Another barrister trying to steal other people's sh*t.
Second Amendment absolutists complain that gun control advocates are an out-of-touch elite seeking to destroy the way of life of real men
| And women, and children. Check your privilege, O Editorial Writer -- we'll have no sexism or ageism here. This is a family website! |
who pack heat. At the National Rifle Association's convention in Indianapolis last weekend, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre warned his members that their lifestyle was under assault.
I didn't know keeping and bearing arms was a lifestyle. I thought it was a right.
"I have never seen it on edge the way it is now," he said. "If it's going to be saved, it's in our hands. It's in your hands."
There's no better venue than this gathering to experience the pain and joy of gun owners. To those not steeped in guns, the exhibition hall with weapons arrayed as far as the eye can see is a frightening display. It is also a place where the young and female are pursued. Kids are encouraged to fondle semi-automatics and take virtual target practice. Women have their own events, including one that features the latest fashions for heat-packing ladies.
| Where do you conceal your carry if you're wearing a fashionable miniskirt and brief summer top? It turns out someone has given this considerable thought. |
As you watch the lobbying group at play, you swing between thinking its members own the world because the $250 million budget allows the NRA to put on a Las Vegas-worthy show, and the feeling that Big Government is about to burst in and confiscate their guns. Triumphalism punctuated by doomsday scenarios keeps the membership on its toes.
Government is confiscating guns. In New York and California. It is easy to dismiss the intent of laws when your stuff isn't being taken from you. I can well imagine your reaction if you lost access to your bank accounts because of "currency controls". You'd be screaming too, and demanding to be armed.
The NRA's 4 million members don't seem to feel a corresponding obligation to understand the 90 percent of Americans who say in polls they would like to see universal background checks for gun buyers.
If 99 percent demanded universal background checks, I would still oppose them, Marge. Whatever "obligation" gun owners are s'posed to "feel" is countered by the fact that the right to bear arms is a protected right. That means if you choose to send government goons to confiscate arms, you become a target yourself. In such as case, I'd advise you to buy a gun.
"It's a cultural thing," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., told me. He said his A rating from the NRA helped the background check legislation he introduced last year with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., get as far as it did.
| One wonders if he still has that A rating... |
Manchin is still using that crossover cred to try to find the five Senate allies he needs to get the bill up for a vote again. He can't explain to me those gun owners who will listen only to Ted Nugent (who gave a speech), or those who cheer stand-your-ground laws (there was a session on how not to have any post-traumatic stress should you shoot someone).
Politicians were well represented at the convention. Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Gov. Sarah Palin, among others, came to pay homage. They can't envision the day when the 90 percent might defeat them, only of past elections when single-issue voters stirred up by the NRA could defeat them.
In the last three elections presidencies and congressional seats were won by coalitions, not by single issue voters. The left and right split the voter base into male and female and both poach voters from the other. Guns may be an issue in some settings and the republican war on women (most vigorously pressed and won against women by the left) may be an issue in another. That you suggest that one day the 90 percent will rise up to vote for tyranny and disarmament as a monolithic block does not change the fact that the other ten percent still get another vote, with their guns. Keep that in mind as you continue to push for more fascism. And Marge, being a socialist you should know that the only way voters vote in such a block is if they have no other choices, like in a fascist state. You know, the kind you are happily pushing us towards.
Since Manchin's background checks went down in Congress last year, about 1,500 state gun bills have been introduced, 178 passed at least one chamber and 109 have become law, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Almost two-thirds of those that passed expand the rights of gun owners; only 39, largely in Democratic-controlled states, tighten controls.
| This suggests that 90% statistic tossed out at the top of the editorial is, well, what statistics so often are. Politicians do not vote against the will of their voters for long. |
Last week in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law a bill that would allow concealed weapons in airports -- this after we've spent billions trying to keep even nail clippers out.
Funny how that works. You try to bone a constituency, they bone back!
For the NRA, part of the cultural divide is between real Americans (its members) and those other Americans who would leave you and your family defenseless.
This is the mentality that briefly made Cliven Bundy a hero, as an armed mob trained their guns on federal agents who were trying to enforce a court order to collect 20 years of unpaid grazing fees. One of the militia leaders was Richard Mack, the NRA's 1994 Enforcement Officer of the Year and head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, who was "strategizing to put all the women up at the front." Had Bundy not imploded in a fit of racism, there may well have been a shrine to him in Indianapolis.
Kewt. Marge, the militias are still there. Bundy isn't a hero.
It would be a valuable cross-cultural field trip for LaPierre to take a look outside the hall, where representatives of the 90 percent were gathered. The moms at the gates gladly would have pointed out to him that 82 people die every day because guns fall into the hands of non-law-abiding citizens, curious children, the mentally ill and the suicidal. (Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Everytown for Gun Safety and Mayors Against Illegal Guns are backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.)
The purpose of the law isn't prevention but custodial. When it is used to prevent ills such as violence, we have a mass of unenforceable laws that no one obeys, but only society's fascists will lament aren't being enforced. And you should drop the term "law abiding". It's just a term for the word serf, and anytime anyone uses it, it just means the user is another fascist, and a "law abiding" citizen who wants to set the country's security apparatus against its own people. You have a duty to break unjust laws, and resist the notion of being a law abiding citizen serf. Free people break unjust laws and misbehave. Serfs are law abiding.
These groups just put up a series of gripping ads showing the murderous downside of readily available firearms and have issued a report titled "Not Your Grandparents' NRA." It traces the gun rights lobby's move away from hunting and marksmanship to defending the rights of felons and terrorism suspects to buy firearms and take them everywhere.
They moved where Threepers and Patriots have gone. If the NRA loses them, well, they may as well join you, Marge.
The NRA spends $20 million a year to scare lawmakers into doing their bidding. For the first time, the other side will be spending more. What a great day it will be when LaPierre has to understand that.
| It isn't really about spending, Marge dear. But y'all go ahead -- the more you spend bootlessly on this cause, the less you'll have to spend on other things. |
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Oh no! They've touched it! No more "progressive" liberals will ever be able to inhabit the White House!
Just days before Tuesday's runoff, Karen Handel holds a slight edge over Nathan Deal in the GOP race for governor, according to a new statewide poll conducted for the Georgia Newspaper Partnership.
Former Alaska 
It took one year, two independent counsels, and tens of thousands of Alaska taxpayer dollars to conclude that former Alaska