The answer to gun violence is the same as the answer to all violence: not an expansion of the carceral state, in any form, but an expansion of social welfare programs (SNAP, UBI, single-payer healthcare, subsisized housing) that have repeatedly been proven to reduce criminality.

I recognize that this is difficult for people to hear, but a society that routinely produces people eager to cause mass harm is not that way because it has tools available that facilitate mass harm. Guns do not make people killers any more than pressure cookers and cars do. A broken society does.

Well, when you're operating on a timeline of seven years to act on anything leadership doesn't see as valuable to their personal interests, 10 months ago might as well have been yesterday /s. A reminder: the legislature has no incentive to do anything that actually benefits MA residents. #mapoli

Resident anti-car, pro-gun poster here: I endorse this position wholeheartedly.

"Tom Cotton wants to kill people" has been a pretty consistent theme over the years. He is very clearly desperate for an excuse, and loves seeing other people living out his murderous fantasies.

Look, I don't mean to be an ass, but this is also literally how gun control works. People who don't understand guns, and think all gun owners are evil, keep slapping new felonies on top of already illegal behavior, and banning things like adjustable stocks because they think they're scary.

I want to be clear: I'm not trying to doom. Fascism isn't sustainable, and I personally think that is especially true in a country the size of the US. It will fall apart, and likely relatively quickly. But it's going to be very painful in the middle. So are you ready to survive the middle?

It is going to be too late to get ready once the violence starts. If you wait till your need for safety overrides your fear of guns, the months long wait for a license will kill you. Get licensed now, so when it's time you'll be hours, not months, from being ready to defend yourself.

No, really, this man has the ear of the president or, more realistically, is pulling his strings. He yearns for widespread violence and death, and there is a veritable army of white supremacists eager to fulfill his and their fantasies. They have guns. Do you?

Hey #Massachusetts, see my pinned post. The violence will escalate, whether by the state or by vigilantes empowered or emboldened by the state. Even if you 100% trust police, they can't be everywhere at once. Understand, this is going to go from "deport" to "kill" very quickly. Are you ready?

Nah, this ain't it chief. Anybody cheering increasing the number of cops needs a reality check. For $1mil/day they could have completely eliminated crime in DC by pouring every penny of it into the social safety net.

Owning old guns is great until you need to repair an old gun. Turns out when you don't clean a gun for 75 years it gets a little gunked up. Pins and screws get stuck, and the blow torch and penetrating oil need to come out. And there's swearing. A lot of swearing. Very worth it, but such a pain.

I heard about the Mamdani-Trump meeting and I was not expecting that level of starstruck from Trump. I was expecting the almost coherent, vaguely positive, noncommittal rambling we usually get when he finds someone shiny and new floating through his vanishing attention span. Mamdani got the cha.

I got a lot to say about this and most of it would get me in trouble, so I'll just say this: do what these goons clearly didn't. Take a firearms safety course. Then get licensed and get yourself a firearm, because you never know who's out there pretending to be law enforcement.

To be clear, I am aware that some powerful people have called for resignations and firings etc. but we all know those things aren't going to stick to people like Larry for long. And those same people stop short at that. They don't call a duck a duck. They don't call for criminal charges.

Unsurprising for the NYT but what a weasely way to avoid taking an actual stand by firing the guy or acknowledging your ties to him. "Oh yeah, he was just a contractor. Honestly we probably weren't gonna renew with him anyway. Good luck Larry! Thanks for all your hard work!"

An excuse to re-up this while I'm on vacation? Don't mind if I do! #Massachusetts #renters, I wrote an article about suing my #Boston landlord and your rights to your security deposit in MA. Go give it a read and share it around. Educate yourself and your friends. And #mapoli (again) cause why not

This is exactly the level of miserable I would like every CBP/ICE agent to be. Depressed and alone, knowing how utterly reviled you are by everyone around you. You are not good people. Your cause is not righteous. Those who command you do not care about you. Suffer.

Look I don't *want* to leep beating this drum, but the MA legislature produced a garbage "gun control" bill that fundamentally does next to nothing to make anyone safer and, separately, are continuing to refuse to make anything about living in MA better for residents. #mapoli

This only works if the supply isn't subsequently bought up by "investors" generating artificial scarcity. "Build build build" is not a silver bullet, it's a small component of the solution. Without regulation to keep costs from being inflated by this behavior, no amount of supply will be enough.

I realize I posted this at a bad time to get eyes on it, so have a bump. #Massachusetts #renters, I wrote an article about suing my #Boston landlord and your rights to your security deposit in MA. Go give it a read and share it around. Educate yourself and your friends. And #mapoli cause why not.

Alright folks, it has been a long time since I wrote anything long-form, but I got some news today that I've been waiting on and I had to share. So #massachusetts #renters... I sued my #boston landlord (and won), and maybe you should to. medium.com/@brendan.sal...

Is a 12 minute read too long for an article? Asking for a friend who hasn't written anything for other people to read that isn't a law or a one-pager in...several years.

Nobody is coming to save you. Act accordingly.

Make the Goddamn meal and put it in your Free Fridge. Write the $100 check to the food bank. Ask your local school what they need for the kids and then go about trying to get that stuff.... Do these things regularly and you are making meaningful contributions to your communities.

I think that superhero movies have done a number of human beings conditioning some people to believe that extraordinary actions are what matter. And if one can't be a superhero, then simple, ordinary efforts aren't worth doing.

A reminder, #mapoli, that the legislature passed an absolutely garbage "gun control" bill that does *nothing* to increase safety in a single session, but somehow can never get anything done that would actually benefit MA residents. Hold their feet to the fire. Repeal 135 and demand real action.

Well, sucks that Erin didn't get dumped but hey, at least Frank got told to pound sand.

Looking like the new Somerville City Charter passed and honestly I could not be more excited that this thing I spent the last several years working on made it through. Really feels very good.

Anyway, apropos of Dick Cheney's legacy of shooting a friend in the face, reminder for #mapoli as many of you vote today that next year you'll be asked whether to keep or dump a new gun law that does nothing but increase carceral harm. We know how to fix gun violence, but Beacon Hill always punts.

Dick Cheney was, in no small part, responsible for our current circumstances. He was also responsible for trapping us in a pair of forever wars, causing a grotesque number of deaths over the course of two decades. Fuck that guy in particular, I'd forgotten he was still alive, and I'm glad he's dead.

Would that I still lived in Boston and could vote for anyone but these two clowns. We do not need the return of "councilor no" and Erin has repeatedly demonstrated that she's unfit for the office. Vote the bums out. #bospoli

Remember when everyone was like "how dare you?! That man had a family! His poor wife!"? Lmfao so not only is his wife just as bad as he was, not two months later she's transparently trying to get with the married-with-children vice president. She ain't mournin' him, why should we?

Shamhna shona daoibh. We are in a time of darkness, but we can make our own light and warmth, both for ourselves and for others. And the sun will rise again. Summer will come.

Look, it's my day off, I just woke up, can we please have a moratorium on historic events for just a few hours. I am *tired*. Can't wait for the inevitable announcement that he's restoring the draft because recruitment numbers are low and he needs soldier to go die for oil.

I'm not saying that Marty O'Donnell and anyone else who invokes the Flood as a horrifying metaphor for immigrants deserves to be fed feet-first into a woodchipper, but I would pay good money for tickets to watch that happen.

Not to put too fine a point on it, #mapoli, but further restricting access to firearms in the current climate only hurts already vulnerable populations who are dealing with a massive imbalance in power compared to the population our president is whipping into a frenzy.

As a kid I had *tons* of older x-th cousins y-times removed who I called my aunts and uncles, which is why it's so wild to know with certainty that several of those people who called me nephew are for sure frothing at the mouth over this story about Mamdani's aunt. Something about specks and logs.

Our own David Phillips was interviewed for this story. #GunRights #ProgressivePolitics

When I did safe cycling advocacy, I would invite anti-bike lane people to go on a bike ride with me. We'd spend some time in the bike lanes, and then I'd say "let's get lunch" and take them somewhere with zero bike infrastructure. Over lunch, I'd ask them how they'd get there without a car. #mapoli

To be clear, these are all #mapoli tweets. Some of you who remember me from the other site and are familiar with me might be surprised at my stance on this issue, but it is completely consistent with an abolitionist worldview.

"Gun control" is carceral thinking, and it distracts from real solutions. The only reason any of you don't see that, or you're ok with it, is because you have convinced yourself that no decent person would own a gun and thus gun owners are worthy of carceral punishment.

Hot take: guns are not and should not be a partisan issue. Much like drug use, gun violence is a symptom of a systemic problem that is not solved by punishing people for having the thing or trying to take it away from them. We know what the root causes of violence are, we've known for decades.

I'm only gonna say this once: the misogynistic and racist posts were bad on their own, but if Platner had owned them and demonstrated that he had evolved as a person and he understood how they were harmful and did what he needed to do to make it right, maybe it could have been forgiven.

And you know what, while I'm on the subject of the state house: quick question, have any of y'all working there ever heard of "track changes"? Archiving? The way statutory amendments are processed is a goddamn nightmare, and the system for codification is somehow even worse.

Calling it now that over the next year I'm going to have to block a whole lot of new follows from the absolute worst people in the world who have no idea who I am beyond my views on gun ownership because MA's anti-gun stance has led to the space being entirely dominated by right wing reactionaries.

I would like to be really clear that Acts 2024 ch. 135, the law at issue, actually contains very minimal changes to improve safety, and the ballot petition for its repeal is locally driven, not by the NRA, and was the result of gun owners being ignored and dismissed by their representatives.

This is all just part of the country's anniversary celebration. Compulsory historical reenactment in contemporary dress.

Describing an American city, *any* American city, as "war ravaged" is easy to dismiss as patently absurd. I encourage you not to simply dismiss it or mock it; truth and accuracy are not the point. Challenging the obvious lie, fighting them over words, is a losing battle and misses the point.

The absurd incompetence of the fascists is the thing that gives me the most hope. Just tripping over their own feet left and right.