Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Some gun bigots don't just dislike guns; they dislike us:

as in the whole country and the idea of not being a socialist cog in the machine:
 Mauser expresses disbelief that the number of gun deaths fails to shock. He blames the American attachment to guns on ignorance, and on immaturity. “We’re a pretty new nation,” he told me. “We’re still at the stage of rebellious teenager, and we don’t like it when the government tells us what to do. People don’t trust government to do what’s right. They are very attracted to the idea of a nation of individuals, so they don’t think about what’s good for the collective.”
 And we should be more like 'mature' Europe, etc.
Mauser either doesn't get or doesn't like that this whole government was FOUNDED on the idea of not liking the government telling us what to do; that's not good for the collective he wants us forced into.  Never mind the horrors perpetrated by governments, we need to be more like the 'mature' governments that have a monopoly on force; that's the 'civilized' way...*


Goldberg strikes me as a soft gun bigot: he doesn't want them banned, and doesn't want CCW ended, but he wants 'sufficient' regulations.  Which always means 'more'.  He doesn't like private sales; he wants waiting periods; doctors should report 'dangerous' patients to the FBI(screw privacy, it's for the public good); we could ban scary-big magazines, etc.  He also buys the wonders of background checks and thinks criminals use gun shows as supermarkets: Background checks, which are conducted by licensed gun shops, have stopped almost 1 million people from buying guns at these stores since 1998. (No one knows, of course, how many of these people gave up their search for a gun, and how many simply went to a gun show or found another way to acquire a weapon.)
Never mind all the false matches, never mind all the honest people jumping through hoops to get the denial cleared, and never mind the truth about shows.  And so on.  They're still good ideas to him.


Another thing they don't like: questions they don't like the answers to:
When I asked him the question I posed to Stephen Barton and Tom Mauser—would you, at a moment when a stranger is shooting at you, prefer to have a gun, or not?—he answered by saying, “This is the conversation the gun lobby wants you to be having.”
Doesn't matter that it's a valid question, he doesn't want it brought up; it might lead to answers he doesn't like.
Just like Mauser doesn't like this question:
 I put to Tom Mauser a variation of the question I had asked Barton. What if a teacher or an administrator inside Columbine High School had been armed on the day of the massacre? Unlike the theater in Aurora, the school was brightly lit, and not as densely packed. If someone with a gun had confronted Harris and Klebold in the library, he or she would have been able, at the very least, to distract the killers—perhaps even long enough for them to be tackled or disarmed.
“That kind of speculation doesn’t solve anything,” Mauser said. “I don’t know if that person might have shot my son accidentally.”
 "I don't want to deal with that question, as the answers  don't serve the collective I want.  So I'll deflect it.  Say an armed honest citizen MIGHT have done harm. And then ignore it."

And the mayor of DC, who has things in common with Bloomberg and the former Richard the Turd of Chicago:
I called Gray to ask him about his assertion that more guns mean more violence, noting that he himself travels the city with armed police bodyguards, a service not afforded the typical Washington resident. “Well, first of all, I’ve never even seen the guns that the security people have.(What, so we're supposed to believe they're not there?) When I travel outside the city, I don’t have security. I would be fine without security,” he said. “But we have 3,800 police officers to protect people. They may not be at someone’s side at every moment, but they’re around.”
Ok, Mr. Gray, so why do you have security people around when you're in DC? Oh, that's right, you're special, aren't you?  You shouldn't have to depend on the police 'being around', like the commoners should.


At the end, there's this:
“In a fundamental way, isn’t this a question about the kind of society we want to live in?” Do we want to live in one “in which the answer to violence is more violence, where the answer to guns is more guns?”
 So much wishful thinking revealed in those questions; so much "If we only pass another law and disarm those who obey the law, things will get better" stupidity.  Mr. Gross, unless you buy into unconditional surrender, the only answer to someone attacking you IS violence; because it IS that, or surrender.  And hope the predator doesn't hurt you too badly, and the police and ambulance arrive before you die, or hurt too much.

The article's worth reading; if nothing else see how many "People cannot be trusted not to use guns, so they shouldn't be allowed" bits you can find.  And it's another good look into the minds of the gun bigots and collectivists.



*There's a piece in the movie The Americanization of Emily where a character says
 You American haters bore me to tears, Ms. Barham. I've dealt with Europeans all my life. I know all about us parvenus from the States who come over here and race around your old Cathedral towns with our cameras and Coca-cola bottles... Brawl in your pubs, paw at your women, and act like we own the world. We over-tip, we talk too loud, we think we can buy anything with a Hershey bar. I've had Germans and Italians tell me how politically ingenuous we are, and perhaps so. But we haven't managed a Hitler or a Mussolini yet. I've had Frenchmen call me a savage because I only took half an hour for lunch. Hell, Ms. Barham, the only reason the French take two hours for lunch is because the service in their restaurants is lousy. The most tedious lot are you British. We crass Americans didn't introduce war into your little island. This war, Ms. Barham to which we Americans are so insensitive, is the result of 2,000 years of European greed, barbarism, superstition, and stupidity. Don't blame it on our Coca-cola bottles. Europe was a going brothel long before we came to town.
 Oddly, there used to be video on Youtube of this speech; I can't find it anymore.

1 comment:

Marja said...

One thing seems to be that every time there is a murder committed with a gun the answer given is 'he wouldn't have done it if he hadn't had access to the gun'. And every time gun banners comment on any of those stories where somebody tells how she protected herself, successfully, with a gun, they say how she could have done this or that or whatever (or how is she hadn't done that to start with she would never have ended in the situation in the first place...) and it would have worked every bit as well as having a gun did.

In one way those arguments are hard to counter, because in a single case they may well be true, and there is really no way to prove that they aren't. Perhaps he really wouldn't have. Perhaps something else really would have worked as well for her.

You can play those 'what if' games forever, and it's hard for anybody to claim decisive victory because the opponent can always go for another round of 'but what ifs'.

What matters are the statistics. So one person gets killed when another has access to a gun, and would still be alive if he hadn't. But how many, at the same time, are alive, or unharmed, because they also had guns? Guns get banned in a country. Do killings decrease? Not just ones done with a gun, but all of them? It really doesn't matter if fewer people die being shot while at the same time more people die by other means, since I rather doubt that it really matters, in most cases, to you or your loved ones how you get killed if you do get killed.

So what should mean something in these discussions are the statistics. And all the ones I have seen seem to favor the pro-gun stance. Murders do not decrease when guns get banned (sometimes they even seem to increase), as many crimes where nobody dies are still committed, and those often DO seem to increase. So it doesn't work. Which leaves the question of rights, and I do think it's wrong for anybody to tell me that I have to leave my safety to things like being lucky enough never to get in a situation where somebody might want to hurt me so that they can FEEL safer in spite of not actually being any safer, or for the sake of their ideological beliefs (which, unfortunately, is the situation in my own country).

A man just murdered his family and then killed himself in my country. He stabbed his wife, drowned his two small children in a bathtub and then drove his car into a truck on the highway. Most murders here are like that. You can never stop people from killing other people by trying to take away the means. There are always means.