Facebook is a horrible place to try to have an intelligent discussion on almost any subject. It’s not just that the medium sucks by design: the scrolling nature of the timeline, the inability to switch between posts, the truncated nature of the space available to comment, etc.; it’s that all of that combines to drive away intelligent debate and discussion. [Remember, it was started as a sophomoric boys’ attempt at a “Face-book” to identify hot chicks… Never lose sight of that when lamenting what it is or listening to Congress hold hearings on it.] I suspect that most of the smart people recognize this and aren’t hanging out there.
Unfortunately, I forget this lesson and made the mistake of posting my thoughts on the terrible and tragic Oregon shooting there. Fuck, what a debacle. This shooting has once again brought out all of the usual jackasses, including the Prevaricator-in-Chief, to lie about mass shootings – and their Fifth Column, the Press, is all happy to oblige.
I can’t remember when I saw the study, but quite a while ago there was a poll that showed that something over 90% of the media/press self-identified as “liberal,” perhaps unsurprisingly. It didn’t mean much to me then, but it sure does now. The Media’s influence has definitely been worn down by the ‘Net, but it would be naive to conclude that television and mass media no longer carry the same influence. TV is still king. I happen to have gotten a free, up-close education on the subject from working media deals as a part of my day job. There is a reason that large companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Budweiser, etc. spend the kind of money they do on live sporting events with large audiences – like NFL Football – not just for the Super Bowl, but every week. There is also a reason why the prices for advertising rise based upon the size of the target audience. Again, this is simple economics.
Given these realities, I despair of there ever being any kind of mature, adult discussion about guns in this country; further, given how quick politicians are to capitalize on the tragedies of the day to advance their agendas, and the Media’s general liberal bias, it’s unlikely anyone advocating for more liberty, less restrictions on our freedom, even for rights they don’t like, is going to be heard above the din. By some miracle, however, it does appear that Americans of various political stripes still retain their desire to be able to protect themselves. For now, anyway…
I do love irony, however, so I can’t help pointing out that it was Reagan as governor of California – and as President – who made California’s and the Nation’s gun control laws so batshit crazy. He did so because the Black Panthers were openly carrying weapons in protests right into the State Capitol, decrying racist legislation. (I’m going with the Black Panthers on this one, given what my research has shown me about the current state of policing in America. Sorry, Boys in Blue, but both your past and present are not exactly models of restraint on using indiscriminate violence against the citizens you’re charged with protecting.) Of course, it isn’t all the police’s fault. The War on Drugs has produced some of the worst second and third order unintended consequences in all of history (I’m saving that rant for another time, but consider this a preview) and among those include the disproportionate impact it has on low income people, both black and white, BUT – since proportionally more blacks are poor than whites (as a percentage of the total) AND more minorities are congregated in cities than in rural areas, it should be no great surprise that the War on Drugs puts police in constant conflict with (mostly) poor blacks, who are generally disenfranchised, can ill afford high-priced lawyers (or powder cocaine), and the drug laws’ enforcement inevitably leads to police violence against blacks.
Voilà! Powder keg meet lighter. In another bit of irony you can’t make up, I’ll leave for later the hypocrisy of both the Team Blue politicians who simultaneously decry racist police (even where an individual case has pretty scant evidence of racism being the motive force), simultaneously want ONLY the police to have guns, and also support the War on Drugs. I’m not sure I can think of a more unprincipled and morally repugnant trifecta, yet Hillary Clinton still leads in Team Blue polls.
It’s almost as if these politicians don’t really care about their constituents…
…And it’s almost as if their constituents are so fucking brainwashed – or stupid – (and that is NOT the disjunctive ‘or’), that they would rather vote for someone who murmurs things they want to hear and gives them free shit, than they would vote for someone who plays for the other team, even if that person advocates different policies that would likely help them. Welcome to Tribal Politics in the early 21st Century.
One might even be so cynical as to suppose that the politicians who pursue these obviously non-working, harmful policies do so intentionally, so that they can then offer another government solution that they’ve authored, thereby continuing the cycle on indefinitely, creating dependence upon said politicians… b-b-but…. naahhhh, that would be straight-up evil! (This is where the emoticon for a sardonic smirk would go).
In any event, rather than rehash the whole thing, I’ll link to what I think is a superlative piece on the subject of gun control. It points out (perhaps not as explicitly as I am about to) just how idiotic both Team Red and Team Blue are given both the history of gun control legislation and where the parties now stand on it. The irony that gun control was originally barely-cloaked racism to keep blacks unarmed – and yet is now championed by the party that captures most of the black vote in every election – well, ya just can’t make that kind of shit up. Only history and politicians can produce that kind of mendacity. I couldn’t have made it up if I were writing fiction; it would be too unbelievable to be a TV plot.
On the issue of gun violence and mass shootings and our President’s claims about them, even PolitiFact has had to label them “mostly false.” Given how much the President equivocates and uses weasel words, he avoided the multiple Pinocchios I would have awarded. Moreover, PolitiFact used data that excludes mass stabbings, which would have made the U.S. even lower in the industrialized world in mass murders because China has some unbelievable mass stabbings. It’s fucking gruesome. And that link is simply school stabbings – and only from 2010-2012.
A simple google search of “Mass Stabbings in China” produces a litany of media reports of some truly horrific incidents, including the 2014 mass stabbing by a number of assailants at a train station in Kunming. Maybe I’m soft or stupid, or maybe it’s because I’ve been cut a few times myself, but getting stabbed seems so much worse than getting shot to me. Regardless, I don’t suppose it was any comfort to the victims that China doesn’t allow people to have guns – or that there are laws against both stabbing and shooting people. The one thing you would want when someone pulled a knife is a hand cannon, like my .357 snub.
Of course, animists continue to believe that it’s the “inherently evil nature” of a gun that causes these events, rather than the violent nature of the people wielding them, so I’m not sure there’s much I can say that will phase them. All I know is this – no one, not a single person who was advocating more gun control and berating me about my stance on the Second Amendment, would answer this very simple question:
If this guy right here, Chris Mintz – a true fucking hero if ever there was one – had been carrying a gun rather than confronting the attacker unarmed, do you think it’s likely those other eight kids would be alive today?
If you can’t confront that question in the gun control debate, and you refuse to acknowledge the obvious answer to that very simple hypothetical, then you’re not being intellectually honest. You’re deciding the issue on emotion and not reality. And you have to ask yourself why you really don’t care about the 8 kids who are dead. I for one wish Chris Mintz had broken the law that day and had a gun in that “gun free zone.” If he had, we’d all be discussing how he shot some dirtbag who showed up with murder in his heart and the weapons to do it in his hands. End of story. No film of grieving families, nor bodies of kids, nor midnight vigils.
The truly despicable thing is that this happens all of the fucking time. School shootings, you say? No. They’re fairly rare, notwithstanding the lies about what constitutes a shooting now. [In an aside, I should note that the Fifth Column has quickly moved in to bolster the Bullshitter-in-Chief’s claims and redefine what constitutes a mass shooting in order to inflate the numbers and then make the point that we HAVE TO DO SOMETHING NOW!!! And, of course, right on cue, anybody who even whispers about Constitutional rights gets to immediately be labeled a homicidal maniac. Then we hear about the “Australian” solution – which is to say, a euphemism for a countrywide recall on weapons, in which police will pay you for your guns when you turn them in, but if you don’t, you are now a criminal. Wonderful.]
No, I’m talking about the defensive and lawful use of handguns by average citizens that saves lives. What? you say. You’ve never heard of such a thing?
I know, it sounds rarer than a unicorn, but the facts are that people do this daily and it gets ab-so-lute-ly zero coverage from the media.
The NRA has been listing “DGUs” (that’s defensive gun uses in the parlance) at the back of its magazine for years. Here is the latest version with links to the archives. Every story I found had a source quoted, usually the local news or newspaper report. Gun-grabbers have gone to great lengths to try to debunk any possible claim of defensive gun use by armed innocent citizens. Reason magazine did a very balanced piece on the two most well-known camps in that academic debate.
I also thought it worth pointing out that in Chicago alone, where the gun laws are so restrictive as to effectively ban a person’s ability to buy a gun (much like my old home state of Massachusetts, where it took me a year to simply pick up a gun that had been given to me as a gift and transferred to the store near my house), there were over 50 people killed with guns. It is also worth noting that Chicago is, and has always been, a Democratic stronghold at all levels of government, that they have almost zero opposition in the home of the Daly political machine to pass their policies, and yet gun deaths the last two years will likely top 2500, according to the Chicago Tribune. Just out of curiosity, I picked a link from September 4th, simply because it was near the bottom of that page, which scrolls for the last 30 days only. This is what it’s like in Chicago right now, where they have all but banned guns.
I really don’t know what else I can say to the gun-grabbers and animists who refuse to even consider that maybe – just maybe – they’re wrong. Quite frankly, I no longer give a fuck. I’ve got my gun and I know how to use it. I will continue to buy more because (a) different kinds of gun serve different purposes, (b) I am well-trained in how to use almost everything there is, up to and including air-launched rockets, anti-tank weapons, and even air-to-air missiles, (c) I have taught my two youngest daughters how to shoot one, as well, and am entirely comfortable with them handling a weapon, (d) I leave my ability to defend myself to no one, ever, and (e) this right is at the heart of individual liberty and I need not justify it to anyone, especially when they are pants-shitting cowards, or mystical-thinking animists who believe that because others commit crimes with some inanimate object that said object should be banned to those of us who have done nothing wrong.
Period.