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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34286 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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It’s also far from obvious why the things he was acting on (eg dating a trans dude) influenced him significantly less than growing up red. He clearly had turned his back on that upbringing.

Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview. Anyone admitting to remotely knowing how to operate such a thing in primarily Blue company would be viewed with noticeable suspicion; it's one of the strongest outgroup/ingroup markers out there. Hence when other Blue Tribers hear "A murdered B using a rifle", they know that at the very least, the murder only occurred because a thing of the other tribe was permitted to exist where A could get it.

  • -18

Maybe you could have said this ten, fifteen years ago. And maybe you can still say it today - 'temporarygunowners' as a stand in for the liberalgunowners on reddit is a joke for a reason - but I'm not so sure.

Maybe it's my odd bubble, maybe it's selection bias, but I can't help but feel that over the past 5 years or so we've seen a rise in gun owners that aren't necessarily red tribe in origin. A sort of twisted inverse of the entire Boomer-ish take of 'I'm a gun owner, but-' that's hard to define in a short, concise way. The kind of people that'll come into firearm forums(atleast on reddit) and start claiming how much they hate Trump and how bad he was for firearms(muh bumpstocks!) while ignoring all the bad behavior from Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

Then, you also have the John Brown Gun Club-type deals, and there's atleast one video floating around on twitter of a blooper reel involving transtifa types larping on the flat range via tactical drills.

Mind - and perhaps I'm reading into this too much - the attitude of those two groups heavily imply that the reason they have said firearms is so they can use it against fascists.

In that light, Robinson doing what he did and how he did it makes perfect sense, imo.

That portion of the left looks an awful lot like the right-wing militia kooks from the 90's, except without the fed infiltration, self-policing, or actually-existing inciting incidents.

I’m sorry but if your position is that a blue tribe person thinks operating a gun is some kind of magic, then I don’t think we can move the conversation forward

Well, of course not. I just think it's viewed as a hallmark of Red culture - something that Reds teach their children and Blues don't - such that in a world that operated entirely on Blue norms, it would be vanishingly unlikely that a mentally unstable 22-year-old would have both access to a gun and training to use it. This doesn't seem crazy to me. Using that as an excuse to unilaterally blame the Red Tribe for a murder clearly sparked by lefty political motivations, that's obviously always going to be a massive stretch. But "if Red Tribe cultural norms had not been prevalent in Robinson's home environment, this wouldn't have happened" is a believable case, so it was the best steelman I could come up with for the offending joke.

I take it that you live in some megopolis?

The Reddest of states still pulled like 20-30% for Harris, and I can assure you that lots of those people go out hunting like everyone else. (ie. not with stone tools)

Sure and if the mom swallowed, the killer wouldn’t have killed. We can always argue over causation. But saying “the mom is responsible because she likes vaginal sex” actually misses the real proximate cause.

And yet, gun use isn't a Blue tribe anathema. Guns have an extremely long history with the left, ranging from highly-American contexts of racial-progressive awareness of the American South's Jim Crow efforts to disarm african americans in order for KKK terrorism, to gender-considerations of God making man and woman but Sam Colt making them equal, to the John Brown gun club varients of various Antifa and other bluer-than-you groups. Outside of the American context, this includes the revolutionary aphorisms up to and including 'all political power derives from the barrel of a gun,' countless cold war era revolutionary chic, and more.

Gun control in general may be a blue tribe coded program, but using guns is in no way a monopoly of red tribe.

John Brown Gun Clubs are a thing.

As a Blue Triber, I could not disagree more with this and find this description almost derogatory; a Red Triber could hardly insult the Blue Tribe better if he tried. Blue Tribers tend not to like guns and tend not to use guns, but gun-toting/gun-hobbyist Blue Tribers aren't unicorns. They're just rare, and the idea that gun usage is so out-there for a Blue Triber that simply knowing how to operate such a thing would be viewed with noticeable suspicion is something that could only apply only to particularly secluded/sheltered members of the Blue Tribe, not to just a typical Blue Tribe. I've lived in especially urban, especially sheltered Blue areas for most of my life, and even there, demonstrating/stating knowledge of how to operate a gun and even admitting a hobby of shooting guns wouldn't raise an eyebrow.

I repeat zeke5123a's statement that this is nonsense. The idea that there could be any sort of honest point to be made about concluding that the murderer was "one of [MAGA's] own" given the evidence available at the time is such transparent motivated reasoning that, as a leftist, it makes me angry to see other leftists discredit our side like this, which demonstrably fails in meeting up to our actual claim of being meaningfully better than the right.

Again, he used a gun. It may be difficult for me to get across to a genuine Red Triber how alien that is to a Blue worldview.

Yes, worldwiew of ordinary Clinton and Biden voting normie with "in this house we believe" sign. The shooter was not one of these people and was not interested in "blue company".

Once you go far enough left, once you cross the threshold, you get to hate liberals and love guns as much as any MAGA hat wearing redneck.

That’s even worse. It’s like saying “he wasn’t blue because he was bad. If bad, then MAGA. Bad therefore MAGA.”

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