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Pro-Gun Russian Bots Flood Twitter After Parkland Shooting (wired.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: In the wake of Wednesday's Parkland, Florida school shooting, which resulted in 17 deaths, troll and bot-tracking sites reported an immediate uptick in related tweets from political propaganda bots and Russia-linked Twitter accounts. Hamilton 68, a website created by Alliance for Securing Democracy, tracks Twitter activity from accounts it has identified as linked to Russian influence campaigns. On RoBhat Labs' Botcheck.me, a website created by two Berkeley students to track 1500 political propaganda bots, all of the top two-word phrases used in the last 24 hours -- excluding President Trump's name -- are related to the tragedy: School shooting, gun control, high school, Florida school. The top hashtags from the last 24 hours include Parkland, guncontrol, and guncontrolnow.
While RoBhat Labs tracks general political bots, Hamilton 68 focuses specifically on those linked to the Russian government. According to the group's data, the top link shared by Russia-linked accounts in the last 48 hours is a 2014 Politifact article that looks critically at a statistic cited by pro-gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Twitter accounts tracked by the group have used the old link to try to debunk today's stats about the frequency of school shootings. Another top link shared by the network covers the "deranged" Instagram account of the shooter, showing images of him holding guns and knives, wearing army hats, and a screenshot of a Google search of the phrase "Allahu Akbar." Characterizing shooters as deranged lone wolves with potential terrorist connections is a popular strategy of pro-gun groups because of the implication that new gun laws could not have prevented their actions. Meanwhile, some accounts with large bot followings are already spreading misinformation about the shooter's ties to far-left group Antifa, even though the Associated Press reported that he was a member of a local white nationalist group. The Twitter account Education4Libs, which RoBhat Labs shows is one among the top accounts tweeted at by bots, is among the prominent disseminators of that idea.
While RoBhat Labs tracks general political bots, Hamilton 68 focuses specifically on those linked to the Russian government. According to the group's data, the top link shared by Russia-linked accounts in the last 48 hours is a 2014 Politifact article that looks critically at a statistic cited by pro-gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. Twitter accounts tracked by the group have used the old link to try to debunk today's stats about the frequency of school shootings. Another top link shared by the network covers the "deranged" Instagram account of the shooter, showing images of him holding guns and knives, wearing army hats, and a screenshot of a Google search of the phrase "Allahu Akbar." Characterizing shooters as deranged lone wolves with potential terrorist connections is a popular strategy of pro-gun groups because of the implication that new gun laws could not have prevented their actions. Meanwhile, some accounts with large bot followings are already spreading misinformation about the shooter's ties to far-left group Antifa, even though the Associated Press reported that he was a member of a local white nationalist group. The Twitter account Education4Libs, which RoBhat Labs shows is one among the top accounts tweeted at by bots, is among the prominent disseminators of that idea.
Be honest. It would take ALOT more power to the anti-gun lobby to stop an adult with no criminal record from buying a gun.
because the people who oppose all gun regulation have a lobby (the NRA) telling them how to vote, they listen, they vote and above all they're single issuer voters.
Gun control is a dead issue. It doesn't matter that 94% of Americans support Universal Background checks when that's just one issue out of many for them. The gun lobby is made up of people that will vote for _anyone_ so long as they promise to let them have their guns. You can't beat that strength unless you match it, and I don't see that happening.
They won. Drop it. You can't win this. The reason is simple. Gun nuts are Otaku. They're nerds. But they're a different kind of nerd than what everybody thinks about. They're extroverted nerds. Folks are used to seeing the introverted nerd; the kind that doesn't want to be around people. But they forget about the extroverts. They _want_ to be around people, but they're weird or ugly or tactless or something else that regular people don't like. So this kind of nerd seeks a community that accepts them no matter what. And a lot of the wash up on the shores of the NRA. The reason why there are so many strange gun nuts, heck the reason the phrase gun nut exists is that their an accepting community. It's like a religion. If you buy into it everybody has to at least be polite to you. It's a community. And if you make the slightest motion to take away that community they will react with a fear and hate you can't even imagine because, well, it's all they've got.
I suppose we could work to build a society that doesn't need such communities, but this is a site for nerds, and we all know how likely _that_ is to happen.
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If you look at Hamilton 68 (http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/) which only tracks the known Russian twitter bots, the very top (i.e most frequent) hashtag is gunreformnow, and at #8 is guncontrol, and there's zero sign of any pro-gun hashtags.
I'm not seeing anything that actually justifies the Wired article's obviously liberal-biassed claims.
The Constitution also says that Congress how the power to conscript the Militia to enforce laws, repel invasion and suppress insurrection. Upon doing so, the called-upon Militias are placed under direct command of the President.
So any notion that the militias are there to fight back against the government is right out the fucking window considering the government has explicit authority to use those same militias to fight against any such attempt. I can think of two historical examples where this has happened; The Whiskey Rebellion, and the Civil War.
And it's not about "free society" either. Among the enumerated powers that Congress has, it's also explicit that a federal army can't be funded for more than two years. The founding fathers were justifiably wary of a perpetual, professional army. Instead, the idea was clearly to use militias of armed citizens, trained and organized at the state level, to be the first line of defense against invaders and insurgents (aka threats to the free state). The militias would hopefully either be able to resolve the conflict, or buy enough time for Congress to fund and organize a proper army.
Just sayin' - if you're not willing to pick up your weapons and fight upon orders of the federal government, you are not part of a militia in the way the Constitution talks about them. You are at best a gun enthusiast, and at worst a potential domestic terrorist.
=Smidge=
Goddam, have you ever used a gun before? The reason guns took over the world is that their so simple even an idiot can use them. This same asshole would have never figured out how to build a bomb, and if he did, probably would have killed himself doing it.
Truck attacks are indeed extremely dangerous. Do you think we should do nothing to prevent Truck attacks? Trucks at least are harder to use than guns, more expensive, and are harder to get into schools.
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The right to bear arms for anyone in a state-sanctioned militia must not be infringed.
It seems unlikely that you're actually as ignorant as you're pretending to be. But you seem to think it's rhetorically important to pretend you're unfamiliar with the constitution, so, sure, let's play.
The phrasing of the 2nd Amendment means the OPPOSITE of what you're transparently pretending it means. The people who wrote the Bill of Rights had just freed themselves from living under a regime that disarmed individuals, arguing that the crown's soldiers were all the law enforcement anyone in the colonies would need. Which was nonsense, of course. But the founders were absolutely dead set against allowing their new government to, for example, take a farmer's personal weapons away, or allow a local governor or other figure to have a monopoly on the ownership of weapons. The founders were very uncomfortable about there even being a standing army of any kind, even at the local militia level. But the realized it was going to be necessary, and - knowing there would be people like you - used some of that precious space in the Bill of Rights to explicitly pre-empt exactly the sort of thing you'd like to do.
If they were to write the amendment in today's conversational language, it would go like this: "Because a standing professional military, even if just local in scope, looks like an inevitable necessity, nobody with government power should use that as an excuse to infringe on a citizen's right to personally keep and bear their own arms."
You know, just like the 1st Amendment says that nobody in government can prevent you from speaking, assembling, etc. The Bill of Rights doesn't establish some standard for your right to speak, or your right to defend yourself. It anticipates people like you with a totalitarian mindset looking to use government power to control others, and they identified some potential hot spots (speech, self defense, privacy, etc) that merited specific language in the country's charter.
Of course you know all of this, because you've also read the many letters, transcripts, and papers authored by the people who wrote the Bill of Rights, who come right out and explain to you that you have it exactly wrong, and they tell you why they said what they said. So quit with the theatrics, and just admit that you're hoping nobody will notice when you're trying to mislead on the subject because you don't have the energy to try to amend the constitution in your effort to return the monopoly on the keeping and bearing of arms back to the way the British crown liked it.
Liberals don't care about what guns you own
Ah, that explains why we keep hearing so many liberals shouting,"Who needs an AR-15? They should be banned!" Please, now you're just embarrassing yourself. The country is littered with laws - written and passed by liberal legislators and governors - that explicitly DO care. States like California and Maryland prohibit, for example, any handgun that they haven't expressly listed (by make and model) as being acceptable. They consider things like 11 rounds to be illegal, but 10 or 8 to be less so, and so bits of sheet metal bent into different sizes to hold the ammo are very much what liberals care about. Which, again, you know, and are trying to pretend you don't.
So what is your plan for reducing the violent deaths?
Enforce existing laws. It's too politically incorrect in liberal circles to call crazy people crazy, so liberals would rather allow crazy people to buy guns than be forced to act all judgey and hurt a crazy person's feelings. Because people who are documented as being crazy are immediately stopped during their federal background checks from buying guns. While on that subject: the NICS system blocks tens of thousands of people from making gun purchases every year. The very act of submitting their federal paperwork to attempt such a purchase IS A FELONY. And yet
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
its amazing how many millions of dollars HRC spent on advertizing and yet $150k in facebook ads elected trump. If you could EVER make a case that Killary was NEVER qualified to be president, you just did. Why elect some bitter turd who would spend hundreds of millions of YOUR tax dollars on shit that could be done for just $150 THOUSAND???? Totally not qualified if anything you say is even remotely true.
so Russia is pro-trump? Did you know all this false crap in the Trump Dossier is from Russia, kind of anti Trump. You know the setup where the Russians came to meet with Trump and met with Jr? This was a setup and he could smell the stink, so were these russians also on Trump's side trying to set him up. And now is Trump Pro-Russia? Trump is Pro US. The Dems including the media (most Dems and media) is anti US, or maybe they do not care about the US in a utilitarian way. Now this army of bots for hire is pro gun? does it make a difference? Will Trump get the blame for anything that is not looking like your point of view? Just blame Trump for everything happening in the world you don't like. These bots are probably controlled by a 14yo in his basement. Or quite possibly they are controlled from Clinton's server sited at the FBI which is being run by a DOJ intern trying to make news for the NYT who is hacked into some Russian PC and slaving it to control the bot army. Any decent hacker will try and lay the blame on an obvious target that is not them.
You can't handle the truth! - Because I don't post left all my comments get modded down, bye bye Karma.
>"For most of our history, reasonable gun regulations were enacted by states and municipalities across the United States. Only with the rise of radicalized NRA in the 1980s did this change..."
That statement is not really correct at all. The first sentence is mostly correct, depending on your view of what is "reasonable." The second sentence isn't- the NRA started to become more powerful BECAUSE more and more *unreasonable* gun regulations were being put forward, and more citizens joined, seeking protection of their Constitutional rights from further erosion. The NRA as a non-lobby is interested in ACTUAL gun safety (like training, handling, information), information and sports.
>"...in the 1980s did this change, and with it came the rash of school shootings and mass gun slaughter."
How ridiculously inaccurate and inflammatory. Gun violence has been DECREASING for decades. What has changed mostly is the emotional, hyper media coverage of such shootings, making it SEEM like it is the end of the world. When in reality, while unreasonable gun control laws have been taken down more and more, things have been getting better. And although overall gun violence is down, I believe that same hyper-sensationalist and slanted media coverage has absolutely encouraged more nut-cases to perform copy-cat mass shootings to get their day of "fame." So the cycle feeds on itself.
It's clear that these school shootings are driven by crazies wanting to "copy-cat" other school shooting they're heard about
It's already been reported that this guy was trained by supremacists and appears to have been radicalized by them. The chief supremacist confirmed it.
Maybe he was more vulnerable to their brainwashing because of existing mental illness, but he's just the latest in a long line of radicalized young men to go on murder sprees.
Just like the young men that are radicalized by Islamists.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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