You are all a bunch of bumbling morons. This is the information age, get a clue. You can’t keep people from doing things by innocuously passing laws as a band-aid or stop gap. In this day and age people are going to find ways to do things. You want to teach them something? Teach them to be responsible with firearms. THAT’S the key that’s missing in today’s youth. You want to know why kids blow up high schools? Because no one in this ‘nobody fails’ government will allow the two kids to duke it out behind the library in the third grade.
Unfortunately, by doing this, you folks have basically ‘screwed the pooch’ on an entire generation. I can only see one way to actually repair the damage, and this is it.
Step 1) Force everyone in the country to carry a handgun.
Step 2) Watch society get really polite, really quick.
In a couple of months all the psychos and gang-bangers will kill each other off and everyone will be happy.
Let’s just call that a win / win / win scenario.
– T
Referring to the Brady Campaign and “the Mayors coalition against private handgun sales”.
July 28, 2010
Complete and Utter Fools are trying to run our Government
[While there is more than a hint of truth in what he says I’m opposed to forcing everyone in the country to carry a handgun. I’m a middle ground sort of guy.–Joe]
“…I’m opposed to forcing everyone in the country to carry a handgun.”
Of course. The idea is stop the government from meddling.
I’d rewrite the steps;
Step 1) Get government out of the education business.
Step 2) Get government out of the gun business (and practically all others, i.e. outlaw socialism).
Step 3) Enact massive, sweeping tax cuts (as steps 1 & 2 would reduce the budget to a small fraction of its current size) and place strict, constitutional limits on taxation at all levels.
Step 4) Watch society get really polite, and really prosperous, really fast.
Or, as Heinlein said, “… an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.”
Catchy though Heinlein’s comment was and is, it is, unfortunately, something of an oversimplification. It is, however, a damned good start.
Regarding T’s comments, though, he is pretty much dead on – the vast majority of anti-rights nuts out there still live in a self-induced delusion wherein they can repeat the same old lies, misdirections, and half-truths, and the media and their supporters will mindlessly and blindly parrot it ad nauseum. I guess that is part of the reason UBU wants to firmly and absolutely restrict posting things on the internet to “authorized journalists” and the like – it makes it easier to control the message, since we all know that the masses are too ignorant and too stupid to figure things out for themselves.
Unfortunately for them, just like the technology behind firearms, the djinn of the internet is well and truly out of the bottle, and, at this point, you cannot stop the signal. No matter how much the anti-rights nuts scream and stomp their feet, the truth will out, and they hate that. Sucks for them, but that is the way of things.
Can’t find a single thing in that plan with which I can agree. Forcing someone to buy something at the government’s insistence is as bad as worshiping the Contraband Fairy. Second: is it really about the guns? What about any other personal weapon? What about where, when and how?
The greater problem–which will not be solved by simple possession of a handgun–is the naked hostility displayed by governments, charged with protecting the rights of citizens, toward the RIGHT OF LIFE of those citizens. You can prance around with your Glorgenplatz Elitemeister 9000 polymer machine pistol–but what’s the point of surviving an attack when someone reports an MWAG to 911, and five minutes later, you’ve been ventilated by a hopped-up SWAT team?
Screw polite society, I want one that actually respects the lives and property of others.
It is, however, a damned good start.
It’s a conversation starter– a little shard of self-reliance to get the mental engine primed and ready to run. From there, you can move on to crime rates in “the wild west,” and comparing gun crime in gun free zones to gun crime in areas with “lax” gun laws.