Recent quotes:

January 5, 2025 - by Heather Cox Richardson

the political rhetoric in which many Americans have marinated since the 1950s: the idea that a government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, promotes infrastructure, and protects civil rights crushes the individualism on which America depends. Ronald Reagan made that argument central to American political debate in the 1980s. Joining those who claimed that the modern American state was creeping toward communism, he warned that the federal government was the current problem in the nation. He championed a mythological American cowboy who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone. That cowboy myth arose after the Civil War, when former Confederates complained that federal protection of Black rights cost white tax dollars. They contrasted the “socialism” in Washington, D.C., with the western cowboys in the cattle industry, portraying the cowboys as hardworking white men who dominated the land and the peoples of the West and enforced the law themselves with principles and guns. The cowboy image of the post–World War II years served a similar function: to undermine a government that, in the process of regulating business and providing a social safety net, defended the rights of minorities and women. After 1980, Republicans increasingly insisted that regulations, taxation, and a social safety net were socialism, and they attracted white male voters by warning that the real beneficiaries of the government were racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities and women. In 1972 the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Reagan took a stand against gun control.
#USAUSA #politics #guns - heathercoxrichardson.substack.com

Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions - PMC

After accounting for all explanatory variables, logistic regressions found that for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism there was a 50% increase in the odds of having a gun at home. After also accounting for having a gun in the home, there was still a 28% increase in support for permits to carry concealed handguns, for each one point increase in symbolic racism. The relationship between symbolic racism and opposition to banning handguns in the home (OR1.27 CI 1.03,1.58) was reduced to non-significant after accounting for having a gun in the home (OR1.17 CI.94,1.46), which likely represents self-interest in retaining property (guns).
#racism #guns - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

What police are trained on

A recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that cadets usually receive fifty-eight hours of training in firearms, forty-nine in defensive tactics, ten in communication skills, and eight in de-escalation tactics.
#guns - newyorker.com

At Least A Third Of All Women Murdered In The U.S. Are Killed By Male Partners

an average of three women are killed every day. More often than not, women are shot. Over half of all women killed by intimate partners between 2001 to 2012 were killed using a gun.
#guns - huffingtonpost.com

How Did America’s Craziest Governor Get Reelected? - Colin Woodard - POLITICO Magazine

Then there’s the unusually high turnout yesterday—perhaps as high as 60 percent—which benefited the governor. This may have been prompted by a pressing public policy issue: whether Mainers should be prevented from feeding donuts to bears. A campaign to ban the practice of baiting bears with pastries and other garbage—and then letting hunters shoot them—may have mobilized large numbers of rural voters who tend to appreciate hunting and the “plain spoken” LePage. (The ballot measure was defeated, by the way, by some five points—about the same as LePage’s margin of victory.)
#USAUSA #politics #GOP #guns - politico.com