Quote of the day—John Burrud

I had a woman who was probably in her 70s, very sharp and alert; she came into the store and said, ‘I want an AR-15’. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ She said, ‘Absolutely. Obama says I can’t have one, so I want one.’

John Burrud
Owner of Loveland Colorado firearms store Jensen Arms
August 13, 2015
Politics, not violence, increase gun permits, sales.
[Obama, the greatest gun salesman of all time.

It’s an interesting dilemma the ant-gun people have. Any serious political push results in increasing the number of gun owners. If they don’t bring the fight to us then we take the fight to them against their weakest points.

It seems to me the only hope they have is to change the minds of the public at large before they can hope to make progress. But we have a significant advantage in that regard. They don’t have anti-gun ranges where people get a big smile on their face when they learn to not use a gun.—Joe]

Share

16 thoughts on “Quote of the day—John Burrud

  1. “It’s an interesting dilemma the ant-gun people have.”

    You got that right – you know how hard it is to find ammo that small? And reloading the magazines is tricky without tweezers…

  2. Our victories are on an individual level. Theirs are statewide, or national.

    They only need to win once to cause immeasurable harm to our cause, as was done in CO, NY, NJ, CT, and elsewhere after the Newtown atrocity. Those legal setbacks in those states have yet to be recovered, and a great effort was required to avoid some really odious national legislation at that time.

    So incrementally rolling back anti-gun legislation is wonderful, but impeded by their occasional wins with bad legislation. And they never, never stop making attempts at bad legislation.

    How to achieve victory quicker?

    • They’re all criminals. Normally, the way to deal with active criminals is to arrest them. So long as we treat them like people we merely have a disagreement with them, and they merely have a political disagreement with us, the more we encourage crime. If we encourage criminal behavior for a hundred years running, what should we expect will result?

      In short, we don’t normally call a legislator when there’s a robber in the house, or try to convince the robber to think of, pretty please, maybe changing his way of life for our sake. But when it come to the robbers of millions of people’s guaranteed rights, we treat them like equals in a political debate. So we’ve invited the robbers into our homes, fed them, and they’re now running things, and then we wonder what might be done about it.

  3. They’ve shifted the focus from banning guns to banning gun owners by social group. Nazi approach by the 1938 example, when it became easier for a “good” German to own a gun but a whole lot of people were categorized as “bad German” and later “subhuman” — those were not allowed to have guns.

    • It’s always been about banning guns of certain social groups. At first it was blacks, then it was Italian and hispanic immigrants (Sullivan law and NFA), then blacks again (1968 act, “Saturday Night N*****town Special” ban), and so on.
      And it has always been about banning guns for “the other guys” or “the ordinary people” — never “our people”. That’s why Pelosi is one of the few Californians with a gun permit. That’s why Ochs Sulzberger got an NYC gun permit. And so on.

        • I understood the target to be italians, but it doesn’t really matter; the point is simply that gun bans are aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of whatever is the current out-of-favor group. And it all goes back to the principle that armed people cannot be enslaved, while the one universal characteristic that identifies slaves is being disarmed by law.

  4. friends:

    can we get something straight, please, please, please, once and for all.

    the liberals/leftists/commies are not against guns. period. exclamation point.

    they are against us having guns, to protect ourselves and to assert our political liberties, rights and privileges which they intend to remove from us as soon as we are disarmed.

    “gun control” means to relieve us of our guns, and does not intend to remove guns from the possession of domestic police, domestic “security forces,” nor from the armed forces. in short, those people in the employ and service of the liberals, leftists and commies will retain possession and use of firearms.

    the next time you see a liberal politician, ask same whether his or her security people are armed w/ firearms, or which squirt and/or cap guns.

    figure it out. the liberal columnists who shoot intruders in their swimming pools. “anti-gun” u.s. senators who carry “heat.” anti-gun movie stars who are surrounded by “security” packing heat.

    they are not in fact “anti-gun,” they are in favor of us not having guns.

    john jay

    • It’s never been a matter of whether people should have guns. It’s about who should have them.

      Criminals and tyrants know, instinctively, that a generally armed society puts them at a disadvantage. They also know that if guns are banned, they will still have them and the law-abiding will not.

      So gun restrictions are nothing but a way to empower evil.

      Tyrants and criminals need each other, and will therefore, one way or another, cooperate against us. It’s inevitable, and of course it’s been happening all along and it will always happen. The only question is; how are we best going to deal with it?

      So there, I merely reiterated what you said. Happy?

      Now, as you find yourself in any discussion about gun restrictions, all you have to do is use the above and, the truth having been told, your part of the discussion is over.

      Also I would ask everyone to notice that I told the truth without even touching on any of the false assertions, emotional pleas, lies or ruses, of the enemies of liberty. Such would only distract from the point. And there’s only that point made above and nothing else but lies to play around with as though they are punching bags and toys to occupy our time and prevent us speaking the plain truth. I’d rather have not mentioned it even here in a discussion of the “tactic” of staying on point, but it bears mentioning only for this reason. Lest anyone think I’m boasting; no. I’m as guilty of being distracted as anyone, but I am able to see it now, while many are not.

  5. I forget where I read it*, but the attitude of the alert and sharp little old lady of the anecdote is what distinguishes Americans from Europeans. You tell Europeans to turn in all weapons and they turn in everything (except the Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians, apparently). You tell the Americans a ban is coming and they all buy the banned Item.

    * I might have read it here, but I really can’t remember.

    • There is an explanation for that: it’s called firearms registration and prior restraint.

      AFAIK, in Europe (and definitely here in Oz) potential purchasers of firearms have to obtain permission to do so, and the firearm is then registered to them.

      In the face of a possible/probable future ban, purchasing behaviour is influenced by the knowledge that the government will know EXACTLY who possesses the banned item.

      Further, since government permission is required to purchase it becomes a simple matter to DENY purchase permission PRIOR to the ban being implemented.

    • There’s another, more basic, explanation. Europeans, and indeed subjects of essentially all countries other than the USA, have no protections from government power. Few if any have meaningful constitutions. Few if any impose any limitation on the powers of government. In some, the paper might seem to do so but the reality is that the paper is ignored to an even greater extent than it is here.

      And at least one has a particularly comical construct: a “constitution” that says certain rights are protected — but then in another article explicitly prohibits any courts from reviewing any government actions against those pretended constitutional restraints. (See the Dutch constitution, article 120.)

      So subjects of those countries know that they have no rights other than what the government deigns to permit them at that time, subject to revocation or abridgment at a moment’s notice. Come to think of it, the term “subject” is significant: it expresses the relationship of the people and their government, with the government as master and superior and the people as obedient underlings.

  6. I feel the need to buy a confederate flag for *exactly* the same reason! (despite the fact that I have absolutely no connection to the south or anything to do with the flag.

    I want one because they say I shouldn’t have one!

Comments are closed.