#fuck Wayne LaPierre

[socialjusticeinamerica]

2 parishioners brought guns to mass. A child was hit in the crossfire and remains in critical condition. More senseless gun violence from a failed third world red state.

#republican assholes #2nd amendment assholes #gun fight #shootout #gun crime #gun death #gun violence #gun control #assault weapons ban #Tex-ass #child shot #senseless gun violence #the nra is a terrorist organization #fuck the nra #fuck Wayne LaPierre #Joel Osteen #mega church #evangelicals bring guns to church #nra=no lives matter #the gun lobby is killing us

[rejectingrepublicans]

👏

#republican assholes #the nra is a terrorist organization #fuck the nra #wayne lapierre #draft dodger

[cyarskaren52]

There’s people who don’t believe hell exists as a place but this MF makes them hope they were wrong about it and there’s people who believe that hell is real because they want this mf to rot down there!

Either way he’s gonna burn

#Wayne lapierre #nra #politics #gun crime #republican hypocrisy #gun violence #gun control #fuck the nra #the nra is a terrorist organization #Should we offer thoughts and prayers #It worked for school shootings #sike #hahaha

[teenagecriminalmastermind]

Fuck the NRA, and fuck every politician who takes their blood money.

TW: Gun Violence

EIGHTEEN elementary school aged children are gone. 18 sets of parents will never see their kids again, 18 families destroyed. I’m so fucking sick of the NRA pretending like their funded legislation is saving lives.

Anyone who says that this is why we need more guns needs to reconcile themselves with the fact that they too, are okay with little kids being murdered; literally nothing else but stringent gun control is gonna stop this. Columbine wasn’t enough, sandy hook wasn’t enough, parkland wasn’t enough, oxford wasn’t enough and neither will this be.

How can pro gun law supporters reconcile their humanity with these beliefs? there’s more than ample proof that the NRA funded pro gun legislation has done absolutely nothing to curb homicides, but on the contrary increased them.

You’re making deadly weapons accessible to teenagers whose brains aren’t done fully forming. who, in the heat of their emotions, might commit irreparable damage - we don’t let kids DRINK until 21, yet you’re arguing that they have the mental faculties to handle a literal weapon?

Legislators keep complaining about how hard it is to gain bipartisan support, but how hard can it be to gain support for basic humanity? You have been elected to do this arduous task, sworn in to serve the people you represent.

The people you represent don't want bodies riddled with bullet holes, they want their loved ones to come home at the end of the day. And if you believe that staying in power with the aid of death-mongers like Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association is more important than innocent lives, then I hope you remember that you are replacable. The dead are not replacable, but you are.

So do your fucking jobs, or get the fuck out.

#I am so so mad about this #i'm so fucking over this #so tired #and exhausted #tw gun violence #tw school shooting #HOW MANY MORE KIDS HAVE TO DIE? #tumblr #texas #uvalde #gun violence

[inkandguns]

One of the reasons why I advocate for national divorce is.. where the fuck is the GOP version of this? Democrats are passing laws that allow pedophiles and teachers to abduct and torture your kids (not hyperbole). They’re showing kids how to use Grindr to meet adult sex partners. Haven’t heard about really any pushback against that.

They go after the NRA and the GOP should go after planned parenthood or something. They go for the throat, we go for the eyes, etc.

[cyarskj1899]

Fuck your thoughts and prayers! I wanna live with fear of the gun

Fuck the NRA.

Fuck Wayne LaPierre

Fuck the pro-mass-shooting GOP.

Face it, you fucks are pro-death.

[trdsf]

Bye bye, murderer.

So Wayne LaPierre has resigned as CEO of the NRA. Good riddance to a damn terrorist who'd rather see blood in the streets than see one violent asshole be denied an AK-47 and a thousand rounds of ammo.

The Second Amendment doesn't say "anything goes". It specifically references "a well-regulated militia".

"Well-regulated" says that if my neighbor buys a gun, he should have to undergo more stringent training, licensing, and insurance than he'd need for a car. It says that if he has a history of domestic violence or other violent crimes, he can *not* be trusted with a firearm.

It's sickening that my barber has to be licensed by the state in order to cut my hair, but any fucking idiot can buy a gun without anything more than the most cursory of checks and zero fucking training.

WELL-REGULATED. That's an integral part of the Second Amendment. Someone without training is not well-regulated. Someone with a history of violence is not well-regulated. It's not that fucking difficult.

#lock-him-up #american-terrorist

[ladyjay333]

I hope he goes to jail for the rest of his life and then burns in hell afterward. I will never understand people who hold the 2nd amendment as the most important. Even in the face of school shootings. The fuck is wrong with you? Rich people suck.

[kyliaquilor-archive]

I get that it isn’t cool to wish people dead, but honestly, I want Wayne Lapierre to die. Preferably in a random shooting where he’s just a bystander, for the Irony value, but I’ll take any death at this point.

JUST DIE ALREADY YOU INHUMAN BASTARD

#Fuck the NRA #Anti-Wayne Lapierre #Anti-NRA

[gojiro]

The NRA is a terrorist organization.

#nra #wayne lapierre #gun control #gun laws #las vegas #sandy hook #orlando #gun nuts #fuck the nra #gop #republicans #ammosexuals #political cartoons #brian mcfadden

[socialjusticeinamerica]

#gun control #gun violence #gun crime #fuck the nra #Wayne lapierre #republican assholes

[mostlysignssomeportents]

VICTORY! New Free File rules ban tax-prep firms from hiding their offerings, allow IRS to compete with them (a love-letter to Propublica)

Six months ago, Propublica began beating the drum about "Free File," a bizarre, corrupt arrangement between the IRS and the country's largest tax-prep firms that ended up costing the poorest people in America millions and millions of dollars, every single year.

The scam is one of those baroque, ultimately boring and complex stories that generally dies in the public imagination despite its urgency, because "boring and urgent" is the place where the worst people can do the worst things with the least consequences.

With that warning, here's a short summary: in most wealthy countries, the tax authority fills out your tax return for you, using the information your employer already has to file every time it pays your wages. If all the numbers look right to you, you just sign the bottom of the form and send it back, without paying a tax preparer. If, on the other hand, you want to claim extra deductions, or if something complicated is going on with your finances, you can throw away that free tax return and fill in a form from scratch, either on your own or with the help of a professional.

When Americans asked to have the same courtesy extended to them -- a move that would save the vast majority of Americans millions and millions of dollars they were currently paying to the likes of HR Block and Intuit/Turbotax, every single year of their entire working lives -- the tax-prep industry mobilized to kill the proposal. The industry (which is highly concentrated and dominated by a small handful of firms whose top execs have mostly done time in all their competitors' board rooms, making them into essentially one giant company whose different divisions have different shareholders) lobbied the IRS very hard, and won a resounding victory.

That victory is called "Free File." Under Free File, each tax prep company is required to serve a slice of working Americans with free, online tax-preparation. The arrangement was hailed as a victory for public-private partnerships, harnessing the efficiency of the private sector to perform this public duty of the state. Importantly, it meant that the IRS would not expand its headcount or budget, both of which had been slashed by successive right-wing presidents and their legislative enablers. The move was cheered by anti-tax extremists like Grover Nordquist, who was delighted by the "efficiency" of you saving a bunch of pieces of paper the government already had, typing them into an online form, and hoping that a company's website came up with the same calculations that the government had already made about your tax-bill.

Part of the Free File deal banned the IRS from creating a competing offer and it banned the IRS from advertising the existence of the program or telling people where to find the free offering.

As soon as the ink was dry on Free File, the tax-prep companies set about to sabotage it. Intuit -- a massive company led by a bizarre cult figure -- and its competitors hid their Free File offerings deep in their sites, and used the "robots.txt" system to instruct search engines to hide them. They took out search ads for the phrase "Free File" that directed users to paid offerings with the word "free" in their names. They created "Free File" systems that would make you go through hours of work entering your data before surprising you with a notice that you didn't qualify for Free File because you'd paid interest on a student loan (or some other normal thing) and then ask you if you wanted to pay to keep your work and finish your tax-return in the non-free system.

There's a simple name for this kind of activity: fraud.

But it was a fraud in plain sight, one that went on for years and years, and which created a stealth tax on the majority of Americans, which they had to remit not to the IRS, but to the tax-prep companies, which used the money to lobby to make it even harder to get away from handing them your money every year.

Enter Propublica, whose relentless reporting did the seemingly impossible: it made a complicated, boring important thing into something that millions of Americans cared about. Something they cared about so deeply that they actually managed to shame the IRS into taking action.

Remember, the IRS is an administrative agency, under the direct control of the Trump administration. That means its commander-in-chief is a guy who said dodging his taxes means that he's "smart." While the IRS has many good, hardworking staffers, it has also been demoralized and gutted by the right, who have convinced millions of poor people that it's somehow in their interests if it's easier for rich people to duck their taxes.

Despite all this, the IRS has enacted new Free File rules: first, these rules ban tax-prep companies from hiding their Free File offerings, and it bans them from using deceptive names for non-Free File offerings (Turbotax will no longer be allowed to confuse Americans by offering "Turbotax Free" -- which is not free -- as a competitor to "Turbotax Free File," which is).

Second, the rule allows the IRS to develop its own competing Free File product, which means that the government agency that already knows how much tax you owe will allow you to review its findings each year and then either challenge them, or simply click OK, without paying a single cent of tax to Intuit or HR Block, and free you from filling in lengthy, bureaucratic forms.

This outcome is nothing short of miraculous: it did not come as the result of Congressional action. It did not come as the result of the Trump administration's inattention (the release came out the same day that the Trump administration revised its tax rules to allow money launderers to retain billions in the loot they've stashed offshore).

It came about as the result of fucking journalism. Propublica wrote its way into a better world, with relentless, deep, accessible reporting that made this boring, important thing come to life.

I am sympathetic to the idea that talking about politics isn't doing politics, but that's not entirely true. Learning about what's going on and telling the people you know about it and getting them to tell others is part of how we make change. Propublica's excellent reporting wouldn't have mattered if people hadn't read it -- and talked about it.

And Propublica has done this repeatedly over the past year, deeply reporting on naked, grotesque corruption in ways so vivid and undeniable that they actually changed things, and not in some abstract, boring way, but in ways that matter to the immediate, lived experience of real people who had been brutalized and poisoned and jailed and mistreated with impunity, for years, until Propublica wrote about it.

Here are some examples, just from the stories I paid attention to this year (Propublica does so much good work that I can't manage to cover all of it):

* Reformed South Carolina's "magistrate judge" system that let "judges" with no legal background and less training than barbers sentence poor people (most of them Black) to prison in defiance of their constitutional rights;

* Dismantled Illinois's system of Quiet Rooms where special ed kids were put into solitary confinement, sometimes for days at a time;

* Shamed a "Christian" hospital into ending its practice of suing thousands of patients, many of them its own employees, for inability to pay their medical debts, and forcing it to jettison the private army of debt collectors it kept on its payroll.

* Killed an Illinois scam whereby affluent parents temporarily gave up custody of their own children so they could steal college grants earmarked for poor children;

* Got two Louisiana cops fired for encouraging people to murder Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez;

In addition, Propublica has done lots of reporting that hasn't yet created political transformations, but has changed our debate and laid the groundwork for change to come: called attention to the penniless hero of the ransomware epidemic; discredited a "walking polygraph" system used by police forces to frame their preferred suspects with sheer junk science; documented the link between pharma company bribes and doctors' prescribing; named every former lobbyist in the Trump administration; tracked every penny of the 2008 bailout money; documented Wayne LaPierre's self-dealing from the NRA's war-chests; documented the grifty conservative PACs that scammed millions out of scared old white people with racist Obama conspiracies and then kept the money for themselves; published a blockbuster story on the theft of southern Black families' ancestral lands through a legal grift called "heirs' property"; debunked the "aggression detection" mics being installed in America's classrooms; outed a "ransomware consultant" that was working with ransomware crooks to simply pay the ransom, while pretending that they were able to get you your files back without enriching the crooks who locked them up; named and shamed Alabama sheriffs who lost their re-election bids and then spent thousands of public dollars on frisbees or stole discretionary funds, or destroyed food earmarked for prisoners, or drilled holes in all the department computers' hard-drives in a form of "vindictive hazing"; followed the payday lender industry to a Trump hotel where it staged an annual conference, funneling millions to the president's personal accounts shortly before Trump reversed Obama's curbs on predatory lending; documented how TSA body-scanners single out Black women for humiliating, discriminatory hair-searches; revealed the secret history of wealthy people destroying the IRS's Global High Wealth Unit; and did outstanding work on the Sackler family, a group of billionaire opioid barons whose products kickstarted the opioid epidemic that has now claimed more American lives than the Vietnam war.

2019 was a dumpster-fire of a year and 2020 could be worse -- or it could be the dawn that breaks after our darkest hour. Finding Propublica's victory lap on Free File on New Year's Day was just the sunrise I needed to give me hope for the year to come. Sometimes, simply finding the truth and telling it to the people can make a change.

I'm a Propublica donor, and an avid reader. I admit that sometimes when I see that PP has published another 15,000-word expose, I am slightly dismayed at the thought that I'm about to lose 1-2 hours of my life to digesting and writing up the new story, but that dismay is always overcome by excitement at the thought that they have turned over a new rock and found something genuinely awful beneath it, and that, with all our help, we can sterilize that foetid sludge with blazing sunshine.

https://boingboing.net/2019/12/31/go-propublica-go.html

[rjzimmerman]

I hesitated to watch this video, or to read this story, because I am an adamant and stubborn believer that trophy hunting ought to be banned, completely and everywhere. No legitimate arguments exist to support it, except in the world dominated by Satan. But because this video pertains to one of the most vile organizations in the world (the NRA) and one of the most vile human beings i have never met (Wayne LaPierre, the Executive Director of the NRA), I felt compelled to do so. While I was watching this video, my blood pressure increased, along with my anger and disgust, particularly as LaPierre fucked up the shoot and the elephant suffered. Then we get to see his wife slaughter another elephant.

This video and this story has been hidden for eight years. I hope lots of people watch it, or learn about it, and perhaps change their minds if they are neutral about trophy hunting, or support it. There is no room in our shrinking world with a looming (or existing) biodiversity crisis to support the slaughter of animals to satisfy the urge for humans to assert their superiority or dominance. It is fucking revolting.

May they both rot in hell, to the extent I believe in such a place. (For them, I believe strongly that it exists and that they both will be cozy there among their peers.)

Here’s the video, followed by an extract of the story from The New Yorker. Warning: if you’re like me, you won’t like the video. It is disturbing.

Excerpt from this story from The New Yorker:

After the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, told Americans agitating for new gun regulations, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Less than a year later, LaPierre and his wife, Susan, travelled to Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they hoped to show N.R.A. members that they had the grit to take on a different adversary: African bush elephants, the largest land mammals on Earth. The trip was filmed by a crew from “Under Wild Skies,” an N.R.A.-sponsored television series that was meant to boost the organization’s profile among hunters—a key element of its donor base. But the program never aired, according to sources and records, because of concerns that it could turn into a public-relations fiasco.

The Trace and The New Yorker obtained a copy of the footage, which has been hidden from public view for eight years. It shows that when guides tracked down an elephant for LaPierre, the N.R.A. chief proved to be a poor marksman. After LaPierre’s first shot wounded the elephant, guides brought him a short distance from the animal, which was lying on its side, immobilized. Firing from point-blank range, LaPierre shot the animal three times in the wrong place. Finally, a guide had the host of “Under Wild Skies” fire the shot that killed the elephant. Later that day, Susan LaPierre showed herself to be a better shot than her husband. After guides tracked down an elephant for her, Susan killed it, cut off its tail, and held it in the air. “Victory!” she shouted, laughing. “That’s my elephant tail. Way cool.”

For three decades, LaPierre has led the N.R.A.’s fund-raising efforts by railing against out-of-touch “élites” and selling himself as an authentic champion of American self-reliance and the unfettered right to protect oneself with a gun. But the footage, as well as newly uncovered legal records, suggest that behind his carefully constructed Everyman image, LaPierre is a coddled executive who is clumsy with a firearm, and fearful of the violent political climate he has helped to create. The N.R.A. did not respond to requests for comment.

#elephants #elephant hunting #Botswana #Wayne LaPierre #NRA #trophy hunting

[alwaysscreechingbasement]

Can’t say I’m surprised that he’s such a fucking COWARD.

#sandy hook #wayne lapierre #nra #national rifle association

[pattern-53-enfield]

I mean, you always hated gun owners before this. It’s not like they changed their attitudes. Now if it were militia guys being disappeared, and gun owners did nothing, that would actually be an example of hypocrisy and cowardice. But this? This is just not taking a side when one enemy of yours is fighting another enemy. Why should gun owners side with leftists as opposed to the state?

I definitely hate gun owners, which is why I'm also a gun owner.

And it's because ever since I was old enough to understand all I have ever heard from gun owners and militia nerds is that they need their guns so they can be SHEEPDAWGZ and protect their fellow Americans against (insert foreign or domestic threat of the week). Spiel after spiel about how they're totally not racist or politically motivated and only have the best intentions, followed up by either complete radio silence or desperate scrambling to explain away why so many goddamn racists keep popping up in their movement. Wayne LaPierre screaming about jackbooted government thugs (right up until certain people were in charge), the Bundys being held up as martyrs and heroes for their brave stand against the government, it's all so fucking boring now.

[possumcollege]

I’m not crazy for wanting a .357 bolt gun. Everyone else is for not overcoming a fucking cartridge rim to make what would be one of the most practical firearms of the 21st century.  And also: fuck the NRA. They’re a nakedly corrupt band of fancy pigs who abandoned advocating reasonable gun ownership decades ago. I hope Wayne LaPierre goes to all the jail. 

#comics #comic art #rifle #guns #firearms #suppressor #fuck the NRA #art by op