What Liberals Don't Understand: A Serious Attempt at Gun Confiscation Could Lead to Civil War
"From my cold, dead hands!" - Charlton Heston Liberals love to fantasize about confiscating every gun in America. It may be their most beautiful dream. Liberals get control of the Supreme Court and ignore the Second Amendment; Washington makes gun ownership illegal; almost all the guns come pouri...
Showing posts with label Second Amendment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Second Amendment. Show all posts
2/19/2018
What Liberals Don’t Understand: A Serious Attempt at Gun Confiscation Could Lead to Civil War
4/18/2013
Blame Bloomberg
Via-
Editorial of The New York Sun
Is it possible to imagine that when President Obama retires for the night that he will wonder who led him into the debacle that unfolded when his long campaign for gun control went down to defeat in a Senate controlled by his own party? Publicly the President reacted with a tirade of blame-shifting more shameful than any our aging typesetters can recall. Vice President Biden, who did so much to confect this catastrophe, stood beside the President looking like he was about to burst into tears. The President railed against the playing of politics — imagine, and in the Senate. He blamed the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby, calling them liars, and the Senate itself. But we find it hard to think that he takes his own words seriously. Back in his private study, he must be think about others.
If we were him, we’d blame Mayor Bloomberg. His Honor has placed himself at the head of the national chorus for gun control. He’s poured millions into the fight. He’s vowed to pour millions more. We understand how much the president resents the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby. But the NRA warned him of the fate of these measures all along. It understood that the issue in gun violence isn’t the size of the magazines. Or “assault” rifles. The issue isn’t background checks. But that’s not the problem, either. The real problem is that every senator comprehended that whatever measure might have been approved, it would have been certain to be used as but a stepping stone to the next restriction on Second Amendment rights.
The problem is that the neither Messrs. Obama, Bloomberg, nor Biden believe in the Second Amendment. Nor do any of their partners in politics, such as Senator Schumer. Not one of them has protested the over-regulation of guns in New York or any other state. Mr. Cuomo just tightened gun prohibitions in a state where Mother Teresa couldn’t get a pistol permit. Not even the most law-abiding, well-trained individuals can carry a gun in New York. The Second Amendment is not in force here. So people look at Bloomberg-land and ask, where is he leading us? Where does he want to go? The way we interpret the decision of the Senate yesterday is that it is saying, “not one more inch in that direction.” Good for the Senate.
Next up in the great battle of guns is the drive to enforce the Second Amendment more broadly and end what the Wall Street Journal, in a particularly important editorial issued the other day, called “massive gun resistance.” He was speaking of the open defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller and in other cases. This is the context in which the Senate came within a whisker yesterday of passing an amendment requiring reciprocity for state carry permits. The only thing stopping it is the 60 vote thresh-hold for cloture that the liberals love to carp about. If the Second Amendment means anything, it means that an honest, law-abiding, adult American should be able to keep a pistol and bear it on his person — even in New York.
Editorial of The New York Sun
Is it possible to imagine that when President Obama retires for the night that he will wonder who led him into the debacle that unfolded when his long campaign for gun control went down to defeat in a Senate controlled by his own party? Publicly the President reacted with a tirade of blame-shifting more shameful than any our aging typesetters can recall. Vice President Biden, who did so much to confect this catastrophe, stood beside the President looking like he was about to burst into tears. The President railed against the playing of politics — imagine, and in the Senate. He blamed the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby, calling them liars, and the Senate itself. But we find it hard to think that he takes his own words seriously. Back in his private study, he must be think about others.
If we were him, we’d blame Mayor Bloomberg. His Honor has placed himself at the head of the national chorus for gun control. He’s poured millions into the fight. He’s vowed to pour millions more. We understand how much the president resents the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby. But the NRA warned him of the fate of these measures all along. It understood that the issue in gun violence isn’t the size of the magazines. Or “assault” rifles. The issue isn’t background checks. But that’s not the problem, either. The real problem is that every senator comprehended that whatever measure might have been approved, it would have been certain to be used as but a stepping stone to the next restriction on Second Amendment rights.
The problem is that the neither Messrs. Obama, Bloomberg, nor Biden believe in the Second Amendment. Nor do any of their partners in politics, such as Senator Schumer. Not one of them has protested the over-regulation of guns in New York or any other state. Mr. Cuomo just tightened gun prohibitions in a state where Mother Teresa couldn’t get a pistol permit. Not even the most law-abiding, well-trained individuals can carry a gun in New York. The Second Amendment is not in force here. So people look at Bloomberg-land and ask, where is he leading us? Where does he want to go? The way we interpret the decision of the Senate yesterday is that it is saying, “not one more inch in that direction.” Good for the Senate.
Next up in the great battle of guns is the drive to enforce the Second Amendment more broadly and end what the Wall Street Journal, in a particularly important editorial issued the other day, called “massive gun resistance.” He was speaking of the open defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Heller and in other cases. This is the context in which the Senate came within a whisker yesterday of passing an amendment requiring reciprocity for state carry permits. The only thing stopping it is the 60 vote thresh-hold for cloture that the liberals love to carp about. If the Second Amendment means anything, it means that an honest, law-abiding, adult American should be able to keep a pistol and bear it on his person — even in New York.
4/17/2013
Clinging to Guns—and Abortion
Via-WSJ
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Atop the quotable Barack Obama there will be this: "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
Everyone clings to something. But when it comes to criticizing unseemly political dependencies, it's almost always liberals accusing them of clinging to positions and ideas that an enlightened society would have abandoned.
But what do liberals cling to? Recent events have revealed two things. Gun control and abortion.
The gun-control cling we know about because rarely a day passes without a news story about the Senate's gun-control legislation. Then there's the Kermit Gosnell abortion trial, which until recently few people knew about because there was little media coverage of it. The rise of the Web notwithstanding, it's still true that unless the mainstream press covers a story, it pretty much doesn't exist.
Kermit Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortion doctor who has been on trial the past five weeks on accusations that he murdered a pregnant woman and a number of fetuses who emerged from the abortion procedure still alive.
By now, many details of the accusations against Dr. Gosnell have become known. One will suffice. The Philadelphia grand-jury report, which is a hard read, says: "The way he ensured fetal demise [Dr. Gosnell's phrase] was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping.' Over the years, there were hundreds of 'snippings.'" Most were third-trimester babies. Eight of his clinic staff have pleaded guilty.
In these times of a media that need to fill a bottomless electronic news hole, a story as sensational as the Gosnell abortion trial should be everywhere. But as conservative bloggers and a few liberal writers such as Kirsten Powers have established in recent weeks, most major newspapers and TV networks have produced little or cursory coverage of this trial. The two exceptions are the Associated Press and Fox News.
The basic conservative criticism here is that the media have underplayed the Gosnell story because its details might undermine support for the abortion status quo, or at least cause people to ask what exactly that status quo is these days. Rather than risk that, the Gosnell story was demoted.
In response, some have said the conservative bloggers are wrongly seeing a conspiracy of silence where there is only a difference over news judgment. By now, this response is implausible. It is hardly a revelation anymore that the media play the news in subtle but tilted ways to protect what they think is a settled social good, such as access to abortion, no matter what.
Another question raised by the trial of this abortion doctor is the matter of reactionaries clinging to the past.
Mr. Obama's remark about rural Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion is the coin of the realm in his crowd. But let's put their shared consensus another way: Somehow it became a conventional view in contemporary American politics that it is non-urban conservatives who in every case have to accommodate their beliefs to a national culture created by people who live somewhere else. "They" must adjust on abortion, guns, school prayer, sexual mores and all the rest of it. Liberals, meanwhile, not only feel no need to concede anything but use the commanding heights of the press and academia to define anyone who dissents from their ever-evolving national culture as a political fringe obsessed with people, one might say, who aren't like them.
The gun-control bill is collapsing in the Senate because its liberal sponsors, led by Barack Obama and California's Dianne Feinstein, lost the support of Democratic senators from states with traditional hunting cultures, such as Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Mark Begich of Alaska or Max Baucus of Montana. Why so many people in these states and many others to this day still distrust public authorities on guns is a good, but untold, story. Kentuckians recently voted the right to hunt into their constitution. Instead, gun-control's failure will be spun as a win for mindless Neanderthals "out there."
But what about Kermit Gosnell? This story suggests something Neanderthal-like may have developed around the fringe of abortion practice in the 40 years since Roe v. Wade. But rather than re-examine and even reform those practices, the curtain will be pulled on the Gosnell case. They'll cling to Roe, no matter how unseemly its status quo.
Political correctness—the silent code that decides whose side of the story gets elevated and whose side gets buried—has been a blunt but effective weapon, which the dominant liberal culture has used to achieve a lot of victories over "them" the past 40 years. But the wins have come at a price. That price is the return of an unmistakable, growing and potentially destabilizing bitterness in American politics.
A fairer-minded media would be the best way to level the playing field. Absent that, our politics will be leveled by other means. What the major media think then, if they're still around, won't matter.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Atop the quotable Barack Obama there will be this: "And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
Everyone clings to something. But when it comes to criticizing unseemly political dependencies, it's almost always liberals accusing them of clinging to positions and ideas that an enlightened society would have abandoned.
But what do liberals cling to? Recent events have revealed two things. Gun control and abortion.
The gun-control cling we know about because rarely a day passes without a news story about the Senate's gun-control legislation. Then there's the Kermit Gosnell abortion trial, which until recently few people knew about because there was little media coverage of it. The rise of the Web notwithstanding, it's still true that unless the mainstream press covers a story, it pretty much doesn't exist.
Kermit Gosnell is a Philadelphia abortion doctor who has been on trial the past five weeks on accusations that he murdered a pregnant woman and a number of fetuses who emerged from the abortion procedure still alive.
By now, many details of the accusations against Dr. Gosnell have become known. One will suffice. The Philadelphia grand-jury report, which is a hard read, says: "The way he ensured fetal demise [Dr. Gosnell's phrase] was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby's neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that 'snipping.' Over the years, there were hundreds of 'snippings.'" Most were third-trimester babies. Eight of his clinic staff have pleaded guilty.
In these times of a media that need to fill a bottomless electronic news hole, a story as sensational as the Gosnell abortion trial should be everywhere. But as conservative bloggers and a few liberal writers such as Kirsten Powers have established in recent weeks, most major newspapers and TV networks have produced little or cursory coverage of this trial. The two exceptions are the Associated Press and Fox News.
The basic conservative criticism here is that the media have underplayed the Gosnell story because its details might undermine support for the abortion status quo, or at least cause people to ask what exactly that status quo is these days. Rather than risk that, the Gosnell story was demoted.
In response, some have said the conservative bloggers are wrongly seeing a conspiracy of silence where there is only a difference over news judgment. By now, this response is implausible. It is hardly a revelation anymore that the media play the news in subtle but tilted ways to protect what they think is a settled social good, such as access to abortion, no matter what.
Another question raised by the trial of this abortion doctor is the matter of reactionaries clinging to the past.
Mr. Obama's remark about rural Pennsylvanians clinging to guns and religion is the coin of the realm in his crowd. But let's put their shared consensus another way: Somehow it became a conventional view in contemporary American politics that it is non-urban conservatives who in every case have to accommodate their beliefs to a national culture created by people who live somewhere else. "They" must adjust on abortion, guns, school prayer, sexual mores and all the rest of it. Liberals, meanwhile, not only feel no need to concede anything but use the commanding heights of the press and academia to define anyone who dissents from their ever-evolving national culture as a political fringe obsessed with people, one might say, who aren't like them.
The gun-control bill is collapsing in the Senate because its liberal sponsors, led by Barack Obama and California's Dianne Feinstein, lost the support of Democratic senators from states with traditional hunting cultures, such as Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Mark Begich of Alaska or Max Baucus of Montana. Why so many people in these states and many others to this day still distrust public authorities on guns is a good, but untold, story. Kentuckians recently voted the right to hunt into their constitution. Instead, gun-control's failure will be spun as a win for mindless Neanderthals "out there."
But what about Kermit Gosnell? This story suggests something Neanderthal-like may have developed around the fringe of abortion practice in the 40 years since Roe v. Wade. But rather than re-examine and even reform those practices, the curtain will be pulled on the Gosnell case. They'll cling to Roe, no matter how unseemly its status quo.
Political correctness—the silent code that decides whose side of the story gets elevated and whose side gets buried—has been a blunt but effective weapon, which the dominant liberal culture has used to achieve a lot of victories over "them" the past 40 years. But the wins have come at a price. That price is the return of an unmistakable, growing and potentially destabilizing bitterness in American politics.
A fairer-minded media would be the best way to level the playing field. Absent that, our politics will be leveled by other means. What the major media think then, if they're still around, won't matter.
4/08/2013
Guns Responsible for Global Warming
from The American Spectator
by Jed Babbin
Frustration is taking its toll in the liberals’ war against guns. President Obama, pushing his broad gun control agenda, said we should be ashamed if we’ve forgotten the Newtown shooting so soon. The New York Times opined that Obama is being shouted down by the “gun lobby,” even though he and Biden had been crisscrossing the country “…making a forceful case for a package of laws that would reduce gun violence.”
That, of course, is the media narrative on gun control. For every issue there is a narrative: a set of assumptions and boundaries of thought with which every story (and editorial) is tailored to agree. False narratives usually serve the left well. For over eighteen months, American politics was forced into as media narrative tat ignored everything else and focused on Obamacare which, we were told, would make healthcare cheaper and more available, the precise opposites of its effect. For months before that, we were told Obama’s “stimulus” would create tens of thousands of jobs and get our economy growing. It did no such thing, but the media narrative helped it become law.
Now the gun control narrative is equally false, and borders on the insane. It has become so wacky that it resembles the left’s hysteria on “global warming.”
4/02/2013
3/30/2013
A duty to preserve the Second Amendment
Via-Washington Times
The right to bear arms ‘shall not be infringed’
By Sen. Rand Paul
When Congress reconvenes next month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is expected to bring gun control back to the Senate floor. If this occurs, I will oppose any legislation that undermines Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms or their ability to exercise this right without being subject to government surveillance.
Restricting Americans’ ability to purchase firearms readily and freely will do nothing to stop national tragedies such as those that happened in Newtown, Conn., and in Aurora, Colo. It will do much to give criminals and potential killers an unfair advantage by hampering law-abiding citizens’ ability to defend themselves and their families.Potentially on the table are new laws that would outlaw firearms and magazines that hold more than just a handful of rounds, as well as require universal “background checks,” which amount to gun registration.We are also being told that the “assault weapons” ban originally introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein is not happening. We can only hope. But in Washington, D.C., bad ideas often have a strange way of coming up again.
These laws are designed to sound reasonable, but statistics have shown that gun control simply does not work.What constitutes reasonable? If limiting rounds and increasing surveillance were really the solution to curbing gun violence, why should we stop there? Because everyone knows that none of this actually curbs gun violence.
Gun control itself is unreasonable.Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the entire country — and one of the worst gun-crime rates, with more than 500 homicides last year. Compare this to Virginia, where in the past six years, gun sales went up by 73 percent, while violent gun crime fell 24 percent. The types of firearms and clips the left is currently so intent on banning are used in fewer than 2 percent of gun crimes — and how many of those crimes involve registered weapons? Few to none.
For every national tragedy that happens, there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of Americans preventing similar killings from happening, thanks to the use of personal firearms. Last June, for example, a 14-year-old Phoenix boy shot an armed intruder who broke into his home while he was baby-sitting his three younger siblings. The children were home alone on a Saturday afternoon when an unrecognized woman rang their doorbell. After the 14-year-old boy refused to open the door, he heard a loud bang, which indicated that someone was trying to break into the house. The boy hurried his younger siblings upstairs and collected a handgun from his parents’ room. When the boy rounded the top of the stairs, there was a man standing in the doorway with a gun pointed at him. The boy shot at the intruder and saved the lives of his three younger siblings.
There have been would-be mass murderers who have walked into schools, churches, shopping malls, movie theaters and other public places who didn’t get very far because, thankfully, an armed citizen was nearby. There have been countless home invasions, armed robberies and other assaults in which lives were saved, thanks to citizens possessing private firearms.These stories are heroic, but they don’t become big headlines. We should all be glad that they don’t become such headlines, thanks to the unsung heroes who prevent them from becoming potential national tragedies.
For these reasons, I will oppose any attempt by President Obama, Mr. Reid or anyone else in Washington who works against Americans’ right to bear arms. Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz have decided to join in this effort.We do this not only because it is right — but because it is our duty as United States senators.
When I stood up for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments during a filibuster a few weeks ago to address drones and executive power, it was not because I was partial to those amendments, important as they are. When I came into office, I took an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights.
I took an oath to uphold the First Amendment. I took an oath to uphold the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment reads: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t say “might be” infringed. Nor does it say “could be” infringed. It read “shall not” be infringed. The current gun-control legislation being proposed unquestionably infringes.For these reasons, I will work diligently to stop any such gun-control legislation. Our Constitution, individual liberty and personal safety depend on it.
Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Homeland Security committees.
The right to bear arms ‘shall not be infringed’
By Sen. Rand Paul
When Congress reconvenes next month, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is expected to bring gun control back to the Senate floor. If this occurs, I will oppose any legislation that undermines Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms or their ability to exercise this right without being subject to government surveillance.
Restricting Americans’ ability to purchase firearms readily and freely will do nothing to stop national tragedies such as those that happened in Newtown, Conn., and in Aurora, Colo. It will do much to give criminals and potential killers an unfair advantage by hampering law-abiding citizens’ ability to defend themselves and their families.Potentially on the table are new laws that would outlaw firearms and magazines that hold more than just a handful of rounds, as well as require universal “background checks,” which amount to gun registration.We are also being told that the “assault weapons” ban originally introduced by Sen. Dianne Feinstein is not happening. We can only hope. But in Washington, D.C., bad ideas often have a strange way of coming up again.
These laws are designed to sound reasonable, but statistics have shown that gun control simply does not work.What constitutes reasonable? If limiting rounds and increasing surveillance were really the solution to curbing gun violence, why should we stop there? Because everyone knows that none of this actually curbs gun violence.
Gun control itself is unreasonable.Chicago has some of the toughest gun laws in the entire country — and one of the worst gun-crime rates, with more than 500 homicides last year. Compare this to Virginia, where in the past six years, gun sales went up by 73 percent, while violent gun crime fell 24 percent. The types of firearms and clips the left is currently so intent on banning are used in fewer than 2 percent of gun crimes — and how many of those crimes involve registered weapons? Few to none.
For every national tragedy that happens, there are hundreds if not thousands of examples of Americans preventing similar killings from happening, thanks to the use of personal firearms. Last June, for example, a 14-year-old Phoenix boy shot an armed intruder who broke into his home while he was baby-sitting his three younger siblings. The children were home alone on a Saturday afternoon when an unrecognized woman rang their doorbell. After the 14-year-old boy refused to open the door, he heard a loud bang, which indicated that someone was trying to break into the house. The boy hurried his younger siblings upstairs and collected a handgun from his parents’ room. When the boy rounded the top of the stairs, there was a man standing in the doorway with a gun pointed at him. The boy shot at the intruder and saved the lives of his three younger siblings.
There have been would-be mass murderers who have walked into schools, churches, shopping malls, movie theaters and other public places who didn’t get very far because, thankfully, an armed citizen was nearby. There have been countless home invasions, armed robberies and other assaults in which lives were saved, thanks to citizens possessing private firearms.These stories are heroic, but they don’t become big headlines. We should all be glad that they don’t become such headlines, thanks to the unsung heroes who prevent them from becoming potential national tragedies.
For these reasons, I will oppose any attempt by President Obama, Mr. Reid or anyone else in Washington who works against Americans’ right to bear arms. Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz have decided to join in this effort.We do this not only because it is right — but because it is our duty as United States senators.
When I stood up for the Fourth and Fifth Amendments during a filibuster a few weeks ago to address drones and executive power, it was not because I was partial to those amendments, important as they are. When I came into office, I took an oath to uphold the Bill of Rights.
I took an oath to uphold the First Amendment. I took an oath to uphold the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment reads: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” It doesn’t say “might be” infringed. Nor does it say “could be” infringed. It read “shall not” be infringed. The current gun-control legislation being proposed unquestionably infringes.For these reasons, I will work diligently to stop any such gun-control legislation. Our Constitution, individual liberty and personal safety depend on it.
Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Homeland Security committees.
3/22/2013
White House Misfire
Via-Washington Free Beacon
Column: How Democratic divisions frustrate liberal dreams
BY: Matthew Continetti
Harry Reid, welcome to the black helicopter crowd.
“When you go to registration, it raises all the black helicopter crowd notion that what this is all about is identifying who has a gun so that one day the government can get up and go to the house and arrest everyone who has a gun, and they’ll cite Nazi Germany and all that,” Biden told NPR Wednesday.
Paraphrase: Opposition to President Barack Obama’s gun agenda automatically makes you a conspiracy nut.
But if that’s true, a lot of Democrats must be receiving messages via their dental fillings. The day before Biden’s interview, Reid had made it clear that the gun bill he’d put to a vote on the Senate floor would not include an assault weapons ban. The assault weapons ban would rather have to be submitted as an amendment, which is almost certain to fail. Same goes for the ban on high-capacity magazines. (Universal background checks would be included in the bill, however.)
The Senate likely will pass an assortment of quite meaningless gun restrictions that will disappoint liberals who had hoped the Obama White House and congressional Democrats would seize the post-Newtown moment.
And they did try to seize the moment. It’s just that they failed—not because of Republicans but because of internal divisions within the supposedly unstoppable Democratic Party.
Let us note that in Harry Reid’s Senate there are more votes against Chuck Hagel than there are in favor of an assault weapons ban. (Reid said the ban has at most 40 votes on the floor; 41 Republicans voted against Hagel’s nomination for secretary of defense.) And let us note, too, that in this season of fake liberal concern for the divided and adrift GOP, Democrats aren’t exactly in tip-top shape, either.
Column: How Democratic divisions frustrate liberal dreams
BY: Matthew Continetti
Harry Reid, welcome to the black helicopter crowd.
“When you go to registration, it raises all the black helicopter crowd notion that what this is all about is identifying who has a gun so that one day the government can get up and go to the house and arrest everyone who has a gun, and they’ll cite Nazi Germany and all that,” Biden told NPR Wednesday.
Paraphrase: Opposition to President Barack Obama’s gun agenda automatically makes you a conspiracy nut.
But if that’s true, a lot of Democrats must be receiving messages via their dental fillings. The day before Biden’s interview, Reid had made it clear that the gun bill he’d put to a vote on the Senate floor would not include an assault weapons ban. The assault weapons ban would rather have to be submitted as an amendment, which is almost certain to fail. Same goes for the ban on high-capacity magazines. (Universal background checks would be included in the bill, however.)
The Senate likely will pass an assortment of quite meaningless gun restrictions that will disappoint liberals who had hoped the Obama White House and congressional Democrats would seize the post-Newtown moment.
And they did try to seize the moment. It’s just that they failed—not because of Republicans but because of internal divisions within the supposedly unstoppable Democratic Party.
Let us note that in Harry Reid’s Senate there are more votes against Chuck Hagel than there are in favor of an assault weapons ban. (Reid said the ban has at most 40 votes on the floor; 41 Republicans voted against Hagel’s nomination for secretary of defense.) And let us note, too, that in this season of fake liberal concern for the divided and adrift GOP, Democrats aren’t exactly in tip-top shape, either.
3/19/2013
Why the NRA is Right about Hollywood
Via-American Thinker
By Selwyn Duke
Upstate New York's Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It's where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn't changed much since he was born of Washington Irving's fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I'd fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.
About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens - sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen - suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting "gangsta'" counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today's recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC's grungy East Village. Yet I'm wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close - a television set away.
My old hinterland haunt was once place where, if you wiggled the rabbit-ear antenna just right, you could pull in one or two TV stations. And what could you see? Perhaps reruns of The Brady Bunch, perhaps the news. But about a quarter century ago came VCRs and video stores; then cable and satellite TV; and, finally, the Internet. The serpent had entered Eden.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, much fire has been directed at gun advocates in general and the National Rifle Association in particular. In response, the organization has implicated Hollywood and popular culture in general for mainstreaming mindless violence. Yet even many Second Amendment advocates part company with the NRA on this point. After all, blaming entertainment for crime smacks of blaming guns. Yet there's quite a profound difference: guns don't transmit values. But how we use guns - and knives, fists and words - on screen certainly does.
Read entire article
By Selwyn Duke
Upstate New York's Catskill Mountain Range is a bucolic place near and dear to my heart. It's where storybook character Rip Van Winkle enjoyed his legendary slumber, and its scenery hasn't changed much since he was born of Washington Irving's fertile imagination. Yet, like Van Winkle, if I'd fallen asleep for 20 years when first arriving in that verdant heaven, I, too, would have noticed some profound changes upon awakening.
About two decades ago, many rural Catskill teens - sons of farmers and hunters and fishermen - suddenly started donning baggy pants and reflecting "gangsta'" counter-culture despite living nowhere near any large urban center. The following generation of teens experienced today's recent cultural evolution and often sport multiple tattoos and body piercings despite living nowhere near NYC's grungy East Village. Yet I'm wrong in a sense: those places were actually very close - a television set away.
My old hinterland haunt was once place where, if you wiggled the rabbit-ear antenna just right, you could pull in one or two TV stations. And what could you see? Perhaps reruns of The Brady Bunch, perhaps the news. But about a quarter century ago came VCRs and video stores; then cable and satellite TV; and, finally, the Internet. The serpent had entered Eden.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, much fire has been directed at gun advocates in general and the National Rifle Association in particular. In response, the organization has implicated Hollywood and popular culture in general for mainstreaming mindless violence. Yet even many Second Amendment advocates part company with the NRA on this point. After all, blaming entertainment for crime smacks of blaming guns. Yet there's quite a profound difference: guns don't transmit values. But how we use guns - and knives, fists and words - on screen certainly does.
Read entire article
2/23/2013
2/20/2013
2/04/2013
1/25/2013
Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm†
Via-The Daily Beast
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so.
By David Mamet.
† A city in eastern Poland.
Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”
All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.
Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.
As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.
President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”
But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?
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The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so.
By David Mamet.
† A city in eastern Poland.
Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”
All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.
Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.
As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.
President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”
But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?
read entire article
1/21/2013
1/19/2013
Gun Violence is Not a Republican Problem, It’s a Democratic Problem
Via-Front Page Magazine
By Daniel Greenfield
Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won’t have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.
You won’t find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.
67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.
Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.
Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.
He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.
These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.
Read entire article
By Daniel Greenfield
Forget Wal-Mart and skip your local gun show. The murderers of tomorrow will not be found wearing orange vests at your local sporting goods store. They won’t have NRA memberships or trophies on their walls.
You won’t find them in America. Look for them in Obamerica.
67% of firearm murders took place in the country’s 50 largest metro areas. The 62 cities in those metro areas have a firearm murder rate of 9.7, more than twice the national average. Among teenagers the firearm murder rate is 14.6 or almost three times the national average.
Those are the crowded cities of Obamerica. Those are the places with the most restrictive gun control laws and the highest crime rates. And many of them have been run by Democrats and their political machines for almost as long as they have been broken.
Obama won every major city in the election, except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City. And the higher the death rate, the bigger his victory.
He won New Orleans by 80 to 17 where the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. He won Detroit, where the murder rate of 53 per 100,000 people is the second highest in the country and twice as high as any country in the world, including the Congo and South Africa. He won it 73 to 26. And then he celebrated his victory in Chicago where the murder rate is three times the statewide average.
These places aren’t America. They’re Obamerica.
Read entire article
1/17/2013
1/16/2013
Gov. Rick Perry statement
Gov. Rick Perry released the following statement regarding President Obama's executive actions:
"The Vice President's committee was appointed in response to the tragedy at Newtown, but very few of his recommendations have anything to do with what happened there.
"Guns require a finger to pull the trigger. The sad young man who did that in Newtown was clearly haunted by demons and no gun law could have saved the children in Sandy Hook Elementary from his terror.
"There is evil prowling in the world - it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.
"In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president."
1/13/2013
1/12/2013
Guns and freedom
Via-From the Freedom Files
Judge Andrew P Napolitano
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a break on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government, and as our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior -- like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy -- immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.
Judge Andrew P Napolitano
The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty. It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny. And yet, the progressives in both political parties stand ready to use the coercive power of the government to interfere with the exercise of that right by law-abiding persons because of the gross abuse of that right by some crazies in our midst.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, he was marrying the nation at its birth to the ancient principles of the natural law that have animated the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West. Those principles have operated as a break on all governments that recognize them by enunciating the concept of natural rights.
As we have been created in the image and likeness of God the Father, we are perfectly free just as He is. Thus, the natural law teaches that our freedoms are pre-political and come from our humanity and not from the government, and as our humanity is ultimately divine in origin, the government, even by majority vote, cannot morally take natural rights away from us. A natural right is an area of individual human behavior -- like thought, speech, worship, travel, self-defense, privacy, ownership and use of property, consensual personal intimacy -- immune from government interference and for the exercise of which we don’t need the government’s permission.
1/11/2013
Biden's faulty lifeguard logic
Via-Chicago Tribune
Jonah Goldberg
"As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they're worth taking," Vice President Joe Biden declared on Wednesday as he previewed what his commission on gun violence might actually do.
"There are executive orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the Cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."
Biden insisted that it is a moral imperative for the White House to do something: "It's critically important that we act."
Most of the attention, understandably, is on Biden's suggestion that the president will consider using executive orders to do things he couldn't possibly accomplish legislatively. The imperial presidency is always troubling, but when it rubs up against the Bill of Rights it is especially so.
Jonah Goldberg
"As the president said, if your actions result in only saving one life, they're worth taking," Vice President Joe Biden declared on Wednesday as he previewed what his commission on gun violence might actually do.
"There are executive orders, there's executive action that can be taken. We haven't decided what that is yet. But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the Cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required."
Biden insisted that it is a moral imperative for the White House to do something: "It's critically important that we act."
Most of the attention, understandably, is on Biden's suggestion that the president will consider using executive orders to do things he couldn't possibly accomplish legislatively. The imperial presidency is always troubling, but when it rubs up against the Bill of Rights it is especially so.
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