The Washington Post reports that the Alt-Right conspiracy theorists have created fake portraits and videos to attack student leader Emma Gonzalez. The most infamous is a doctored video allegedly showing her tearing up the Constitution, changing the original, in which she ripped an NRA target.
Disgraceful. There is no limit to how low the far right will go.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Even if Gonzalez did tear the Constitution, she has the freedom to do so in America, just like Kaepernck has the freedom to take a knee during the Pledge.
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Excellent point.
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The fact that the alt-right is willing to distort so badly shows just how inept and vile their message is. Truth never needs any distortion.
How sad that so many people now believe a whole slew of falsehoods and lies. Our con-man/baby/ignorant/ leader is tops in this field.
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Idiot-in-Charge is one term for I use when referring to him. There’s more, but can’t post them.
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Praise the Lord and bless this fellow!!!
…….
From The New York Times:
John Paul Stevens, a former Supreme Court justice, calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment in a Times Opinion piece
This weekend’s marches make it clear: To enact real gun control, we need to change the Constitution.
Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.
That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that “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.” Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
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Carol,
That is a very very long shot that requires a higher degree of consensus than we have.
I would settle for Congress reauthorizing the ban on assault weapons that was in place from 1994-2004 plus very extensive background checks, registration of gun owners, and liability for those whose guns are used in crime.
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Diane, I know this is a very long shot and one that will never become a reality. However, these are words coming from a well respected Supreme Court Judge. It is on my fragile wish list. I can ‘dream the impossible dream’. [I played in a pit orchestra in a musical years ago and loved the song ever since.] It was a great song and the judge’s ideas would certainly spare future people from needlessly being killed. That is a reality that one shouldn’t miss.
Damn, I wish people in the US didn’t love their guns so much. Can’t they find something else to hug?
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I agree, Carol.
The Second Amendment was written more than 200 years ago, and it has no relevance to our lives except to the extent it allows criminals and mentally unstable people to get guns and kill people.
I think that repealing a Constitutional Amendment is a very difficult thing to do, and if possible, the work of many many years. We could achieve the same result by passing laws that ban assault weapons, semi-automatics, and all other military weapons; by requiring long wait periods to buy a gun (30 days); by requiring those who want to buy a gun to pass intensive background checks; requiring them to have training and produce a certificate, as drivers must to get a license; requiring them to own a secure gun safe; treating gun ownership as seriously as we treat getting a drivers license and auto registration; raising the age of purchase to 21; banning gun sales online and at gun shows. All that can be done far more easily than repealing the 2nd amendment.
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Diane, I agree with what you say.
” …requiring them to have training and produce a certificate”. I’d like the recertification to be something required at regular intervals. One shouldn’t be able to possess a gun if they are showing the inability to use it correctly. Car drivers have to prove that they are proficient in driving and licenses have been removed from those whose eyesight or mental capacity has been limited by age or other factors.
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A small, but significant, technical point: the term “assault weapon” has no clear definition, even among firearms experts. Where it’s been used in law, it has different definitions in different localities.
https://www.nssf.org/msr/
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/21/definition-of-whats-an-assault-weapon-is-a-very-contentious-issue.html
I mention this because those who advocate for maintaining current firearms availability will jump on use of such terms & use it to divert the discussion: “Well, you say you want to ban ‘assault weapons,’ but the AR15 isn’t an assault weapon, so there’s no problem w/my AR15…” etc. In order to avoid a lot of irrelevant argument, it’s best to use terms generally accepted by gun users, such as “semiautomatic” or “AR15 equivalent.”
Use of ambiguous or incorrect terminology also provides semiauto gun advocates another (in fact reasonable) argument, asking how someone who doesn’t know enough about a topic to understand the operation or terminology can discuss it intelligently. It’s true that our concern is only the result, i.e., people are dying, but if we want to change existing regulations, we have to be prepared to discuss the issue from where it is currently, not where we’d like it to be. We’re asking some people to give up something that’s important to them; it’s irrelevant whether we believe they should consider it important (unless, again, we want to engage in an entirely separate argument). It can be seen as an issue of respect if we imply that we can’t be bothered to learn basic facts about the topic we’re discussing. People who feel disrespected are unlikely to be receptive to alternate points of view.
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This is the “vote for the lesser evil” mentality again. But there is no either-or: nothing precludes from working on both acts in parallel.
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Gruff: Thank you for the thought.
I read a lot of the comments put out on an article in the NYT headlined, “John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment”. These comments were almost totally in favor of repealing the 2nd amendment. It was refreshing to read, as opposed to the ‘it’s my god-given right to own a gun’ that is put out by the gun lovers of the US and the NRA. Their ‘god given rights’ end when thousands of people die each year.
This whole thing makes me sick. These wonderful teenagers at Parkland are being trashed by phonies. This does not say much for the underside that exists and is flourishing due to the bigotry and hatred of our Orange Hair Monster.
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What I don’t get is how some advocates for semiautomatic weapon ownership by private citizens think a bunch of them armed with AR15s or equivalents are going to stand off RPGs, missiles, tanks, Blackhawk helicopters, & armed drones. At the time the 2nd Amendment was written, military & civilians had access to essentially the same weapons. Weapons tech has advanced somewhat since then. We’re way beyond the point where civilians armed, even extensively with the most sophisticated weaponry available, to them (even illegally) could stand against the US military, if it got to that point. Our best hope is to see that we all communicate civilly with our fellow citizens & elect legislators who won’t allow that to happen. The biggest danger of that happening is if we continue with the exaggerated animosity among Americans with different political views.
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So if you feel the need to arm yourself for the purpose of defending against tyranny, with a weapon that is not capable of (never has been ) defending yourself against such tyranny . By definition you must be mentally unstable or deficient . We can further that argument to most situations where a person feels the need to be armed for self defense . The states with the loosest gun restrictions are the states with the highest gun crimes per 100k of Population. And you are twice as likely to be killed in a gun crime when you posses a weapon.
The best defense being a good offense, it is time we sought to drastically reduce gun rights in this nation. When you cede the field to your opponents and have the discussion on their terms it is a losing battle.
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The GOP is panicking. The evidence speaks for itself. If you are bashing high school students who had to endure 6 plus minutes of some mentally challenged kid firing a AR15 assault weapon, then you are clearly panicking.
The republicans now realize that this shooting has become the death of the republican party. Yes, the students at Marjory Stoneman HS have finally found the guts and the intelligence to present republican politicians with a do or die situation of their own and they are clearly concerned about it.
The student who spoke at the rally on Saturday had a great message for politicians who take money from the NRA and that message was to get your resumes ready.
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I hope you’re right, but don’t think you are. The malleability of the American public combined with a collective short attention span, which gets shorter with every passing day, always seems to make it easy for reactionary responses to be big issues. Here’s to hoping I’ll be proven wrong.
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That is where IMHO street demonstrations and large ones, serve to refresh that “collective short attention span ” The fall is a lovely time of the year to be out on the streets. Followed by get out the vote efforts.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Fascism comes in many forms. Beware. We teachers have been the victims of fascism from our own government as well the mega rich who OWN politicians.
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The right has no other choice! The youth will stand strong and I’m extremely proud of these young people!
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An Ohio lawmaker, Butler County Representative Candice Keller spoke at a gun rally in Columbus Ohio. She is a gun nut, who said: “A month ago, we weren’t really having this conversation, and all of a sudden a 15-year-old on television who would just as soon be eating Doritos and playing video games wants to tell me that my constitution needs to be changed. Really?”
She said that she would not listen to teens, and “I was born with the right to carry.” “Nothing empowers women more than carrying. So firearms protect me against offenders. My husband is not always with me,” she said.
The audience at the gun rally in Columbus appeared to be mostly men, white, with MAGA hats and shirts. The YouTube of the event is long, but the “God-given right to bear arms theme is repeated over and over and gun violence is connected with removing prayer from schools (at about 1: 29-1:30). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQBjBHhLmqs
https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/26/butler-co-lawmaker-mocks-teen-gun-control-activists-doritos-eating-video-game-players/457946002/
The gun nuts have to be voted out of office. That is the only hope for some sanity on the issue of silence from guns, especially those designed to tear the guts out of the victim.
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Emma Gonzales is now obviously a target of the Koch brothers, ALEC, Bannon-Mercer Psy-Ops campaign to mislead and disrupt with its continuing agenda to generate widespread chaos and hate.
This organizations goal is to motivate one of their brainless drone followers to use an AK-15 to assassinate her and sweep her off the national, global stage.
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