What's True Pussycat? - Trump Thread #134

[Spandauer]

Non-fake, stable genius thanks to @Crucible for the new thread title.

Seniors' special today.*
They’re eating the dogs!
They’re eating the cats!
They’re eating the pets!...
So do you want fries with that cat? (*Apologies to non-MAGA seniors)

In other news, the swing states continue to be too close to call and it looks like it's going to be a nail-biting, buttock-clenching, hand-wringing 50 days to the election. (or thereabouts)
Increase your anxiety with this handy countdown 😭
https://days.to/until/election-day-in-us

Previous thread here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5134172-its-not-over-until-the-cat-lady-sings-trump-thread-133

He hid in the bushes for more than 12 hours before being spotted.

Compare and contrast with the effect a lone gunman is having on Trump's life. (None, except to improve his chances of being elected.)

Didn’t Vance say school shootings were a fact of life the other week? Perhaps Trump attempted shootings are the same and they should just learn to live with it.

You have a point. At the risk of diving down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole, I am still flummoxed at how easily Trump and his supporters took the shooting at his rally where not only did he get an ear-ache, but one of his entourage was actually killed. Yet for this recent apparent non-attempt, they're all vociferously blaming Democrats. Something stinks.

I don’t think you should go around shooting people you don’t like and definitely don’t condone it. But I’m finding it quite hard to develop any sympathy beyond ‘thoughts and prayers’.

On which note, and it may have been mentioned already I haven’t caught up, the 1st graders who survived the Sandy Hook shooting are now 18 and will be voting in their 1st presidential election this year.

@RafaistheKingofClay - I haven't looked, do you happen to know if any research has been done on how those Sandy Hook 18 year olds are likely to vote? I'm assuming Sandy Hook is in a blue state, anyway, though, so would their votes have any sort of impact on the results?

Not sure about all of them but a few of them met Harris recently, I think.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/first-graders-survived-sandy-hook-will-vote-first-presidential-electio-rcna170471

Turns out it was June, so not that recently. It was before Harris was running for President.

Worth a read. I was just not aware that that race baiter Vance was brought up an hour from Springfield and he is the senator for it

www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/09/how-jd-vance-unleashed-the-racist-backlash-against-haitian-immigrants-in-springfield-ohio/

This was deliberately misreported and taken out of context. The full comment by JD Vance was:

"I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realise that our schools are soft targets.”

“We’ve got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door … and wants to kill a bunch of children – they’re not able to. As a parent, do I want my kids’ school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

I read this as a sad realistic recognition that there will always be psycho killers and that the solution is to improve security at schools.

Of course the opposing view is that there will always be psycho killers and that the solution is gun control to prevent such killers having the means to kill lots of people.

These are two different solutions to the same problem, but at no point did JD Vance's "fact of life" comment imply there wasn't a problem.

Thank, @1dayatatime .

It is mildly amusing to see Team Trump's hoist by their own, eternally dishonest, petard occasionally – but I definitely prefer to know the true, fuller story.

The full quote from JD Vance has been available all along if one read the articles about it rather than just the headlines. Or to put it another way, I had certainly seen it before more than once, possibly because I don't just go by what Morning Joe Scarborough has to say. I think there has been at least one link on this thread in which it was given, for instance.

Nevertheless, JD Vance has clearly accepted as "a fact of life" that Americans will shoot American schoolchildren: he has not been misquoted as having said this. He just said that he doesn't like that fact.

People in other countries seem not to have this "fact of life" to contend with regarding, say, French people and French schoolchildren, certainly not to the same degree. – Except in war settings, in which all bets are off: more schoolchildren have been shot and killed in Ukraine (population probably about 33,000,000) during the past year than in America (ppa 335,000,000) during the past ten years, chances are, but that's a slightly special case.

Ghislaine Maxwell has lost her appeal against her sex trafficking conviction

Good

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

"Nevertheless, JD Vance has clearly accepted as "a fact of life" that Americans will shoot American schoolchildren: he has not been misquoted as having said this. He just said that he doesn't like that fact.

People in other countries seem not to have this "fact of life" to contend with regarding, say, French people and French schoolchildren, certainly not to the same degree"

So the reason other countries such as France do not suffer the same level of school shootings as the US is because there is not the same gun culture or a high gun ownership in France as there is in the US.

But it is a fact of life in the US there is a strong gun culture and high gun ownership. To be very clear JD Vance has not accepted school shootings as a fact of life". What he has done is recognise that such school shootings are a fact of life which they absolutely are given the US gun culture.

Now this doesn't have to be the case and in countries like France where there are strong restrictions on gun ownership it is not a fact of life.

To change this in the US the logical path would be to adopt the same gun control measures,but in reality given the strong gun culture this is going to be incredibly hard to achieve and given the vast numbers of guns in circulation it would take decades to achieve.

So instead JD Vance advocates bolstering security in schools to stop such shootings. From a US perspective it is more realistic action that provides more immediate reductions in school shootings.

For what it's worth my own opinion is that gun ownership culture in the US is simply too deeply ingrained to be solved by banning guns. Of course the Europeans don't get this but the US is a different country with a different culture. So rather than trying to seize guns from their owners imo it would be easier to just tax the hell out of ammunition making guns more expensive to use.

. So rather than trying to seize guns from their owners imo it would be easier to just tax the hell out of ammunition making guns more expensive to use.
Clever!

Chris Rock has an excellent stand up on that subject - 'if a single bullet cost 5000 dollars, you'd think twice before firing' it's a brilliant routine.
The price of everything is manipulated (see diamonds it's not difficult). Why not bullets?

@BruceAndNosh

Sadly instead there is a stand off between the pro gun right that want to bolster security at schools but in reality will never stop every psycho shooter. And the gun control left that want to ban guns but in reality will never achieve this with so many already in circulation.

And in the meantime another school shooting happens. So on that point JD Vance is absolutely correct- it's a horrible horrible fact of life that shouldn't be so.

The solution may well lie midway: don't ban all guns guns, ban mad owners. Make it very difficult for them to get a gun in the first place, rather than allowing troubled children to buy what amount to machine guns on their eighteen birthdays and gun down their schoolfellows.

It is hard to see what a civilian needs a machine gun for, apart from to please the gun-manufacturer-owned NRA. And gun crime seems to have gone down at times they were not readily available to gun-nuts.

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime

"The solution may well lie midway: "

Nah reasonable compromise and the middle ground has gone completely out of the window in the increasingly polarised world of US politics.

Also from a practical perspective how do you prove someone is mad or not when they come to buy a gun? What's to stop them taking one from someone else etc.

The solution is to allow people to sue gun and ammunition manufacturers for the damage caused by their products. It would do to the industry what being able to sue the tobacco giants did to smoking. Jason Kander is fabulous on this - worth a read or listen.

*Alongside other common sense measures.

This week's key phrase on Fox "News"...
Anti Trump rhetoric.
Apparently the Left is totally to blame for nut jobs taking highly ineffective pot shots at Trump by calling him a danger to democracy, and they should dial it down.
Trump's line that "we won't have a country left" if Harris wins is perfectly OK.

Here you all are. 🐈‍⬛

Did anyone else read this? America under the thumb of Trump's court is just a shocking, shocking place.

Nicolle Wallace also did a segment on this yesterday, and three things that jumped out at me when I listened, is that 1. the boards that examine these deaths are two years behind, 2. the families don't know the outcome (Amber's mother only knows because propublica told her), 3. When they reached out to Kemp, his office said they were 'fear mongering'.

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-amber-thurman-death

It's horrendous isn't it. I get so cross about anyone claiming to be pro-women supporting Trump. This case is heart breaking and its women like that Trump supporters are throwing under the bus (someone posted it on a thread I'm on in FWR)