Posted on 04/27/2009 7:46:42 AM PDT by TADSLOS
THE evolution in public policy concerning the manufacture, sale and possession of semiautomatic assault weapons like AK-47s, AR-15s and Uzis has been very disturbing. Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and I all supported a ban on these formidable firearms, and one was finally passed in 1994.
When the 10-year ban was set to expire, many police organizations including 1,100 police chiefs and sheriffs from around the nation called on Congress and President George W. Bush to renew and strengthen it. But with a wink from the White House, the gun lobby prevailed and the ban expired.
I have used weapons since I was big enough to carry one, and now own two handguns, four shotguns and three rifles, two with scopes. I use them carefully, for hunting game from our family woods and fields, and occasionally for hunting with my family and friends in other places. We cherish the right to own a gun and some of my hunting companions like to collect rare weapons. One of them is a superb craftsman who makes muzzle-loading rifles, one of which I displayed for four years in my private White House office.
But none of us wants to own an assault weapon, because we have no desire to kill policemen or go to a school or workplace to see how many victims we can accumulate before we are finally shot or take our own lives. Thats why the White House and Congress must not give up on trying to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, even if it may be politically difficult.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why do I picture Elmer Fudd maniacal and old still looking for a pesky wabbit?
People murder people with all sorts of weapons, not strictly assault weapons.
It is insanity to have the "desires" that Mr. Peanut speaks of above. There are other purposes for the guns and he knows it.
Are you still beating your wife, Mr. President?
The little worms inside his skull are acting up again and causing him to do his verbal vomitus. He’ll go back to his tea-mouse slumber again soon enough...
“NRA is defending criminal’s rights to own assault weapons”??? Screw you, Carter, you’re a damned liar!
Not a popular sentiment around here, but here goes.
If the security forces come to disarm you, you will lose. If you defeat the cops, they'll bring in the Guard. If you defeat them, they'll bring in the regular Army, complete with tanks, helicopter gunships, etc.
There are very good reasons for being well armed, but the idea that a single individual or small group will thereby be enabled to take on the US government in armed combat, win the shootout and walk away isn't one of them.
You WILL lose, unless your stand leads (many) millions of others to engage in a massive revolution that overthrows the government, and/or leads the military to turn on and overthrow the government out of sympathy for your cause. As the military often has minimal sympathy for those shooting at them, I wouldn't bet on that one either.
If tens of millions of armed citizens turn out to fight, that's a very different story. But one, ten or one hundred will just be slaughtered.
The fact that the three firearms Carter cited, AK-47, AR-15, and Uzi, fall into three entirely different categories is something quite outside his rudimentary knowledge of the subject. They're three scary-sounding labels. Three scary-looking guns. They can be identified, focused upon, and demonized, and that's what's going on here. That's politics, but if you have to work that hard to create the illusion of a problem, perhaps there isn't really a problem to begin with.
ASSASSIN! Why does Jimmy Carter need an assassin's weapon of choice? Or does he really need to murder Bambi from 500 yards away? Perhaps he should improve his hunting skills, so that he can get into a sportsman's distance of his prey!
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or, if during periods of mass arrest, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lair, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. Or what about the Black Maria [paddy wagon] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chaffeur- what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would have quickly suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
“If... if... We didn’t love freedom enough. [...] We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Jimmy Carter is constantly pandering to the cosmopolitan statists of the global Left. In this op-ed at the rapidly sinking NY Times, he reveals himself as a pathetic, pathological liar. If he would occasionally put down his copy of the NY Times and pick up a paper with an increasing readership, such as the Wall Street Journal, he would learn that stocks from companies that manufacture firearms and ammunition are their own little bull market. His countrymen find solace in buying such products ever since Mr. Carter’s party returned to power. That is really the point. The second amendment is not about “hunting” or beautifully “crafted” “muzzle-loaders”. It was meant by our founders to be a bulwark for personal liberty against the excesses of a tyrannical state. Because Mr. Carter loves state authority more than the Constitution, he lies about gun owners, the NRA, the weapons themselves, and imports by Mexican drug dealers. He raves on and on. We can only hope that Obama, Reid, Pelosi, et al, follow his lead. They will reap the whirlwind in 2010.
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h45/text
Almost time to separate the sheep from the goats ......
Fair enough, as long as you understand the price that would be paid by the resisters, especially the first ones.
Also, while we may be at the top of a slippery slope that could lead to Solzhenitsyn territory, we’re at present a LONG way from being in that territory. At some point the tactics you mention would undoubtedly be justified. Implementing them now would mean the ambush and murder of policement just doing their jobs, probably a good many of them philosophically on your side, at least until you start murdering their buddies.
This is where the real slippery slope of disarmed passivism leads: to the slippery slope into this pit.
"Only well-trained professionals in the military and the police need guns. History proves that civilians are much better off without them."
When the stock gets to -$1.00, buy. :)
So Solzhenitsyn’s description of resistance, transferred to America, wouldn’t involve murdering cops? How’s that work?
Cops enforce the law. If you are in rebellion against the law, they will try to enforce it on you. If you resist forcibly, it will result in either you or them assuming room temperature. If it’s them, they will be reinforced until you lose.
You might believe your resistance is justified and is not therefore murder. Under certain circumstances I might even agree with you. I suspect the coworkers of the dead cops would beg to differ.
Robert A. Heinlein had a lot to say about the horrible brutality necessarily involved, on both sides, in an insurgent vs. counter-insurgent conflict. He had little but contempt for those who would encourage others to jump into such a situation without counting whether they were willing to pay the price.
This price involves not only the brutality suffered by the insurgents, but also that which must be inflicted by the insurgents if they are to win. We would in all likelihood be talking about many, many millions dead in the USA before the government could be overthrown.
Things are bad here, and getting worse, but we are nowhere near conditions that would justify such a response.
In the immortal words of Claire Wolf: “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
I own two Evil Black Rifles. Neither of mine have ever induced me to do the above.
I wonder if they are defective?
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