Because there would be more guns around?
(Notice my use of the conditional tense.)

@Trajan61 What is your method of prognostication? Crystal ball? Taroh cards? Astrology? Or are you just pulling this out if your ass?

@Flyingsaucesir Just common sense. The economy was definitely doing better under Trump than it is under Biden.

@Trajan61 Economies run on long cycles of years and decades, and are subject to global forces that no one man or administration can control. The best any president can do is nudge, and hope for the best. I think Biden is doing fine. Especially given the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

@Flyingsaucesir Democrap policies have caused runaway inflation just like they did when Carter was president. And Carter was the only democrap presidential candidate I ever voted for. Didn’t take me long to learn my lesson.

@Trajan61 You remind me of a cave man who is frightened of thunder, thinking that the gods are angry.

@Flyingsaucesir There are a lot of people who feel just like I do. I think the Democraps are fixing to get beat bad in the midterms and in 2024. People are sick and tired of their idiotic policies.

@Trajan61 I KNOW there are a lot of people who think like you. That's what is so effing scary.

@Trajan61 You do realize, I hope, that there was a time when most people thought the Earth is flat.

And a majority still believe in god(s).

Just because a lot of people buy into a brain fart doesn't magically make it a good idea. It's still a stinker.

I feel your pain. But I'm not ready to give up. I'm going to continue to fight until my last breath.

Splitting the vote will get us nowhere. We have to elect more Dems in order to get anything done. Or, if we are going to have only a razor-thin majority, eliminate the filibuster. We are only 10 senate votes away from all kinds of meaningful reforms. But Republicans in the senate can block almost everything.

Consider this: the Dakotas, with only 1.5 million people, have 4 senators, all of them Republicans. California, with 40 million people, only has 2 senators (both Democrats).

What we need is equal representation. What we have now is minority rule.

@Flyingsaucesir I understand your concern about splitting the votes of people on the left, but lesser evil voting and supporting the Dems in federal elections for the last forty years has only led to the party moving further to the right. When, in your opinion, is it time to say "enough"? It seems we are always being told to wait and hold off until after this election to go with a third party, etc.. I've had enough and feel we have nothing to lose at this point.

@TomMcGiverin We have literally everything to lose. Now is not the time to he divided and conquered. You guaranteed? There are none. Have Dems been pulled to the right? Yes. But try to see the glass as half full. Despite of a very uneven playing field, we have held our own. We're down by 5. It's 4th down and we're on our own 20 yard line with 1 minute remaining. Punting will solve nothing. We have to go for it.

@TomMcGiverin There gas been a shift in the party lately. Progressives are beating out more moderate primary candidates in many races. You can feel it in the air. Democrats are getting fired up. They're going to take it to the enemy, and take some scalps. The Republicans are vulnerable, because they have no platform and aren't for anything. They won't support gun regulation and they want to take away a constitutional right. All they have is the culture wars, and on that they're dead wrong too.

@Flyingsaucesir Culture war issues are very effective,, esp. in largely rural states like Iowa, where the vast majority of voters are not well educated or, to be bluntly honest, that intelligent. So if the voters see little difference between the parties on economic issues, because frankly they are not that different, then they will vote according to how they feel about the culture war issues. It has been proven time and again that when someone on the Dem side like Bernie Sanders presents a left wing populist economic message, it has great appeal to most voters, even many of those who voted for Trump in the last two elections. But the Dem leaders would rather lose than pick up those voters as well as independent voters, by allowing a progressive to get the nomination.

Many working class Trump voters could be won over with a candidate and message like Bernie, but the DNC would never allow that to happen.

@TomMcGiverin I can't argue with any of that. If we pull it off, it will be close. I'm just hoping to peel off enough independents and undecideds to squeak by.

Unfortunately, it often falls on deaf ears.

I have seen stock market booms, real estate booms, even a cryptocurrency boom, but I never thought I would live to see a book banning boom.

@Flyingsaucesir Some books need to be banned in elementary school. Kids don’t need to be taught CRT or about transgenders at least till they’re 10-12.

@Trajan61 CRT is a graduate-level course. It is jot taught in K-12 classrooms.

@Trajan61 Many of the books being banned deal with topics like slavery, jim crow, apartheid, inequities in criminal justice, lynching, massacres of black people and total destruction of their homes and businesses, redlining, genocide against native Americans, and other subjects that might make white kids feel "uncomfortable." It's a gutless position to take. To those parents that say their kids cannot deal with such subjects, I say they underestimate the children. And if we do not deal honestly with these subjects then we will never heal from it and they will have to continue to deal with the kind of horror visited upon their peers at Sandyhook Elementary, and the school in Uvalde, Texas.

@Flyingsaucesir The Democraps alway try to play the race card. The blacks demanded he pick a black VP and he did. They also demanded he pick a black Judge for the Supreme Court and he did. They keep saying if you don’t support the radical racist group BLM that you are racist. Racism was pretty much non existent until Obama backed criminals like George Floyd, the Saint Louis thug and Travon Martin. I’ve never been racist and have 2 Mexican employees who have worked for me for years but I’m sick of the BLM group and the unionized democrap supporting teachers who often try to teach radical crap like teaching elementary school kids about gender identity and transgenders. The kid who did the shooting in Texas came from a broken home and apparently had a lot of problems. To bad they didn’t prevent him from buying those guns and the body armor. I’ve often wondered where he got the money to buy they stuff as it’s not cheap.

@Trajan61 ". I’ve often wondered where he got the money to buy they stuff..."

Financing is available; payments as low as $100/month.

@Trajan61 A silly fear of gender fluidity is no reason to ban books that discuss the real history of this country.

@Flyingsaucesir I’ve never encountered a gun dealer who offered financing. Most gun deals I’ve done were cash.

@Trajan61 The people that Biden chose to fill the positions of VP and justice of the supreme court are eminently qualified. That was, as it should be, the primary consideration. But it was also important symbolically, to show that black women could serve in those positions. The fact they were both THE FIRST black women to serve in those posts EVER, after 246 years, is a wrong that cried out for correction. It was about time.

@Flyingsaucesir We need to teach more history. Maybe if we did that people wouldn’t vote for looney idiots like Biden and his democrap cronies.

@Flyingsaucesir It was also racist to demand that they be black. What if someone had demanded that they be white?

@Trajan61 You have a very myopic view of recent history vis-a-vis race relations. For a ling time white antipathy towards blacks lay hidden beneath a thin veneer of respect and comity. Then Barak Obama was elected president, and what had been somewhat under wraps suddenly surged, like a lidded pot boiling over. Donald Trump emerged as a leader of the racist backlash when he loudly and persistently insisted that Obama was not a native-born American. Now with a leader with wide name recognition (and an internet rife with white nationalist propaganda), the racists ramped up their activity. Whenever an unarmed black man was killed by a white police officer, there were, predictably and understandably, street protests. White nationalists often showed up intent on disrupting the marches and beating up protesters. All the while, racist demagogues like Tucker Carlson and Rush Limbaugh were trafficking in the mythical "Great Replacement Theory on prime time TV and on conservative talk radio. A moment of clarity occurred when white nationalists chanted "Jews will not replace us!" in South Carolina, and one white guy drove his car at high speed into a crowd of counter protesters, killing one and injuring many. Trump later said there were "fine people on both sides." The white nationalists heard Trump's dog whistle loud and clear.

The situation has only deteriorated. Racially motivated shootings, like the one in Buffalo, are occurring with more frequency. The FBI has identified white nationalists as the greatest terrorist threat facing the United States.

After hundreds of years of slavery, followed by jim crow laws, and a reign of terror where thousands of black people were lynched, and others were arrested on trumped up charges and made to toil on prison farms, or were beaten and often killed for accepting a job that had been previously filled by a white man, segregated and treated as second class citizens, forced to live in the least desirable locations, attend substandard schools, disenfranchised by many methods including poll taxes and literacy tests where the clerk would require the would-be black voter to use a ballpoint pen to write something on a piece of wax paper, we finally arrived at the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Only after LBJ signed civil rights legislation into law did the United States, for the first time, start to live up to its reputation as a democratic republic. It has only been 50 years since Johnson's Great Society was born. And in that 50 years, some progress has been made. If you weren't paying attention, you could almost believe that racism in America was a thing of the past. Then a black man was elected president, and whitey went ape shit. And here we are. Don't give me this malarkey about Democrats being racists. Don't even think about it.

@Trajan61

@Trajan61 Yeah, why do you suppose no one was calling for some white men be chosen? Because that would not have been anything new! It was about time that some black women were chosen. It was symbolically important. Installing some white men would not have been just more of the same, when the times call for a change in the status quo.

@Flyingsaucesir Why not pick the best person for the job irregardless of race? Making it a requirement that they be black was definitely racist.

@Trajan61 Two things:
First, "irregardless" is not a word in the English lexicon. The word you want here is "regardless."
Second, Biden DID pick the best candidates for the job. Both are highly qualified; you could not ask for better in terms of education and experience. And they both are aligned with the ideals that Biden wants to promote in our government. As president, it is his prerogative to choose who he likes. And in this case he chose to make a symbolic gesture as well as fill a slot with a qualified person. He wanted girls and women to see that they can rightly aspire to these high offices. And he especially wanted black girls and women, a group that has been kept down for centuries, to know that there are no artificial limits being placed on them now. And really every American can look at this and say that this country is indeed great, that anybody can make it to the top if they have the grit and intelligence and really try. Biden's gesture is not racist. Just the opposite. It's all about freedom and equity.

I’m sure it will get better when the republicans take over from the looney idiotic democraps.