this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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Waiting to see when this will make the news that one is posted in a US school building.
Image of a “good guy with a gun” trying to stop an active shooter; asking everyone running past him if they have change for a dollar as with increasing urgency, he keeps trying to smooth out and feed a crinkled dollar bill into the machine that keeps spitting out.
Edit: the dystopia flows through me - how bout it becomes subscription based so if you’re on the lowest paid plan you have to watch a 60 second promo spot for season 62 of “Congress Candy Crush Smackdown” or transfer ownership of 10% of your genetic sequence to Disney-Boston Dynamics for their “Real Boy Initiative”, or agree to enable Server mode on your “Nestle Neural Chocolate Chip” to contribute 10% of your brain’s processing power to their distributed “Metabolism Enhancement Network” where subscribers can customise their own metabolic rate, preferred tastes and even allergies.
It becomes SNL adjacent when the shooter also needs to refill on ammo, but he’s not a member for this particular vendor - so his ammo dispense-rate is glacially slow and not without strings attached. He can wait it out and eat a “compliance wafer” per round dispensed, or he can speed it up after “correctly” answering questions about FAANG (after the big 5 companies merged post Project 2025 and effectively took control of the world population and their minds) - he can switch his neuro-wave thought chip to the machine’s provider on the spot, or provide the names and addresses of five dissenters who are unaligned with the values of the one true religion, Capitalism.
Is this too dark for Saturday night live?
Yes, but SNL would be better if it wasn't.
If you went entirely the other way it could be a Black Mirror premise…
lol
It won't. Many Americans drift through life in ignorance and even if confronted with something they don't know, won't incorporate or react to those things unless they are told how to react. You see it all the time with Trump. When he does something that has been happening since Clinton it's suddenly a big deal and outrageous, when Obama did something that was perfectly normal since Reagan, it was suddenly beyond the pale and evidence of a commie plot.
When an ammo vending machine was installed in my high school 25 years ago no one noticed or cared, but if I went and took a picture of it today and posted it on twitter with some provoative text like "I can't even..." there would immediately be some kind of outrage about it for some reason.
Can you expand on the ammo vending machine installed at your high school in 1999? That's wild to me.
It's extremely boring and mundane as such things should be, but it here it goes. We had skeet shooting as an extra curricular. At the beginning of the semester you'd buy some boxes of shells and store them in your locker along with your shotgun. A box of shells would last about 3 sessions. If you ran out of shells but hadn't brought more ammo you'd have the option to go use the vending machine instead of having to leave the grounds to buy more and probably miss practice or the competition. So it was just a convenience having it there. Of course if you had some friends you could borrow their shells.
I wish we still lived in those times. It's really unfortunate the reality we find ourselves in vis a vis school shootings and other gun violence.
That's kind of what I figured it would be, I did something similar in college except it wasn't skeet shooting just targets with a .22
It's crazy to me how we've seen this proliferation of shootings and access to very dangerous weapons finding their way into kids hands. As a gun owner I think we should have required classes on gun safety and handling and some basic training before you could purchase a firearm.
We have drivers licenses and gate driving behind tests because you're operating a potentially lethal weapon. It's dumb easy to kill someone with a car. Why the hell is it easier to get an actual tool designed only for killing vs a vehicle for getting around. We have to do something to help drive down firearm deaths and a lot of those are accidental and easily preventable with minimum due diligence.
Idk I know there isn't a "silver bullet" but there must be more than just shrugs.
Anyways hope you enjoyed your time reminiscing and you have some fond memories of those times.
Nothing has changed as far as the weapons available, however society is much worse off then it was 25 years ago. And I'm not talking about the good old days of overt racism. I'm talking about material conditions, wealth inequality, employment opportunities, and just general dissolution of "polite society." Violence is a symptom of this degradation and going fascist with regards to the State monopoly on violence is going to make things much worse for everyone who doesn't already live in the guilded parallel society (like CEO's, the rich, and their pocket politicians.)
I also agree we must attack the root causes as well. No single solution will bring us the needed change.
I'm not suggesting going fascist just some things I think would help. The monopoly on permissible violence already is the defining factor of statehood.
Anyways yeah shits fucked, the wealth gap needs narrowed and we need some real fixes. All crap aside, hope you have some nice holidays and a good day.