Jason Zengerle indicates that the real point is that openly carrying weapons at a protest makes it harder for the Secret Service to do their job. Probably. On the other hand, lots of things make it harder for the Secret Service to do their job. Protesting is much harder on the Secret Service--almost certainly harder than one guy openly carrying a gun, because the protesters are a crowd of people who have to be watched constantly for suspicious movements. Should we ban protesting? Or force the people who do it off the premises and into a park eight blocks away?
Of course not. Expression in a free society is important--important enough even to let us risk the president's life, as we are indisputably doing every time we allow a protest, or for that matter a crowd, near him. You can say, well, free speech is really important, and carrying a gun isn't, but that's begging the question. I'm going to stop discussing this after the post, because what it comes down to is liberals saying, "Conservatives with guns make me extraordinarily anxious and upset," and clearly, they're right. Nonetheless. Carrying a gun is clearly an attempt to make some sort of political statement, though we may not know what--rather like flag burning. And the supreme court takes a very dim view of "Fighting words" type excuses to limit constitutional rights.
Rather like flag burning, it shouldn't happen, even though you've a perfect right to do this. The problem with taking a narrow position is that everyone wants to push you into the broader position. It's easier to argue with the opposite of your position than a halfhearted compromise. And making narrow arguments in the face of towering rage and anxiety seems, well, kind of wussy.
Nonetheless, I take the narrow position: openly carrying a gun to a protest is idiotic. Our president isn't the only one who has had a totally lunatic pastor. But there's really very little statistical evidence that it's likely to cause anyone any problems except their own stress. People who are planning to commit violence are probably going to try to conceal it until the last moment. And the other people aren't going to pick fights with the guy with the gun. Furthermore, these protests are hardly some variation on the Seattle WTO fights. They're small and, other than the gun freak show and the LaRouchies with Hitler signs, pretty boring.
People carrying guns are acting like jerks. So are the liberals who have created a giant scary amalgam of a right-wing protester, who has done every bad thing that every protester has ever done. More than one person has now asked me how I can defend someone who shows up at a rally holding a gun in one hand and a picture of Obama-as-Hitler in the other, and starts screaming about death panels?
Moreover, having created this horrifying bogeyman, the next rhetorical move is to claim that this constitutes the whole of the opposition to your program.
Does any of this sound oddly familiar? Wait a second . . . it'll come to you . . . yes, that's right, it's 2003 all over again! Coldplay's on the radio, Elizabeth Smart is being reunited with her family, and the rest of America is trying to rip each other's throats out, rhetorically speaking. The party in power is busy branding the opposition as something close to traitors because they are skeptical about a speculative venture that the majority just knows is going to turn out beautifully . . . Meanwhile, the opposition is staging increasingly freakish demonstrations, while the loud lunatic fringe starts looking for fascist jackboots and death squads behind every tree. The party labels have switched, but the vitriol, and the emotional tenor of the debate, seems very much the same. You'd think that the various players would have learned something from our last outing.
Well, no, you wouldn't. But it would be nice to think that, wouldn't it?
I'm done talking about this now. To me, liberals sound like the pro-war crowd did in 2002--positive that they're right, and constructing a lot of arguments around their ability to imagine what is going on in the heads of people they don't know very well, and like even less. Too many conservatives sound like the lunatics heading the ANSWER brigade, who were not content to say that Bush et. al. were really, really wrong about invading Iraq--no, nothing would do but that they also be secret fascists looking for ways to increase the net stock of suffering in the world. And too many on the right are letting these morons talk uninterrupted, including me, I suppose, because I can't bear to spend any of my precious life moments listening to Rush Limbaugh or someone even worse.
I hated it then, and I hate it now. This country can survive Bush,
Obama, or anyone else who is likely to get elected. It cannot survive
the moral equivalent of civil war.
Update: I should add that Zengerle asks me what, besides a bet, I would take as proof that liberals are 100% serious in their beliefs about protesters. Well, I think revealed preference is the best cue, but I would take a non-bet bet. That is: what would falsify your belief that these people are the vanguard of a rising tide of dangerous right-wing militia action?
I don't get the feeling that it is possible to falsify these beliefs--indeed, the rage that confronts me when I attempt the fairly anodyne task of showing that law-abiding gun owners almost never turn criminal, suggests a very considerable emotional investment in them. But I would be happy to be proven wrong. So: what would falsify the belief that all these people are, in some sense, out to get you?
A Democrat with a pro-healthcare sign and a gun on his hip does not seem to falsify the belief that the only thing carrying a gun can possibly signal is an intent to threaten and/or harm. A black man carrying doesn't falsify the belief that this is deeply tied into a racist movement. The utter lack of gun violence so far in no way erodes this belief--indeed, seems to strengthen it, as it can only be a matter of time.
My belief could be falsified in many ways: on the record statements from the protesters, a shooting incident started by someone who arrived at a rally openly carrying, a plot uncovered by a law enforcement agency. Obviously, I hope it's not the case.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Well, something survived a real shooting Civil War, where lots and lots of people died. Exactly whether it's the same thing as the government started out to be is open to wild speculation, but there you have it. It can survive all kinds of verbal and non-verbal unpleasantness. Whether it will be the same thing on the other end is another question - but then I attribute all problems in our polity to the direct election of senators, so feel free to discount my comment and instead speculate on whether or not Deval Patrick or the People should be able to choose Kennedy's replacement.
The narrow ledge you carved out for yourself is still really stupid. Yeah. People are not particularly likely to shoot the president even if they have guns in his presence. Great. Got it. That still doesn't mean that people shouldn't be really disturbed by their presence or even think to themselves, gee, these lunatics could possibly be dangerous. Lecturing anyone for being freaked out about it because no one is LIKELY to be shot is ludicrous.
"That is: what would falsify your belief that these people are the vanguard of a rising tide of dangerous right-wing militia action?"
How about one year of zero nutty conservative crackpots shooting people up?
Too much to ask?
I think we have to strike the anti-semitic nut from the roster of right-wing shooters, since the rest of the conservative movement completely abhors them, and is pretty avidly pro-Jewish. Otherwise, that seems fair.
Just because the loony part of the right has bifurcated "love Jews!" (Hagee)/"hate Jews!" (Ku Klux Klan) wings doesn't mean the guy wasn't right wing fringe.
No. Plenty of fringe militia types in the past have been anti-semitic nuts. And it's not like the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have dies off in that sector of the world.
You don't get to say the right-wing fringe isn't right wing because the mainstream right wing finds them abhorrent. You certainly can't do that while commenters are talking about far-fringe left wingers. All violent fringe groups are abhorrent.
Those damned antisemitic neocons.
Gives new meaning to "self-loathing Jew" I guess.
The space between an extreme right-wing nut and an extreme left-wing nut is less than most here would like to admit.
Could that be the source of so much discomfort?
Doctor Clevland - re: "You don't get to say the right-wing fringe isn't right wing because the mainstream right wing finds them abhorrent." Fair enough, but you don't get to be the authority defining them as right wing. Just because someone is nutty and is not an avowed socialist, doesn't make him or her a "right wing nut". Also "anti-Semitic" does not equal, and is not evidence of "right wing".
Shut up troll. McArdle can write anything she wants on her blog. If you don't like it - you can just GTFO now.
Or I can comment within the parameter of the guidelines and add to the discussion. You know, either way.
Once the likelihood goes down too low, then yes, you shouldn't freak out about it. If Obama is vastly more likely to be killed in an accident than by one of these people, then you should say, well, there are weird people in the world, not OH MY GOD TRAITORS!
Come on, Megan, surely you can see the difference between being killed by an accident (random) and being killed by the presence of guns in the hands of lunatics (preventable!).
And given the number of political figures who have been assassinated throughout history, why are you so convinced it's such a low likelihood? You're quite an optimist.
Really troll? How many American presidents have been assassinated? Exactly 4 in 220 years. Stop with the hysteria. We know you hate right-wing Republicans with guns. Get over it.
I said political figures, and I assume you'll provide that number as well and call me further names.
And hey, even Reagan got shot.
Reagan was shot by a certified lunatic, as was Garfield. Kennedy and McKinley were shot by left wing loners. I give you John Wilkes Booth as right wing in his own social context, but that was a while back, and I think we can forgive the Democrats by now.
I'm not freaked out by the fact that right wing nuts are carrying guns around the president I'm freaked out that ANYONE other than the Secret Service is carrying guns around the president, just as I would have been appalled and outraged if some Democratic lunatic brought guns to a Bush event (you couldn't even get near a Bush event with the wrong sign, so that's another story).
You're right: presidents are killed by lunatics. If you want to make a case for a guy carrying an assault rifle who belongs to a militia that wanted to bomb buildings go right ahead.
Four presidents have been successfully assassinated, about 9% and two others have been injured in an attempt bringing the total to 13% of presidents out of 44 total. I'd say that's a fairly high percentage of presidents.
ElectronHayek, I am stunned by your apparent belief that 4 murdered presidents out of 44 is such a low number that it makes political violence in America a negligible problem. How many occupations can you name that carry with them a 9 percent chance of being murdered?
Byrk says that 2 other Presidents were shot but not killed. I don't have a president by president history of this, but I guess Byrk is talking about Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan. But where do you put someone like Ford who had an attempt foiled? And what about RFK and/or MLK? For that matter what about an assassination of someone like Dr. Tiller. Or the Anarchists that tried to kill presidents with bombs near the turn of the century?
Lunatics - and the left and the right (and the moderate, squishy middle?) define the word and attach it to people, in their own way and matter. It's use has become less of a descriptor than an epithet; probably should use something a little less inflammatory.
Carrying an open gun at a protest, is, indeed, a protest itself. Megan has it right there. Simply put, firearms at a protest, alone, isn't enough of a reason to ban guns in any way, because of it's infringement and curtailment on the ability to protest.
It doesn't take a gun to assassinate anyone, just the opportunity and skill, using whatever method works at the time. I daresay, more assassinations have occurred using non-firearms in history, then with them.
"Once the likelihood goes down too low, then yes, you shouldn't freak out about it. If Obama is vastly more likely to be killed in an accident than by one of these people, then you should say, well, there are weird people in the world, not OH MY GOD TRAITORS!"
What are you even saying here? Are you drunk? Is it just me, or is this incoherent?
Megan, to be honest, I’m pretty tired of hearing you voice your opinions on gun ownership too – so I really do hope that this is your last post on the subject.
That being said, I’m starting to think this whole thing – defending the presence of guns at political rallies - all of it - smells like bullsh!t. And maybe it has nothing at all to do with the right to bear arms per se. Maybe you just like the presence of guns at healthcare events because they have been effective at intimidating people with real concerns about our current healthcare system and kept them from these venues, helping to hijack any serious debate. And that’s why I haven’t heard you come out in favor of allowing guns in federal buildings – because this has nothing to do with gun rights, it has to do with the healthcare debate. And if that’s true, that’s just sad.
And maybe you like silencing those you disagree with with outrageous accusations of horrific motives because you're too dim to come up with any rejoinder more sophisticated than "You are a pottyhead!" Maybe you have a size twelve ego stuffed into a size four soul, and enjoy unleashing your petty fits of juvenile righteousness upon people who have the temerity to not recognize the overwhelming genius of everything you say.
Or maybe you just lost your temper.
Which should I assume?
Damn. I think... Hold on. I'm pretty sure...
Yup. I just got a little jealous of Suderman.
"Maybe you have a size twelve ego stuffed into a size four soul."
That is the most effective insult I have ever seen.
Megan:
You're too dim to come up with nothing more sophisticated than "You're a pottyhead" when your motives are being questioned? BTW, you're an incredibly hypocrit because you accuse Eric of trying to silence you. How is that for accusing somebody with using outrageous accusations of horrific motives.
And oh the irony: according to you, carrying and brandishing a gun to a political rally is not intimidating and not in the least trying to stifle debate and free exchange of ideas and thoughts and opinions. How dare anybody think anything to the contrary.
But questioning your motives is OUTRAGEOUS and IS stifling free exchange of ideas and an attempt to "Silence" you.
OUCH. incredible. witty.
remind me not to get on your bad side.
Eric, I think you're only seeing half the story here.
Considering that union goons have attacked at least two people to my knowledge, due to their opposition to universal healthcare there is a legitimate defensive reason for people to be armed. The fact that all of the assailants have been explicit union members suggests some kind of organized effort to intimidate political opponents.
Don't misunderstand, I'd rather see a police presence and video recording sufficient to stop this kind of violent union intimidation than having people carrying guns. In the same way that federal buildings don't allow weapons, but have a sufficient police presence to prevent violence, I'd like to see guns banned from where the president is speaking.
But to argue that people defensively arming themselves is a form of terrorism is simply unsupported.
The Union goons did attack at least two anti-Democrat Obamacare protesters, and that was just the ones given national press. I've seen lots of recent union intimidation locally, that doesn't get much play.
I seem to remember at the union protest that is a video showing: 'the unionists pushing out people who were protesting from a room, then shutting the door in their face,' and it also showed a security guard in the picture. He was helping the goons. He had a uniform, but I don't believe (fervent hope) that he was a policeman. If he was, then the local police were also complicit in the thuggery.
THe point is, what do you have to do to eliminate the risk? If the risk is small enough, and the cost to freedom is large enough, you don't do it. And you don't start making broad generalizations about large groups of people on the basis of a tiny increase in a miniscule relative risk.
"A tiny increase in a minuscule relative risk."
WOW. Is that what they're calling terrorism these days?
And make no mistake, the spate of killings were acts of domestic terrorism. I'm not trying to say that the entire right should be lumped in with the nuts, nor am I trying to say that nuts who bring guns to events are terrorists. But there's a disturbing trend among the conservative mainstream defending the nuts and treating these lunatics as Patriots and Upstanding Citizens and Brothers At Arms. It's ridiculous and dangerous.
What spate of killings are you talking about? I'd feel safer around right-wing protesters with guns than walking around the South Bronx at night, and the statistics agree.
Why would the South Bronx be dangerous? That's a place with very high gun ownership, isn't it? Shouldn't it be one of the safest places on earth according to you gun freaks?
No, guns are illegal in the South Bronx, so a high percentage of people who have them are criminals (100%, if you count the crime of owning a gun).
You're confusing a high rate of gun violence with a high rate of gun ownership.
Wyoming appears to have the highest rate of gun ownership, yet gang wars seem strangely absent.
And you are ignoring scientific studies that demonstrate a correlation of rate of gun ownership to rate of gun violence.
I can't be ignoring them if you just brought them up.
Obviously there must be some correlation, since without guns there could be no gun violence. But, oddly enough, there is also a strong correlation between restrictive gun laws and gun violence.
And perhaps lefty gun phobia is best explained by the strong correlation between Democrat voting districts and gun violence. It's only natural they would assume people in other districts behave the same way.
Well, first of all I am a Democrat who lives in the city and who actually owns a shotgun (but don't keep it here with me in the city) because I hunt. I'm not some ban-all-guns left wing nut.
I just don't happen see the wisdom behind letting people walk around with handguns and assault rifles, nor have I seen any convincing scientific evidence that would suggest we would be safer with more guns rather than less. I'm fine with some basic level of gun-ownership combined with sane restrictions, but gun nuts tend to only see black and white (in more ways than one).
Buddy, if you want to argue that open carriage at a political rallies is unwise as a matter of forethought and prudent behavior, most of the pro-gun-rights commentariat would fall in line behind you. If you want to argue that such behavior should be socially stigmatized in order to reduce incidence thereof, a good many people would still be with you. (Many from among their ranks have already spoken up to that effect in the affected threads.) But we don't need to make that behavior illegal, nor is it reasonable to create a ninety-foot high composite strawman of healthcare rally extremists that looks and talks like the antagonist of a B-grade Japanese horror flick, then assign it to everyone who might be so unwise as to engage in an objectionable practice.
On a related note, as a matter of forethought and prudent behavior, I believe it is perfectly fair and reasonable to stigmatize the wearing of revealing clothing and expensive jewelry outdoors at night, especially while unescorted by an absolutely honorable companion and treading through dark urban alleys. But if a mugger or a rapist strikes, the problem is not the revealing clothing or expensive jewelry -- it is the presence of someone who is willing to break the law and violate the rights of another person.
EH: dude, relax.
NRB: when has anyone other than the Secret Service had guns in the presence of the President? I (and most people) am fully in favor of 100% gun bans where the President actually is. I don't see how guns where the President isn't are such a big deal, or how they make the job of protecting him too much harder.
Rob-
I'm not going to get into splitting hairs, but they were standing outside a presidential event with guns. Yeah. They weren't in the building. But if a dude is standing outside facing my house with a gun I'm not sitting inside thinking he's just exercising his 2nd Amendment rights. And that's completely tangential to the other matters at stake, such as intimidating a good faith debate and why the eff anyone needs to be brandishing an assault rifle in public anyway.
I'm not going to get into splitting hairs, but they were standing outside a presidential event with guns. Yeah. They weren't in the building.
And if they'd tried to enter the building, they'd have been arrested or shot. So the actual threat of assassination from these clowns (and I do think they're clowns) remains somewhere in the low zero digits.
Also, as I've asked others, please define "assault rifle."
The point of bringing a loaded weapon...
Any evidence any of them have been loaded? Some of them, probably.
Assault rifle (n): any big ass gun that my uncle ostensibly collects for "shootin' varmints" but actually mainly uses for shooting at beer cans in a field as it is not particularly useful for hunting.
How's that?
And honestly, I get that you have to draw a line somewhere. I'd just draw it somewhere farther away than "outside the building."
I'm content to let the Secret Service draw the line; if "outside a giant convention center" is good enough for them, then it's good enough for me. I hear they know what they're doing.
That's the best definition of "assault rifle" I've see yet, but it's a tad non-specific for those of us who don't know your uncle.
Trust me, you don't want to know him.
And yes, I agree that I'll leave the leave the securing of the president to the people who own ear pieces, but still - there were plenty of other reasons to be disturbed by the presence of guns at a health care debate. I'm not calling for these guys to be rounded up and arrested, but there's a difference between what is legal and what should be condoned. Is it really a coincidence that these people were part of fringe militia/wanna-be-domestic-terrorist organization?
Megan is criticizing people for being freaked out by them and the other "tiny increase in a minuscule relative risk" incidents, aka right wing loonies shooting people. I'm freaked out that she's not freaked out.
but there's a difference between what is legal and what should be condoned.
Oh, I agree entirely with that, and I've said over and over that this is stupid and people shouldn't do it. It just doesn't freak me out all that much.
I've watched my wife and friends get swept with a .38 which ultimately came to rest pointed directly at me. THAT freaked me out. One of the ranges I shoot at occasionally has bullet holes in light fixtures corresponding to an elevation of 75-80 degrees or so. That also freaks me out a bit whenever I go (which, if I can help it, is late at night so nobody else is there. Somebody was recently stabbed in broad daylight right outside my wife's office. That freaks me out, too, though I haven't convinced her to start packing.
Weirdo alleged militiamen? Oddly, perhaps, not high on my freak-out scale.
Well, I can't control your personal freak-out meter and I won't judge you for that.
I personally am freaked out by 1) the level of rage all around this country and the number of multi-murder gun incidents that have been happening lately, 2) the extreme paranoia of the right wing at the moment and the extent to which the Republican leaders and media fan these flames, 3) the specter of assassination.
And wouldn't you know: right wing crackpots holding guns at presidential events is a trifecta.
And I'm sorry, anyone (ahem Megan) who doesn't see and feel a disturbing uptick in both the level of paranoia and the actual incidents of violence and fear it is just living in the cold world of statistics. It's not likely that we're going to have another Oklahoma City or assassination or what have you. Odds are nothing will happen. But it sure seems more likely that something bad will happen at the hands of a violent kook than it was a few years ago.
Should I fear that uptick in probability (if there even is one)? From an odds standpoint: no. I'm more likely to be struck by lightning in broad daylight than be killed by a politically motivated lunatic. But I do fear what it will do to this country at a time when we have serious problems and need to come together for some solutions.
FREAKING OUT!!
It seems that the disturbing uptick in paranoia is coming mostly from elected Democratic Party officials and their supporters. They're the ones who keep saying the sky's falling...
Gee, circleglider, you think the people who are most likely to be targets might also be the most worried? YOU DON'T SAY.
First off, it wasn't an "assault" rifle. Second, it wasn't loaded. Third, he wasn't "brandishing" it, he was "wearing" it.
Basically this was a fashion statement, not a threat.
Yeah. That's it. A fashion statement. I know I'm excited about the Gap's new handgun line.
NBR - Is there an 'uptick in probability' or an uptick in paranoia? It seems like a lot more was being blown up during my parent's generation.
why the eff anyone needs to be brandishing an assault rifle in public anyway.
As I've mentioned previously and noone's yet addressed. There have been at least two incidents so far (The # is based on what's been recorded on YouTube videos, the major media outlets seem to be avoiding this) where people were attacked by union thugs for their opposition to the Democrat's healthcare bill.
Give men swords. Give women guns. Be well.
You know, I have good reach and know my riposte from my moulinet, but I'd still be hosed if two bandits ordered me to "stand and deliver". Can I at least get a crossbow?
i miss the economic discussions.
this is not this blogs forte.
funny: blog posts on this subject (4) have outnumbered the people carrying guns at a protest (2)
Guns at political rallies.
I guess it's legal. I guess it's not really dangerous, if you buy Megan's argument and I'll grant her her argument.
But it's never happened before in my lifetime.
So Megan and cohorts, go ahead and be an apologist for it all you want. You can compare it to the opposition to the war in 2003, but those folks did not carry guns.
Something is very wrong.
Yeah, that's not true either:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/ken-shepherd/2009/08/18/media-barely-noticed-legal-gun-brandishing-leftist-black-panthers-2000
The Black Panthers were protesting the war in Iraq in 2000? That's certainly an example of not waiting till the last minute!
You were comparing the protesters of Health Insurance Reform to those opposed to a war. I think what typetype wrote is in fact true - or at least your link does not counter the argument.
I meant to point out that it is not true that guns have not been pulled out at a protest in TypeType's lifetime. Or else TypeType is a very precocious child.
This is probably the more appropriate comparison:
http://www.alternet.org/election04/19676/the_myth_of_protest_violence/
Money quote:
"One of the big discussions before every new mobilization has now become where to hide the giant puppets. In Miami the City Council actually made the display of puppets illegal during the month of the summit - ostensibly because they could be used to conceal weapons"
But it's cool to openly display weapons now, even if the Prez is there. No need for puppets.
I'd just like to say that I'm a big fan of the puppets, with or without weapons inside.
Maybe your lifetime has been rather brief. It's recollection time, because my lifetime has not been brief. Until the Left gained real political power in the US (starting in, say, the 60's might be a good way-marker), carrying a gun on your hip in parts of the west was absolutely no reason for commenting on it. And yes, at political rallies, and at just about any event. It wasn't common, but it was accepted as something you could do without fear of the public around you.
The difference now is the heightened level of emotion in most sectors of our politics. The vitriolic Left's staging and protest at the 1968 Chicago Democrat convention was a watershed in bringing hate into the public. From that point forward, the loathing of those of a different political party against each other has only accelerated. In my estimation, the escalating level of hate has been primarily instigated by those on the Left.
The Right has, eventually, reacted to the hate with high emotions of their own. But like in most schoolyard spats, the retaliator is usually pinned as the instigator by the slow-eyed school proctor. Thus we're talking about 'right wing nuts' as the only cause of concern here, but the gun is truly only an implement, and its the hate-filled emotions that are the real weapons of destruction.
By the way, that doesn't mean you start banning speech, be it with hate or not. That only compounds the problems.
I hope we are talking past each other because of a misunderstanding of the the facts. At the event here in Phoenix, the protesters with guns were no where near the President. Yes, they were "outside the building" the President was in, but that building -- the Phoenix Convention Center -- covers more than three city blocks and is properly measured in acres, not square feet. Given the logistics, the protesters posed no danger to the President. On these facts, there is no rational basis for believing that the "purpose" of carrying guns to protests is to "make things harder for the Secret Service." If "making things difficult for the Secret Service" were the goal of the protesters, they wouldn't have notified law enforcement they would be carrying guns at the protest.
"Should we ban protesting? Or force the people who do it off the premises and into a park eight blocks away?"
You do realize that this was EXACTLY what was done by Bush - in "free speech zones" set up blocks away and out of sight of the President? If the left is touchy, perhaps it is because the same group that is loudly proclaiming that there is nothing wrong with bringing guns to public Presidential events were ejecting people from Bush events, because of a "no blood for oil" bumper sticker on their car.
But the question of whether violence results is moot. The point of bringing a loaded weapon, openly displayed, to a town hall forum on Health Care (and not wanting the country to initiate an unprovoked war is equivalent to protesting attempts to revamp the health insurance industry so that more people, even those with coverage, can get better treatment? Really?) is to physically intimidate.
Years ago, at my university a student, legally, brought an unconcealed firearm to a graduate oral exam. A stressful situation under ordinary circumstances, and now the student is packing. Guess what - he passed! Is that the vision of civil society we should accept?
When you must use weapons to bolster your arguments, to draw attention to what you are saying, then you have admitted that your words and ideas alone are inadequate. I would think that libertarians, devoted to reason (hey, that would make a good name for a magazine), would recognize this.
And from a previous post: People with restraining orders probably should not be allowed firearm permits? Probably? After a court of law has determined that you do not recognize boundaries, and can not take no for an answer, you *probably* should not be allowed access to firearms?
I was a subscriber to the Objectivist Newsletter a lifetime ago. On many issues I still have a libertarian bent. And I also don't believe that I should get something for nothing. I like public parks, paved roads, clean water, food that has been inspected by a neutral government agency so that I can assured of its safety, public libraries. I am happy to pay taxes to support these. Sometimes i have to oay taxes to support things I don't like - such as unprovoked wars justified on false premises. But without the intimidation of physical violence, I protest those uses of my taxes at the ballet box. I also like public education, not just because I, my wife and my children benefited from it, because I like living in a society where a value is placed on giving everyone, regardless of station, an equal chance to advance.
I guess it is all science's fault. A hundred years ago or so, doctors could carry nearly all they needed to treat the ill in a little black bag. Bedside manner counted for a lot, for there was little that doctors could really do for you. So you paid a doctor's bills and didn't have to worry about catastrophic bills, because if you got sick, that was the catastrophe. Thanks to science we have a much better chance of curing you, or at least keeping you alive, and now it is the bill that is a catastrophe. After years of neglect, the government is trying to address the costs and unfairness this system has engendered. Will it be perfect? Almost certainly not. But I have no hard evidence that it will be worse than what we have now. I like living in a society where people care about such issues. Those who want a society free of government interference in their lives, I hear Somalia is lovely this time of year. Don't forget your guns. Unlike at a town hall meeting, there you will really need them.
The "free speech zones" were and are still a prominent feature of Democratic conventions and lefty universities, not the RNC conventions or Bush events.
Violent Lefty protesters were not in "free speech zones" far from the Bush inauguration. They lined the parade route, threw things, and forced Bush to abandon his walk to the white house. Bush patiently put up with a plethora of abuse during his tenure at the white house, all in the name of free speech. Lefties cheered when a Ba'athist thug physically attacked Bush.
Get your facts straight.
What I said about free speech zones is correct.
Lefty universities? Aren't you being redundant?
Yes, yes, Bush was a champion of First Amendment rights. It was the Fourth Amendment, guarding against unreasonable searches and seizures, and warrentless wiretaps, that he had some trouble with.
I'm detecting a trend on the comments on this board. Completely ignore the salient points of someone's argument, and challenge some minor technical point, which has absolutely no bearing on the main issue. It's not just you - Ms. McArdle "corrected" me on whether the transistor was patented. I never said it wasn't patented - the fact that it was patented and that the patent was NEVER exercised by Bell Labs actually supported my point - that her argument that innovation would suffer if Health Insurance Reform is enacted was flawed, or at least that there were striking counter-examples. To the rest - silence.
Well, I have work to do. Goodbye.
I have work to do as well, but being bored, I decided to take you up on your Lamentations of the Wounded Debater to see if they would withstand a five-minute scrutiny. I'm not convinced:
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/health_care_a_lesson_in_practi.php
JimK wrote: Few innovations have had a greater impact in the 20th century than the development of the transistor. Which was not developed at a "for profit" research lab. No transistor, no integrated circuits, no computers, to reason for the internet, and Ms. McArdle would have to find honest work that might not have associated health benefits. As Ms. McArdle has conceded, her main argument against health care reform is that it might stifle innovation, and even that part is argued incorrectly. Thus the final very thin reed is severely bent. The problem with these arguments is that the Comments on these threads are more thoughtful and better argued than the postings that they are responding to. Which is exactly backwards, as the commenters are not being paid, while the host is.
For this measured but detectably snide swipe, you merited the following response:
Ummm . . . transistors were, last time I looked, invented at Bell Labs. Which was very much "for profit". It was patented by the folks at Bell Labs: http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/patbat.html
I actually agree that there's a big hole in non-patentable therapies that we should be addressing by prizes or some other mechanism. But that doesn't negate the role of the profit-driven sector.
The conversation continued from there with you explicating your meaning, and then some random wag latched onto your prior swipe and spent a moment or two speculating deeply on MM's presumed failings as a member of the Chicago MBA program, and then things closed.
Given that these threads tend to burn out in a couple days from geometric progression, especially as more and more tangents are introduced, it's hard to contemplate what else you thought should happen. If you wanted to continue the conversation, did you try email?
Yes, I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Other than what's wrong with the VA, BIA healthcare, and the level of waste in Medicare and Medicaid, that is.
And those who want to live in a cradle to grave government supervised wonderland, I hear Europe is lovely this time of year. Just don't insult the Prophet or criticize the Quran, and you should be fine.
Different subject, but since you draw a parallel with Iraq- clearly the cycle of hatred goes back a long way. Prior to Bush, Clinton was absolutely, viscerally hated by a certain segment of the population, and the impeachment was largely a measure of the power of that hatred. Prior to Clinton, Reagan was mocked and despised. Prior to Reagan, Carter was (and still is) vilified. Prior to Carter, there was Nixon, and, well, we know about him. Etc.
This hatred is part of the American political landscape. Inducing it is itself a measure of success. Of course, effectively dealing with it is also critical to a successful presidency.
To a certain degree, I think the expression is healthy; based on my personal experience, I would like to think that it's part of the process of learning and growth. When I personally feel hatred, I've come to learn that the feeling is a signal that there's something I have to learn. There are very few real circumstances, involving personal violations of one kind or another, that are worthy of feeling hatred about. So often my feelings of hatred derive from abstract, perceived crimes and need to be tempered by understanding reality a little better.
That said, drawing parallels of the actual foci of the hatred directed at presidents over the last 40 years is an interesting exercise. Hating Bush for going into Iraq vs hating Obama for- let's say worst case is Medicare for all? Hating Clinton for (lying about) getting head from an intern vs hating Reagan for Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran-Contra? Hating Carter for screwing up dealing with Iran, vs hating Nixon for Vietnam and Watergate? I can see a curious Kissingerian moral calculus that rates these issues as equivalent. It's probably fair to say that such a calculus is pretty uniquely American.
And you just proved you're nothing but a left-wing maniac.
Electron, have you considered a course in basic logic, as well as residing on planet earth at some point?
Consider the possibility that people SHOULD bring guns to protests, especially given the disheartening abundance of left-wing violence as of late. A gun, prominently displayed, might prevent SEIU from using town hall attendees as pinatas in the future.
An armed society is a polite society, and since lefties presently have a near-monopoly on political-based violence and intimidation, they are hardly ones to whine about reasonable self-defense measures.
Holy crap dude, "a monopoly on political-based violence?" Your skin must be red from all the kool-aid. Have you noticed how many right wing nuts have been actually shooting people lately? Not fisticuffs, full on shooting and killing?
No, not so much, given the full-on rampage leftie violence lately. Lefties beating up, intimidating people who want to talk with their congressman, lefties making death threats against informants who blow the whistle on other lefties who in turn plan attacks against Republicans, lefties who can't seem to find a RNC office to vandalize, so have to take out their aggression on the nearest DNC office. Lefties intimidating voters outside of polls.
I could go on...
Oddly your list of alleged lefty atrocities of political violence don't actually include, you know, KILLING PEOPLE. As opposed to righty political violence. But noooooo it's the left who has a near-monopoly on political violence.
Your suggestion that it's the Dems that are trashing their own headquarters is especially hilarious. Do you even listen to yourself?
But hey: pardon me for misquoting!!
NRB, what exactly defines a rash of right-wing nuts killing people?
Liberal ideological motivates people to murder as well, it doesn't seem to get covered in quite the same way. But I would absolutely call that a rampage of left wing nuts shooting people.
Your suggestion that it's the Dems that are trashing their own headquarters is especially hilarious. Do you even listen to yourself?
What's truly hilarious that lefties don't even know about this. And they think everyone else lives in an echo chamber.
smilerz-
Well, let's see now, there was the guy who shot up the Holocaust museum, the guy who shot the abortion doctor, the guy who shot up the church, and the guy who shot the police officers in Pittsburgh because he thought Obama was taking away his gun rights. All of these people were specifically motivated by politics, not, as far as anyone knows, by personal grudges against anyone involved.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_06/018561.php
If you want to name some specific instances of left wing violence I'd be curious to see it.
NRB, how about this one?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/us/02recruit.html
Uh... no. Islamic extremism is not left wing political violence. Don't even try and go there.
Well, let's see.
James Von Brunn, the Holocaust shooter, vehemently opposed the Iraq War and thought Bush was behind 9/11. So he's just as arguably a left-wing nut as a right-wing nut.
The abortion nut I'll give you, and the church shooter seems to have been right-wing. But there's also the DC snipers, Abdul Hakim Muhammad and his crusade to kill American soldiers, the Dem who set off the car bomb, etc.
And there's this:
"We were told that the baby was 35 weeks gestation at the time of the abortion. The baby came out and was moving," he continued. "Sella looked up at Ms. Davis, then picked up a utensil and stabbed the baby in the left ribcage, twisting the utensil until the baby quit moving."
The MSM tends to hype the stories they agree with and bury those they don't.
The wackos have moved in, and I'm moving on out. Goodnight, folks.
I mean, the DC sniper? Really???
He wanted to extort the government and other wacked out stuff.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/24/us/24malvo.html
You people are crazy.
So you can disavow left-wingers that you don't agree with but conservatives can't disavow right-wingers they disagree with.
What exactly defines the tents of inclusion?
The most relevant fact about the Holocaust shooter was that he hated Jewish people. That has never been associated with any element of the left wing.
In the soldier shooting, the fact that anyone could conflate Islamic violence with either the left or right is completely nuts. That is not politically motivated violence, it's religiously motivated violence. To associate that with politics of either stripe is insane. They want us all dead, not just the Republicans.
The DC sniper... already linked to that. Completely nuts, noting to do with politics.
I'm not getting into the abortion stuff.
And aside from that we have.... what, exactly?
A shame you don't provide evidence.. but hey, you've probably decided that it's not in the constitution, right? Random wingnut allegations don't require evidence, hmmm?
If we are going to disqualify people that are simply motivated by hatred of race/creed then several examples of 'right wing nuts' shooting people simply go away.
You can't count everyone right of you committing violence as right-wing and everyone left of you as motivated by something else.
If you are going to disown the murder in Arkansas from leftist ideology then please share what is considered left-wing and what is right-wing because there is a severe lack of definition going on.
Or is it just anyone that holds a racist view can be characterized as right-wing?
And if you are going to quote me, please have the decency to actually, you know, quote me, rather than put words in my mouth.
The left does not have a monopoly, nor even a near-monopoly on dishonesty, but that does not seem to be from lack of trying.
I think I've figured it out. When people with nominally left wing sentiments become violent, this is right wing behavior. So their actually right wingers. So its tautologically impossible for left wing violence to occur.
If by "SEIU" and "pinatas" you are referring to Kenneth Gladney, it's clear that Gladney cooked up his "beating" to make money off gullible conservatives. The videos don't show him being beaten, and he was miraculously well enough to rise from his wheelchair to enjoy a discussion on a talk show. If you look at the tape of the incident, it's clear that Gladney was briefly pulled down, and bounces right up, wanders into the crowd, chats with people, and is perfectly fine. But do keep touting him as a victim, send him some money, make a fool of yourself.
.
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/faking-victimhood-just-how-hurt-was
So they only roughed him up a little? Is that it? That's your argument?
Nope, the evidence says that no-one "roughed-up" Gladney, and that he was perfectly healthy when he found himself a wheelchair, a lawyer, and some gullible rightwingers. But don't worry, I am sure you'll find a way to explain that he was amazingly delicate and went into psychic shock because of all the big, mean, scary liberals who were standing nearby. After all, it's not like the actual video evidence shows him bouncing around perfectly normally after the alleged "incident". By the way, would you like to buy a Bridge to Nowhere? I have an excellent specimen, left behind by a quitting governor.
Ah...having linked to a partisan blogger, who admits not being present at the event, and who ADMITS his video enters the scene late....
You declare '...the evidence says that no-one "roughed-up" Gladney'
Next thing, I suppose you will declare violent left wing conspiracies "hypothetical". Oh wait, you just did.
Gee, what about the Austin Firebombers that were just convicted. Are they hypothetical? What about Maurice Schwenkler?
SL, perhaps you'd care to explain how Gladney was walking around totally comfortably after the alleged beating - and suddenly discovered a need for a wheelchair and a lawyer after a good night's sleep? Was he brutally beaten by the Tooth Fairy? Did Santa Claus call out the paramilitary elves? Perhaps the Easter Bunny has violent tendencies? Or perhaps Gladney is a fraud. You did note that even in his wheelchair enthroned state, he has no bruises, nothing broken and shows no signs of violence whatsoever? Or were you too busy rushing to ginn up a case against the union members - as the rightwing does whenever possible. There's no evidence that Gladney is anything other than a conman, making a buck off gullible conservatives. Give him time and he'll get his own talk radio show.
Interesting to see how McArdle manages to blame everything on some hypothetical (and monolithic) left wing conspiracy, while miraculously absolving the rightwing militia members and racists of any evil intent. And yes, clearly an attempt to conduct an imperial presidency, lie about WMD, start an unnecessary war, torture POWs,and spy on Americans - yes, clearly that is exactly the same thing as trying to reform a corrupt healthcare system that excludes millions of Americans, causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year and will result in national bankruptcy unless something is done now to curb costs and open up the healthcare market to real competition. How could we have missed the blindingly obvious similarity between them?
Did you really read everything before you blathered on in such a seriously-misguided a manner?
Megan: I wish you'd ended this particular fray a couple of posts earlier. I appreciate your efforts to delve into the issue, but it immediately became clear that, at least with regard to the comments, vastly more heat than light was being shed. I suggest in the future, if a similar situation arises, making selected posts comment-less.
But then what would become of the marketplace of ideas? If you can't stand the heat....
Megan deploys glib actuarial arguments to combat common sense.
I think these posts are deeply irresponsible, especially coming from someone with such a prominent position in civic discourse.
I think it is quite a pathetic use of comment space to attack someone who doesn't regurgitate your latest mushy creed that is fermented in your fecund brain.
Thank god Megan does what she does, and how she does it. I certainly don't agree with her the vast majority of the time, but she at least brings a level of discourse to these pages that clearly pisseth off the knuckle-draggers.
Making it harder for for the Secret Service to do its job? Here's how they do their job.
In the past I got to watch them do their job. I did a lot of business with the UN and was in offices on the 14th floor of the Secretariat all the time. If you looked out the window, you looked down on the roof of the General Assembly, facing First Ave. There's a giant rain gutter that runs along the front of that GA roof - facing First Ave.
When the President is going to the UN, or to the US Mission to the UN across First Ave, that rain gutter is lined with snipers and spotters - a lot of them. The have very big rifles. The same is done with other foreign big shots visiting the UN, like the opening of the General Assembly in September. For that, feds are supplemented by NYPD snipers - green windbreakers with big NYPD on back.
I would assume that they do the same whenever possible at any location visited by the president. I'm guessing that anyone who might have a gun openly carried would have a scope on him the entire time. Remember that both the Ford and Reagan assassination attempts came from people with illegal concealed handguns who managed to get through the crowd.
Meagan writes: "liberals .... constructing a lot of arguments around their ability to imagine what is going on in the heads of people they don't know very well, and like even less."
I am neutral in this debate although it might not come across this way. I have lived in free democracies that have banned guns and in free democracies that have guns widely available. It is no big issue. It is definitely not a core issue that some make it to be and therefore it becomes oh so ... interesting. As a technicality. It was the gun defenders, I believe, who first tried to imagine the mindsets of other people they don't seem to know or like and not vice versa?
How about a little common sense? It will be a fine day when American conservatism returns to common sense as a core value.
If you want to erode gun rights in this country, you're doing a bang-up job. Insisting on pressing rights to their most extreme conclusions, however absurd or dangerous, is always the best way to persuade the general public to limit those rights.
As for the liberal beliefs about right-wing violence, what could spread that idea better than right wingers beginning to turn up armed at public gatherings? Liberals who do not already believe that right-wing violence is an imminent threat will, by and large, begin to take that idea seriously when they see people turning up at Obama's speeches with weapons. And frankly, so will a lot of moderates.
Meh, I'm a radical left-wingnut, objecting on egalitarian grounds. Got anything for me?
Huh - lots of bile being thrown around but I have yet to see anyone state how their belief that people carrying open guns at a protest are dangerous could be falsified.
Color me surprised.
You know, there is a small subset of claims that cannot be falsified because they are claims about definition. A weapon is, on one level, "dangerous" by definition. If it were not capable of causing harm or taking life, it would be a pretty poor excuse for a weapon.
McArdle's claim, about the gun-bearing protesters not being dangerous, is ultimately not about the guns but about the conduct of their bearers. But I have a problem there, too: it doesn't take anything to joined the ranks of the openly armed protesters except a gun and the desire to bring it to a public event. It's hard to rest a claim on the character or judgment of a group when the bar to entry is nonexistent.
So, I suppose I would need to see gun-bearing protesters screening out less stable folk who showed up armed, or pointing law enforcement in the direction of, say, a genuinely dangerous nutter. That would demonstrate an active concern for public safety.
In a more extreme circumstance, I would be convinced by some unfortunate public disturbance where the gun-bearing protesters were actively helpful in saving life or restoring order, and most especially if they showed notable restraint in use of their weapons. Knowing when to keep your hand off the trigger is the most important thing about carrying a weapon.
If the activity became really wide-spread I think that you may be ultimately correct. Hiding in plain site is an excellent trick.
However, anyone within a mile of the President openly carrying a gun will still be diligently watched by the SS - and rightfully so. Anyone that is willing to try that trick will likely be extremely disappointed that it won't work.
Doesn't the fact that "anyone within a mile of the President openly carrying a gun will still be diligently watched by the SS" enforce the claim that it's expending limited SS resources on people who -- ostensibly -- have no intention of hurting the president?
What if the number of people exercising their right to carry a gun outnumber the SS agents? Is it okay to have a few people carry guns, but not everyone?
I can see it now: someone gets shot at a public event. Smilerz leans over the victim and says, "Don't worry, no one has stated how the belief that guns are dangerous could be falsified. You're going to be fine!"
So you will continue to embrace an irrational view that people that carry non-concealed weapons are somehow dangerous. Got it, thanks for clarifying.
You have very violent fantasies.
Megan,
I was one of the several who, literally almost word for word, asked you to "defend someone who shows up at a rally holding a gun in one hand and a picture of Obama-as-Hitler in the other, and starts screaming about death panels".
In combining those three crazy behaviors into one obvious caricature I thought that it was apparent I wasn't being literal. Given the level of vitriol coming at you, I can forgive your mistakenly literal interpretation. The point I was trying to make though, was that you repeatedly, and correctly assert that guns in the hands of normal people are not dangerous, and I totally agree with you. However, anyone who does any of those three things [shows up to a town hall a) to scream about death panels, b) carrying an unconcealed weapon gun, or c) carrying a poster of Obama-as-Hitler] is de facto abnormal and at least slightly crazy. You say the people who murder are "not like us" and they are "are usually abnormal in some way, and it shows". Well I'd say some of these protesters are doing a pretty damn good show showing how abnormal they are, and showing very clearly they are not the kinds of people who you want carrying guns in situations of heated conflict.
I'm not trying to make broad statements about all of the protestors, or people who carry guns, and I'm not taking the "next rhetorical step" that you for some reason think is inevitable, and claiming that my (tongue-in-cheek) caricature "constitutes the whole of the opposition to your program". In fact, the health care reform bills out there aren't "my program", I'm not a democrat, I'm not a liberal, and I find the response to the protesters largely hysterical. But I think you're being reactionary in your under-reacting. You're debating whether the presence of guns in most normal everyday situations in the hands of normal people raise the likelihood of something bad happen, when the situation at hand is not a normal everyday situation with normal people; it's an anger filled shit show with a fair amount of irrational people screaming nonsense and demonstrating their craziness pretty clearly.
Lastly, I will take your bet if you give me odds. It doesn't need to be a 60% chance of gun violence to be worth worrying about. I'd say a 5% chance of gun violence is something worth worrying about. So give me 20-1, $100 to $2,000 and I'll take your bet. This allows you to be consistent in your argument that liberals are overreacting, but also admit the common sense proposition guns at protests, in the hands of people demonstrating their abnormality, are dangerous on some level.
ao, your points you cite have placed you in a very partisan place in your argument. "a) scream about death panels" - how about "vent their frustration at the congressman because she refuses to answer directly the questions posed to her about the current House version of one-payer health care?"...
or how about "c) carrying a poster of Obama-as-Hitler]" - "a protestor with the most pithy statement who was holding a placard with a swastika on it and a slash through it, and the words below it saying, 'Stay out of my Healthcare!' ".
Your otherwise sedate words give the lie to your use of emotional triggers to stigmatize your targets without seeming to be completely unreasonable yourself.
That's a pretty astounding feat of rhetoric you've got there. How about we call the guy who actually carried the poster of Obama-as-Hitler "One gentlemen, whose willingness to sacrifice his time to participate in our democracy clearly demonstrated his concern for the well-being of his fellow countrymen, held bravely above his head a masterful work of artistic political remonstrance; a caricature highlighting the subtle yet edgy point that Obama has the same political tendencies as a past political figure who was famously disliked."
Seriously though, thanks for the laughs.
Meh. I'd be more worried if Democrats weren't blowing people up and breaking windows at their own HQ (and in both cases pretty incompetently).
I doubt those actual incidents of violence got a tenth as much play as these hand-wringing "worries" do on lefty blogs.
BTW, the last serious attempt on a President's life was not with a gun.
I wonder if any lefties here can tell me what the weapon and target were?
Assuming the lefties won't, I'll give the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots#George_W._Bush
2005, hand grenade thrown at W and Georgian President Saakashvili in Freedom Square in Tbilisi.
Well, I think we can all agree no one should bring a hand grenade to a political rally.
Size 11 loafer, Baghdad.
Will your belief be falsified if a gun is used to defend a protester who's being beaten to a pulp by people that were hired and/or encouraged by the pro-health care side to go out and intimidate the anti protesters?
Because I see this sequence of events:
1. Protesters started showing up.
2. The SEIU showed up (after being encouraged to do so, apparently, in a white house conference call) and beat the snot out of a protester.
3. Protesters started showing up with guns.
4. The counter protesters haven't roughed anyone else up.
Now, I think bringing a gun to a political protest is probably a bad idea. Even though the odds of some nut getting encouraged to come and shoot up the place are very small, the magnitude of the harm caused would be terrifyingly huge.
On the other hand, your odds of getting beaten up by the SEIU and like groups apparently goes down quite a bit. So I basically think it's bad that we've gotten to this place, but probably understandable given the stakes.
Which protestor got "beaten to a pulp"? If you are going to try and claim that Kenneth Gladney got beaten up, the facts are massively against you.
What's our position on guns at basketball games? Is it ok or not? Could everybody in the building have a gun or just a few people? What about coaches? They get pretty excited; should we ask them not to bring guns? Should the players themselves be armed? What kind of gun do you suppose Kobe would bring? Hey, back off, dude, I'm exercising my second amendment right to slam this mother on your ugly head. Could we get guns in team colors and then we could all support our favorite team by carrying color coordinated handguns. And get your old lady one of those really nice little ones in pastel. People, people the fact that we are even discussing whether or not it is a good idea to bring guns to political rallies is extraordinarily sad and a sign of how far into the sewer political discourse in this country has fallen.
Exactly. This behavior should be socially shamed, not defended as an expression of a right.
When's the last time you shamed a cop? Or do you lack the courage of your convictions?
Why is carrying a gun at a political rally any different than carrying a gun anywhere?
I think that most of this is just discomfort with that fact that people can carry guns legally.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it. Why is carrying a gun at a political rally different than carrying a gun in other contexts?
Because it's not incidental. It's designed, as has been said 50 times, to intimidate. MikeDC, who supports the idea, explains how.
The gun says either (1) "Obama & Co. - watch yourself with this fascism or I might just refresh the tree of liberty"; or (2) "the potential price of expressing a view contrary to mine just went up. Ya never know, pal."
Yes, it can also mean (3) "I believe in gun rights and want to show people what that looks like - and there are a lot of people over here at this health care protest." But frankly, I find that unlikely, because carrying an assault rifle conveys messages #1 and 2 quite well. But is quite ineffective at persuading anyone of the merits of #3.
If you're going to mention me by name, could you do me the courtesy of getting my points right.
I don't think I really expressed support for bringing guns to the protests. I said
I think bringing a gun to a political protest is probably a bad idea. Even though the odds of some nut getting encouraged to come and shoot up the place are very small, the magnitude of the harm caused would be terrifyingly huge.
The point I was making was more along the lines of (4) "You guys on the other side of this argument have been taking things a step too far by beating the snot out of people on my side of the argument. I won't be intimidated and I'll protect myself - and intimidate right back - rather than yield my right to speak my mind.
That I understand this dynamic doesn't mean I support it any more than I support the left bringing out its thugs to shout down and beat down the right.
It's a series of escalations on both sides that have created an extremely dangerous situation.
What basketball games are you going to?
I'd think that people carrying concealed weapons would make it harder for the Secret Service to do their job.
A lot of this would go away if liberals chose to carry guns. Supposedly only the benighted carry them.
So, Smilerz, I take it that your position is that people should be allowed to bring guns to basketball games? Or maybe you're even saying that they should be allowed to carry guns wherever they please--children's playgrounds, church services, classrooms, hell, courtrooms? My experience with legitimate gunowners is that more of them are likely to shoot somebody by accident (or shoot themselves) than they are other people simply because they are careless or poorly trained. That is a major danger in having a bunch of people playing Dirty Harry in public places. I don't know about you but I wouldn't go hunting with Dick Cheney and I certainly don't want him with a gun anywhere near my children.
I grew up in a hunting culture, was taught to shoot and respect guns before I was ten, and own a lovely Model 12 Winchester that I inherited from my dad. I can think of only two reasons to ever legitimately carry a gun; one, you are on your way into the woods to blow the head off some small furry critter (but only if you plan to
eat it later) and two, you're doing some target practice. Anything else and you're just being a jerk.
Guns are carried (concealed mostly) in all of those locations (well, except the courthouse). You don't hear about a lot of accidental shootings outside the home.
I could be wrong - provide some actual evidence and I'll consider it.
I for one am not a big fan of guns, they make me nervous. But there is a claim that the simple existence of a gun (unconcealed not less) is going to increase the chance of violence and no one has yet to provide any evidence to backup this claim.
I can think of only two reasons to ever legitimately carry a gun; one, you are on your way into the woods to blow the head off some small furry critter (but only if you plan to eat it later) and two, you're doing some target practice. Anything else and you're just being a jerk.
It would seem that the real world is not confined by the very limited scope of your thought processes.
A few years ago here in Denver -- and I only happen to remember this because it was one of those few times where the media actually reported a self-defense use -- some hoods tried to jump a 66yo grandmother for an old-school mugging. She pulled a .22 revolver from her purse and offered them an appointment with the business end; they decided the grass was greener on the other side of town and made hasty tracks in that general direction.
On another occassion some wack job with Columbine Envy pulled a gun and started shooting in a mall. An off-duty police officer was eating dinner with his wife in a mall restaurant and happened to be carrying. He brought down the shooter with his weapon.
The Appalaichian Law shooter was shut down when another student retrieved a gun from his car and performed a garden variety citizen's arrest.
One of my friends has a CCW permit. He doesn't carry all the time, but being an attorney, he sometimes has good reason to do so, and does.
All jerks, by your reasoning. Unfortunately, that merely convinces me to place very little stock in your "reasonsing", since things like this happen every day.
I have to say that among the right-of-center discussions I've stumbled into this is the most literate and most civil. I applaud everyone here for avoiding the usual name-calling and Terry McVeigh-on-a-bad-acid-trip invective. It makes it a lot easier to hear each other and makes me glad that the once publicly-financed government program we now call the internet exists. To aMouseforallseasons, I would say that the heroic self-defense incidents that you mention do not, fortunately, happen "every day." The fact that you had to reach back for something that happened in Denver "a few years ago" pretty much proves the point. Obviously, I have no problem with off-duty law enforcement officers carrying guns although we have had a few intra-precinct shootouts here in New York as a result. The latest figure I can find for accidental deaths by firearms in the U.S. is about 700 a year but there are more than 50,000 non-fatal accidental injuries, at least a third of those to people under the age of 17. Accidental gunshot wounds are second only to automobile accidents as a cause of death. I can't vouch for these statistics but I would be very surprised if they are oversstated. Just as a sidelight: Tokyo Tom reports that Japan has a new law that makes it illegal to carry around a knife with a blade longer than 5.5 cm (2 1/4 inches, measured from hilt to tip), including a penknife or pocketknife, or practically any type of double-edged knife, including an oyster knife.
No, this is not even remotely in the category of true. Suicides are the majority of gun deaths, and of course, if people didn't have guns, they wouldn't suddenly regain the will to live. There are many, many very permanent and effective ways to kill yourself, unfortunately.
Those numbers also don't include crime that simply didn't happen because criminals know that there is a chance that the person they are carjacking may be carrying a gun.
There have been a number of studies that suggest conceal carry laws result in lower crime. Such studies are never definitive because there are simply too many variables involved.
It is interesting to note that when Florida liberalized concealed carry crime overall went down, but violence to persons in rented vehicles went up. So much so that Florida enacted legislation preventing a rental car from visibly identifying itself as such.
The point is that just because 'heroic saves' don't happen everyday doesn't mean that guns don't prevent crime.
I would say that the heroic self-defense incidents that you mention do not, fortunately, happen "every day." The fact that you had to reach back for something that happened in Denver "a few years ago" pretty much proves the point.
I doubt it. As noted, that was merely one of the cases where the media bothered to report a self-defense use, and I suspect the real hook for the reporter was the unusual circumstances (senior citizen, female). In most of these cases, including that one, nothing happens other than fifteen extra lines on the daily police blotter because the arming of the intended victim is, in itself, sufficient deterrence to prevent a shooting or some other escalation. Uusally if you aren't personally aquainted with an involved person, you would never hear anything about it.
JFK had the last word on Presidential Protection:
Impossible task, risk goes with the territory.
The hoplophobic Left imagines their Messiah Martyred.
The Survivalist Right admires guns, ah, _rifles_ on parade.
De gustibus non disputandum est.
The real fear/hope here is that the people are going
to reclaim some of the responsibility/authority they
have ceded to their increasingly clearly incompetent
elected representatives.
No, we worry about the President of the US being murdered by one of the rich assortment of rightwing kooks, secessionists and assorted lunatics that the Republican base seem to be spawning at an ever increasing rate.
The entire question of how much danger the guns pose is ancillary. They pose some, but not enough to get terribly worked up about. Megan is vastly overstating how much people are worked up -- in her words, "hysterical" -- over the actual danger posed, intentionally directing the discussion away from the real issue. The real issue is weaponization of discourse by people with an extreme version of her basic perspective. Anything to distract from that basic political fact is essential for her.
The real issue is weaponization of discourse by people with an extreme version of her basic perspective.
And those Black Panthers were just hanging out, right?
Well, I guess since Obama's AG dropped the case "weaponization of discourse" is a nonissue these days.
TallDave, you should be defending the Black Panthers if you want to have any sort of consistency. They weren't breaking any laws, right? Or do only crazy white people get to carry guns at political rallies?
I am at least consistent: no guns at political rallies! Not for right wing loonies and not for the Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers weren't carrying guns. They were carrying clubs. A holstered revolver on the hip of a couple of conservatives going towards them to vote, would've caused said Intimidators to back away from their hate-speech they directed at whites who wanted to vote there.
Of course, Philadelphia police would've probably absolved the Intimidators and arrested the citizens because they were 'obviously racists' /s
I'm absolutely defending the black panthers, provided the weapons were legal. And I note that again, nothing happened. They were still jerks, of course. But harmless jerks.
The real issue is weaponization of discourse by people with an extreme version of her basic perspective. Anything to distract from that basic political fact is essential for her.
Just as ignoring that only two people in the whole country have actually open carried at rallies is an essential distraction for you.
You know the public figure who comes off best in this whole debate is Barack Obama? He has been able here to 'bridge the partisan divide.' Some people who disagree with him have made a political statement with a firearm and rather than go to "Conservatives with guns make me extraordinarily anxious and upset" like a right thinking liberal, his press secretary has said 'We're OK with people exercising their 2nd amendment rights.'
To be fair, he's bringing way, way more guns along with him than the other side is.
Again, why must you defend ridiculous, extreme conduct with ridiculous, extreme arguments?
You're saying it is "IRRATIONAL" to believe that "people that carry non-concealed weapons are somehow dangerous."
I rationally conclude that people carrying guns are more dangerous than people NOT carrying guns.
Supposed to be nested under Smilerz at 9:45 PM. Apologies.
It is irrational to hold a view where there is counter evidence. The fact that it is known there are weapons diffuses the possibility of violence.
Nice job equivocating on two massively different issues. In 2003 protesters were trying to stop a Federal policy that would murder thousands of innocent people. In 2009, protesters are trying to stop a Federal Policy that aims to spend money to give people access
2003 killed a lot of people and cost a lot of money, 2009 would save a lot of people and cost a lot of money. These are not the same thing at all.
Irrelevant. We're talking means, not ends.
No, not at all, Megan began this game of equivocation by comparing two very different groups and pretending that they were the same. You don't get out of the right wing's grotesque descent into Little Amerikaner secessionism, intimidation and advocacy of political murder quite that easily.
The people opposing national health care believe it will be a giant clusterfuck that will, one way or another, kill millions of people. Your inability to imagine any possible legitimate disagreement with your position is part of the problem.
Yes, some of the people who worry are idiots. Trust me, so were some of the Iraq war opponents I argued with. They were also right, and I vastly underestimated the difficulty of achieving the good ends I genuinely believed the Iraq war would bring about. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Actually, the opposing view on health care policy believes that it will kill millions of people through the loss of innovation.
This isn't a left=good right=bad argument unless you just want to create a caricature of it.
No, that isn't the claim being made, smilerz. The claim about innovation is that the pharmaceutical companies will no longer innovate because they won't have the incentive of the free market to compete. This claim is refuted inter alia by the very successful track record of British companies, despite the evil socialist presence of the NHS. You might also note that government subsidies provide the big money for innovation in the US.
.
The claim about killing millions of people arises from the idea that with a public option healthcare will suddenly be rationed, or that we shall have death panels or both. The death panel idea is the usual pernicious nonsense from Palin and McCaughey, and even Saxby Chambliss admits that it is nonsense. As for rationing, what the right wing conveniently neglects is that we already have rationing by the health insurance providers, plus cartels in most states, which is why premiums are excessive, and customers can be screwed over regularly. For a serious advocate of competition and the free market, this would suggest that introducing competition would be an excellent idea, and that the public option would have much to recommend it. This would, however, demand that such serious advocates be present among the right wing, rather than the howling, braying, falsehood-babbling rabble that appears to be your current leadership.
We can disagree about whether or not government interventions will or will not have a negative impact on innovation. However, the claim IS that it will have that negative impact. To frame the argument as liberals want to help people and conservatives don't want to help people is disingenuous.
There are many honest people that oppose the reform without having to resort to false statements about death panels.
The reform as is currently being discussed will kill competition for various reasons.
- it locks individuals into a choice between their current plan or the government one
- the government plan is subsidized which will put them at an advantage over private plans. that isn't competition.
- the government plan won't have to comply with state regulation which puts them at further advantage
There are significant options for the government to increase competition without spending a dime.
- allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines
- eliminate tax preferences for employer purchased insurance
In 2003 protesters were trying to stop a Federal policy that would murder thousands of innocent people. In 2009, protesters are trying to stop a Federal Policy that aims to spend money to give people access
I think that nationalized healthcare may potentially kill people as well, depending on how it is enacted. It may seriously deter innovation. It may take money from more effective pursuits (employment, investment, vacation time, healthy food, exercise time) and re-allocate it to less productive medical spending. It could be done well, but I'm not sure that's happening.
Treatment for diabetes doesn't come close to the cost or effectiveness of time spent exercising.
And hey, we may eventually leave Iraq. We have no exit strategy for a bad healthcare plan. On the contrary, a lot of people view the current spending as getting their foot in the door.
In any case, you're trying to compare the costs of a war to the benefits of a program (with the costs totally ignored.) That's not comparing apples to oranges.
I think I see most healthcare as providing less benefit at greater cost than you do. People arguing for healthcare tend to make the assumption, for instance, that all or most differences in lifespan between populations are due to the quality of medical care. Can you tell me you're not basing your thinking on the same belief? Evidence suggests otherwise; lifestyle is a far greater determining factor.
The most relevant fact about the Holocaust shooter was that he hated Jewish people. That has never been associated with any element of the left wing.
That gives new meaning to element and left wing.
Uh... great. Yeah, in Russia a hundred years ago the left wing hated Jews. Great work, Sherlock.
I was talking about, you know, the United States in, you know, the present.
I see, so you're just giving new meaning to "never" and "any." Also, it was more like 50, but maybe you're not a numbers person. Regardless, for starters, you will further need to qualify that Israel certainly definitely has no connection whatsoever to Jewish people, and that Jeremiah Wright is not a left winger.
The pogroms were 100 years ago. 50 years ago was just Stalin being Stalin: he didn't really need any particular reason to kill anybody.
WTF does Israel and Jeremiah Wright have to do with this?
I swear, you right wingers are like wind up dolls. Doesn't matter what anyone is talking about, it's always *wind* *wind* *wind* *wind* ... ACORN JEREMIAH WRIGHT BILL AYERS SOCIALISM BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!!
The Nation of Islam, et al., are black nationalists, which is a left-wing movement, not a right wing one. Al Sharpton, who is certainly on the left, helped incite the anti-semitic riot that killed Yankel Rosenbaum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Heights_riot.
There are fringe antisemitic strains on both sides. Both have been waning for decades. Neither is representative of any significant number of members any longer.
Ok, point taken that I shouldn't have made such a broad statement about anti-semitism not being associated with the left at all, but the Holocaust Museum shooter was a white supremacist, not a member of the Nation of Islam. And even if we discount that guy as a right winger because he happened to be among the 70% of the country that hated George Bush, there are still the other shooting cases that lead plenty of rational people to conclude that yes, there could very well be an upsurge in right wing motivated violence underway.
And it's incredible the way right wingers yelp about some ambiguous footage about some possible fisticuffs at a rally and whine about scary left wing intimidation and political violence or some conspiracy theory about dems trashing their own office.
You know what's really scary? Lunatics with guns. Killing people.
Oh, but Megan thinks we should just trust our actuarial odds that political violence or assassination isn't likely to occur. I'm sure she accordingly thinks we shouldn't go to war against al Qaeda or have anything to fear from them because none of us are particularly likely to die in a terrorist attack.
Historically, in Russia it was conservatives who hated Jews - and it was in conservative Russian circles that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion arose. If anything, it was the Marxists and Jews who worked together. But why should you worry about such a mundane issue as historical fact?
I really think Megan could have ended her argument w/ Zengerle with a simple "yeah, maybe the bet thing was in bad taste." When I read his last post, that seemed to be his biggest problem.
And I'll just concur with Mike D. above as to the broader argument here in the comments. Megan confesses that bringing guns to rallies is counter-productive and stupid. So what I'm seeing is yet another example of: i) pick issue, ii) find what side my party of preference aligns with, iii) craft argument to defend that side, iv) ignore common sense. That's why she and Zengerle (who's equally guilty) really are just "talking past one another."
You must wonder why people carry guns around to these places when they, supposedly and according to megan are not going to use them anyway. You know, like normal people don't just carry gold around just in case they run out of money or something. At the end in megan's innocent world carrying a gun is just like wearing a macho biker's jacket - a fashion symbol for the macho right that we must preserve, even though it's so symbolic and doesn't make any sense especially considering the fact we can't even smoke anywhere anymore because supposedly smoking kills, not as fast as guns though. no megan there's not much freedom we gave away by not allowing people carrying guns, actually bush told us not to carry freaking perfume bottles to airplanes and we still have to do that. a lot of freedom is sacrificed there.
and the worst argument i've even seen is to say the desire for peace and the desire for killing is the same thing because that's like saying the desire for being fat and the desire for being fit is the same thing. i'm only using megan's favorite topic to make a point here.
carrying a gun is just like wearing a macho biker's jacket
while wearing ass-less chaps... When I was a kid typical eminent conservatives were Barry Goldwater and William Buckley. Sensible people disagreed with them, but you could at least look at them and not want to hurl. Today, typical leading conservatives are Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, and their lunatic followers in the street carry high-powered faux-military rifles to political rallies so awed onlookers will be aware that they're awesomely double-tuff.
tired of McCardle deleted comments she doesn't like, she's an intellectually dishonest corporate trollop
I haven't deleted any comments. If you're having trouble with a comment, feel free to email me.
Can anyone care to guess how the Bush administration would have reacted to a gun carrying man in an "Out of Iraq NOW" t-shirt at a Bush speech? If I recall correctly Secret Service or hired goons were throwing people out of Bush public appearances just for having the t-shirt.
Perhaps some blacks, Hispanics, and feminists should exercise their 2nd amendment rights at a Sarah Palin public appearance.
As you'll see upthread, Black Panthers marched on Bush with AK-47s when he was governor of Texas and running for president. He ignored them.
As did the current President in Phoenix. Not sure why the last sentence is relevant. The alleged hysteria does not reside in the White House.
Michelle Bachmann said citizens should be "armed and dangerous."
Liz Trotta said on Fox News, "and now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama. Um, uh, Obama. Well both, if we could.”
And just this week an Idaho Republican gubernatorial hopeful said he was only joking when he said he would buy a license to hunt President Obama.
Sure, Americans have the right to act like violent extremists. I just wish the Republican politicians and pundits weren't so anxious to exercise that right.
Simply stated, brandishing a weapon at a public, political event is an intimidation tactic. You know it, and no amount of cheap intellectualizing will dispel it.
Your inability to imagine any point of view other than your own is not my limitation, or my fault.
Perhaps Megan could explain what value guns add to the health care reform debate? Are they a subtle advocacy on some complex issue? Do the triggers symbolize "triggers"? Are the bayonets symbolic of rescission? What precisely do protesters need guns for, in the context of health care reform? Or are we going to hear the default line about "they can do what they want and don't you dare criticize them, because I am a libertarian"?
Well, I'm a libertarian, and I don't think that important civil rights get protected, or not, on the basis of whether your government, or even your fellow citizens, thinks you "really need them".
But I don't take these folks to be saying anything about health care. I'm sure if you look in that crowd, you will find signs about all sorts of things, because hey, Americans don't all care about the same stuff. I took them to be demonstrating in favor of the second amendment.
Go back to the Democrat who came to protest in favor of healthcare reform, with a sign, and also in favor of the second amendment, with a gun? Are you arguing that what he was really trying to do was signal his willingness to shoot people who disagree with him? Should conservatives be terrified for their lives?
Does that include all of the snipers that the president brings along to brandish weapons in their concealed nests?
One thing this post and related ones seem to have been about is reinforcing Ms. McArdle's credentials as a staunch American conservative. To me at least this just undermines her credibility.
Liberals tend to confuse libertarians with kinder gentler conservatives. We disagree vehemently with them on many issues--drugs, social issues, etc--but we are in complete agreement on guns.
What these threads have made clear is that a number of liberals are simply unable to comprehend that anyone genuinely believes in an important right to bear arms for self-defense. Obviously, if you think I'm making it all up for some obscure fetishistic reason, this all seems kind of crazy. But the overwhelming majority of libertarians believe in a right to bear arms that is as important as the rest of the bill of rights. The philosophical and practical aspects of this are at least as well thought out as any liberal position, precisely because we're constantly challenged on it. Aside from drugs and civil liberties, this is the area where we are most in agreement.
This isn't the place to go into the very long arguments about guns, but this has nothing to do with any attempt to reaffirm my place as a staunch American conservative, which I am not in any way. Rather, I'm reaffirming something that I actually believe, which is that the second amendment protects an important individual right, and that people legally exercising that right do not pose any significant threat to others. Doing so in some circumstances may be a bad idea, and I think that this is one of those circumstances, just as there are many forms of speech that I would fight to the death to protect, even though I think they are wrong. But demanding that we restrict that right because of a trivial increase in an already small relative risk is the same sort of thing that had us gutting the bill of rights to go after drugs (Clinton) or terrorism (Bush).
Rather, I'm reaffirming something that I actually believe, which is that the second amendment protects an important individual right, and that people legally exercising that right do not pose any significant threat to others.
I'm with you halfway through. The 2nd Amendment says what it says, and libertarian thought says we hold on to those freedoms.
But that doesn't mean the Founders were right on it, or that, in reality, the logical underpinnings of the Amendment's prominence in the Bill of Right still hold up. To me, absolutist activism on gun rights is as goofy as if we had an organized "anti-quartering" lobby. Yeah, it's in the Bill of Rights, but is it really, honestly a problem in daily life?
I have a very hard time understanding the "everyone is safer with guns" thinking. You've criticized others for failing to understand that, but I've yet to hear anyone actually articulate the thinking. If you wouldn't mind...
There is your problem. "Everyone" is not safer. That's the whole idea. The bad guys are not safer.
The USA has a much lower hot burglary rate than most of Europe. That rate is higher in places where handguns are illegal.
My fiancee told me a story about how a man wandering through her yard frightened her. I truly didn't understand, until I realized that a housebreaker would assume she was unarmed, and even if she was armed and she shot him, she would be arrested and charged with a crime.
The USA runs on trust. You trust your neighbor to do the right thing most of the time. When he doesn't you handle it. Hoepfully he survives the experience and goes to jail. This has been our competitive advantage over the rest of the world.
The second amendment assumes that one's neighbors can be trusted with weapons. You assume we cannot.
Flag burning = toting loaded weaponry to a Presidential event? Honestly?
When was the last time someone was killed by a burning flag?
Just because you have the capacity and perhaps legality (depending on state) to carry a weapon it doesn't mean one has to be an idiot about it. Your defense of this is weird.
Try this: If we were forming America today and decided not to include a second amendment would any of your liberties and freedoms be endangered? Observing the rest of the Western world I would have to say no, you'd be just fine without your gun, perhaps even better for without a second amendment we would not have the amount of weaponry on the streets as we have today and our murder rate would be considerably lower.
Yes, yes my liberties and freedoms would be endangered. Most basically, because nothing should be forbidden unless it is extremely dangerous to others, which gun ownership by non-felons is not.
So your saying our friends across the pond in Europe enjoy less freedom and liberty because they have much more restrictive gun ownership laws than we do? Seriously?
Yes, seriously. If you can't do something that I can do, you have less liberty and freedom. (They also have a lot fewer procedural civil rights, but that's another issue)
Adding on: So you are saying the second amendment begets the first and other amendments? Without the second we have none of the others?
Here's a shot: a right is a legitimately enforceable moral claim. So, a right is a particular claim on the legitimacy of making a proportionate use of force. To the extent that an armed second party may violate one of your rights, a third party also violates that right if they prevent you from responding proportionately to the second party: i.e.: by preventing you from arming. Q.E.D., without the right to bear arms, you do not fully possess any other right.
Their aim is to intimidate. In the 30's they wore white sheets here and brown shirts in Germany. Autres temps, autres mœurs.
I completely agree with you.
One minor quibble is that you are ignoring the right of citizens to carry guns into federal buildings, courtrooms, elementary and secondary schools, etc. Maybe you could consider taking up that cause too.
Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind on protesters with guns if/when we have a republican president. But I'm sure that's implied in your argument too.
The Black Panthers carried guns at an anti-Bush rally when he was running for president. I think they had a perfect right to do so, and also, that they were jerks. But harmless jerks, as witnessed by the fact that no one got killed.
Preventing people from carrying guns into buildings is a perfectly legitimate limitation, given the problems of guns in an enclosed space. But how many people does this restriction, or even the metal detectors, protect? How many people were shot in Federal buildings, elementary schools, etc. before we had the ban?
Not very many.
The purpose of the ban was so that later, government folks could point to it and use it as an example of "reasonable restriction" to buttress an argument for yet another "reasonable restriction."
It's done quite well in that respect.
Here's a question that should be asked: How many people have been shot *with* the ban in place? If the answer is greater than 1, then the "ban" isn't very effective is it?
And I fail to see the problem a gun in an enclosed space presents that a gun in an "open" space does not. Unless you mean the sound when fired.
Hey, I completely understand about needing to be consistent (as long as we don't have a republican president). I'm with you on that (wink, wink).
I think it's GREAT that you are willing to take on the outrageous laws against guns in federal buildings, courtrooms, elementary and secondary schools, etc. You would be surprised how many people won't touch that one. They seem to think it will make them appear batshit crazy or something.
I was pretty sure I could count on you.
I remember seeing a handgun in my elementary school -- it was carried by a police officer that lied to us about drugs. I think he should have checked it at the door, don't you?
The Black Panthers were and are a hateful group. But I don't see, Megan, why you're bringing them up . Political intimidation involving the threat of physical force is wrong no matter who practices it. It poisons our politics and causes hate between political groups. Gun toters at town hall meetings, the Black Panthers, and the Weathermen back in the 70's should be anathema to everyone interested in civilized discussion of the issues. I'm sorry you and your fans in this thread disagree.
"Political intimidation involving the threat of physical force is wrong no matter who practices it."
Interesting. You do realize of course that all governments are predicated on the premise of "intimidation involving the threat of physical force" don't you?
There's nothing wrong with being "hateful", meaning "full of hate", where "hate" is the drive to destroy something that should not exist, such as cops acting like brownshirts in black neighborhoods, employing "political intimidation involving the threat of physical force". So, I think is there is value in defending a proportionate response to such evil, say, following crooked enforcers around in armed groups, even when it is explicitly "hate" that is the motivation -- we should hate evil.
Whether this judgment applies to the Panthers I'll leave to you.
@Joshua Lyle
All your comments in this thread are hilarious.
Do you see the 2nd Amendment as some kind of meaningful deterrent to Police/Military action against you? Thats what the Founders had in mind, btw. Citizen soldiers keeping the King's men out of their homes. Do you really think thats a relevant rationale today?
The 2nd Amendment didn't do a whole lot to keep the ATF from huffing and puffing and blowing David Koresh's house down, did it?
Today the 2nd Amendment has become an anachronism for all but traditional game hunters (who scoff at all the little-big men out there who use assault rifles and fancy handguns to fill the void in their underwear)
Well, given how often the police over react to people carrying weapons in my community, yes I do, as those innocent people would be subject to much worse treatment if they didn't have at least some legal remedy to pursue afterward.
But if you're asserting that our police are too powerful, you'll get no argument from me. Why do you think I keep pointing out how unjust it is to take even more power away from the comparatively powerless?
Anyway, I have no particular need for a fancy handgun, but living out in the country, where help from anyone but neighbors is quite remote and with an intimate partner working in an industry where someone was recently assassinated just down the road from us, I don't think having an old shotgun about is particularly unreasonable.
Also, I'm pretty sure what the founders actually had in mind was preserving the ability of the republic to call up a militia that was ready and armed, but whatever.
Joshua Lyle,
Given that some of the Founders believed that revolution would be required every generation or so, I doubt that there intent of the 2nd Amendment was to make sure that the government had a ready supply of militia.
(replying to smilerz @2:12 here as comments only nest finitely)
Can I get away with the quibble that if revolution is required the identity of "the republic" and "the government" is no longer the same?
@Joshua Lyle
"living out in the country, where help from anyone but neighbors is quite remote and with an intimate partner working in an industry where someone was recently assassinated just down the road from us, I don't think having an old shotgun about is particularly unreasonable."
See, I agree that you are describing reasonable gun-ownership. Your location is remote, your access to law enforcement is limited, and your shotgun is commensurate with your necessities--protecting against trespassers, be it man or animal. (For all its gun controls, you can still own a hunting rifle/shotgun in the UK)
My problem is that people defend unreasonable gun-ownership in an attempt to protect their own right to possess a gun in a reasonable way.
I wouldn't understand why someone in your situation (not you in particular) would feel compelled to defend someone's right to bring a gun into a crowded area, or a public event where there is already an adequate law enforcement presence. Nor would it make sense to protest against a local handgun ban in a city like D.C., where gun violence between citizens is an everyday occurence and puts the entire community at risk. There are lots of rights that are restricted based on a recognition of time & place appropriateness. At home on the range, and on the corner of 8th & Washington seem like completely different scenarios, and I just don't make the logical connection that regulation in one will necessarily lead to undue regulation in the other.
(replying to Pwnce @3:16 here as comments only nest finitely)
Given that you think the country and D.C. differ, why don't you think that they differ in a way that also applies to police? The critique from egalitarianism still attains.
I'm willing to admit that people carrying guns at all, legal or not, freaks me out a bit. It's just not common where I live, or have ever lived. The only time I've ever seen a person carrying a gun outside of a firing range is when that person had it illegally, in the pocket of a jacket I was asked to hang up when I was 14. Obviously, there's some cultural difference here.
I don't really understand the need to carry a gun. That said, I understand and fervently believe in the Bill of Rights, and while reasonable people may disagree about the interpretation of the second amendment, it is very important that people are able to own and carry guns, within a debatable set of restrictions set by federal and state government. (And I wonder why the ACLU doesn't defend this right.)
All this is to say that yes, I agree that my concern over guns biases my perception of someone who carries one to a protest.
The second point is that gun owners are people, just like everyone else. Most people are not violent, will never commit a serious violent act, and are rational much of the time. Everyone is irrational some of the time. Many, many, many people seem to me to be behaving irrationally, or rationally on the basis of irrational fears, when it comes to the health care debate. That people are worried that health insurance reform will "kill millions of people", to quote Megan, is a perfect example. What would you do to prevent the death of millions of people?
If you think that abortion doctors are killing hundreds or thousands of babies, is it irrational to murder one? For nearly all abortion opponents, yes. For an occasional one, no. Should we ban gun ownership because an occasional person might kill a doctor who provides abortions? No -- as Megan says, it's a large curtailment of freedom for an extremely small reduction of risk of an already extremely small risk (one that, I might add, does have a chilling effect on other doctors, as small as it is).
So where does that leave us? Well, people are pissed about health care. (Last year, people were pissed about their OWN health care, not government reform efforts, but that's a different story.) Many people seem to be CLEARLY thinking and acting irrationally, egged on by their political leadership. This is separate from rational disagreements; I'm talking about "pulling the plug on grandma", "death panels", "the government will make me have a circumcision", "health insurance reform will kill millions" territory. If many people believe these things, one probably believes them militantly enough to be violent about it.
Does that mean we should somehow prevent people from legally bringing guns to a protest? No. I agree, and actually said in a prior post, that I think bringing a gun to a protest only slightly increases an extremely small risk, and preventing it would come at the cost of a large curtailment of freedom.
Am I afraid of what might happen nonetheless? Yes. Do I want to be around an angry protester carrying a gun at a health care protest? No. Do I want my president, or anyone else, to be in the vicinity of a guy carrying a gun who's pastor called for Obama's death the day before? No.
And I will submit that the calculation changes when the president is involved. Small risk * small consequences (a dead or injured person) = don't act. Small risk * massive consequences (God forbid, an injured president or worse) = curtail. That's why we have the Secret Service restricting freedoms for people around the president.
P.S. Re a few comments up thread:
The Black Panthers in 2000 were total assholes (and if that happened now, it would be a HUGE story). So were the voter intimidators whom the government just dropped the case against -- they should be prosecuted.
Megan, you can't call Larouchies Democrats and then strike the anti-semitic nut from the conservative ranks just because conservatives don't like him.
The Nation of Islam is -- but only in certain ways -- a conservative movement. Ta-Nehisi Coates: "I maintain that Malcolm X was, for much of his public life, a black conservative." I think I agree with that, and at the very least think that the Nation of Islam is hard to categorize on the mainstream political spectrum (much like Larouche).
I understand Megan's argument about incentives for innovation, and arguments about rushed, complex government systems and unintended consequences. I think that people have forgotten how bad our current system is, as evinced by the staggering shift in favorability of our own health care (what, from 30% to 80%?). And I think very few people on either side are actually listening to counterarguments.
What counts as Left and what as Right, particularly where libertarians and anarchists get involved, is pretty sticky. I can't recommend Roderick T. Long's lecture Rothbard's "Left and Right": Forty Years Later highly enough for clarifying the historical and modern perspectives.
I think my problem with this whole discussion is that I think that a lot of the pro gun posters are unserious wankers who have no frikkin' idea about the carnage wrought by guns in American cities year in and year out. They caress their guns, engage in their John Wayne fantasies, and quote Robert Heinlein to each other. Robert Heinlein? Yep, they quote Robert Heinlein on gun policy. You know, I'll go to Robert Heinlein when I want to learn about time travel, aliens, and sex in the 26th century. But Robert Heinlein is no frikking authority on gun policy. Anyone who thinks an armed society is a polite society should spend some time in Somalia, Afghanistan, or Congo before they go repeating that nonsense any more. Better yet, try Southeast DC, West Baltimore, or North Philly. No takers? Didn't think so.
I guess it's where you are raised. Megan, I'm sure, grew up in neighborhoods where guns were seen as really cool toys, so she pretty much has that view of them. When someone says someone "openly carrying a gun should not be considered dangerous", I really wondered what planet they were from-until I realized that where they grew up, guns were seen as toys and thus not dangerous.
Where I grew up, if you saw some non-police person carrying a gun, they weren't going target shooting or deer hunting. They most assuredly weren't carrying their guns for "symbolic" purposes. They were looking to shoot someone. I've actually spent time with shooting and robbery victims. I know that people get shot over trivial disputes-disputes over $20 or over "disrespecting someone". That informs my view of the gun debate.
If you think of guns and shooting as a cool hobby, you have a different view, I guess. Openly carrying guns to heated debates are viewed as harmless pranks. I don't see it that way, but then I've seen different things.
This is dead on the money. Thanks.
I think my problem with this whole discussion is that people keep making completely ungrounded exceptions for people that are by all evidence way more dangerous than the protesters. Rad Geek's list of 42 "isolated incidents" since July 10 (!) involving police officers should be enough to convince anyone, once they quit vomiting, that giving these people an monopoly on armament in addition to an "institutional environment of entitled privilege" is a fantastically stupid idea, not to mention unjust. By all means, let us leave our weapons at the door, but only if the powerful do so as well.
DC? Don't they have pretty strict gun control laws there?
Your experiences are legitimate and have no doubt contributed deeply to your views, but unforutnately those views are apparently bound hand and foot by a spoiled fascination with said views -- as evidenced by that work of creative fiction you prefixed to your post.
As you may not have known, one of our hostess' DC social aquaintances was gut-shot on a DC street about a year ago when he didn't turn his wallet over to some thug at fast enough pace. All of the laws and structures any gun control advocate could reasonably expect to get were in place to make that handgun illegal to own or introduce on a public DC street. According to you and yours, it simply shouldn't have existed at that time and place. But according to the victim it very much did, with corresponding pain and a five-figure healthcare bill, and maybe, just maybe, that informs Megan McArdle's view of the gun debate. (I don't know for sure, but I have a hunch.)
And maybe she, by accessing thought processes equally intelligent and reasonable as yours, concluded that since gun control cannot keep a gun off the street, and since the police cannot always be available at the time of need, law abiding citizens should not have their freedom to carry and defend, abrogated. Even if leads to something so heinous and unconcionable as a few misguided protesters having legal, unloaded, shouldered, and police-notified firearms on display at a healthcare rally.
Maybe the things you've seen aren't all that different. Instead, you just came to different conclusions, which are not wrong, but are also not self-evidently superior.
I think my problem with this whole discussion is that I think that a lot of the pro gun posters are unserious wankers who have no frikkin' idea about the carnage wrought by guns in American cities year in and year out.
And many of the anti-gun posters--and I'll go ahead and identify you as one of them--are unserious wankers who have no frickin clue how seriously most gun nuts take safety and lawful conduct (toys? I have never met a gun owner who though it was a toy, though I've see losers who rent them at ranges who did), who persistently and intentionally conflate law-abiding gun owners with armed career criminals (which group shoots people over "disrespect"?), and who bring up a couple of anecdotes about people who went bonkers while ignoring both the millions upon millions of people who don't go bonkers and the occasional cop or soldier (the "good" gun carriers, right?) who does.
That was unnecessary. I withdraw the "wankers" part, sorry. I'm sticking with the rest of it though.
I don't think everyone on the left who is pro gun control is necessarily completely anit-gun. At the same time, I do think gun lovers are a bit unserious about the extent to which their opposition to any law that curtails any gun sale at all contributes to the easy availability of guns in the wrong hands and
I mean, look at what's happening in Mexico. Where are the drug cartels getting their guns? In the United States. Because it's cheap and easy. Guns are also being imported into the cities.
People act like gun laws are monolithic and that a gun never travels from a place where it's easy to get one to a place where they're banned.
Gun nuts should be able to have their guns. I'm not trying to take them all away. I have one myself. But at the same time, being a gun nut should not necessarily mean that everyone should have access to all types of guns at all times unless gun nuts also accept that while they personally might be responsible, easy availability will make it very much more likely that those guns will fall into the wrong hands.
really? Mexican gangs get their fully automatic weapons and grenade launchers from the United States? Care to wager, say, $2,000?
"More than 90% of guns seized at the border or after raids and shootings in Mexico have been traced to the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Last year, 2,455 weapons traces requested by Mexico showed that guns had been purchased in the United States, according to the ATF. Texas, Arizona and California accounted for 1,805 of those traced weapons."
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/10/nation/na-guns10
I mean, the criteria that gun nuts are adhering to is along the lines of, "I'M a good driver, so why shouldn't anyone be able to just show up at the DMV and get a driver's license? Who needs a test!! Let them drive a semi while they're at it."
Today the 2nd Amendment has become an anachronism for all but traditional game hunters...
What does the 2nd Amendment have to do with traditional game hunting?
It has to do with being the only reason to bear arms that is still relevant in today's society.
Why else is having a gun useful nowadays? It won't stop the Government. With the provision of local law enforcement, it isn't necessary for every citizen to play peacekeeper (and isn't that a good development? Specialization in law enforcement allows more people to focus their time and productivity elsewhere.)
What are the odds that someone, even if wearing a holstered sidearm, would be able to repel an equally armed assailant who, as the aggressor, will likely get the drop on them? Unless you're the guy in A History of Violence, I'd say they're pretty low.
Even highly-trained soldiers often fail in live combat situations, so the idea that being a gun-owning civilian turns someone into Dirty Harry, able to perform competently in sudden, violent confrontations, is something perpetuated in the mass media and mythologized by the NRA, but hardly a realistic depiction of the actual benefits derived from gun ownership.
At some point the mere principle of having an unencumbered freedom should be outweighed by its obvious practical harms.
This is an unbridgable divide. If you're opposed to self-defense, believe it totally unnecessary because the police will protect you, or believe it impossible for ordinary people to effectively deploy a gun to protect themselves, then you are simply living in a different world than I am.
I do think it's sad that so much of gun nuts' passion comes out from fear. They want people to believe that we should all fear the people around us, fear that the police won't discourage crime, fear that the government is going to turn into tyranny because someone takes their damn AK47 away, as if an AK47 is going to defeat a tank in the event of a military coup.
Having lived in both a tiny conservative town and the city, I'd argue that it's life in a rural or suburban world breeds fear. People live in a bubble, drive everywhere, and never have to walk a city street at night and get over their fear of people who aren't like them. It's telling that gun nuts and the people who are most obsessed with Islamic terrorism live in the country and suburbia and have terribly little to fear from actual terrorism and actual gun violence.
@NRB
LOL
What the f**k do you think is driving you and everyone else so crazy and into 250-plus post aruguments?
You guys are AFRAID of the freaking GUNS! But you'll now tell me "oh no, just the people who carry them"
It's still FEAR!
We institute governments and pass a myriad of stupid and useless laws based on violence, threats, and intimidation because of one freaking thing: FEAR
Fear that someone might hurt us, or our kids, or our dog, or our house, or we might lose our job, or our bank might fail, or the economy may crash, or the [insert enemy of the day here] might attack us...
It's all based on FEAR!
If guns are so useless and so dangerous, why not improve the personal safety of our police by taking their guns away?
I would definitely be in favor of armed police being the exception rather than the rule, after an adequate phase-out period to allow gun restrictions (on say, most handguns and large-magazine firearms) to take effect.
I don't think everyone on the left who is pro gun control is necessarily completely anit-gun.
That's probably true as to individuals one encounters in blog comment sections, but as to the gun control movement as an institution, it is not. No prominent gun-control group has ever opposed DC's laws as being "unreasonable restrictions," for instance. No well-known gun-control advocate has ever appeared on "Meet the Press" to forthrightly explain what the "assault weapons" ban actually entails, and then cogently explained why a pistol grip is fine, and an adjustable stock is fine, a pistol grip and an adjustable stock is really, really bad and must be banned.
That is to say, the gun-control movement has no credibility and no right to expect gun owners to trust its good faith. On the other hand, the NRA is not seeking to roll us back to the pre-'68 days, when you could order a handgun from Sears Roebuck and have the mailman deliver it to your door (and when, by the way, crime was lower). So it's not obvious to me, at least, who is the real extremist here.
Meanwhile, if you have a suggestion for a law that will actually significantly impair criminals' ability to get guns (and which does not rely on the willingness of criminals to obey the law), I'm all ears.
I'd be more than happy with an institution of a nation-wide, consistent, logical background check on all firearms period, a DMV type system where people have to apply for a license to own any firearm and demonstrate gun competency and register their firearms and ammunition purchases with authorities, a mandatory two week waiting period, and some sort of sane restriction on the number of bullets in a magazine. No exemptions for gun shows, no unregistered guns, and lots and lots and lots of red tape. You know -- recognizing that guns are as dangerous or more dangerous than cars, and making it harder to buy a gun than get a driver's license.
You know what all this red tape would do? It would make it incrementally harder to acquire a gun. They'd be more expensive. And when you incrementally increase the price and ease of access to guns, it makes it incrementally less likely that they'll be easily acquired by people who would do harm with them. The kid from Virginia Tech might not have gotten his hands on as many firearms legally, or, heck, might not have gotten them at all.
You're never going to stop the truly motivated. Some criminals will always get them and use them. But some consistency and more difficult would go a long way to reducing the number of gun deaths in this country, which is insanely high relative to other countries throughout the world. Right now it's way, way, way, way, way, too easy to get a gun.
Well, aside from the fact that the easiest way to get a gun (illegally) is just to steal one from a cop car, you're incremental red tape approach reminds me a little too much of the incremental red tape being used to prevent women from getting abortions for comfort, not to mention failing on the grounds of equality-of-outcome and justice-as-fairness: the burden falls disproportionately on those that have the hardest time affording compliance and who would benefit the most from being able to exercise their rights.
Ok, you're positively nuts if you think it's easier to steal a gun from a cop car than to just buy one from a guy who knows a guy.
(replying to NRB @2:42 here as comments only nest finitely)
Correction: ...the easiest way to get a legal gun illegally... Already illegal guns are obviously another option.
Seriously, how hard do you think it is to break into an unattended Crown Victoria and then run away?
Uh.... Joshua, just about every gun in the United States started as a legal gun. If the easiest way you can think to illegally acquire a gun is by stealing it out of a cop's car I don't suggest you pursue a life of crime.
So, magazine limits right?
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEADLY_DOG_ATTACK?SITE=ORALB&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
But what if you miss? What if you miss alot?
Cars are far more dangerous than guns. Most gun deaths are suicides.
Getting a gun allows you to protect yourself. Waiting periods endanger one who is under threat, as many found out during the 1992 LA riots.
An effing dog attack in which no guns are involved? This is your argument against magazine limits?
First of all, if you "miss a lot" you probably shouldn't be owning a gun in the first place because the chance that you're going to shoot, miss, and hit someone innocent increases dramatically.
The Virgina Tech killer had 19 10-15 round magazines and had almost 400 rounds of ammunition, which he purchased legally. First of all, imagine if he had had to register his ammunition purchases with the authorities. Shouldn't 400 rounds of ammunition trigger some sort of alert that there's someone stockpiling ammunition for no apparent reason? And if magazines were limited to 5 bullets he would have had to have carried 80 magazines, which would have been a physical impossibility.
Oh, but the bad shots of the world need to spray the neighborhood with more bullets! Yeah! Great argument!
the pre-'68 days, when you could order a handgun from Sears Roebuck and have the mailman deliver it to your door (and when, by the way, crime was lower)
Are you sure of this statistic? When you say crime was lower, what crime do you mean? And pre-'68 leaves about 200 years of time in which to cull statistics, but I question your assertion that crime in 1964 being "lower" than crime today. Do you have proof to back up your assertion? If so, please show it and I will retract this.
http://www.jrsainfo.org/programs/Historical.pdf
Scroll down to the graphs starting on page 4; there are lots of them.
NRB: I'm sure that would make it incrementally harder to buy a gun legally, just as massive red tape makes it hard (but note, not impossible) to buy cocaine legally. And it might prevent some people (such as the Tech shooter) from doing any damage (but, of course, it might not).
It seems unlikely to do much about drug gangs' turf warfare, though.
And of course you haven't done a damn thing to allay the concerns of gun owners who fear subsequent banning and confiscation.
That's the thing: making it harder to buy guns legally also makes it harder to get them illegally. If there aren't as many guns in circulation it means they'll be more expensive for criminals to buy them on the black market. If they're more expensive in the black market there will be incrementally fewer of them that are out there illegally. If there are fewer of them in the hands of black market criminals and other assorted lunatics there will be fewer of them used to kill people.
Look: I'm not so naive to think we could eliminate gun violence entirely or to think that we're going to stop all criminals from getting them. But it seems perfectly reasonable to think that if we just treated guns the way we treat cars we could very easily reduce the number of gun deaths in this country while still giving sane, safe gun nuts access to firearms.
NRB, your chain of reasoning makes some sense. The key questions are 1) how much do your proposed restrictions really limit the supply of guns to criminals, 2) what alternative channels will spring into existence which are only slightly more expensive than the current channels, and 3) how price elastic is criminal demand for guns?
I'm not so naive to think we could eliminate gun violence entirely or to think that we're going to stop all criminals from getting them.
Good. I'm not so naive as to think that, should we implement your proposed scheme and gun crime fails to fall significantly (or falls for a while, then spikes up again, or whatever), the gun control lobby will just throw up its hands and say, "Well, we were wrong. Might as well stop sending fund-raising letters and all get real jobs."
Have a look at those crime charts: there are big, big variations in many different types of crime which do not correlate well with major gun-related legislation (1938, 1968, 1986, 1994).
Rob-
Those are great questions and ones I admit I don't have the expertise to answer and don't know that they would be provable until the programs I outlined were implemented. I still think the steps I outlined, though, are completely within the realm of common sense. Surely there are fewer unlicensed and terrible drivers on the road than there would be if we didn't restrict who can drive, even if you're never going to stop every unlicensed driver from getting on the road. The same should go for sane gun restrictions.
And I know there's an inexact correlation between major gun control legislation and violent crime, but there was a pretty dramatic fall off in gun deaths after 1994 after a steady rise in the '80s and now has been creeping up since 2000, when the waiting period provision in the Brady Bill expired. I know full well a lot of that has to do with economics and other factors like the end of the crack era, but gun control advocates could very easily point to those numbers as evidence that the Brady Bill worked.
It should be easy enough for somebody to tease out the significance of those numbers by examining how many murders are committed with "new" guns, and how many are committed by people found in the NICS database. I don't know if anybody has tried.
Nor would it make sense to protest against a local handgun ban in a city like D.C., where gun violence between citizens is an everyday occurence and puts the entire community at risk.
This is just mysterious to me. By your own statement, DC is a dangerous place where 1) police presence is apparently inadequate to prevent lots of crime, and 2) extremely rigid gun control is apparently inadequate to prevent lots of crime. But it makes no sense for someone who could legally own a gun in rural Virginia to complain about being forcibly disarmed because...there are police to help? Something else?
I would argue that gun control in DC clearly needs to be even more rigid in order for law enforcement to maintain order, and if that doesn't succeed, then it probably means that the kinds of guns available everywhere needs to be curtailed to prevent them from being sent into the city (which i doubt would overlap with the kinds of guns required in rural VA).
If every drug dealer or gang enforcer's arsenal was restricted to that of a rural VA farmer/sportsman, I think that would be an excellent outcome.
Cool. You do realize with about $40 in hardware store parts and a working brain somebody can make something similar to this:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16108331/BSP-SMG-9mm-full-book
Somebody with the tools and knowledge of an auto technician can manufacture far more effective weaponry.
Remember, the insurgents we fight in Afghanistan can manufacture Kalashnikovs from nothing but the scrap metal of old cars, and no power tools.
I would argue that gun control in DC clearly needs to be even more rigid
Let's see, they have a complete ban on handgun possession and any long guns (rarely used in crimes) must, by law, be kept disassembled and locked up at all times. Heller is supposed to change it, but so far reports are that it hasn't changed much. How will you make it more rigid?
Thanks for the details. In that case I'd say that my Plan B would go into effect. If U.S. gun manufacturers were no longer allowed to sell handguns/large magazine-rifles to the general populace they'd probably stop making most of them, and then its just a matter of pulling those used in the commission of crimes out of circulation.
Maybe if you already had one, you could get grandfather'd in, and retain the right to keep it in your place of residence only. Not a quick or perfect solution, but by cutting off the supply, eventually I think you'd see a reduction in the number of guns on the street, at least the kind that are designed solely for shooting at people.
You better include anything that holds an edge or is harder than a skull. Might as well ban everything over 4 on the Mohs scale. Let's not forget gasoline -- if Molotov cocktails could take out a Russian tank they can be used in gang warfare and burn down whole neighborhoods.
Seriously, anti-weapon groups in England are trying to get rid of kitchen knives with points. Where are you drawing the line? And don't forget that better weapons do the most for the weakest people. I'm a six foot guy with a long reach; a blade or bludgeon does me a lot more good than it does my 110 lb friend afraid of getting raped in D.C., not to mention gangers that have spent years pumping iron. Even given unarmed police you're pushing gun control to the point of creating egalitarian concerns.
I don't know why you suggest I'd want to ban anything capable of killing someone, since I've never advocated for that.
Where I draw the line seems pretty explicit in my comments above:
"If every drug dealer or gang enforcer's arsenal was restricted to that of a rural VA farmer/sportsman, I think that would be an excellent outcome."
Your shotgun is safe, a hunting rifle is reasonable. Other than that I'd like to hear a good reason for allowing the sale of semi-automatic handguns and large-magazines to civilians.
I do think it's sad that so much of gun nuts' passion comes out from fear...Having lived in both a tiny conservative town and the city, I'd argue that it's life in a rural or suburban world breeds fear. People live in a bubble, drive everywhere, and never have to walk a city street at night and get over their fear of people who aren't like them.
This stands in sharp contrast to the manly fearlessness of the urban gun controller, who has no fear whatsoever of those who are different from him (gun owners, hunters, "rednecks"), and also no fear of crime at all (which is why crime is NEVER used as a justification for gun control), and never stokes the passion of the like minded by fear-based appeals (e.g. "assault weapons").
Fear is strictly the province of gun nuts.
That's (mainly) a fair point, although I don't know what in the world you're saying about crime not being used as a justification for gun control. Still though, the urban gun restrictor is actually concerned about something that is disproportionately likely of affecting them directly (i.e. gun violence and terrirorism), whereas the rural gun nut espousing their guaranteeing of liberty through ownership of guns is basing their beliefs purely in the realm of the fantastical.
I'm being entirely sarcastic. Fear is used to sell gun control just as surely as fear is used to oppose it. Not clear who's wetting their panties more.
As for opposing the government with guns, it is not necessary to be able to literally defeat the US Army on the field of battle, which is impossible for pretty much anyone, including foreign armies. It is only necessary to compel oppression to take place by literally violent means and then to sap the will for such violence among both the political class and the soldiers themselves. See, e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan (then and now), Vietnam.
It might be fantastical to imagine that such a thing will be necessary, but it's a demonstrated fact that it can work.
Rob, it's amazing someone so obviously intelligent can write something as idiotic as this: "It is only necessary to compel oppression to take place by literally violent means among both the political class and the soldiers themselves."
WTF does that even mean? That in the oh so likely event our government morphs into a totalitarian regime people should have guns so they can take up arms to compel oppression so that... what, exactly? So that our lives will be so obviously horrible under our new totalitarian government that said totalitarian government will start feeling all soft and cuddly on us?
WTF are you talking about?
There's a reason the US army does not run jackbooted all over us: it's because we have strong institutions that are backed by the collective democratic will of the American people, not because some freaking wingnuts have a few AK47s.
And are Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam really the examples you want to use for countries that are better off because the people have ready access to guns?
Honestly: at the heart of every gun nut is a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist.
Although sorry I snipped your quote incorrectly.
In all its glory: "It is only necessary to compel oppression to take place by literally violent means and then to sap the will for such violence among both the political class and the soldiers themselves."
I'm not saying that people should "compel oppression" to occur, I'm saying that they should compel the oppression--which, by hypothesis, the government wishes to impose upon the populace for its own reasons--to occur by open violence.
That is, given a government which wants to oppress the populace, that government should be forced to do it with tanks in the streets and door-kicking (lest the oppressors be shot) rather than un- or lightly armed gentlemen quietly carting you off to a mental health facility for opposing the Radiant Future.
And I'm not suggesting that Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam are nice places to live, I'm suggesting that the experience of the US and Red Armies there indicates that a rag-tag bunch of losers with AK-47s can be a highly effective opposition, despite their obvious tactical inferiority.
The political will for tanks and door kicking--and the ability of the Army to sustain morale as it attacks its own citizens--is much more fragile than the tanks themselves.
As I said, you may think that the very idea of an oppressive US government is ridiculous (can I assume you're white?), but the idea that a handful of determined lunatics with rifles could cause monstrous trouble for such a hypothetical oppressive government, and even force it to accept terms, is not so much ridiculous as it is proven by history.
Ah yes, now the government is carting us away to mental institutions. Of course.
Sorry, Rob, you've gone too far into wingnut territory to even have a debate.
Let's face it: the guarantor of liberty thing is simply an article of faith among gun nuts, and there's no room for debate when it comes to faith because it's not in the realm of the rational. You can try and gussy it up with a veneer of rationality, but a conspiracy theory with some gloss of intelligence is still a wild-eyed fantasy.
Your examples are terrible too, btw. In the last 50 years virtually all transitions in power from totalitarian to democracy have involved peaceful means, not an armed populace. In fact, virtually all armed revolts by an armed minority have resulted in totalitarian governments, not democracy, which is why bringing up Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam are such terrible examples.
I would write more, but the government is knocking at the door, ready to take me away. Thank god there's a right wing nut with an AK47 out there to save me.
What's making discussion impossible is that you're putting words in my mouth. I never said the government was already carting anyone off to mental institutions (indeed, they should probably cart more people off than they do), or that it was about to do so, or that it was likely to happen, ever. And I haven't said anything to disagree with your latest point, which is that non-violence is better in many, many ways, assuming it actually works (See Beijing, 1989).
What I said--all I said--was, lightly armed opponents of a regime, while they cannot literally, tactically defeat the US Army, can nonetheless create so much trouble that they force its withdrawal. Your notion that an AK-47 is no good against a tank is literally correct, but the notion that guys with only AK-47s and no tanks cannot defeat an army that has tanks is false. They did it in Afghanistan in the 1980s, they did it in Vietnam (the NVA had armor, but it was the Vietcong at the US Embassy--a tactical defeat--that really won the war), and they came (are coming?) very, very close in Iraq.
Your focus on tactics, to the exclusion of objectives, strategy, morale, and logistics (all of which probably favor potential gun-nut insurgents over the hypothetical oppressive US government) is misplaced.
Rob, you're the one focusing on tactics, and I was making fun of the hypothetical that the government is going to take us away to mental institutions, not saying you believe they currently are. Still, that's a pretty preposterous hypothetical.
Your examples are great for throwing off foreign occupying powers, whether they be the US, Soviet Union, or King George's Britain.
The example of an armed minority throwing off the yoke of their (domestic) oppressors and instituting democracy.... yeah, not so much. That's because a small minority can throw off an occupying power because the foreign power isn't sufficiently motivated and can be bled of treasure and lives to the point the occupation is no longer worth it. A domestic totalitarian regime is about a thousand times more motivated to stay in power and will do everything it can to stay in power, including gassing its people and starving them to death.
In fact, it usually works in the reverse of what you're outlining: what usually happens is peaceful transition to democracy, armed transition to totalitarianism.
I feel like I'm about to throw up (some kind of virus, no doubt), so I'll let you have the last word here.
Feel better.
Megan, isn't there one huge difference between the left protesting the Bush and the war and the right protesting healthcare? Weren't the concerns of the left proven valid? Aren't you presenting a false equivalency?
@ pwnce: Guns can't stop the Government
I took a similar position on the futility
of individuals resisting the State on BIX,
about 20 years ago, and S.M. Stirling set
me straight.
The two false assumptions are:
Individual action and arms as sole recourse.
As the numbers and organization of the resistance
to the State increases, the power of the State
to oppose them decreases; Only when the State
fails to achieve its ends by legal means, and
escalates to unconstitutional and/or violent
measures, need the citizenry take up arms.
As I wrote up-thread:
The real fear/hope here is that the people are going
to reclaim some of the responsibility/authority they
have ceded to their increasingly clearly incompetent
elected representatives.
Sorry, citing a Sci-Fi author doesn't make the reality of a successful armed rebellion against the U.S. Government any more plausible.
Luckily, our system is designed so that sufficient "numbers and organization" can effectuate regime change every 4 years without resorting to violent revolution.
OK, the only kind of "protest" where the Secret Service is going to be involved takes place at a public event attended by someone entitled to Secret Service protection. An example of such an event is the Inauguration. The Secret Service takes the position that it is too dangerous to allow umbrellas or strollers into the public square on this occasion, much less openly carried firearms. They do not exclude signs with mean words on them, as long as those signs are not attached to long sticks, which are also forbidden. Does anyone contend that the Secret Service shouldn't be allowed to cordon off areas close to the president and others they are charged with protecting? Should they not be allowed to screen people admitted to these areas? I think this matter has been already been settled in favor of security. If people insist on pushing the envelope by openly carrying closer and closer to people protected by the Secret Service, the Secret Service will just place more restrictions on those present at such events.
Even at events that don't involve people protected by the Secret Service, people openly carrying will not be allowed into public buildings where an event such as a town hall, a debate or a Q & A session with a public representative is being held.
That limits opportunities for open carrying at political events to outdoor events that are not being attended by anyone entitled to Secret Service protection. If more than a few such individuals show up at such events, I predict that a whole lot of local laws and restrictions will be passed to curb the practice. As long as open carrying is rare and not done in numbers to be threatening--in other words as long as it's clearly window-dressing only--it will be allowed to pass. If a group of a couple hundred people openly carrying show up outside of a court house to wave signs and tea bags among office workers eating their lunches on the steps, I'm inclined to think that people will feel threatened and gun control laws will gain in popularity.
254 comments and counting. Libertarians talking about guns reminds me of Beavis turning into Cornholio. It's almost like they're a bunch of gun nuts!
Using your logic in a broader context: what's your argument in case of Iran having a nuclear bomb? Because lets face it: "there's really very little statistical evidence that it's likely to cause anyone any problems except their own stress."
Eight years ago about 0.001% of the US population were foully murdered by Saudi terrorists. Apparently this justifies the invasion and continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the torture of prisoners, and the "Patriot Act".
Whereas about 9% of US presidents have been assassinated by nutters with guns. Apparently this does not justify a ban on carrying guns at political demonstrations.
I suppose that even in the USA there are some circumstances in which one is not permitted to carry a gun. Why should this not be one of them?
Megan says: "To me, liberals sound like the pro-war crowd did in 2002--positive that they're right, and constructing a lot of arguments around their ability to imagine what is going on in the heads of people they don't know very well, and like even less...I hated it then, and I hate it now."
Really, you hated it then? Funny, according to my recollection (backed up by the Google) back in those days you were saying how great it would be if people went out and hit anti-Iraq War protesters in the heads with 2X4s. (I'm surprised no one has mentioned that little detail on this thread.) Of course, you later said you didn't really know what a 2X4 was, a follow-up which should basically disqualify you from any discussion relating to hardware, weaponry and civil protesting. But I guess memories can fade or be cleaned up, eh, Megan?
@ Pwnce
You say Sci-Fi as though it were an attack on the man, in an attempt
to discredit his observations; SF authors have been planning the
future of the human race, including anticipation of our current crisis, for the last fifty years.
You find implausible the reality of armed rebellion, which scenario
_you_ constructed out of straw, in order to confound it with the
spectrum of realistic opposition to the State which SMS described,
and which is _not_ limited to voting for President every four years.
Our system is on the edge of being subverted by those who think that
achieving a majority of the popular vote gives them the power to
institute a Tyranny of the Majority and wield _unlimited_power_
like Emperor Palpatine; Not on this planet.
@ PaulB: 9/11 justifies Iraq and Afghanistan, torture & Patriot Act ?
Yes, because the US response is not motivated by revenge for a past
act, but by prevention of future acts, as any student of SF could tell you; The CoDominium was established to prevent terrorists from
acquiring weapons of World destruction.
Torture, like all violence, should be legal, but rare.
The Patriot Act was a mistake; They had to look tough, so... :(
All violence should be legal but rare?
I think you read science fiction because you're from another planet.
I'm with you Megan. I've got splinters deep in my ass from sitting on the fence watching all the hullabaloo. Progressives and right-wingers are a detriment to themselves and our great country.
I'll by pass all the double standards in play here (right wingers loaded for bear getting cossetted by the Obama authorities while under the Bush experience liberal protesters were forced into "free speech zones" miles away and arrested for wearing T-shirts, for God's sake!) and go straight to something you may be able to understand: when someone shows up in a public venue that is not a hunting/collector/sporting event, it is NOT a friendly act. Get it? Appearing in public openly flaunting loaded weapons is an agressive, gauntlet-throwing act. I come from the country, I come from a hunting family, and we own guns in my house. Trust me...this is so far beyond the pale that I can't believe these fools didn't end up with a bullet between the eyes. And yet you try to paint it as just another protest, much like those of the left. Well, sweetie, I've been to many, many protests by the left, and I have yet to run into anyone packing.
Hey, whaddaya know! It isn't just Broughton's priest who's crazy!
'...when a reporter followed up with, "you're not advocating violence against the president?" Broughton, who has previously said his weapons are for defense, says "I'm not going to answer that question directly."
"I don't care how God does it, I'm not going into further detail than that," Broughton says. "It would be better now than later."'
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/08/gun_toter_i_like_my_pastor_want_obama_to_die.php?ref=fpblg
Where does this leave Megan's tattered argument?