Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Didn't McClane lift most of his weapons off the bad guys in that movie? If you were going for absurd on purpose, you could have put Naked Gun or Super Troopers in there.
The reluctant hero (who just happens to be armed to the teeth/a former karate expert/skilled in the use of guns) thing is a recurrent trope.

I'm not an expert on Die Hard lore, from wikipedia

John McClane was originally based on the fictional character Detective Joe Leland from Roderick Thorp's bestselling novel, Nothing Lasts Forever. Other aspects are derived from Frank Malone from Walter Wager's novel 58 Minutes (adapted as Die Hard 2).

Die Hard villain Hans Gruber describes him as "just another American.... who thinks he's John Wayne," to which McClane replies that he "was always partial to Roy Rogers." He is described as being a "foul-mouthed, wisecracking, no-nonsense New York cop with an itchy trigger finger ... and a never-say-die maverick spirit."

McClane's marriage is in a constant state of crisis, his vigilantism and disregard for authority have put him in danger of losing his job more than once, and he is a chain-smoker who is described by Inspector Cobb in Die Hard with a Vengeance as being "two steps away from becoming a full blown alcoholic", which McClane jokingly corrects him saying only "one step".
The point is its another media portrayal of an angry and dysfunctional man who achieves hero status by extra-judicially killing a bunch of people who are apparently 'bad guys', when he could have left the building and left it to the Police.
McClane was not an LAPD cop, he was in NYPD, as far as I know Police in the US aren't allowed to roam the continent blowing people away if they feel like it.

The situation with the public and the police in America now seems to be that as soon as someone is perceived to be a 'bad guy' its OK to kill them, even if they've done nothing and are running away.

e: It's also weird to me that you use the deadly car analogy in seeming mockery of actual gun control, yet follow up by condemning violence in media. Am I looking at this too straight on? Am I missing something.
Its more a comment on the equating of gun murders being an acceptable and unavoidable consequence of the 2nd amendment with people accidentally killing others in car crashes being an inevitable consequence of car ownership. I used the image of someone murdering people with a car to highlight the point.

I am a gun owner, I'm thoroughly in favour of very tight gun control so that I can hopefully not be murdered but still keep my guns.
The situation in Australia is fairly slack TBH, more than half the gun owners I come into contact with are morons with some sort of fetish or latent fantasy inherent in their desire to own guns. There's been an explosion lately in applications for licences, I suspect its due to the Walking Dead TV show, there are so few places where hunting is actually permitted the goggle-eyed numpties must be shoulder to shoulder at the weekend, or sitting at home stroking them waiting for the zombie apocalypse, I dunno. Even the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for social collapse.

In America the level of gun hoarding and fetishising is fucking nuts.

I can continue the guns/cars analogy. People are driving around in SUVs because they think it makes them safer when the statistics show the opposite, and they're arming themselves and resisting sensible gun controls because they think it makes it safer for them when the statistics show the opposite.
There seems to be no rationality, except everyone wants to be 'safer' than the guy next to them, never mind it makes things more dangerous for everyone including themselves.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-01-29 01:47:36)

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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
The gun owners who seriously think gun owners would rise up and overthrow the government if the 2nd Amendment was repealed are a trip.

Despite how much shit they talk on the internet, most gun owners are lazy like most other Americans. They would just huff and puff and roll over for the government like Americans huff and puff and roll ever for everything else.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422
i remember reading somewhere a line that said the militia movement are basically best understood as LARP'ers in miltary fatigues rather than wizard capes.

that or war-damaged vietnam vets in montana or w/e.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
LARPer is accurate. If they were serious about doing revolutionary and dangerous shit they could just go to Ukraine or Rojava or somewhere else to act it out. There is no shortage of places that would take foreign volunteers.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Its easy to dismiss people you disagree with as nuts.

They're a product of their environment and firmly believe they're doing their patriotic duty, the American mutiny having depended on nutty militias, and civilian ownership of guns being a key enabler to remove what they saw as an oppressive government.

Look at it from their point of view, they pay 30% of their income to the gubmint, get nothing in return except to be harassed by the same gubmint wanting to know how many children they have had with which of their cousins, and trying to take their guns away.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
the american mutiny didn't depend on nutty militias. it depended on the french empire, lol.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
The American Revolution was started by extremely wealthy people who wanted more political power. Since wealthy people generally have more things to live for than the poor, I don't expect them to use their wealth to LARP in the mountains as soldiers.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Dilbert_X wrote:

I'm not an expert on Die Hard lore, from wikipedia

John McClane was originally based on the fictional character Detective Joe Leland from Roderick Thorp's bestselling novel, Nothing Lasts Forever. Other aspects are derived from Frank Malone from Walter Wager's novel 58 Minutes (adapted as Die Hard 2).

Die Hard villain Hans Gruber describes him as "just another American.... who thinks he's John Wayne," to which McClane replies that he "was always partial to Roy Rogers." He is described as being a "foul-mouthed, wisecracking, no-nonsense New York cop with an itchy trigger finger ... and a never-say-die maverick spirit."

McClane's marriage is in a constant state of crisis, his vigilantism and disregard for authority have put him in danger of losing his job more than once, and he is a chain-smoker who is described by Inspector Cobb in Die Hard with a Vengeance as being "two steps away from becoming a full blown alcoholic", which McClane jokingly corrects him saying only "one step".
The point is its another media portrayal of an angry and dysfunctional man who achieves hero status by extra-judicially killing a bunch of people who are apparently 'bad guys', when he could have left the building and left it to the Police.
McClane was not an LAPD cop, he was in NYPD, as far as I know Police in the US aren't allowed to roam the continent blowing people away if they feel like it.

The situation with the public and the police in America now seems to be that as soon as someone is perceived to be a 'bad guy' its OK to kill them, even if they've done nothing and are running away.
I wonder how many people who've seen the movies read the books that inspired it.

I think the movie inspires suspension of disbelief. McClane is insanely lucky to survive all this nonsense to the point of caricature. Also the "bad guys" as you put them in quotes were doing objectively bad guy stuff.

It's not really as big of an issue as I've drawn it out to be. I'll let it drop, but I still think they were odd choices next to other characters that you could have cited. Spies, thugs, retired hit men, mob bosses, bank robbers.

In America the level of gun hoarding and fetishising is fucking nuts.

I can continue the guns/cars analogy. People are driving around in SUVs because they think it makes them safer when the statistics show the opposite, and they're arming themselves and resisting sensible gun controls because they think it makes it safer for them when the statistics show the opposite.
There seems to be no rationality, except everyone wants to be 'safer' than the guy next to them, never mind it makes things more dangerous for everyone including themselves.
Through a stereotype lens, sure. There's different justifications for owning an SUV or a gun, and not all of them have to do with the things you mentioned.

I'm still not sure where you were going with your vehicle analogies, but I won't deny that there are gun owners who take their fascination to weird extremes.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

It's not really as big of an issue as I've drawn it out to be. I'll let it drop, but I still think they were odd choices next to other characters that you could have cited. Spies, thugs, retired hit men, mob bosses, bank robbers.
My argument is about 'good guy' mass shooters.

Criminals are going to commit crime, usually against other criminals, one on one.

Its otherwise fairly responsible white men with minimal criminal histories who tend (ignoring the fact that the majority of men in America are white and men and have minimal criminal histories) to commit mass shootings of innocents for no clear reason.

Giving people the idea that they can make the determination of who is a 'bad guy' in a split second on the spot while they are angry is a bad thing

Giving people the idea they can pick up a gun and justifiably blow away people they've determined to be 'bad guys' is a bad thing

Giving people the idea that picking up a gun and blowing away dozens of 'bad guys' will give them hero status is a bad thing

I quickly picked a few random examples of pop culture reinforcing the above, Die Hard is a good example.


Cars - The argument - car ownership is lawful and we accept routine accidental fatalities - gun ownership is lawful ergo we should accept deliberate shooting fatalities as routine - is a retarded one. 2nd amendment campaigners who use this just make themselves look retarded.
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unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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Why not get to the core of it and say one of the most glaring features here is the sheer quantity of guns floating around in the US, rather than illustrate tenuous cause and effect between some hackneyed old movies (out of all potential variables), and specifically white mass shooters.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
The glaring feature is that mass shootings happen for no real identifiable reason.
You'd think that availability of guns would enable people to shoot specific people who annoyed them, not multiple random strangers.

The huge numbers of guns 'floating around' are skewed by a small number of people who hold 20+ guns. I suppose another question is why people think they need 20+ guns.
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uziq
Member
+492|3422
for no identifiable reason? they pretty clearly and self-evidently tally with a massive mental health crisis. healthy normal people and well-adjusted citizens do not decide to shoot up outdoor country music concerts or their local church congregation. whether it's too prominent in the culture or spread as a function of the media, or whether it derives from deeper causes/conditions that contribute to poor mental health, at the very least the 'identifiable reason' is sick and psychopathic people.

Last edited by uziq (2019-02-01 05:18:53)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Dilbert_X wrote:

The huge numbers of guns 'floating around' are skewed by a small number of people who hold 20+ guns. I suppose another question is why people think they need 20+ guns.
Adam Lanza shot his mom, took four guns from a sub-20 collection to school, and used two. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris managed to scrounge two guns each that they should never have had free access to.

It's so frustrating when people condemn gun violence but stubbornly blame anything but the guns. It's like there's some unspoken ban from discussion. This doesn't mean there aren't other legitimate factors. That's why I called it "one of the most glaring features." Shouldn't be that surprising since the one thing present in all mass shootings are guns.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
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This guy that beat me up in highschool pretty bad for no reason died a few days ago. He got shot to death lol
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Mental health crisis - I agree, the American lifestyle does seem to make people twitchy and paranoid for various reasons, lack of a social and health safet net for one. But I think telling mentally ill people  they can redeem all their mistakes and achieve hero status by killing dozens of people, which is what the entertainment industry has been doing for a long time now, does not help.

Availability of guns - Obviously people can't carry out a mass shooting without a gun, however mature nations do manage to combine private ownership of guns with low crime rates and few mass shootings. Not America though, that was the point of Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine but everyone saw it as an anti-gun rant.

And obviously availability of compact semi-auto high capacity firearms such as short-barrel AR15s makes spree-shootings super-easy. If you can operate a super-soaker you can operate an AR15 until it overheats.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2019-02-02 03:49:14)

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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
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How do you feel about regulations on weapon design? You can't kill with a bolt action rifle as quickly as you could with a semi automatic.
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War Man
Australians are hermaphrodites.
+563|6683|Purplicious Wisconsin

SuperJail Warden wrote:

How do you feel about regulations on weapon design? You can't kill with a bolt action rifle as quickly as you could with a semi automatic.
You can be real close if the bolt action is properly designed and you drill yourself well enough. Also bolt actions tend to be a little more accurate.
The irony of guns, is that they can save lives.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
The Vegas massacre would have been impossible if the guns were bolt action. The amount of casualties would be way lower in almost all mass shootings.


Don't bother responding to this post by the way. I just remembered how stupid it is to even try arguing against pro-gun nonsense.
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coke
Aye up duck!
+440|6679|England. Stoke

War Man wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

How do you feel about regulations on weapon design? You can't kill with a bolt action rifle as quickly as you could with a semi automatic.
You can be real close if the bolt action is properly designed and you drill yourself well enough. Also bolt actions tend to be a little more accurate.
Don't be fucking daft.
I can probably out shoot you aiming at fixed targets on a range for accuracy with a Lee Enfield No.4 on a range, but I ain't doing as much "damage" on a killing spree vs a semi auto M4 with 30 round mags.

Last edited by coke (2019-02-08 17:13:50)

Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
One thing with a bolt action is that you're more likely to hit your target because you're going to take the time to aim if you know it takes effort to reload. Spray and pray with a semi-automatic weapon is inherently inaccurate. The guy in Vegas had like 22,000 people to shoot at and only killed 56 in ten minutes, while firing 1,100 rounds.

And no, I'm not saying that a bolt-action is just as good if the goal is mass murder. A bolt-action takes skill to use. A semi-automatic doesn't. But, give a skilled marksman a bolt-action and he'd probably do more damage than the untrained idiot with a semi-automatic. Give a skilled marksman a semi-automatic and it's a force-multiplier... to a point. You can only fire so fast accurately.

Last edited by Jay (2019-02-08 17:21:55)

"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
Most mass shootings take place at ranges that aiming is pointless though. Most of these idiots would probably be better off using handguns, but AR's are cooler and scarier I guess.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

Jay wrote:

One thing with a bolt action is that you're more likely to hit your target because you're going to take the time to aim if you know it takes effort to reload. Spray and pray with a semi-automatic weapon is inherently inaccurate. The guy in Vegas had like 22,000 people to shoot at and only killed 56 in ten minutes, while firing 1,100 rounds.

And no, I'm not saying that a bolt-action is just as good if the goal is mass murder. A bolt-action takes skill to use. A semi-automatic doesn't. But, give a skilled marksman a bolt-action and he'd probably do more damage than the untrained idiot with a semi-automatic. Give a skilled marksman a semi-automatic and it's a force-multiplier... to a point. You can only fire so fast accurately.
The Parkland guy in Florida shot 34 people in less than 6 minutes by randomly shooting at the walls and doors.
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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
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I watched the entire video of the mass shooting in New Zealand. Hopefully this dispells many of the myths regarding how bolt action weapons and zip guns are just as dangerous as AR-15s.

As far as gun control goes, I really don't want to hear a damn thing from gun rights advocates anymore.
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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
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I was reading the manifesto and he complained a lot about hedonistic modern culture. Which means he wasn't getting laid. Only people who complain about that aren't getting laid.
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unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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Beyond his white nationalistic ideals, he also considers himself an environmentalist and a fascist who believes China is the nation that most aligns with his political and social values. He has contempt for the wealthiest 1 percent. And he singled out American conservative commentator Candace Owens as the person who had influenced him the most.
What the hell?

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