That the crowd who supports gun control can sometimes be a bit unhinged is certainly not news to those who frequent the gun corners of the blogosphere, but lately it’s been getting even worse. Just today, from Twitter:
I’m not sure where I was making a joke in that conversation, or where the bigotry and racism comes from, but whatever that hejjet guy is sniffing, smoking or snorting, he should really share with the rest of us, because that’s some grade A hallucination right there. Of course, that’s not all. Let’s not ignore the other shit gun control activists say. Blaming the gun for gun violence is nothing new, but the latest tactic is collective blame. If you own a gun, and especially if you advocate for your Second Amendment rights, you are responsible for every crime or accident with a gun that comes along.
This is what the gun control movement in this country is now reduced to. It greatly pleases me, because they aren’t far from political oblivion if this is the best they can proffer. The funny thing is, despite the accusation, it does indeed feel increasingly like we’re up against angry children, who offer child-like arguments to the problems of our society. We must keep pushing.
Say, why not just pass a law that it’s illegal for people to go crazy and shoot random people?
Makes as much sense as their statements……
They could just as logically argue that supporting men=supporting rape or supporting women=supporting PPD.
While I’m a gun owner and advocate for 2nd amendment rights – as well as concealed carry – I do NOT agree with most of the other stances of the pro-gun party. I would say that your statement
applies to pretty much equally to the opposite side – everything else that republicans argue about (i.e. abortion, church/state separation, civil rights, lgbtq issues, etc.).
It’s unfortunate that there is no good alternative, as it puts many gun owners like myself in an ugly position of having to pick an evil either way, especially when I’m already in a US state where defensive voting is required.
There are bozos all over the place, no doubt. But I’ve increasingly watched the gun control movement deprofessionalize over the past several years. If they didn’t deserve it, it would be kind of sad to watch. Ultimately, it’s good for gun rights that this is happening, but it’s getting difficult to talk about gun policy when you’re opponents are not able to raise arguments that are worth seriously countering.
I have to agree, and it’s been an issue that has caused me growing concern, as a gun owner with a history of RKBA activism.
You don’t need to spend much more than five minutes with Google to find high-profile personalities in the RKBA movement with really unsavory associations, and/or are outright loons, and for everyone who isn’t conversant with the Who’s Who of gun rights movement, it is very easy to paint a profile of gun rights activists as being simultaneously racists, homophobes, and closet fascists.
It is easy for us to dismiss that as negative “spin” by our enemies, and to dismiss the people they cite as not that important to us, but again, for people not that conversant with our “culture,” our protests go right over their heads and the damning evidence seems to be right there. And to tell the truth, even most of us are willing to hold our noses a little as long as someone talks a good RKBA fight. We’re more ready to damn the messengers who peg them for what they are, than to inspect the substance of what they’re saying.
Andy,
Gun Culture 1.0, as I call it, was filled with people who politically are considered unacceptable to moderates and liberals. This is what happens when the “left” kicked gun owners interested in self defense out of the Democratic party back in the 1960’s (JFK, then RFK and MLK, among others), it put a lot of gun owners wayward into traditional right wing politics.
Some of Gun Culture 2.0 and most of Gun Culture 3.0 will not be on the side of right wing politics. In California, and on CGN specifically, I’ve gotten into bitter arguments with certain persons who are anti-abortion extremists who have taken the mantra that since self defense is about protecting life, you have to be pro-life or you aren’t really pro-2A or pro-self defense.
This discussion came up in the context that in California, if you are not pro-gay equality and not pro-choice, you have ZERO chance of winning statewide office, and gun owners hitching their wagons to such candidates is an extremely bad idea, and contributes the belief that gun owners are hateful & misogynist pricks.
Sorry – “He’s doing it too!” and pointing to shiny objects are not valid arguments. Most of the arguments against weapons ownership ARE childish, as the given examples demonstrate. Gun ownership = terrorism? Thre’s no logical argument or progression of thought there, it’s just a “feeling”, like most liberal positions. Supporting guns = supporting violence? There’s a good essay at The Smallest Minority (IIRC) about wolves and sheepdogs. Either the anti-gunners haven’t read it, or are incapable of understanding it.
I clicked on your Twitter link but found following the “conversation” difficult to follow. What spurned these idiotic comments.
You kind of need to start from the bottom and go up. Most of them came fairly out of the blue.
Gee, I responded to some of the arguments from HeyHeyNRA, but they stopped talking to me really quick.
Makes me sad, I was having fun with them :D
Well, I will gladly take the collective “responsibility” for gun ownership. I can actually evaluate the pros and the cons, unlike our simpleton opponents.
By that I mean all of the GOOD that gun ownership entails. The number of murders done by guns in the hands of evil criminals is VASTLY outweighed by defensive gun uses by the store owners, frail grandmothers and by women refusing to be rape victims. On any given day the net benefit of firearms to decent citizens dwarfs the damage done by criminals. Being a victim because you viewed a firearm as icky, is not a good result. I will go to sleep tonight with a totally clear conscience because I did not prevent someone from offering effective self-defense. If you want to assign collective guilt, the gun control advocates are responsible for every murdered person who was denied a firearm due to a waiting period or was prevented from carrying a gun at a school, a theater, a mall or a church.
What about the backstop or final bulwark that firearms provide to our citizens against tyranny? It is likely that a potential dictator did not even try to rise to power in this country due to the armed citizenry, but we will never know. Remember that Hitler got elected and got laws passed regarding firearms and his authority to cement his dictatorship. Never Again!
“Remember that Hitler got elected and got laws passed regarding firearms and his authority to cement his dictatorship.”
Just thinking out loud again, but, remember that German citizens had the wherewithal to resist tyranny at an early point, but gave it up voluntarily to a popular government. A fellow named Milton Mayer once wrote a book titled They Thought They Were Free: The German People 1933 – 1945.
I’m going to repeat a story from a local Wehrmacht veteran I knew; I’m not sure he’s still alive. He said that at one point in his teens he had what may have been one of the biggest handgun collections in Germany; the city where they lived had a park with a deep ravine, and he was climbing down into it periodically to collect the illegal guns German citizens were throwing into it. Then his brother, who was in the SS, impressed on him that he really would be killed if he got caught, and made him get rid of them.
But the point of the story is that German citizens at one point had the resources to resist, but were willing to surrender those resources out of fear for their lives, when threatened by a politically popular government.
For me, the moral and message is, that our danger never will come from guys in blue helmets or black helicopters, imposing physical tyranny overnight, that we’ll know to pick up our guns and resist; it will come from people we have been rallying for, who break off segments of our society, one by one. “First they’ll come for. . .,” as the man said, and it will be a move most of us will cheer for.
The other day I posted in response to some of Sebastian’s reflections on local Bucks County history, some anecdotes about the Ku Klux Klan’s very mainstream activities here, not much over eighty years ago. To those I’ll add that people also choose not to remember that in the early ’30s there was at least one Nazi rally, in the Morrisville area, that attracted as many as 5,000 participants. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time, so was popular.
You’ll never get as much shit as suggesting to gun owners that tyranny may not come in a form you can easily shoot. The drama llama stayed for days when I suggested that a few years ago.
And the Wehrmacht soldier you know, if he was a paratrooper, and came over here as a POW, I think I’ve met that guy. He was alive as of a few years ago.
I don’t recall that he was a paratrooper, but he was a POW, captured in Italy. He was a mortarman I think, and had been wounded in the leg by a GI with either a Thompson or M-3. And, a few years ago was the last time I saw him.
I also recall that he participated in the WWII reenactments at Tobyhanna, where he said the Wehrmacht veterans like him were treated as celebrities.
One of Jeff Snyder’s essays addresses this issue head-on, I think it was called something like “Walter Mitty’s Second Amendment”. Jeff made it clear that we’ve already lost most of our freedoms.
Similarly, I remember someone writing an essay about what FDR did to the country. He said that vigilance wasn’t enough to preserve freedom: while we were watching the pass, the tyrants paraded through, singing songs of freedom.
I’m not sure what to do about it, though, except to hunker down, and to do what we can to teach the rising generation what it means to be free.
I would really prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around! :-)
Every so often I see in a blog or comment section some short anecdote from “a guy I knew” like a former German soldier, or a Russian citizen, or a Jew… and I can’t help but think that these tidbits of insight should be collected somewhere and shared. Maybe printed and given to schoolkids.
Actually, the German people did NOT have the ability to resist the National Socialist Worker Partei thugs. They were disarmed under the Treaty of Versailles, and that disarmament was carried out with both great efficiency and great thoroughness. As well as with marked brutality.
Between 1919 and 1921 Germany/The Weimar Republic lost more than 95 percent of its sporting and self defense firearms. At the insistence of David Lloyd-George; the man who imposed gun control on England.
Stranger
” They were disarmed under the Treaty of Versailles”
Someone should have told the owner of the classic Mauser Sporter I own, one of the nicest guns I have, that was liberated by a GI at the end of WWII. I have seen a huge number of liberated German sporting arms, that were readily found in U.S. gun shops back in the ’60s and later. (The one I have was liberated by a friend’s uncle.) So, somebody over there had guns. I suspect you may be right in reference to the “assault weapons” of that era (i.e., militaria) but I don’t know how that was defined.
I am under the impression that the worst anti-gun laws were passed by the Weimar Republic itself, c. 1928, possibly during a period of Red Scare; and that all the Nazis did was put some teeth into “enforcing existing laws.” (Where have we heard that phrase used recently?)
Yeah, we should remember that the evil “Nazi Gun Control Law” was a … liberalization of gun ownership laws in Germany, from the near-total-ban under the Versailles treaty and Weimar government.
(A liberalization conveniently only helpful for their side, but a liberalization nonetheless, which just reinforces how punitive and draconian the Versailles and Weimar laws were.)
The Nazis didn’t need to legally disarm their opponents – the Weimar government had already done it.