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Why We're Talking About Flags Instead of Gun Control
Slate ^ | 6-24-2015 | Jessica Winter

Posted on 06/25/2015 2:18:00 PM PDT by Citizen Zed

Last weekend, the world saw white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof posing stone-faced with Confederate flags and license plates. Sometime after the pictures were taken, Roof allegedly shot dead nine parishioners at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, using a legally acquired 45-caliber Glock handgun after passing a background check.

On Monday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced that the Confederate flag would be removed from State House grounds, calling it “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.” In the space of 24 hours, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Walmart all stopped selling products featuring the Confederate banner.

Google stated Tuesday that it would scrub the flag from ads and Google Shopping. Several flag makers say they will stop manufacturing the flag.

Today, the governor of Alabama has ordered the removal of the flag from state Capitol grounds.

Almost literally overnight, the chimera of consensus around the Confederate flag as a divisive but misunderstood symbol of “heritage” or “Southern pride” fell away, revealing the banner for what it is. The obscenity of the flag and the murderous racism it represents have dominated a national conversation about the American way of hate and violence for all the right reasons.

The flag has also dominated the conversation for a single wrong reason, which is that most Americans have given up on achieving meaningful gun control in their lifetimes or in their grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Up to and including the December 2012 mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Americans could be certain that every time a crazed man emptied a weapon inside a church or movie theater or first-grade classroom, the aftermath would produce a national conversation—just like the one we’ve been having about Confederate symbolism—about strengthening America’s gun control laws.

(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...


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To: Citizen Zed

We should be contacting our senators to tell them to oppose any and all gun control legislation. Manchin and Toomey are plotting and scheming.

Manchin, Toomey both interested in reviving gun control push
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3303455/posts

National Association for Gun Rights
https://www.nationalgunrights.org


21 posted on 06/25/2015 2:47:29 PM PDT by familyop ("Baxters over there, Rojos there, and me right in the middle" ("A Fistful of Dollars").)
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To: Sopater; Smittie

According to his friend his father gave him money for his birthday, which he used to buy the gun. He lied on the form saying he had no charges pending against him when he did.


22 posted on 06/25/2015 2:49:52 PM PDT by Hugin ("Do yourself a favor--first thing, get a firearm!",)
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To: Citizen Zed

never let a crisis go to waste

besides they do not care one whit about those 9 Christians who were killed


23 posted on 06/25/2015 3:00:03 PM PDT by GeronL
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To: Citizen Zed

No one has thought this out.

This will be expanded to every expression of southern pride.

When I drove down I-81 from PA years ago, the first “attraction” was to visit the “Virginia Museum of the Civil War and the New Market Battlefield”.

The description of the battle there was not factual. The description was to to glorify confederate “valor” against Yankee intruders. Clearly racism by today’s standards.

If the confederate flag has to go, what happens to places like these? Is there going to be federal copy editors for monuments?


24 posted on 06/25/2015 3:10:18 PM PDT by cicero2k
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To: Sopater

Obama’s comrade Bill Ayers approves.


25 posted on 06/25/2015 3:33:42 PM PDT by Red Steel
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To: Red Steel

“Why We’re Talking About Flags Instead of Gun Control”

Look, Squirrel... Any word from Hillary on this? On the SCOTUS decisions? On Obamacare? On Benghazi? On emails?


26 posted on 06/25/2015 3:35:46 PM PDT by EQAndyBuzz (The NE Liberal Elites have declared war on the Conservative South. Civil War #2)
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To: EQAndyBuzz

Queen Hillary sequestering herself from pesky questions.


27 posted on 06/25/2015 3:39:52 PM PDT by Red Steel
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To: Citizen Zed

—Last weekend, the world saw white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof—

I take exception to this. The press ALWAYS paints the white wrongdoer as ‘white supremacist’. Why? To my knowledge Dylann didn’t state that. This was revenge for what he saw as pervasive blacks murdering whites with impunity.

Part of the anti-American plan apparently is to facilitate white guilt while fomenting black hate by constantly referring to Caucasians thinking of themselves as ‘white supremists’. Nobody seems to call them on it and it also seems to work.

Revenge does not translate into thinking one’s own race is ‘superior’ to another. I doubt people who are that scrood up to begin with even think beyond they’re own rage.


28 posted on 06/25/2015 3:45:33 PM PDT by Paulie (America without Christianity is like a Chemistry book without the periodic table.)
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To: Sacajaweau

we don’t control the narrative anymore - they do


29 posted on 06/25/2015 4:45:11 PM PDT by telstar12.5 (...always bring gunships to a gun fight...)
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To: Citizen Zed

Utterly brainless drivel from Jessica Winter - yet another IQ-challenged hack at Slate.


30 posted on 06/25/2015 11:04:50 PM PDT by Jack Hammer
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