our minds as they’ve always been…no matter who it is or where it may happen.
We are no more “comfortably numb” about mass shootings because of our resistance to the continuous blame of gun owners as a whole, than M.A.D.D. is about the deaths brought on by alcoholism. If anything, we are acutely aware of the need for the protection of the innocent. Seems the media is more adept at sloughing off the personalization of shootings to further their agenda than legal gun owners will ever be.
Nailed it!
They have keyboards and computers, so do we. We also have the ballot box and the jury box. Please let them keep up this Communist drumbeat. The sooner they whip up their fringe element to a point where it can no longer be contained, the sooner they will be revealed to everyone what tratiorous scum they are.
“We also have the ballot box and the jury box.”
And let’s not forget the cartridge box. We have them, too.
“Sugarcoat the horror of Jacksonville”, give a F’in break. Two people were shot and killed. That’s sad, my condolences to their families. But this wasn’t a mass shooting. This wasn’t wholesale slaughter. More people are shot on an average weekend in most major metropolitan areas including Jacksonville. This isn’t newsworthy.
Agreed, but it’s all the Left has, so they’ll pound the drum relentlessly until something better comes along.
Not even a public mass shooting by any definition.
This was an attack against people known to the shooter.
Same can be said for school shootings and some church shootings.
The vast majority of school shootings, over 90%, no one is even shot.
CC the vast majority of “school shootings” are not even associated with a school.
They said 11-12 people were shot. Only two died. There was over a hundred people there.
It’s hard to hit a quick moving target fleeing out a pizza place. It’s much easier to hit a sitting target in a classroom.
And there was a lot of kids watching/listening to the shooting live! They experienced it in a way most haven’t.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzfK-ir1Zt8
So to sum: “we need fewer facts and more feelings!”
This has been the liberal Democratic tactic since the 60’s. That’s when the leaders of the socialist movement in the United States determined that playing to people feeling would allow them to push their agenda. Nearly every democrat bases their decisions on how they feel about any certain issue. Facts only get in the way and serve little in that decision. This is the difference between republican and democrats.
I don’t know… I remember a lot of feelings after 9/11 and the two wars. The lack of facts got people I know killed.
And remember in November, any vote for a democrat, like this guy, is a vote to end the 2nd Amendment. Vote in a democrat house, and they will impeach Trump, and the democrats in the Senate will leverage the impeachment to get squish republicans and Never Trump republicans to refuse to confirm any of Trump’s nominees….in particular his judicial nominees, the last line in the sand for the 2nd Amendment. You may hate the Republicans and think they are vile…..but only a Republican Senate can confirm Ginsberg’s or Breyers replacement…or, Thomas’s replacement should he decide to retire….. Remember in November…
I’m voting in the FL primaries today and would never vote for a democrat but the scary part is that the so-called “Republicans” are starting to turn on our 2A also. The Republican candidates I have to choose from in this election are for the most part equally bad regarding gun rights. If we can’t count on the Republicans to stand up for our rights, who else do we vote for?
If your voting in the primaries then your doing the best you can. The primaries are the only place we can get rid of the RINOs. Vote for real conservatives like Desantis and White. Unfortunately Scott is probably a lock up, however there is one guy running against him, that I haven’t heard of until I went to vote earlier. Don’t know who he is but I voted for him just so Scott wouldn’t get my vote.
Any vote for a Democrat this November is also a vote to impeach and remove a non-anti-gun President. Can’t really call him pro-gun, but at least he is not anti-gun.
Granderson there seems to know a lot about how other people think n why.
…not much about people getting killed or making space for people to live their lives, alive, free from theft and thuggery.
Aplarently, G, there doesn’t much care abiut such things.
Mr Granderson confuses ‘numbness’ with advocating legislation he wants.
Oops, I meant “not advocating’ legislation he wants.
Since when is it Ok to be “comfortably numb” to the relentless mass-murder machine in Chicago?
Because they claim to only be in 7th place for US “ethnic self-cleansing”?
Suicide pact?
Of course, when you point out that heavily gun-controlled areas are awash with violence, it’s for “a raft of highly complex reasons”. Similarly, many areas with little gun control have little violence, presumably for another “raft of highly complex reasons”. It’s almost as if those “complex reasons” were to blame and not guns. If the author really had any concern for Chicago or other violence-saturated places, they’d actually engage with those complex reasons instead of handwaving them away to focus on guns.
Nice, Dave!
Once again the shooter was on anti depressants and anti psychotic “medication!”
Alex Jones made this link way back in 2001 and it’s been something I look for and invariably find 100% of the time in the reports days after these mass murder sprees.
The only cases where this isn’t so is Islamic terrorism.
He was on those meds because he was seriously mentally ill. The meds didn’t make him ill, he was that way to start.
This is not a conspiracy, numbnuts.
He’s not saying the meds made him crazy, but the (tested and observed in the clinical trials) side effects include making the person even more crazy. Not to mention suicidal/homicidal ideations for almost all of them. This is clearly stated on the PPI.
Conspiracy? Meh. Other than by the drug companies to downplay the risks of this whole assortment of drugs.
Not treating schizophrenia, or other forms of severe mental illnesses, is worse. The tactics of blaming it on the meds is just as bad as the anti-vaxers blaming (fill in the blank) on vaccines. These are not snowflakes with trumped up issues, but certifiably mentally ill violent individuals.
Sounds like you are advocating for confinement???
Crazy is still crazy. Same as in 1918. Due process and institutionalize/lock up is still the only thing that works. All the gov;t drone employee pshinks don’t make any difference (and F the ACLU).
Chiraq doesn’t have particularly “strict” gun laws. The author is uninformed/retarded. Honestly murder was UP when laws WERE strict. Check out the 1970’s through the 90’s. What changed?!? 24/7 “news”. No Daley running the Windy City. The Tiny Dancer© in charge. And young teen thugs(YTT!) wrongly labeled “children”. Duh…
It’s not that I’m numb about shootings. I’m not. I am however sick of gun free zones. They by themselves are an invitation to any nutcase that wants a place to shoot folks. That can’t offer any resistance. By law.
They think they own you. They don’t allow shooting someone to protect property.
What a clever way to avoid the question. We ask “what about Chicago?” to show that gun control has failed, and he effectively responds by saying, “You don’t really care about Chicago so I’m not going to dignify that comment with a response.” Real mature, guy. And here I was under the impression that you were clamoring to have that discussion you’re always rambling about.
Just like we’re comfortably numb to car accidents, medical malpractice, death from disease, still births, childhood disease, rape, cancer, workplace accidents, heart disease, murder, terrorism, theft, natural disasters…..
Hey, life is hard. Bad things happen, when they happen a lot, it blends into daily life.
Also claiming something is preventable doesn’t actually make it preventable. Also hindsight doesn’t make something preventable.
That guy was clearly on the path to destruction. His parents knew, his mental health professional knew, etc. I think I read that the mental health person said he is likely to do harm to his mother. This went on for years. What else do you need!?
But such a response is used as way to fend off any real discussion of the problem of guns in our country. Do we want to find an answer?
“Sadly this is America: comfortably numb.” – LZ Granderson in Don’t try to sugarcoat the horror of Jacksonville [via cnn.com]
None are so blind as those who will not see.
The left claims that the right refuses to have an honest discussion about “gun violence” in this country. However, the right is merely refusing to accept the left’s boundaries of discussion, that Jacksonville is necessarily a “gun violence” problem and necessarily not a NICS problem or a mental health problem. In other words, the left says, you must debate under these narrow terms. The right says no. Then the left says, see, you don’t care about the violence in America.
America’s worst school shooting was Virginia Tech and that was in 2007. Mental health was quickly known to be an issue. However, the left refused any mental health solutions because it wanted it’s pet solution, gun control, to be the only one. So, 5 years later a real crackpot walks into a school in Connecticut.
Granderson, try to think outside of your narrow, leftist perspective.
So, it’s basically the same from those on the left. The killings only matter when it affects white kids from the suburbs. What would really blow their minds is that the root cause for the killing in both situations might be the same.
Hint: It’s not guns.
ANY CNN “source” or bilge has no relevance to the real world in 2018. Their ship sailed, more than a decade ago, into fantasy irrelevance land. This website has more users than CNN has viewers.
As per Chicago: It is being run in the same manner as the results quest was for “Fast and Furious”- allow a certain amount of violence (and subsequent lawlessness) to occur to further the “need” for a national floodgate of concern to attempt to implement yet more stringent firearms laws. (Wayne LaPierre articulated this during the Clinton regime and he was correct.) It’s not working- the vast majority of the Chicago shootings are gang-related, black-on-black crime and don’t seem to be spilling beyond gangsta turf and affecting the more civilized areas. It’s sad commentary because the majority of those people who have to live in the crime zones would rather be safe and have their kids safe as well but so long as they put race above civilization and normal lawful behavior, this is the result. It is the same in similar parts of most large metro areas.
When I was a kid in the late 1960s attending a large, racially-mixed high school, students of all races were expected to live up to (not down to) the civilized standards of the community and American culture. The left began trying to make excuses for lawlessness and substandard behavior and now we’ve come to this, where it’s even difficult to determine what the American culture is. The return to an actual American culture- the melting pot as opposed to the leftist-inspired “salad bowl”, has caused the rise of Donald Trump and his allies and it continues to confound the left and elitist right as they struggle to maintain their power and hold on the country. It has NOT brought about a general clammor for more gun control from the masses, actually the opposite no matter how the left-owned MSM tries to spin it. Thinking Americans of all colors and creed, through voting and upward-spiraling numbers of CCW permits and firearms purchases/NICS checks, prove the majority now believes it would be insane not to own firearms for everyday self-protection.
The writer is correct. I don’t give a $#!+ about Chicago or other cesspools of crime caused by decades of unilateral liberal control. You made your bed, now sleep in it. If I were to ask, “What about Chicago?,” I’m not inquiring about it’s health, like “How is your mother?” What I mean is, “Isn’t your proposal logically invalidated by the existence of Chicago’s restrictive gun laws, including FOIDs, while also having one of the highest gun related murder rates, and doesn’t it indicate that restrictive gun laws don’t significantly reduce crime and fall disproportionately on lawful gun owners while criminally minded will obtain and use weapons regardless of restrictions?”
Also numb to 600,000+ abortions a year just in the USA…
Hundreds of thousands of medical mistakes….
Obesity…diabetes…etc etc etc
I don’t care about California, Washington State, Colorado, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, oh and yes Chicago. Gun civil rights are simply not a priority in many states and cities. Legal marijuana intoxication, homosexual issues, open borders, animal rights, and other things are more important than gun civil rights. People can make jokes about Kentucky and the southern states all they want.
Depending on the list you use Kentucky is number five for best 2A gun rights.
http://cavearmor.com/2016-best-worst-states-gun-lovers/
http://www.gunsandammo.com/second-amendment/best-states-for-gun-owners-2017/
The lists need to be updated. Several states have changed positions.
I’m 48. I grew up in a small town in rural South Louisiana. The town had been segregated, and was de facto segregated even through the 90s. The old time cops had a term for what happened on the dark side of town. They called it “N-word business”. There was always somebody getting stabbed or beat up or shot, and this is in a town of 12000 people.
How many people live in Chicago?
Or Memphis? Or New Orleans?
So he admits that in Chicago, with fairly strict gun laws, violence is caused by ‘a raft of complex reasons’… but everywhere else it is apparently caused by guns? Does not compute.
After having lived just outside of Chicago for 35 years I can honestly say that city truly is swamp-filled cesspool…EVERYTHING and EVERYONE is for sale!! Personally, as a native southerner, gun rights are at the top of my preservation list and I don’t care about the thugs and the gangs killing each other. Those filthy gangs have been around in Chicago for DECADES and no one ever curbed the violence when they could have. Now, it is impossible to do this, short of illegal means; not enough law enforcement and even if there were enough, their hands are tied. It is hard for me to care about thugs killing thugs. They aren’t defending themselves, their families or their homes! They do this because they CAN and because they LIKE killing. I have no regard for them whatsoever!!
But such a response is used as way to fend off any real discussion of the problem of guns in our country. Do we want to find an answer? Sadly this is America: comfortably numb.”
No, the invocation of Chicago is due to the opposition’s refusal to acknowledge the utter failure of gun law as a governor on violence. You’re right– We largely don’t care about Chicago per se other than it is a human rights tragedy but make no mistake, it is an avoidable one due to a myriad of reasons that many, many other cities don’t seem to be affected by. If we are numb as a people, it is because “gun violence” is used as a thought bludgeon when it is obviously inappropriate to the given circumstance.
When a bro comes to a football video game championship already armed, it indicates premeditation and some degree of crazy. Now you can blame GUN!VIOLENCE, but that’s as dumb as saying VAN!VIOLENCE was responsible for all those murders in France, yet somehow the humble van isn’t being attributed as a purveyor of mass murder like the gun is.
If we are comfortably numb, it’s because you as a movement seek to personify a tool, not an individual or their psychological malady as a means of death and destruction. It’s because you seek to group the millions of responsible gun owners in the united states with what is clearly a super minority of individuals. You’re persecuting a vast supermajority of individuals instead of finding out what is setting the minority over the edge, and that, my friend, it wrong.
If we are numb as a people, it is because you have cried wolf too many damn times to care anymore.
Of course, when you point out that heavily gun-controlled areas are awash with violence, it’s for “a raft of highly complex reasons”. Similarly, many areas with little gun control have little violence, presumably for another “raft of highly complex reasons”. It’s almost as if those “complex reasons” were to blame and not guns. If the author really had any concern for Chicago or other violence-saturated places, they’d actually engage with those complex reasons instead of handwaving them away to focus on guns.
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