We're not having a serious conversation and we're not trying to understand each other. It's simply yelling. Guns are the problem and the 2A folks need to be able to admit it. If we didn't have several hundred million guns, if private citizens were forced to go to extreme measures to own even a single gun, these mass murders of children would become very rare. You can't drive a van into a school to run over the kids. Vans don't fit through the hallways.
I'm not in favor of reducing the number of guns.
I don't trust the government, not for a second. The most recent revelation from the farcical Russian collusion story is that the FBI honcho whose wife worked for GPS Fusion, the creeps who created the rubbish intel on which the illegitimate FBI spying on Trump was based, did not declare his wife's income source to the department. If he had, he should have been instantly removed from the case.
It's called an OGE 450. By law, he has to file one. Look it up.
The FBI lied to everyone in order to spy on a political enemy. President Obama ran the most corrupt administration in history. He used government enforcement agencies as his own, private Gestapo. If there was a way to oppress his political foes, of which I was one, he did it. Imagine what he would have done against an unarmed populace.
So I want guns in the hands of private citizens. Lots of them. I don't want the government having any more control over them than it has right now. In exchange for that, I know that this will lead to school shootings by lunatics who somehow manage to get their hands on guns. That's the honest tradeoff. Take away the guns and people like Barack Obama will have practically no limits on their behavior. Allow us to keep guns and we'll sometimes have school shootings. It's a shame we can't be honest with each other.
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| I'm with Chuck on this one, but I acknowledge there's a serious downside. |
OK, to start with, I generally agree that guns should remain legal. I do not want the government taking away people's weapons. Anything that makes the government think that they can kick in the door and search the place just because they feel like it, is a bad idea.
ReplyDeleteBut.
You listed a bunch of examples of government corruption and abuse. Let's say that you had enough, and you get together with a bunch of similarly-unhappy people, get your weapons, and go to have it out with the government.
What is the result? A shoot-out with the police. Maybe, if you got enough people together, this could eventually escalate to shooting it out with the Army, but first it's the police. Even if you go for assassination of government officials, it is the police who will come after you, not the people you actually have a grievance against.
How do you feel about people having shoot-outs with the police? How often does this result in the citizens doing the shooting getting the results they want? How many countries can you think of where (a) the citizenry got unhappy enough with the government that they started shooting, and (b) this ultimately ended well for anybody (aside from, maybe, the new dictator that takes power afterwards)?
More specifically, how would an armed citizenry keep, say, the FBI from lying so they could spy on a political enemy? At what point in that process would they have been slowed down by a citizen with a gun? Of all the crimes you can think of by the Clinton or Obama administrations, how many of them could have been affected in any way by armed citizens? And what overreaches can you think of that they *might* have done, but didn't do because they were afraid of armed citizens?
The guns are defensive and put a lower limit on governmental behavior. They aren't going to be of much use as part of a larger rebellion unless things get totally out of control.
ReplyDeleteSolzhenitsyn said that if Russian neighbors had organized and attacked the NKVD/KGB goons when they came to arrest people, the socialists would have quickly run out of willing goons. It never happened because such organization isn't natural. However, if the Russians had been armed, an individual Russian would have been quite willing to take a few socialist thugs down with him, knowing his fate. That would have put an end to things and that's what guns do for us.
I sometimes wonder if I'm being hysterical, but then again, a few years ago, it would been unthinkable to see an engineer fired from a technology company for quoting scientific literature on sexual dimorphism. That's what happened to James Damore. There are scads more examples of crazy, prog, religious persecutions. How far would they go if we had no guns? Would Brendan Eich have been arrested in the middle of the night instead of just losing his CEO job at Firefox? Would Little Sisters of the Poor simply vanished into re-education camps instead of being taken to the Supreme Court? What heretical opinions do you hold that, if they got out, would cost you dearly?
Why do you think I blog under a pseudonym?
As long as we have guns, people like Jordan Peterson can fight back with words instead of a hopeless Whiskey Rebellion-style uprising. We might not be able to stop the weaponization of the government, but we might at least be able to fight back in the culture wars with words instead of a Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Shorter answer: I am totally against shoot-outs with police. I would suggest that the prevalence of guns actually prevents it because we have some forlorn hope that we can fight these battles with words instead of living in terror of police sweeps against political enemies.
ReplyDeleteGuns aren't going to prevent the FBI from spying. They are just going to keep it from going totally nuts.
You are delusional. And your pseudonym won't protect you from hackers or the police. It only hides you from your neighbors.
ReplyDelete"There are scads more examples of crazy, prog, religious persecutions. How far would they go if we had no guns?"
ReplyDeleteYou really think that even comes into their calculation. You are completely out of touch.
Modern pubic schools are fortresses; I'm looking forward to learning how the killer got in. My suspicion is that some kid propped open a back door against school policy. If that's the case, come down so hard on the kid that no kid anywhere will ever leave an unauthorized way into their school.
ReplyDeleteAs for a shootout with the Army, that's exactly what happened in 1775. This time the Army worked to ensure it had dominance over the government's subjects.
There is such a simple solution but it's opposed by all the do gooder ban all guns mostly lefty retards, every staff member in every school should be trained and armed. Those three brave guys who died shielding their students should have been armed.
ReplyDeleteWhy do people always dehumanize the police, like putting on that uniform makes you an idiot robot that is going to follow illegal orders with a homicidal grin?
ReplyDeletePart of why Obamites didn't get away with more is because people kept getting in the way-- and it wasn't reasonably possible to remove them.
The problem with 'people who have shoot-outs with police,' currently, when "hunting season in X state" can be characterized as one of the largest armies in the world arriving in town for fun, is that 'people who have shoot outs with police' are violating objective morality and that's why the police oppose them. Being opposed to the police doesn't magically make them bad. The police currently being there to enforce good or neutral laws does that.
That doesn't excuse continuing policies that have demonstrably resulted in more school shootings-- to whit, removing legal firearms and making sure that they are as soft a target as you can hope for. There also need to be improvements in the mental health field where someone who was apparently committing abuse fairly regularly as a young teen, made in person threats, etc.
No, that doesn't mean disarming people who are a mental health risk-- for heaven's sake, my mom made a rifle with her dad, from stuff they got from the scrap pile, when she was quite young. The criminals in Australia are making home-brew M11s. They probably have a car in the garage, and even if you remove that, they only have to remove one driver to get their hands on a truck. If someone is enough of a mental health risk to disarm, they need to be locked up.
With all the due process that requires.