De Fenestra

I think the last time I watched television news was the weeks after 9/11. For me, the signal-to-propaganda ratio is no longer favorable. Fox is better pronounced "Faux," the rest of the national channels fail to deliver anything of substance, and the local programming isn't even on my radar.

This piece on television news' loss of legitimacy in the eyes of anyone under 40 is well-presented, interesting, and a bit disturbing. I'm looking at it not only as a member of that age range, but as someone whose job may occasionally involve getting citizens to take actions to save their own lives. How do we reach a fairly large demographic that fundamentally distrusts - or outright ignores - the only information channels that our chain of command wants us to use?

ETA: Chain of command reference here is in a general sense. In my specific office, I'm fortunate to have a director who gets social media's importance. A lot of shops run by Boomers who still think of Facebook as a fad don't always have that recognition at the policy-setting level.

In dubious honor of our alien space-brothers, I mowed crop circles in the yard again. Happy Roswell Day, everyone!

(Is anyone else nostalgic for the nineties, when the fictional government conspiracies were scarier than the real ones?)

So we have some folks who want to flag any purchase of a thousand rounds of ammo as an indicator of an incipient mass shooting.

Bullshit.

Buying a thousand rounds at once means that someone found a good deal online, or that he's planning to take a shooting class (most of those I've attended have had a 500 round/day minimum), or that he trains at a high volume but doesn't own a reloading press, or that he trains at a lower volume but wants to build a backlog to get him through times of ammo shortage like the current one, or that he just got a new collectible gun in a rare caliber and wants a lifetime supply for taking it out to the range once a year. It doesn't mean he's going to go dump a thousand rounds into a mall.

(Also, from a practical perspective, carrying a thousand rounds to a gunfight is stupid unless your gun is a belt-fed support weapon and you have a few friends to help you carry the load. Even with standard-capacity AR-15 mags, you'd be waddling around with roughly 45 pounds of lead and powder.)

Since 2006, I think I've bought ammo at retail prices twice. Both times, I was at a range teaching friends or relatives to shoot and they were having so much fun they went through the several hundred rounds I'd brought to start them off. Except for a couple of small quantities of odd calibers for some of my C&R guns, all my other purchases since then have been online... and in excess of a thousand rounds each. Why? Not pure evil - pure economy. Buying a kiloround at a time at online prices, even with shipping, saves me 25 to 50 percent over retail.

Someone tell me again how gun control isn't a major issue for the Democrats.