Posted on 10/10/2017 5:07:14 AM PDT by Kaslin
Since the carnage in Las Vegas, there's been a lot of talk on TV and commentary in print about gun control. Not just any gun control of course, but "reasonable" and "common sense" gun control.
But since words matter, it matters how you define "reasonable" and "common sense."
And on this, liberals and conservatives might as well be inhabitants of two different planets. As Daniel Henninger succinctly put it in his Wall Street Journal column: "Progressives embrace the benign, while conservatives fear the malign. Liberals say, give peace a chance. Conservatives say, Annie, get your gun."
To that I'll add, liberals embrace the federal government, conservatives are deeply suspicious of all that power -- and think they need guns not just to protect themselves from common criminals but maybe even from their government.
I heard one liberal pundit on TV, after calling for what she considered reasonable tweaks in our gun laws, add, as if to satisfy silly concerns, well "no one's" for taking everyone's gun away.
Well, actually some people are for taking everyone's gun away.
Back in December 2015, a journalist and author named Phoebe Maltz Bovy wrote this in the New Republic:
"Ban guns. All guns. Get rid of guns in homes, and on the streets, and, as much as possible, on police. Not just because of San Bernardino, or whichever mass shooting may pop up next, but also not not because of those. Don't sort the population into those who might do something evil or foolish or self-destructive with a gun and those who surely will not. As if this could be known -- as if it could be assessed without massively violating civil liberties and stigmatizing the mentally ill. Ban guns! Not just gun violence. Not just certain guns. Not just already-technically-illegal guns. All of them."
She's not alone. You think progressives like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, if they could snap their fingers and make it happen, wouldn't echo every word of what Phoebe Maltz Bovy wrote in the New Republic?
This is not an argument for doing nothing. It is an argument, though, for acknowledging that there may not be much government can do to stop what happened in Las Vegas.
Leah Libresco, a statistician, wrote in "The Washington Post" that two-thirds of gun deaths in America are the result of suicide; the next biggest group, about 20 percent, are young men killing each other, often in gang violence; then came women who were killed, usually the result of domestic violence.
Focus on those groups, she wrote -- "not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns."
The killer in Las Vegas had 23 firearms in his hotel room and 19 more at his house. Is that too many? It sounds like too many to me, but what should the legal limit be? Ten? Five? One?
The gun lobby won't agree to any of those numbers. Absolutists aren't big on compromise. Even small, limited restrictions, they believe, will inevitably lead to more intrusive restrictions. And let's be clear, the gun lobby isn't only the National Rifle Association. It's a big chunk of the American people.
Recently, Rosanne Cash had an op-ed published in The New York Times where she called on her fellow country singers to stand up to the NRA. But she knows it won't be easy. Anyone who gets too vocal about guns and says the "wrong" things winds up in the crosshairs him or herself. Here's what Cash had to say about that.
"I've been a gun-control activist for 20 years. Every time I speak out on the need for stricter gun laws, I get a new profusion of threats. There's always plenty of the garden-variety 'your dad would be ashamed of you' sexist nonsense, along with the much more menacing threats to my family and personal safety.
"Last year, I performed at the Concert Across America to End Gun Violence with Jackson Browne, Eddie Vedder, Marc Cohn and the Harlem Gospel Choir, and we got death threats. People wanted to kill us because we wanted to end gun violence."
The Las Vegas killer used something called a "bump stock" to turn his rifle into a something like an automatic weapon, a kind of machine gun that's been illegal for quite a while now.
Both Republicans and Democrats -- and even the NRA -- are signaling they might support legislation that would restrict or flat out ban the use of bump stocks.
That sounds like a legislative limit a lot of Americans could get behind. But is it a change the absolutists can live with? Or will they worry that it's the camel's nose under the tent, the first step to more restrictions that will ultimately gut what they see as their Second Amendment rights?
Will anything change after Las Vegas? I'm not making any bets on that. But this much I'm pretty sure of: Americans, a lot of them anyway, love their guns. And politicians -- few of whom are profiles in courage -- love their votes. So you tell me if anything will change after Las Vegas. And if it did, would it make any real difference regarding gun violence in America?
No and no. And what Bernie and the rest of the elites don't care to address is that criminals don't obey laws. Even gun laws passed with the very best of intentions by people who say they really, really care about the little people.
The end game of their strategy is to deny law abiding Americans of their ability to protect themselves and their families.
Good...for LATER.
Thanks
The above little gem appeared in the article, and while it's not exactly about the topic, if there was ever any proof of reason to fear the concentration of power in the federal government, the Obama regime proved it.
The perfect example of a tyrannical federal government was "Operation Chokepoint." Using the power of the banking system, the government selected "objectionable" (objectionable to whom?) but perfectly legal businesses (or even people in professions that, again, were considered "objectionable,) and threatened the financial backers of the banks used by those businesses and people. Porn stars were informed that their bank accounts were being closed. Gun dealers and manufacturers were no longer able to accept credit cards.
This is a PERFECT example of the sort of tyranny from which the Constitution of the United States was supposed to protect The People.
Mark
I can see that you are trying to point out positive things, reining-in an out-of-control MSM, but using Australia as a model for reasonable steps towards maniac-control is a bad idea.
Australia is an example of where a free country went from gun “buy-backs” (here now: as if the state sold you the gun, now they want it back) to offering “amnesty” to “gun criminals”.
Australia is now the bumper sticker come true: only criminals have guns. This is America, where citizens have a God-given right to keep and bear arms.
National carry reciprocity—now!
There is nothing sexist in saying that her father would be ashamed of her over that. If a man said something equally absurd and treasonous, the man would be told the same thing.
Still, she can't play the worn out race card, so she has to reach for the equally worn "sexist" card. America's anti-freedom enemies have no better defense and no other recourse on this question.
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