A problem with diversity

I’ve been reading what people have been saying about Utah and their proposed “state gun”:

After reading these posts, editorials, and comments it appears to me there sure are a lot of people who have a problem with cultural diversity.

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29 thoughts on “A problem with diversity

  1. I don’t know why this is such a problem for them. They can counter by getting some of the few remaining anti-gun areas to get an appropriate symbol of their own movement.

    My suggestion: Illinois should make a symbolic show of its anti-gun bona fides by naming a State Baby. They can pick from either the baby held by Vicki Weaver when she was shot in the head by an ATF thug, or else one of the babies incinerated at Waco because David Koresh didn’t pay a gun tax on time.

  2. Actually I’m pretty good with the diversity thing. I just have a problem with the gun culture. No Don’t go gettin’ all hurt and feeling persecuted again, Joe.

  3. The words of a hypocrite, never truer spoken from mikeb…damn that dirty Rome water must really be messing with your head.

  4. Considering MikeB302000 can’t determine truth from falsity and doesn’t care I’m not sure it qualifies as hypocritical. The rants of the mentally deranged I could agree with. But it seems to me one has to know the difference between truth and falsity before hypocritical has any meaning.

  5. Actually I’m pretty good with the diversity thing. I just have a problem with the gun culture.

    Hypocritical or not, the bipolar, inherently contradictory nature of those two sentences is just hi-larious, especially with one immediately following the other.

    And word substitution yields all kinds of amusing results: “Actually I’m pretty good with the diversity thing. I just have a problem with the black/Jew/gay/etc. culture.”

    Bigotry, intolerance, inconsistency, and self-adulation, all rolled up in two sentences – for Mike, that ain’t too bad.

    In other news, go Utah – Tennessee needs to step up its game, considering that the Tennessee Rifles are not so categorized here.

  6. Hmm. What would be the Idaho State Gun, then?

    Joe; you know you’re pushing their buttons when your opponents feel the irrepressible urge to chime in with the craziness.

    mikeb, Allow me to fix your statement, so you’re not making a total ass of yourself;

    “Actually I’m pretty good with the diversity thing. I just have a problem with the enemies of liberty. THOSE motherfuckers gotta go!”

    There you are now. There’s a good boy. Glad I could help. Thank me very much.

  7. Apparently you don’t like diversity, Mikey, seeing how you fled a diverse nation for a monoracial and relatively monocultural one.

    And you’re still trying to mess with the rights of the nation in which you lacked the balls to stay.

  8. Mikeb sounds exactly (almost word for word) like my grandfather, a Southerner, who swore to his dying day that he wasn’t a bigot, he just didn’t like black people. There are people like that in this world–my grandfather in particular was quite the piece of work. Go figure. In his case, it was not that he was dumb, it was that he only switched his brain on when he decided that he wanted to & that wasn’t one of those special occasions.

  9. You guys are so funny it’s difficult to respond seriously.

    The posts I just put on my blog this morning illustrate perfectly what I’m talking about. You’ve got a Florida mom who shot and killed her two teenagers for back-talking. You’ve got a Florida 5-year-old who brought a gun to school and the cops are “trying to figure out” where he got it from.

    These things are an inevitable part of your gun culture. When you multiply it my all 50 states and consider the ever-increasing number of guns out there, it’s bad.

    No wonder you guys just mock anyone who questions it. I realize you come up with plenty of stats and proof and substitution games. But mainly you just scoff at serious suggestions that the gun violence is part and parcel of the gun culture you love so much.

  10. “Inevitable?” You’re resorting to anecdotal evidence without going to the trouble of establishing any kind of correlation/trend. Again.

    Show us the data indicating that, in general, gun owners are more likely than the general population, or non-gun-owners (sorry, you don’t qualify for that one), to commit violent crimes. In case this isn’t acutely obvious to yuo, legitimate self-defense is not a violent crime. Until and unless you can do that in a proper, repeatable fashion you are quite simply barking up the wrong tree. Also just barking. As in mad. As in insane. As in incapable of further firearms purchases. I’m sure you get the idea.

  11. Ahh, and now the bigot is attempting to rationalize his intolerance with the standard, “Guns are BAD!” routine. Yes, well, black men commit a disproportionate number of all crimes here in the States – apparently, according to Mike’s “rationale”, discriminating against blacks would not only be acceptable, it would still leave the discriminator “pretty good with the diversity thing”.

    These things are an inevitable part of your gun culture. When you multiply it my all 50 states and consider the ever-increasing number of guns out there, it’s bad.

    Except there is precisely no evidence to support your bigoted position. None. You can quote “common sense” all you like, but the facts are quite clear – there is a very strong, negative correlation between firearm ownership rates and fatalities-with-the-assistance-of-firearms rates, and there is a strong, negative correlation between firearm ownership rates and crime-committed-with-the-assistance-of-firearms rates.

    Negative. As in “as firearm ownership increases, fatalities/crimes have historically gone down (on average)”. That means, quite simply, that there cannot be a causal relationship, based off the evidence we have, between firearm ownership and fatalities/crime.

    You see, Sparky, that is making an argument – I give you the facts, figures, and relatively simplistic calculations necessary to put them all together, and I show you where they go. You have nothing. You have no facts. You have no figures. And you cannot track even middle-school-grade calculations. That is why we ridicule you and your ‘serious suggestions’ – because those ‘suggestions’ are born out of a mind that has admitted, of its own free will, that it simply cannot process information!

    … the gun violence is part and parcel of the gun culture you love so much.

    And, again, the anti-right nut unnecessarily narrows the playing field. Violence is part of all culture. Until you have found some magical cure-all for The Human Condition (TM), you are nothing more than an irrational hoplophobe hoping to inflict his particular paranoia and fear on everyone, by governmental mandate if he has to.

  12. Considering MikeB302000 can’t determine truth from falsity and doesn’t care I’m not sure it qualifies as hypocritical. The rants of the mentally deranged I could agree with. But it seems to me one has to know the difference between truth and falsity before hypocritical has any meaning.

    Joe, how right you are… in his Utah thread, his buddy JadeGold talked about how all Utahns are fat, middle-aged, polygamists to underaged girls. A little bigoted, but everybody has their opinions. I countered them on it saying that the only ones that practice polygamy are a tiny offshoot of the LDS church and it is by no way rampant and nowhere near everybody. Also about how Utah had one of the lowest obesity percentages in the country (we’re number 7 or so in skinniest). Of course, he had to let us know where his facts come from…

    I’m sure you’re right about the obesity in Utah, but c’mon, polygamy is alive and well there. I watch TV, I know these things just like everybody else.

  13. Publius asks, “Show us the data,” which is the typical response around here by those who refuse to use simple honesty and common sense.

    Dear Publius, gun violence is an inevitable part of there being guns in the society. The discussions could be what is the percentage and is it acceptable, or the discussion could be is the gun violence unimportant because of the 2nd Amendment, but just a smidgen of honesty would obviate the need for your demand of proof about the correlation.

    The correlation is obvious.

  14. No, Mike. It’s deeper than that. If you remove ALL guns, then it will be knives. Remove all knives and it will be baseball bats and golf clubs. Remove those and it will be sticks and stones. There will ALWAYS be violent crime, the handgun is just the most proficient method to both commit that crime and more importantly to defend against it.

    Mike, can you honestly say that if you remove all of the guns that there won’t be the exact same number of violent deaths, just by other means? How naive does that sound?

  15. Mikeb, I’m a scientist by profession. “Show me the data” is what my entire professional life is all about. You’d never make it as a scientist.

  16. The correlation is obvious.

    You are absolutely right – it is obvious that you are wrong.

    Common sense would be for you to eventually realize that, but I guess we both know the odds of that happening.

  17. Publius, I’m not a scientist, you’re right. But when scientists hide behind the request for proof lest they have to admit the obvious, I think that’s dishonest.

    Tango, in that ridiculous scenario you described, “if all the guns were removed,” etc., what would happen is the deaths and injuries would go down with each “removal.”

    What’s even more ridiculous about your response is no one is talking about removing anything. We’re talking about ways to keep dangerous people from getting guns so easily by legislating what you lawful gun owners can and cannot do.

  18. If there is no proof, it is not “obvious”.

    Alternatively, if it is so very “obvious”, present the proof.

  19. Publius asks, “Show us the data,” which is the typical response around here by those who refuse to use simple honesty and common sense.

    Dear Publius, gun violence is an inevitable part of there being guns in the society. The discussions could be what is the percentage and is it acceptable, or the discussion could be is the gun violence unimportant because of the 2nd Amendment, but just a smidgen of honesty would obviate the need for your demand of proof about the correlation.

    The correlation is obvious.

    The correlation is negative. Which is shown by the data that you so blithely claim is unnecessary.

    But when scientists hide behind the request for proof lest they have to admit the obvious, I think that’s dishonest.

    It’s amazing how many things that are “obvious” turn out to be wrong once you look at the data. After all, it’s “obvious” that glass is a solid… until you look at the data. It’s “obvious” that the sun and the stars revolve around the earth… until you look at the data. It’s “obvious” that the earth is flat… until you look at the data. It’s “obvious” that I was born male because the sun was in Gemini when I was conceived… until you look at the data.

    Should I go on?

  20. We’re talking about ways to keep dangerous people from getting guns so easily by legislating what you lawful gun owners can and cannot do.

    Your own words say it. Your misconceived perception is that everything needs legislated against. It already is. It’s illegal to murder people. It’s illegal to SHOOT people. It’s illegal to do any number of things, yet NONE of that will stop someone that wants to do it. NONE of it. Every legislative action out there ONLY affects the law abiding.

  21. What’s even more ridiculous about your response is no one is talking about removing anything. We’re talking about ways to keep dangerous people from getting guns so easily by legislating what you lawful gun owners can and cannot do.

    The above quote from mikeb is just yet another in a long series of intentional falsehoods made by the VPC/Brady crowd. Even as their explicit purpose was to ban the private possession of firearms in total, they lied about it. They still do.

    What puzzles me is why they think we’ll be fooled?

  22. Mikeb302000, do you HONESTLY believe that if the government asked the Bradys, VPC, etc… that if they said yes, all guns of all types would be banned, that the Bradys and VPC would say “Oh, no we just want the current restrictions tightened. We don’t want to remove guns from normal citizens that are legally able to own them.”

    Do you HONESTLY believe they wouldn’t do it? They’d LOVE a total ban on all guns, more than likely just as all of their followers would.

  23. MikeB302000,

    It was more than just:

    gun violence is an inevitable part of there being guns in the society

    There was:

    When you multiply it my all 50 states and consider the ever-increasing number of guns out there, it’s bad.

    This second part presumes facts not in evidence. It and follow on responses of yours presumes that there is no or an insignificant amount of good that comes of guns in society. It also hints that all “gun violence” is a bad thing. It asserts that increasing numbers of guns means increasing “badness”–presumably without an upside.

    If you were to reword the statement of your concerns to be something like the following you wouldn’t raise everyone’s hackles so much:

    With all the examples of criminal and negligent use of guns in our society do the benefits justify the cost?

    Here is another example wording that would express what I believe to be your position and probably wouldn’t get such a hostile response:

    I believe the correct restrictions could decrease criminal and negligent use of guns without significantly reducing the benefits of gun ownership.

    You would be challenged to show what “the correct restrictions” are that haven’t already been tried and failed but it wouldn’t be an unsupported assertion of absolute truth.

    I know you hate this but it is one of my tools I do best when trying to explain things to other people. And I honestly just don’t know how to get through to you. But I’m going to try anyway…

    Substitute cars for guns and evaluate the meaning of the result.

    Car accidents and cars used in the commission of a crime are an inevitable part of there being cars in society. When you multiply it by all 50 states and consider the ever-increasing number of cars out there, it’s bad.

    That presumes that increasing numbers of cars in society is bad. It ignores the good. It ignores that each of those cars was purchased by someone who evaluated the good, harm, expense, training, etc. and made what they believed was the best decision.

    When someone commits suicide in a car, to escape after robbing a bank, in a drive-by shooting, straps their kids in and drive the car into a lake, or even when plowing through the playground of a kindergarten there are calls for more restrictions on who can buy or drive a car. And there aren’t people saying “consider the ever-increasing number of cars out there, it’s bad.”

    You need to show the data that increasing number of guns is bad rather than assert that it is bad. We have had a dramatically increasing number of guns sold in this country for the last few years yet the criminal use of guns has gone down. When using the full data set rather than a few news items exemplifying the bad it is far from obvious “it’s bad.”

  24. Joe, I hear ya about the better ways of phrasing what I’m saying so as to communicate my ideas more successfully, but you lost me when the old car comparison came in. Sorry.

    Tango, you may very well be right about the Bradys and the VPC folks, but speaking for myself, I wouldn’t want to disarm everybody, honest injun. (I can just hear Linoge going off on my racist remark, but I hope you know what I mean.)

  25. The Leftists’ idea of diversity is a sort of m&m’s approach to diversity. A rainbow of colors on the outside, same pernicious political prejudices on the inside.

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