Category: Guns

I wish we could make MAIG membership as toxic in Pennsylvania as it apparently is in Texas. Pennsylvania rivals Texas for top spot in terms of number of NRA members, but for some reason our members aren’t willing to hold politicians accountable to the degree Texans are.

“Anywhere in the civilized world you would be able to make the argument that everybody should be able to be against illegal guns. But we’re not in the civilized word. We’re in Texas,” said Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson.

Except that Mayors Against Illegal Guns has very little to do with illegal guns, and everything to do with repacking the same old agenda the Bradys have been pushing into a more palatable pill for politicians to try to swallow. Like gun control groups of the past, their means to stop illegal guns centers around making gun ownership more difficult and risky for the law abiding. There’s nothing new about that. It’s good to see Texans are seeing through the smoke and mirrors. I wish Pennsylvanians would too.

Josh Horwitz seems to be having issues with the fact that insurrectionist thinking is going mainstream. I hate to tell him this, but many of the ideas he rails against have always been mainstream. Take a look:

While America began as a revolution against the king of England, revolution turned out to be a terrible form of governing, Horwitz says. “There was no ability to tax, so (Gen.) Washington’s army starved. State legislatures had an immense amount of power. There were mobbings in every city with no central authority to put any (revolt) down. Militias formed and closed down the courts.”

This seems to be a tacit suggestion that perhaps we would have been better off staying under the British Crown. I have to wonder if Horwitz believes that. Because really, what Horwitz is rallying against is the very founding idea of this nation itself:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If you had to pick one paragraph from the Declaration of Independence that you could say is really the philosophical basis of the United States of America, this is it. This was the sentence that gave birth to this nation. If the anti-gun people want to take the side of the loyalists, and suggest we ought to have remained under the British Crown, they are free to. But you can’t escape this passage. It is who we are, and it shouldn’t be surprising that people are still talking about it 234 years later.

What I can’t figure out is whether Horwitz is legitimately goofy about believing that folks who would suggest the Declaration of Independence is a blueprint for just revolution are just as radical and extreme as, say, a Timothy McVeigh, or whether he’s trying to chain the real extremists to those who are not in hopes that it pulls the whole issue under the water. If it’s the latter, he might want to rethink much of his rhetoric.