The National Gun Victims Action Council (NGVAC) is petitioning President Lightbringer to declare a state of emergency, permitting him to use emergency powers to fight the “gun violence epidemic.”
I’ll give them credit, there’s no pussyfooting around about how ‘nobody wants to take your guns.’ These people want to take your guns from your cold dead fingers.
Countries with strong gun laws and our national statistics show “law- abiding” citizens cause most gun violence. Only 7% to 8% of US gun homicides are gang based — most mass shooters are legal gun owners. (emphasis in the original)
There’s the usual blizzard of lying statistics, some repetition of Bloomberg lies, a howler of a lie about…well, read it yourself…
Rather than attracting gun crime “gun-free zones” repel it. That is why courts and the headquarters of all major U.S. corporations (including the NRA) ban guns.
The victims of the mass shootings in all those gun-free zones – which is approximately equal to the number of victims in every single ‘mass shooting’ the press has crowed about in the past few years – would take comfort from that. Think how dead they’d be if that sign on the door hadn’t repelled more shooters.
There’s a great deal of pearl-clutching over the chance that there might be a mentally ill person out there with a gun!
We do not know who they are. Nor do we know who has developed mental illness since buying a gun.
And finally a list of frankly rather stale and milky recommendations, vaguely enough worded that Stalin could have half the population in gulags before nightfall without violating the letter of any one of them. It’s pretty standard stuff, really, but…
It got me to thinking about something, a thing I occasionally wonder about. Clearly none of our would-be masters, elected or otherwise, really care very much about any laws that impede their own freedom of action, and clearly a great many would-be masters would see us all disarmed and buttering our bread with plastic sporks if they could get away with it. Yet this has been going on for most of my life, and they never seem to quite get away with it. There have even been reverses – quite significant reverses – in what I always took to be the strictly one-way march of gun control.
And I always wondered how that can be. Here they’ve got a captive and cowed tax base, a hundred million sleep-walking voters, heavily-armed law enforcement goons at every level of government who’ll cheerfully kill you in your bed knowing they’ll be declared guiltless before your blood is dry – why is this even still an argument? Why didn’t we lose it decades ago?
It’s almost enough to make me think that, despite my instincts on the matter, a quorum of wannabe kings out there actually do still feel constrained by the laws on the books – at least to some extent.
And then we get this flock of victims – “No, please! Suspend the laws! Become all-powerful and make us all safe from the bad ‘law-abiding’ gun owners!”
And I get a little chill.
These people want to take your guns from your cold dead fingers
Fucking bullshit of The First Order, Joel. These people want to take your guns from fingers of any temperature. All they care about is being able to exercise their will over all of us.
Get with the program.
I wonder what it is that drives some people to try and run roughshod over others? One thing that is constant Rules, laws… they are always for “the other guy.”
I suspect not one of these do-gooders, who demand crap like this, has ever said “Please pass this law so I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop doing.” I think that all those people who have signed this bogus petition should be forced to endure a search of their persons and property and any firearms found be taken. After all if they want a police state they should at least have a taste of what one is like.
They are not constrained by mere laws, they are constrained by 100 million American gun owners….Wanting to take them, and TAKING them are two very different things
This is, I’m sure nothing new to most who hang out here. However, if you have an acquaintance that leans toward gun grabbing and assuming his head isn’t completely empty, you could show him this.
http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/costs-consequences-gun-control#full
If he actually comprehends any of it you might see a dim light start to show as he struggles to separate the truth from the lies he’s fallen for, for lo these many years.
OG
“It’s almost enough to make me think that, despite my instincts on the matter, a quorum of wannabe kings out there actually do still feel constrained by the laws on the books – at least to some extent.”
Joel, time to wake up and smell the coffee. Of course rulers aren’t constrained by law. That is how you tell someone is a ruler – the law does not (in any real sense) apply to him.
Jesse is right. The rulers certainly would have disarmed us if they thought they could get away with it. It is fear, only fear, that constrains them. They don’t want to end up like Mussolini.
That is why one should not worry about gun control. Gun control is dead, other than as a fantasy of ruling assholes. Even the usual constituency (Dems, city people) of gun control is shrinking fast; everybody is seeing the utility of having an AR-15 in the closet.
The rulers will never do a confiscation (more’s the pity). It would mean war, which would be an appropriate time to throw off all our other chains. The rulers know this would be a violent end for them.
Y’know, heartwarming as it is that there are people out there who believe me capable of naiveté on the subject of pols and bureaucrats, that’s not why I think it more likely that they’re constrained by laws than by citizens. I have a hard time believing they’re all that afraid of their serfs, because I don’t really believe they have any reason to be.
Here’s the way I see it going, should the feds ever really get serious about disarmament: At first, of course a majority would hide their guns and hope the problem goes away. If the feds pushed it by kicking in some doors and busting some folks, most would turn’em in (“What can I do? I’ve got a family.”) and a few who got narced by their kids or ex-wives would go to pound-you-in-the-ass federal prison. That would scare most of the hold-outs straight. Lone nuts who actually defended their ‘line in the sand’ to the death would be killed and vilified by MSM lackeys as ‘domestic terrorists,’ and virtually everyone else would fall right in line. Dead cops would actually work in the feds’ favor. The whole thing would be a crisis that would absolutely not go to waste.
Yet none of that has happened, as I said. So either I’m dead wrong (very possible) and the feds really are afraid of us, or they’re constrained by something other than our lantern-jawed selves.
Last night I began a comment to Joel’s statement that Paul X cites – but eventually just shut that tab without hitting submit – too wordy – too many assumptions and qualifiers, etc.
I was going to reply with something I noted a couple years ago at WRSA. So this morning I see that the same notion was again raised today – so I’m taking that as a kismet-type reminder that maybe I should have hit ‘submit’ yesterday instead of keeping my yap shut.
So here’s the notion brought up again today at WRSA:
““It is not ours to restore the power of the Constitution. It is ours to show them the wrath of America without the protections the Constitution offers them.”
And on the same note:
“The only reason for not tarring and feathering any government official for effrontery when they tell us what to do is that their power to do so is somehow legitimate. But that legitimacy comes from the exercise of constitutional power. If the Constitution doesn’t mean anything, well, then, maybe it’s time to go long on pitchforks. Because without the Constitution the angry mob is just as legitimate as the perfumed princes of the state.”
Glenn Reynolds
(Excuse the references to the Constitution – the idea hails back to simpler things – like plain manners and the golden rule.)
We all walked around calling ourselves “law-abiding gun owners” for years, particularly during the darkest days of the “assault weapons” ban.
Stop it.
We are “peaceable armed citizens” and folks need to understand what’ll happen should we drop the “peaceable” part.
Right, Peter. I mentioned somewhere else that conservatives ought to get over their fetish of being law-abiding. Hell there were a lot of law-abiding people in Nazi Germany too.
Another possibility Joel, is not that they are afraid of the Mussolini treatment, or that they actually have a conscience and sense of right and wrong, but something else: They worry people will stop paying attention to them. They are like those people in the front of some parade, always looking back to make sure everybody is still following them. They understand how fragile the concept of “legitimacy” is. And it is getting more and more fragile. Every time a cop gets away with killing a 12 year old kid, that erodes legitimacy in all the institutions they depend on for their power.
More likely, all three factors are operating here to restrain them. Certainly, a lot of cops respect (more or less) RKBA. But I think the people at the top really do not have any kind of conscience. Keep in mind these people think nothing of killing thousands with their wars. For them, it is either physical fear, or fear of loss of legitimacy, that restrains them.
BTW this blog software is weird. Sometimes it allows me to post as “Paul Bonneau”; other times I have to log on as PaulX through google. And it’s a display bug. The longer my post is, the less there is of my details below the post, including the “Post Comment” button. I took a screenshot if you are interested…
Oh, BTW I think your scenario of how a gun confiscation would work is completely wrong. It’s also embarrassingly defeatist. Would YOU just hand your guns over?
“Here’s the way I see it going, should the feds ever really get serious about disarmament: At first, of course a majority would hide their guns and hope the problem goes away. If the feds pushed it by kicking in some doors and busting some folks, most would turn’em in (“What can I do? I’ve got a family.”) and a few who got narced by their kids or ex-wives would go to pound-you-in-the-ass federal prison. That would scare most of the hold-outs straight. Lone nuts who actually defended their ‘line in the sand’ to the death would be killed and vilified by MSM lackeys as ‘domestic terrorists,’ and virtually everyone else would fall right in line. Dead cops would actually work in the feds’ favor. The whole thing would be a crisis that would absolutely not go to waste.”
Joel tipped his hand – how he ‘sees it going’ really IS the way it’s going right now. Excepting the ‘total ban’ or declared confiscation – those sorts of things are already happening.
His last sentence there does bring us right up to date. One things Joel didn’t mention is the amount of new hardware and ammunition that has gone into private hands over the last several years. Even that can serve a purpose to the grabboids – got to have lots of manifestations of ‘enemies’ to hate. Can’t have a proper war on anything without a proper ‘epidemic’.
Would I, Paul? Hell, no. But I’m a statistical outlier, I have nothing to lose but my life and honor and even now it’s possible I’ll end up as a Lone Nut.
If my scenario is proven wrong in the event, nobody would be more happy about that than me. But I have lost all faith in the fighting spirit of the masses of Americans. (See: IRS) And masses are what you need to win that sort of war. I find the brave talk about civil war embarrassingly optimistic.
One possible exception to my scenario I think is increasingly plausible is a regional split, de facto if not de jure. The feds disarm the serfs in their enclaves and declare victory, ignoring what goes on in savage flyover country.
“One possible exception to my scenario I think is increasingly plausible is a regional split, de facto if not de jure. “
I almost mentioned that when writing last night. On one hand there’s a lot of ‘self selection’ going on in regional terms – and on the other side – the real or perceived dilution of ‘culture’ brought on by federal immigration efforts. Btw – I’m not saying the dilution isn’t real – but that the perception of it may play an important part in the PR side of the matter.
Btw – Joel – when I used the term ‘tipped your hand’ as a metaphor I wasn’t implying you were being disingenuous. It was just that you’d laid it all out right there – showed the cards – so to speak. I was trying to imply though – that it was more an appraisal of current times than a prediction. Or if a prediction – certainly based on the historical trend. “More of the Same” usually pays even money – right up until it don’t!