I saw this clip on The Impolitic this morning: perky Sharron Angle having a bit of a smugfest about how Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Ben Franklin really wanted us to have the uninfringable right to own firearms, not to facilitate raising a militia, as was stated, or to put food on the table or keep the fox out of the henhouse, but to protect us against tyrannical despots demanding to provide us with affordable health care.
To be fair, I'd like to know the rest of the sentence starting "we need to take Harry Reid out. . ." Vote him out of his elected position, or just "take him out?"
Inquiring minds want to know, but batshit crazies with their hairy ears glued to the radio don't bother to ask. They already know. One has already spoken and as in Mao's famous statement about the voice of revolution -- from the muzzle of a gun. Indeed many self styled conservatives seem to have read intensively from the little red book.
I'll give her the benefit of the doubt for the nonce, but although Jefferson did indeed, how literally I don't know, suggest further revolutions, one would have a hard time convincing me the system he helped design wasn't intended to facilitate that process bloodlessly and with due process of law.
The bit about guns being needed to protect against "tyranny?" to allow the minority to have bloody revenge for the actions of elected representatives? Sorry, Sharron, this is beyond the boundaries of acceptable speech and perhaps even further into the territory of treason, if fomenting armed insurrection against an elected government be such.
It recalls Henry II crying "will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" Not exactly a demand that someone kill Thomas à Becket, but someone soon did and Hank got to wash his hands of the matter. Whether it be the king of England, the Queen of Scotland or a Prefect of Roman Judea, some bloody bastard is always seeking such cleanliness, but that damned spot usually proves rather difficult to remove.
And they just wasted all that time reading the Constitution in the House... isn't it comforting to know that some flake in NV can explain it to all of us so we all can understand how it's supposed to work?
ReplyDeleteI'm sick of it all, Democrats making up stories about legal machine guns, $900 Glock pistols in Cracker Jack boxes and general lawlessness and howling for gun control we already have and shouting down reasoned discourse and whining about Bambi and Utopia -- and Republicans taking advantage to frighten and enrage and lie and advocate violence and whine about Utopia.
ReplyDeleteOur gun laws and the constitution are a matter of public record but nobody reads them or has the vocabulary to understand them and as the ignorance of both sides rises, the nation falls apart like a pile of wet cats.
The sad thing is that you can't answer the blind, angry howl of "Gun control" or "revolution" in a rational way, and trying to inject any reference to reality makes you the goat of both sides. Nobody wants their opinions modified, nobody wants to hear it. Any random stimulus makes on side scream gun control and the other "Gun grabber."
People are demanding the "assault weapon ban" be restored and if you read the bill, showing that it's a fraud, they slander you. People are insisting Obama is taking away their target pistol and if you show he isn't, they hate you and malign you.
If you try to put this in the perspective statistical probability which suggests that we have a massively higher chance of shark bite, lightening strike, fatal auto accident and crippling fall in the bathroom, or that in a nation of over 300,000,000 even rarities will happen often enough to seem frequent, you get shouted down. Liberty! Liberty! -- Danger! Danger! No middle ground.
If I weren't made of silicon and copper and plastic, I'd have given up on America by now.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteI don't know what you're reading or listening to, but I don't hear any calls for draconian gun control at the moment. I believe one female legislator whose life was touched by gun violence years ago has brought up some bill or other that would ban the sort of 33-bullet extended clips used in Tucson a few days ago, but that isn't whining about utopia or bambi. It's common sense.
It should be possible (though not with a GOP House, of course) to write a bill into law that would ban certain kinds of weapon as going beyond "arms" and into the territory almost of WMD. We have the right to keep and bear arms, not guns that are as destructive, almost, as tanks or shoulder-launched missiles.
Yet whenever someone brings up this commonsense point of defining what is meant in today's terms by "arms," someone else pipes up that they need to have clips with a million rounds so they can engage in target practice. That's absurd. Gun fanciers can engage in target practice with standard clips. They can, that is, act like adults, not adolescents looking for cheap, intense thrills, at the expense of facilitating massacres.
Well, I had just come from a familiar forum where that AWB was being called for as an obvious solution to keeping people from being murdered by madmen and where it was mentioned that allowing hunting was a repugnant thing. Perhaps I'm wrong in inferring a vision of some pure land of no crime and no wolves achievable through eliminating all means of inflicting harm, but that's not the gist of my argument - only a lament. I've wasted too many words trying to get people to read that Clinton Era legislation and to put things into perspective.
ReplyDeleteJust as an aside and with no disrespect intended, when someone uses the world "clip" it's a marker and I sort of know who they've been reading and what they're going to say. A clip was a thing used in WW II to facilitate loading cartridges into the M1 Garand Rifle with it's integral magazine.
There is no standard magazine. The Glock in question probably had a 15 round or perhaps 17 round magazine that fits in the grip. Others have other amounts. Extended magazines simply stick out the bottom and make it very difficult to conceal. Depending on the pistol in question, magazines might contain 5, 6, 8, 10 or more - depending on the size. Rifles may come with standard capacity from 4 to as many as 30 with 100 round drum magazines readily available if you feel like carrying all that weight. Hey, if I was cruising the Somali coast, I'd want several of those and don't scoff. I hang around people who have sailed around the world several times over. Not all people you meet a thousand miles from the law are nice people and some have full automatic weapons.
Should we limit capacity? Maybe yes, but that would decrease the utility for some people with no criminal intent whatever - which describes pretty close to 100% of American gun owners.
Few people use extended magazines because they're clumsy and goofy looking and in fact I've never seen one and they're hard to find, but the question remains: did that magazine contribute to the likelihood of the man having gone on a rampage and the number of people he managed to shoot.? I suspect it didn't influence his actions, although to be sure if he had carried 2 15's the one or two second reloading time might have spared someone. Seeing the rarity of such incidents when we consider the huge population of our country, is this what we should be focusing on or should we discussing more reliable ways to keep people like whatshisname from having anything dangerous? Seems more commonsensible to me anyway.
And of course the late and rarely read "ban" didn't actually ban magazines of more than ten round capacity - it banned those made in foreign countries after a certain date in the future and those who felt safer thereby were never made aware of that fact or the fact that there was a hundred year supply in warehouses of "pre ban" guns and accessories.
Automatic military and civilian weapons have been heavily restricted since 1937, but we still have wild eyed journalists telling us that a Ruger mini-14 is, as advertised, a "farm rifle" but with a plastic stock it becomes an "assault rifle" which used to be banned if made in China but not if made here. You can almost smell the truthiness. And weren't we all safer back then? Somehow that belief comforts them and they usually get very nasty if I try to explain the facts. It doesn't get much easier when I merely suggest that the problem is keeping anything dangerous from a few deranged or malicious people without making criminals or targets for criminals out of the 99.9999999% of use who have firearms and live our entire lives without getting into any trouble with them.
ReplyDeleteMost of our shooting deaths are either suicides or drug related and I think available medical care and the end of our drug policies would save more lives than worrying about magazine size.
But OK, lets talk about 8 round magazines - that would allow a Colt .45 Government issue cannon but rule out my little .22 target pistol. Just what mission is accomplished here? a Walther PPK like James bond? Any easily concealable little .25 or .32 auto? No problem. A folding survival rifle like the AR-7 in your airplane or boat's survival kit? Afraid not, Mr. Responsible citizen - that would induce you to shoot congressmen!
There is no simple solution and no effective solution that does not involve pre-qualifying people, not objects and doing a better job than what Arizona is doing now.
So all I'm asking for is a recognition of facts - such as the relative independence of crime rates and gun laws we've experienced. Perhaps fewer peremptory statements like "if we allow this - that will happen" when experience denies that. Perhaps here's the one place the right and left resemble each other.
ReplyDeleteI want to talk about how much trust we remove in all American citizens as a result of one in three hundred million happenings and why we apply more emotionally driven rhetoric to things enormously less dangerous than to everyday dangers more easily dealt with.
I keep guns but I'm not as passionate about this debate so I guess I can see both sides of the argument. I agree with Fogg in that gun bans have proven to be woefully inadequate in containing violence. Criminals do not usually buy guns from the store, many weapons come into this country illegally and are bought underground. They are already illegal but first you have to find them.
ReplyDeleteWe already have laws prohibiting fully automatic weapons and I don't know of any other weapon on the market today that would be considered a WMD on the same level as a tank or bazooka - just saying. Does a law abiding citizen NEED a semi-automatic weapon? Maybe not but owning one will not make them a brazen criminal.
Seems a greater issue here is the ability in some states to be able to buy guns so easily without the necessary safety nets. We need a federal standard where anyone who wants to buy a gun must first complete a basic gun safety course and then fill out the apps and wait three days before being allowed to take home their gun. I thought that was pretty much going on nationwide but I guess not. Also local law enforcement should receive the names of gun buyers in case they have a particular person flagged.
That kind of oversight might have kept this guy from getting that gun.
I can’t decide which is worse right now: The bagheads or the media? Or which is the most pressing topic of the day: Rett or Rick?
ReplyDeleteAssuming the bagheads have no common decency, I fully expected them to turn defense into offence, and Apocalypstick Palin didn’t disappoint. Here reference this morning to Blood Libel is about the most outrageously offensive coinage I ever heard. Meanwhile, the media is doing what the media always does: Squeezing every agonizing moment out of controversy they possibly can. Palin always gets what Palin wants: Publicity, publicity, publicity.
Damn, damn, damn!
"Blood Libel is about the most outrageously offensive coinage I ever heard."
ReplyDeleteOh, I dunno -- there's a lot to choose from. She's been posing as a victim all along so eventually she had to wrap herself in the Torah and act like she's a Jew. Next week she'll be a Lakotah or a Potowatome or maybe even a Witch. Actually she's a natural for that part.
Anyway, I don't give a damn. Next time someone tells me I killed God ( even though he's still alive) or that I eat Christian babies, I'll just say "hey, talk to the Boss" and give them her number.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteHave moved forwards to your more recent post. You're welcome to make the point about magazine size and so forth, but I don't see why the choice has to be between a Davy Crockett-era musket and an Uzi, with nothing in between. Why so much either/or? In the earlier post, you write the following:
"I have to remain firm that in my opinion which includes over 50 years of familiarity, a 30 round magazine, sticking a foot out of the grip of a pistol had nothing to do with the shooting having occurred at all and to a large extent, how many people were shot. If that were an effective weapon system, the police and military would use them. They don't."
I understand that such a weapon is awkward -- not the choice of a professional assassin, to be sure. But that awkward magazine was anything but ineffective last Saturday, as the forensics and funerals show. The point isn't that the extended magazine caused the suspect to commit the crime, neither is it that it would be an effective system for the police or even the military. But then, the police aren't usually trying to commit lethal mayhem in the shortest possible amount of time.
Anyhow, on the other subject, the "why" issue, Rachel Maddow did a section on that one -- her point was that if a person takes "defending onself from our tyrannical gubmint" as the purpose of the 2nd Amendment, we would pretty much all need at least a couple of tanks, a navy destroyer, and several nucear warheads since, after all, that's the kind of fancy toys the gubmint has. I suppose the righties are generally conjuring up something more like the Waco and Ruby Ridge standoffs -- a few defiant individuals holed up and keeping a large number of federal agents at bay. Of course, those affairs never end well -- it just wouldn't be possible for individuals to defend themselves against a modern government's abuses by anything but the ballot box and the voice of popular dissent. If civil disobedience doesn't work, the people are plumb out of luck, I'd say. So I think they had better stick to the basic point that the Constitution guarantees them the right and it doesn't need much explaining.
Wow, this is getting to be awfully full of hypotheticals, misreadings and hyperbole, if not a trace of anger. If you like we could bring up the idea that if he had had two Glocks, one in each hand like John Dillinger, he'd have had twice the rate of fire and we could go even more tangential about limiting us to one gun apiece. And then we could argue that psychopathic killers don't really tend to follow rules -- and we could go on forever.
ReplyDeleteThe Second amendment clearly states that at least one reason that we have the right to own and carry weapons is that a militia may be at times be required - not that one must first be in the militia. Armed insurrection is not mentioned and although it's easy to flaunt stereotypes and assign revolutionary motives to people who own guns, it's -- well, you know -- a different subject and a wee bit irrelevant.
And as to a middle ground between musket and Uzi, that's what I'm talking about, not the all or nothing rhetoric that pervades the national argument.
The real, Israeli army Uzi is not legal anyway and that's fine with me. The one that is legal is simply a 9 mm pistol. I surely believe we can regulate magazine capacity - and we already do when it comes to hunting, but we won't arrive at a reasonable regulation by talking about tanks and nuclear weapons and telling people who live in dangerous areas that they may only get 5 or 6 or 7 shots to defend their home against some gang because "Glocks are designed only to hunt people" ( heard that on on Bill Maher the other day) or any of the passionate tropes I'm playing dodge ball with here. I think I've been trying to clear the air of hyperbole - evidently you don't think I have. So I'm not going to extend this public thread further out of respect for the group.
But once again and for the last time, I think we're making a big mistake by applying all the (in my opinion)old, reflexive, inaccurate, misleading and emotional rhetoric and missing the point that no weapon is safe in unsafe hands. We have legislation and a nationwide system designed to prevent this having happened and it did not work because we have a national problem with mental health care and in how we treat the mentally ill.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteI saw no traces of anger (or "emotionalism" or strawmanship) in my previous post -- just the clarity of a large, simple lizard who, after all, needs no weapons other than his teeth and tail and who doesn't find your perspective on guns entirely convincing. We're not bound to agree anyway, so I suppose we might as well avoid debating this particular subject in future.
As Capt. Fogg says, rifles (and shotguns in some cases) used for hunting have their capacities limited by law in many states. Why is that? If it's unreasonable to limit the capacities of magazines on semi-auto pistols, which are used, almost exclusively, to kill PEOPLE, why would anybody give a rat's ass about how many rounds of .30-06 or .223 I can use when I'm hunting non-humans?
ReplyDelete