A Journalists Lament

A reporter for the New Republic wonders why, just like shooting tragedies don’t lead to discussions about gun control, why bad storms don’t lead to discussions about climate change. This, of course, makes me greatly amused by this ad:

Support thought-provoking, quality journalism. Join The New Republic for $3.99/month.

That’s worth a laugh, for sure. But you see the attitude that drives it. The gun control crowd says my owning a gun contributes to the climate of mass shootings. That’s just fanciful nonsense to anyone who stops and thinks. That’s about as ridiculous as suggesting that my owning a car contributed to Sandy. Could there be greater societal and climatological processes at work here that we ought to be talking about? Sure. But you can’t point to a single storm, or a single mass shootings, and draw broad conclusions.

4 thoughts on “A Journalists Lament”

  1. As far as “climate Change” is concerned I think it’s the height of human arrogance to think we actually could (or even if we could, should) change the planet’s climate.

    These political buffoons can’t even fix the human condition so all the people of the world are at least comfortable and safe.

    And they think they can “fix” the world it’s self??? Insanity!

  2. Bill McKibbin, IIRC, is not just a New Republic writer. He’s one of the main spokesmen for the whole “climate change” movement.

    If he had any political sense, he wouldn’t tarnish an already very controversial cause (to put it mildly) by also publicly supporting something as unpopular as gun control. Perhaps he thinks that gun control is wildly popular among everyone except Southern Baptists and Pentecostals? If so, it’s no wonder AGW hysteria is so unsuccessful politically.

    For what it’s worth, I think a lot of these activists in various left-wing causes are more leftists than they are single-issue voters. They specialize in one cause, but they could just as easily specialize in something else. They don’t quite get the fact that while Barack Obama may have roughly 47% of the popular vote in an election, give or take a few percent, that does not mean that 47% of the population support every weird leftist cause.

    That was a large part of why Gore lost in 2000. He misinterpreted Clinton’s personal popularity for popularity of leftist causes in general, and gun control in particular. Polls after the election showed that guns were an issue that pretty much exclusively helped the GOP: the conservative base would crawl over broken glass to defeat an anti-gun candidate, and so would a lot of less conservative voters. Meanwhile, Democrats were at best apathetic about guns as an issue, and in many cases were openly hostile to their party’s stance.

  3. CO2 is only about 4% of the atmosphere and an inefficient green house gas. Man’s activities create only about 3-4% of that measly 4% of atmospheric CO2. So, if man vanished from the Earth today, the impact on CO2 would be insignificant.

    If you believe in AGW, you are a scientific imbecile.

Comments are closed.