Quote:

In the coming hours and days, we’ll learn about the victims of this tragedy. Their names. Their faces. Who they were. The joy that they brought to families and to friends, and the difference that they made in this world. Say a prayer for them and say a prayer for their families—that God give them the strength to bear the unbearable. And that He give us all the strength to be there for them, and the strength and courage to change. We need to demonstrate that we are defined more—as a country—by the way they lived their lives than by the hate of the man who took them from us.

---

Change what?


FF around 4:25 

Oh, this one was spot on.

Citizen X said:

Like America's fight to defeat communism, it's damned fucking hard to destroy an idea or an ideology or a religion.

---

hostileuniverse said:

USSR was our biggest communist foe, and we beat them, so there is precedence for beating an idea

---

Quote:

A large majority of Russians regret the end of the Soviet Union, not because they pine for "communism" but because they lost a secure way of life. They do not share the nearly unanimous western view that the Soviet Union's "collapse" was "inevitable" because of inherent fatal defects. They believe instead, and for good reason, that three "subjective" factors broke it up: the way Gorbachev carried out his political and economic reforms; a power struggle in which Yeltsin overthrew the Soviet state in order to get rid of its president, Gorbachev; and property-seizing Soviet bureaucratic elites, the nomenklatura, who were more interested in "privatising" the state's enormous wealth in 1991 than in defending it. Most Russians still see December 1991 as a "tragedy".

"almost everything that happened in Russia after 1991 was determined to a significant extent by the divvying-up of the property of the former USSR". Soviet elites took much of the state's enormous wealth with no regard for fair procedures or public opinion. To enrich themselves, they wanted the most valuable state property distributed from above, without the participation of legislatures. They achieved that, first by themselves, through "spontaneous nomenklatura privatisation", and after 1991, through Kremlin decrees issued by Yeltsin.

---

Maroon said:

Crazy how fast these mass shooting fathers and mothers get over grieving and start lobbying against "assault weapons"

---

If I were the father of one of these victims, I'd be pretty pissed at Congress' inaction after all the previous mass shootings as well.  Shouldn't something be done?  Maybe banning guns from suspected terrorists? 

GOP blocks bill to stop terrorists from buying guns