Posted on 05/19/2018 2:29:50 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Before I was sent out to use it, I had to prove an intimate familiarity with my weapon — how it worked, its maximum effective range in meters, how to load and unload it safely, how to disassemble and reassemble it, how to clean it, clear jams, sight it and fire it accurately. So it’s hard for me to fathom how easy it is for almost any civilian to walk out of a gun retailer carrying a new weapon without a clue about so many of these standards.
And where military and law enforcement undergo extensive training on how to make the right shooting decision quickly while under extreme stress, civilians receive no such training, contributing to avoidable deaths arising from poor decisions and petty disputes. In this context, the National Rifle Association’s favorite slogan about good guys with guns defeating bad guys with guns is more naive myth than solution.
It’s crucial that veterans now bring our voice and experience to the national conversation about reasonable gun reform. As a group, we understand guns and appreciate that responsible gun ownership is an important part of American life — but we also understand that a safe environment is achieved through training and regulation.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
Being a cop or a service member does not automatically bestow some phenomenal expertise with a firearm.
And whether it does or not, I don't recall there being any "entrance criteria" for the 2nd Amendment. Whether this lackey thinks someone is qualified to own a firearm or not, that right is vouchsafed by our Constitution.
It’s called personal freedom - and personal responsibility. Yes, any non-felon adult can go buy a firearm without a clue as to how to use it. If they injure or kill themselves or others they will (quite rightly) suffer the consequences. I’d rather have that system than one where an all-powerful state decides what I’m allowed to own and operate.
To Mr. Diamond:
I spent a while writing a long exposition about how you are completely wrong and frankly a total moron. Then decided why bother? You’re too stupid to understand basic history, the Constitution, why the 2nd Amendmen exists, and pretty much anything else of import.
To reiterate: Mr. Diamond, you are completely wrong and a total moron.
/clearly not directed to you, Ben
Yep. He lost me at "gun reform". People who deliberately twist the narrative through cute word games aren't being sincere about anything else.
What I learned in the armed services is perhaps 5% of what I know about firearms, and I knew at least 50% of it before I ever took the oath. The author has no case.
Yup. I’ve seen it in real life. You are 100% correct. That said, I know service member and hunters (mostly deer and hogs) who are REALLY good. But they are on our side.
So, what war is he a veteran of? MI types typically do not engage in anything but paper pushing.
they are, in some part, the reason we D/A autos, which I despise.
John Moses Browning knew what he was doing when he designed guns, no improvement necessary.
Ok. This vet will bring his voice. I swore to uphold the constitution against all enemies foriegn and domestic. That means defend the 2nd amendment from infringement. Infringement from the author. The author who is an enemy of the constitution. I will do that.
Why is it that the only place I feel safe without carrying is at a gun show?
Thanks for reminding us what could\does happen when our military is unarmed.
He didn’t go back far enough.
By the time I got to RVN, we had to have a red wooden block in the magazine well of the M16, when we were on base.
It had a notch on it that sat between the bolt and the round chamber.
That solution must have been based on military intelligence as there was no solution for the 1911a1 or the Shotguns many carried.
and that solution was not applicable in the states...go figure.
we need to restore firearms training (and shooting sports) to our high schools!
This cat seems to assume that people go into the military knowing nothing about guns ammunition shooting and the like. Like somebody else said he should speak for himself but not the rest of us. He ought to watch the movie, Sergeant York.
“...you might want to actually have done something other then logistics your whole military carrier.
When your create a deliberate false premise about your military background at the start of your article, it destroys any intellectually credibility it might have had.”
Couldn’t find the word “logistics” anywhere in the linked NBC News article.
The final line described author Michael Diamond as an intel officer who spent seven years in the Army Reserves.
None of which qualifies him, nor disqualifies him.
More than 24 years on active duty convinced me that it’s possible to find fantastic, aware, insightful, talented, committed people in any technical specialty. The other side of the coin: it’s possible to find wrongheaded morons and petty tyrants anywhere also. Being a trained trigger-puller is no guarantee of a sensible understanding nor greater awareness of what’s going on. And the same holds, for combat veterans, jarringly enough.
And members of the military can be all over the map politically: I met political liberals who were far better at their jobs than political conservatives.
What Michael Diamond has done is to confuse the military with wider society: the military is a top-down, authoritarian organization that is necessarily run socialistically. Given the imperatives of command and control, unity of purpose, and centralized direction, it’s tough to see how any other sort of organizational structure could function effectively. The military serves the nation and the wider society, not the other way around.
Left/Progressive totalitarians commit a cardinal error when they conclude that what works for the military will work for the wider society.
What Michael Diamond has written here proves he is a dunce, not some professional with extra-powerful brains and penetrating insight. Which - unsurprisingly - has no impact on the mavens at NBC who are propping him up to pose as someone with special understanding of the problem, and thus higher credibility and authority.
I am not sure about other vets, but I have never walked out of a store with a weapon. I have walked out with many tools.
My guns and knives are tools, I am the weapon.
The problem is not the guns but the culture we have allowed to remove the testicles from boys and put them on girls.
So I guess the current vets are a product of that culture.
Also the problem is that young people today have very little knowledge of history or the constitution. It is such a sad thing that we have let happen to our country.
There is no gun culture. When you strip a kid of all reason for living with your insane nihilistic liberalism, and he becomes depressed, and you shove “antidepressants” into him, you cause the murders.
The chemicals make the body show external signs of being happy, while the person is actually unhappy. It is well known that the drugs lead to thoughts of suicide or violence!!!!! That is no f*cking antidepressant!
I swear, half this country is f*cking insane!
through training and regulation?????
Training yes regulation no
“Michael E. Diamond served as a military intelligence officer in the United States Army Reserve for seven years.”
No years given
MI in the reserve. Why should I believe anything this yob says?
It used to be that safe gun use and respect for firearms was a natural part of growing up in a family. Sadly, today guns are introduced in the worse possible way to our unsupervised youth through video games and on the silver screen. In this fictional, make believe world killing is glamorized and completely removed from reality, which later makes it much to easy to move from their make believe world into a real world where actions have grave consequences.
I don’t disparage him for speaking his mind about how he feels about guns. That is his right.
I deeply and with prejudice disparage the notion he seems to have that he speaks for other people who have also served in the military.
I ran into people like him in the “Veterans for Peace” group at confrontations down in Washington during protests. We had eight active duty Marines in civvies who had just returned from a tour of duty in combat, I met them in Arlington while visiting my dad’s grave and invited them to join us.
When we encountered this Vet for Peace guy, one of the Marines with us took extreme exception with what the guy was saying and had to be held back by his buddies.
That is why it bugged me to read this guy’s comments. He DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME.
And he DEFINITELY does not speak for THOSE men.
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