I remain convinced that Keith and those who poke him with pointed sticks (All of you) are in Bloomberg's employ to generate craptastic posts to make us all look bad. What better anti-gun propaganda than these threads?
So asking for civility is anti-gun?
I think you misunderstood the point of my post. To be clear, "asking for civility" is most certainly NOT anti-gun. Asking for civility is what I was doing. Asking for civility in our forum is taking tools out of the hands of anti-gun propagandists.
By way of example, you'll remember that last year Maura Healy, the anti-gun AG of Massachusetts, declared by fiat that certain models of gun, which had been designed, approved and sold as compliant with Massachusetts law (and were compliant with Massachusetts law), were no longer compliant with Massachusetts law because she said so. As expected, the blogs and chat rooms erupted (among other things). What happened?
The nastiest and most incivil of the commentary was the stuff that got world-wide press. From an article in Britain's Guardian newspaper
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016...an-contribution :
Healey, who has suffered horrific sexist and homophobic abuse online since she introduced the new ban, said action must be taken to try to save lives. She said 10,000 assault rifles nearly identical to the one used in the attack in Orlando were sold in Massachusetts last year, and sales of the weapons jumped 450% in the wake of the Pulse nightclub massacre.
A person has tweeted that he would like to hire a homeless man to rape and disembowel the attorney general alive. Another is a said to have posted her home address on a gun blog, underneath a commenter has posted: “Road Trip???. Who wants to be a hero?”
The Boston Globe was equally happy to run with even more of the incendiary stuff from the gun chat rooms and paint themselves the victims.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/0...w7bN/story.htmlIn other words, when people in spaces like this site fling shit, the antis are only too happy to take it, paint themselves as victims, and raise funds off it. I would not be surprised if the folks who posted some of the really foul stuff about Healy were provocateurs of the kind who wait for the chance to say the kind of stuff which was said and make all of us look bad.
No one goes lurking in 16ga.com to find inflammatory stuff to rally the anti-gunners with. They have a civility code of sorts at 16ga and it works. The people on this site - many of whom are also over at 16ga.com - would do well to emulate their example. Voluntarily. In a fit of common sense. Because they're smart enough to.
