Quote of the day—Mark Wahlberg

Well, I would love it if they could take all the guns away. Unfortunately, you can’t do that so you hope that good people in the world have them to protect the people who can’t protect themselves.

Certainly, I haven’t used a gun anywhere other than on a movie set and I’d like to see if we could take them all away. It would be a beautiful thing.

Mark Wahlberg
April 26, 2007
Straight shooter
[This is a much more interesting quote that I originally expected.

I originally ran across this quote with the preceding paragraph that I quoted:

I’d like to see if we could take them (guns) all away. It would be a beautiful thing.

Which is attributed to Wahlberg in several places:

It is rarely (only once that I discovered) is it pointed out that the actual quote (that I used above) is more ambiguous than the more common one. In fact I could see the second paragraph of my selection being taken out of context in such a way that it completely changed the meaning. The “I haven’t used a gun anywhere other than a movie set” could mean something like “used a gun against people or animals”.

I don’t trust Hollywood actors to have solid political sense or philosophy but I trust the accuracy of reporters even less.—Joe]

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23 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Mark Wahlberg

  1. It still is wrong.
    Just because someone advocates taking away all guns — which may (or may not) include guns in the hands of criminals and guns in the hands of governments — doesn’t mean they have a valid answer to violence.
    The reality is that this is still victim disarmament. It still leaves the victims at the mercy of criminals. The fact that the criminals are, perhaps, no longer armed with guns is hardly any help. If the bad guys come at you with baseball bats, or knives, or pick axes, is it any consolation that at least they aren’t attacking your defenseless person with guns? I didn’t think so. If a gang of 200 pound thugs is gang raping your teenage daughter, is the fact that she has been forced to be defenseless offset at all by the fact that the gang doesn’t have guns either?
    The only right way to look at this, as Samuel Colt did, is that the handgun is an equalizer. It levels the playing field in the confrontation between strong young thugs (possibly several of them) and weaker victims. Disarming them all, even ignoring the fact that in the real world this isn’t possible, only means you’re advocating that the weak should be at the mercy of the strong.
    No thanks Ms Wahlberg, you’re still an idiot.

    • Now where did that typo come from? “Mr Wahlberg” is what I meant, of course.

      • Freud was right! LOL!

        People who do this kind of wanton violence have no self control. Further those that have this abhorrent behavior, and choose to speak out against lawful gun owners, rather than violent people like themselves prove that they feel there is nothing actually wrong with their behavior.

        Oddly I work with many different foreign nationals and ethnicity, yet I don’t feel the need to give them a savage beating, even when we disagree about things, or I don’t particularly like them.

        Yet That’s what Marky Mark felt was perfectly OK, and thinks I shouldn’t have guns.

        I’ve had arguments with my wife. Some of these arguments I’ve been armed with various weapons. In stead of using weapons or my fists I simply continue to discuss the issue until its resolved.

        This is not what Sean Penn did….and he feels that’s perfectly natural, and I shouldn’t have guns.

        • Projection. People tend to assume others are like themselves. Those with no self-control feel others are the same. These folks don’t trust themselves, so they don’t trust others. The perfectly natural result of people not being raised properly.

    • I think there is a difference between “wishing” and “advocating.” I don’t see Wahlberg advocating as much as I see him wishing. Right up front he says, “Unfortunately, you can’t do that.”

      • So somebody “Wishing all the Ni**ers go back to Africa” is just a hopeless dreamer rather than a repugnant racist?

        Somebody wishing all homosexuals could be banished to some remote island aren’t horrible people expressing horrible wishes?

        How do you feel about the White Supremacist movement in America?

        Do you have distaste for all of them, or just the small handful of loaners who actually act on it?

        I mean from all I’ve seen, most of the Aryan Nation and other such hate groups just do a lot of nasty talking….

        • People who belong to hate groups ARE advocating. That’s not wishing. Wishing is what kids do when they say “I wish it were Christmas every day.”

          When your wife says “I wish we lived in a castle,” is she advocating that you buy a castle for her?

          Definitions for the two words:

          Advocating — publicly recommend or support
          Wishing — feel or express a strong desire or hope for something that is not easily attainable; want something that cannot or probably will not happen.

      • No, Ubu, you missed my point entirely. Ignore the “you can’t do that”. He’s wishing for people to be defenseless when there are stronger, nastier people around. He’s dreaming of a world in which my 80 year old neighbor would be defenseless against a home invader.

        I think part of what’s going on here is the erroneous notion that self defense with a gun is only justified if the attacker has a gun. Nonsense. Self-defense with any suitable tool is justified against any violent attacker, no matter what weapons the attacker is using — gun, knife, fists, it doesn’t make any moral difference. Nor, in civilized states, does it make a legal difference. NH state law for example recognizes justified use of lethal force whenever you are faced with a threat of deadly force, or force during burglary, or rape, or arson.

        • He isn’t wishing for that at all! You can’t ignore the “you can’t do that” because it is part of the quote! You are taking his honest statement and trying to make it fit your dishonest interpretation.

          • Wrong. Saying “but you can’t do that” doesn’t turn a wish for x into a wish for the opposite of x.

            He IS wishing for x — but he’s merely admitting that his wish cannot, at the moment, be realized.

            Don’t try to whitewash it, it won’t work. And by the way, note that I am not giving it a “dishonest interpretation” — I’m using the old rule of “don’t attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance”. (Or in this case, “stupidity” — as in “the difference between ignorance and stupidity is that ignorance is curable”.)

          • So, now you admit he is wishing and not advocating…

            Again, there is a difference in the meaning of the words.

            When someone wishes for a particular thing, they wish for that thing alone, not everything that might be associated with that thing. If I say “I wish Fred would fall in love with me,” that doesn’t mean that I’m also wishing for all the crap that comes along with Fred — the ex-wives, the mortgage payment, the five kids in college.

            When Wahlberg wishes all the guns were gone, he’s not wishing harm to your Grandmother. (That would take two wishes, not one.)

          • It’s pretty clear that you aren’t a girl because you have no idea how this wishing stuff works… 😉

          • I’m not a sexist, so I don’t know what this girl thing has to do with the question.

            In any case, Wahlberg expressed a wish for everyone, including my feeble 80 year old neighbor, to be defenseless. That means that he is expressing a wish for the weak to be unable to defend themselves against the strong.

            I really don’t see how to make it any plainer than that.

      • I’ve got to defend Ubu here. The second sentence in the full quote from Marky Mark makes that clear.

        He wishes we could get rid of guns, but admits that we cannot — so he hopes that good guys have guns to defned themselves with, as the best remaining option.

        Hey, if I could sprinkle Magic Fairy Dust and eliminate the _need_ for defensive tools, I probably would. Just as if I could sprinkle Magic Fairy Dust and eliminate the _need_ for trauma dressings, pacemakers, and cancer treatments. Since we cannot make Bad Things go away, we’re stuck with keeping the best tools around to fight against them — which is how I interpret Marky Mark’s comment _in_context_.

        • Are you arguing that “But you can’t do that” is short for “but you can’t do that because you would leave people defenseless”?

          I admit that’s a *possible* reading. I don’t consider it a *plausible* reading. The way I read it is “but you can’t do that because people are clinging too stubbornly to their guns and would not comply”.

          If you assume that Mark is dreaming of a world in which guns are not needed because no evil exists, then yes, I suppose Ubu’s point is valid. Given the rest of the quote (in particular the part that admits he doesn’t understand guns) is that a likely reading? Possible, yes; likely, I don’t think so.

          • Since Walhberg SPECIFICALLY says that, because we CAN’T make them all go away (for wahtever reason), then keeping guns in the hands of the “good people in the world. . . toprotect the people who can’t protect themselves”,it is very clear that he realizes that guns are not intrinsically evil.

  2. Marky Mark is a prohibited person. I don’t take my cues on gun control from someone who is already outside the bounds of civilized people.

    • EXACTLY!! It’s a classic case of sour grapes; “I can’t have it, it’s worthless, no one else should have it either.”
      And who was that man a couple of years ago who was an outspoken proponent of gun control in some eastern US city, either Chicago, Philadelphia or DC, and it turned out he was a prolific serial rapist? That’s not surprising either.

  3. Allow me to translate Mr. Wahlberg’s quote.

    “I’ve never really handled firearms, and so I have no real familiarity with the subject other than what I’m subjected to through mass media. So I think it would be really great to live in a world where there are no guns or gun violence. It would be great to live in a world where there weren’t bad people who can overpower weaker people.”

    The quote isn’t evil, just naive. However 2007 was a good seven years ago, so I wonder if there has been any changes to Mr. Wahlberg’s opinion in the intervening time.

    • Not unless, instead of pretending to be the pointy end of the stick he experienced the pointy end of someone else’s stick.

  4. Interesting comment by Mark. Although, like a few others have said, I don’t take anything from celebrities seriously. The majority of them don’t know a single thing about the Constitution and America’s founding.

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