oh, you have stress/anxiety/depression? because you have 3 jobs that all pay you a poverty wage? no gun for you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/lkd9ue/biden_calls_on_congress_to_ban_assault_weapons/

I'm surprised to see r/politics, usually the first to call an atlatl an assault rifle, fairly lukewarm on it. When even Joe Biden's cargo cult is wary of it, that's a special kind of political suicide.

I don't think legislation on it would pass without some crisis to exploit like Las Vegas and bump stocks. However, there are two angles to it that I think are important:

1. This is something the administration is starting to focus on as a pre-midterm issue with a campaign promise to have that plan within 100 days. He's handing their propaganda networks the line, "he'll take your guns and hold witch trials against his enemies before he feeds your family". Electorally that's not good. When his strategy is reaching out to those people instead of the left, it's especially not good.

2. That right-wing hysteria has already translated to escalating terrorism, militia action, and storming the capitol to assassinate national politicians with the most tepid response by politicians and police that could be asked for. They could either fall into resentful acceptance of an ideologically right-wing administration or double down on the trend of the past decade. The spectacle of this encourages the latter because it shows that the hysteria isn't a baseless threat. Combine it with a militarised Washington DC and a prosecutor as VP and you're providing all the optics of an imminent dictatorship. That's a bigger selling point than race war or Christian dominionism because you can plainly point at it.

Democrats have barely gotten anything done in my entire lifetime. That doesn't mean they haven't driven a Spectacle of an agenda. That Spectacle is so strong that a good chunk of the those hysterical people believe the democrats are baby-drinking Satanic paedophiles. Driving them further in that direction in a time where the material conditions underlying their psychosis are decaying at a rapid pace without relief is a more dangerous thing now than it would have been when things were better.

Because the only way we can heal the soul of the nation is to immediately use all of our political capital to repeat the same right-wing militia surge that we did under Obama. You know those people who were one pig away from lynching the vice president last month? What if, and stay with me here, we enraged them during an economic collapse we're still not addressing. You've heard of adding insult to injury, but what if we added insult to insult to injury? Remember how our entire electoral strategy is "reaching to the moderate republicans who think the right has gone too far"? What if, just as a prank, we attacked them on the one culture war issue that could also protect our entire base from the people we're empowering?

In an unrelated statement released on the same day, the president clarified his current stance on COVID relief. "Payday loan stores are small businesses which benefit their communities. If we don't help the little guy, what does America even mean? We need to provide immediate and substantial economic relief to the payday loan stores so that they can continue to assist the poor. We need to come together and take out payday loans so that employers don't have to risk their businesses just to pay you on a regular schedule during these trying times. We need to set aside $10 from that loan for a Gofundme to rekindle our common bonds. We need to purchase a radio with those loans so that we can sit poor kids in front of it and make them listen to big numbers until they think richer. Look at the price of silver, fat. Invest that payday loan in silver and you'll be rich without ever having to ask for a handout. We gotta teach a man to fish, man."