On Friday, April 2, 2021 at 9:07:07 PM UTC-4, ltlee1 wrote:
> About 10 years ago, a pair of senior political commentators, Norman J. Ornstein & Thomas E. Mann, described America dysfunctional politics. They also warned the readers against delusions that the system would self-repair or through quick fixes.
>
> "Finding an American who does not think our politics are dysfunctional is much harder these days than finding Waldo. Approval of Congress hovers around 10 percent, limited, John McCain often jokes, to “paid staff and blood relatives.
> ...
> It is not going to be easy to find structural fixes to our problems because many of them flow from an increasingly corrosive culture, not just from institutional breakdowns. ”
> https://www.the-american-interest.com/2012/06/10/five-delusions-about-our-broken-politics/
>
> Since then, a lot had happened. The situation is getting worse. A lot of talks on a second war, cold as well as hot. But the urgent problem at hand is massive extremism.
>
> https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/challenge-mass-extremism-179948
> "In twenty-first-century America, support for political violence has become a mass phenomenon. As a measure of that phenomenon, a recent poll conducted by the Survey Center on American Life found that 29 percent of Americans, including 39 percent of Republicans, support using violence “if elected leaders will not protect America.” Thirty-six percent of Americans, and a majority (56 percent) of Republicans, agree with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”
>
> The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was an act of terrorism. Whether or not it gets routinely described as such, it meets the criteria in most official definitions of terrorism, which involve politically motivated violence against noncombatants, conducted by someone other than the military forces of a state. Although investigators have uncovered some preparatory organization by groups involved in the incident, the attack was primarily a mass phenomenon. It was fed by a nationally propagated lie—still held by many Americans—about supposed fraud in an election and had the extremist objective of overturning the result of the election.
> ...
> ... with mass political extremism at home, we ought to have a much broader concern. The biggest threatened harm is not the deaths or injuries to individual Americans from terrorism—which by most comparative measures is small—but instead the severe injury and threat of death to America’s democratic political system."
>
> Broken democratic politics --> massive extremism --> severe injury and possibly death of America's democratic politics -> ???

Broken democratic politics --> massive extremism --> severe injury and possibly death of America's democratic politics -> ???
Here come the guns.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/gun-sales-reach-19-million-here-e2-80-99s-every-state-ranked/ar-AAKHVxG
"U.S. gun sales in the first five months of 2021 surged 26% to 19,188,494. This makes it among the largest figures since sales were first recorded in 1998.

The increase is part of a trend. Sales of guns in the United States rose 40% last year to 39,695,315. That represents the high water mark in annual gun sales since the current record-keeping system went into effect. ...

The New York Times points out that pandemic gun sales are largely over. People who already own guns have started to buy more. However, there is a new group of buyers. "New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners." More these buyers are people of color and women, as well.

NPR commented on another trend "Most often, the first-timers are purchasing a semiautomatic handgun, outpacing the second-most-purchased firearm, shotguns, by 2 to 1, according to NSSF [National Shooting Sports Foundation]."

Growing civil unrest may have prompted people to buy guns for personal and family protection, many social scientists have posited, although this remains a matter of debate."

> What to do before too late?