Quote of the day—Luke Chitwood

Whether or not Barack Obama actually has plans to personally invade the homes of America’s 100 million gun owners and forcibly remove their firearms is irrelevant. The NRA has achieved great success in making this event seem possible to the Americans who fear it the most. The NRA has perfected the use of slippery-slope arguments and doomsday predictions to activate a passionate, idealistic, and focused base.

Luke Chitwood
October 8, 2013
Here’s How the NRA is So Freakishly Effective in the Gun Control Debate
[Chitwood has a problem with the truth. This is just one of many examples in the article. Obama would never personally do this and the NRA would never suggest he might. And as usual, if someone starts out with false data and assumptions whatever follows is almost certain to be in error.

What Chitwood apparently doesn’t understand is that NRA members drive the NRA rather than the NRA driving it’s members. People join the NRA to, among other things, encourage them to protect gun owner rights. I know a few people that have quit or refused to join the NRA but all of them did this because the NRA compromised or were to soft of supporters of gun owner rights. Not that they were too “extreme”.

The NRA is a grassroots organization. Our opponents cannot seem to understand that. Their model appears to be that the NRA recruits members and turns them into some sort of mindless minion that does the bidding of the evil NRA overlord. As is usual, anytime an anti-gun person says something you can be fairly certain it’s crazy talk.—Joe]

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23 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Luke Chitwood

  1. OK; let’s back WAY UP and forget about the NRA for a bit.

    That there should ever be any perceived need (and in this a very real need) for a large organization to struggle constantly to protect what is an already guaranteed, constitutional right is, all by itself, and absolute outrage.

    That a fundamental human right is being questioned at all, by anyone, is an absolute outrage and a crime of gigantic proportions. That defenders of a fundamental human right are being impugned, insulted, maligned and attacked is just icing on that rotten cake.

    Anti rights agitators (collectivists, essentially) like Luke Chitwood, though they may feel completely comfortable in their positions and their public attacks against the constitution right now, had best start thinking twice about what they’re doing. Certain federal crimes have no statute of limitations.

  2. I didn’t want to sign on to the site, but he also missed that people like me, and 17 other like minded folks worked at phone banks and gap bag stuffing events for our local Congresscritter.
    The staffers know who turn out the people.

  3. Some people also join the NRA because it makes their gun ownership seem legitimate. (Yes, I am talking about criminal gun owners like those affiliated with street gangs.)

        • It is quite a stretch to arrive at your conclusion from that evidence. Do you have anything else?

          • And 8% of the American population believe Elvis (Presley) is still alive, and 4% believe that if you write him a letter, he will get it. (citation, Larry Elder).
            One instance is, as leftists are fond of pointing out, an anecdote, not data, and there is no evidence that the star of the article joined the NRA as any sort of cover.
            As an aside, “unregistered”? Other than weapons defined by the California Code as “Assault Weapons”, what registry is there? We might as well be talking about unregistered machetes and kitchen knives.

        • Some people also join the NRA because it makes their gun ownership seem legitimate. (Yes, I am talking about criminal gun owners like those affiliated with street gangs.)

          Citation still needed. Most organizations don’t employ psychics to screen the motives of members it is also possible that he happened to have a membership with the NRA and then later became a criminal with no connection between the two. It is also possible the guy cited in the link isn’t a criminal at all. The city was reconsidering the charges whether his son should be charged. The article is from 2009, but I can’t find an outcome.

          NRA has perfected the use of slippery-slope arguments and doomsday predictions

          The NRA’s slippery-slope arguments tend to have a strong basis in recent history and are often proposed by gun controllers as future steps. Politicians promoting a policy of demonizing inanimate objects doesn’t encourage the hope that their future policies will be rational.

          • Indeed. The best way to “perfect” the slippery slope argument is to demonstrate its application to real world events, much as negotiating with the Soviets emboldened them around the world to reopen negotiations when the time for delivery of what they promised nears.
            And also the PLO and the way the intifada erupted during the Oslo Accords when 97% of what the PLO wanted was not enough.

          • One look at the tyrannical New York State SAFE Act (down from 10 rounds to 7, to some semiauto rifles to now none) – and the slippery slope is in full effect.

            Either the author is willfully ignorant or somehow he had one hell of a lobotomy.

  4. Got any documentation that this is an situation more common than say, police officers committing criminal acts, or are you just throwing out another unfounded allegation to justify your bigotry against a civil right you do not care to enjoy?

  5. The only person I know who “unjoined” the NRA because they were “too extreme” was George Herbert Walker Bush (“41”), ol’ pudding spine himself.

    • B41 only joined the NRA before the election as a campaign stunt to sucker liberty-minded folks into thinking he was one of them. Once in office he turned on them, showing his true colors just like any run of the mill Progressive Republican. The good news is that many of those same RINOs are starting to eat crow, right now. They’re on the run.

      • Joe reminds me that it was B41 who, by the end of his term, had had Randy Weaver’s wife and son murdered over the question of one eighth of an inch (or was it a whole quarter of an inch?) in the length of a shotgun. No evidence of any possibility of a slippery slope there, eh?

        We’re on to you, Progressives. How much farther do you want to crawl out on your plank before you call it quits?

        • Lifetime NRA member/supporter to child and woman killer in one term. Nope– No slippery slope there.

  6. Odd that anyone would claim there is no effort to take people’s guns so soon after the passage of the NY SAFE Act, which is taking guns from tens to hundreds of thousands of people, and denying millions more the ability to get them.

  7. Indeed Mikee!

    The outlawing of objects is the first step to allow for the invading of houses for confiscation. It turns me, the nice guy, into a criminal overnight unless I will now surrender the suddenly illegal item. Comply and lose my firearm/magazines or face criminal prosecution down the road if discovered. It is de facto confiscation without the need to kick in doors. However, the illegal nature of the item will make kicking in doors so much more politically feasible. Go to hell gun grabbers!

  8. The reason leftists think the NRA is astroturfed is because that’s all they know. They wouldn’t know true grassroots if they jumped out of the ground and stained the ass of their best white jeans. Check the artificial turf rug burns on their knees if you don’t believe me. The whole Left is a communist front. No wonder they can’t believe the truth.

    M

  9. To be fair, my father wouldn’t join the NRA because he didn’t want to be on any list (and he went through great lengths to acquire every single firearm he owns privately). After what came out with the NSA in recent months, I can’t say that I blame him. However, for me, after Newtown I bought myself a life membership. Couldn’t stand on the sidelines anymore. The Dems also managed to turn me into a single-issue voter for the rest of my adult life

    • Single-issue as in this essay — http://www.lneilsmith.org — right?
      The NSA thing is a reason why some technology folks I know have been trying to “make encryption ubiquitous”. Instead of using it only occasionally, suppose everyone who possibly could would encrypt everything — all email, all Internet phone calls, any other Internet traffic that possibly can be — all the time?
      That would be a Good Thing.

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