@Rx_Ed I think #gunsense means guns should NOT be sold to people who are bat-shit crazy. That eliminates #2A supporters.
Michael @consultmelater
Tweeted on August 26, 2015
[This is what they think of you and Second Amendment rights.—Joe]
Update: In the comments Michael says:
My comment is being misread. After reading it again I can see how many are thinking that I refered to #2A supporters as bat-shit crazy. On the contrary, my intended statement was that only #2A supporters should be allowed to have guns.
I apologize for the confusion.
This echoes the Soviet definition of “insane”: anyone opposing the Soviet dictatorship. And of course it does, because he’s another one of those.
And they wonder why we object to psychological tests for firearm ownership.
Because that has NEVER been abused in the history of humanity…
Andrei Snezhnevsky, father of Soviet psychiatry in the service of the state was unavailable for comment.
It’s doubtful that outbursts like this come from people who even pause to consider what they are saying – completely ruled by emotion on the subject. What’s weird is that they may be fully functioning at a relatively high level on other topics and in other endeavors – but the gunz topic just switches off any neural pathways to their logic center.
It seems like this disease may be spreading, too. You see and hear (mostly see in writing, because these idiots don’t necessarily like to display their ignorance where they can be identified) a lot of similar statements: “Anyone who would do [insert some minor infraction] should be killed.” ” All those [insert group that isn’t like you] should be rounded up.”
So what’s the cause? Public education? Decades of liberal media brainwashing? Brain-eating virus? Or, more likely, the lack of decency and politeness required to log on and spew – rather than say crap like that in public and be gently (or not so gently) corrected?
My comment is being misread. After reading it again I can see how many are thinking that I refered to #2A supporters as bat-shit crazy. On the contrary, my intended statement was that only #2A supporters should be allowed to have guns.
I apologize for the confusion.
You must admit you were asking for it.
So anyway; who gets to decide who’s batshit crazy and should therefore have their rights officially violated? Even if “successful” that just closes one avenue of gun acquisition. What’s to stop a batshit crazy person (who also supports the 2A, for surely there must be someone out there who supports the 2A and is also batshit crazy) from getting their guns illegally? There are those just waiting for guns to be banned so they can make bank in the black market. I’d do it myself.
The point of course is; trying to decide who is and is not batshit crazy, and then attempting to deny gun sales to them, is in itself batshit crazy.
Finally; whoever would take on the actual job of determining who is batshit crazy for the purpose of denying them their rights, is, for sure and for certain, batshit crazy. So how about let’s offer up the position and then lock up anyone who applies for the job?
There was that California State Senator Leland Yee (D) who supported every gun control measure that came before the Senate but who was running guns to the gangs on the side.
There must have been a calculation that the laws would increase his profit.
And right here is where many who believe they support the 2A will help erode it. Once Progressives have another tool for denying 2A rights, they’ll attempt to expand on it until it affects everyone. There are already those believe that anyone who wants a gun is crazy.
Focusing on the gun acquisition as the problem is what’s crazy. As was recently pointed out; we didn’t look at lynchings by the KKK as a rope issue. We didn’t talk of who should and should not be allowed to posses rope, or how legislation should be used to keep rope out the wrong hands. Nor do we look at arson and immediately begin to put on a stupid, emotional act, pretending we’re about “controlling” access to matches, “but only for crazy people” of course.
An example that comes to mind is the incoherent ranting by Juan Williams on The Five, shortly after the TV reporter shooting. It was hard to parse all that he was saying. One comment was that the bad guy was crazy (plausible) and that therefore he should not have been armed (with no explanation of how that was supposed to have been achieved). I think he also mentioned that the bad guy had made threats and/or that he was perceived as threatening. Wow, if “I feel threatened by x” is a sufficient excuse to deny x the right to bear arms, the 2nd amendment certainly is a dead letter.
There was a cartoon, years ago, in which mathematician #1 has a sequence of equations, in the middle of which was “…and then a miracle occurs”. Mathematician #2 said: “I think you have a problem in step #4 there.”
That’s the problem with a lot of policy proposals. They leave out the hard stuff, assuming that a miracle will occur to solve the problem.
We see it here, with what the author no doubt thought would be an uncontroversial statement — that batsh!t-crazy people should not own guns. Problem is, he never defined “batsh!t-crazy”, nor explained who decides… which makes the proposal meaningless. (It would make just as much sense to say it in reverse: “only Nice, Good people should be allowed to have guns”. Great. Who decides?)
America was founded on the idea that The People should decide… and that, tempting though it is to restrict rights of some people for some reasons, it is far less dangerous to acknowledge the rights of ALL the people. That’s why the Bill of Rights doesn’t say that only certain people should have freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, or the right to a trial by jury, or freedom from self-incrimination… or the right to keep and bear arms. (If anyone wants to claim that only well-regulated militias should have arms, I refer you to Robb Allen.)
Given that bat-shit crazy people will usually find the means to obtain guns, and if not, will resort to knives, vehicles, gasoline, and bombs, I think we can safely say that everyone should be allowed to own guns.
When the bat-shit crazy guy emerges (sometimes with minimal warning signs, i.e. they can pass a background check with ease) we need to be able to stop them. The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun (just like we do when we use the police).
So, this whole mental health thing is a decoy. We don’t institutionalize a vast number of people who are likely to become violent and some states are lax in reporting disqualified persons, so what is Joe Citizen to do? Arm himself!
Better tell that to the NRA and other “pro” gun people, many of whom have been calling for “strengthening” the background check system.
This goes back to the 1990s when we had “pro gun” writers calling for better enforcement of existing gun laws, which they thought was clever as an alternative to passing more gun restrictions. The NRA was quite big on this idea for a while. In so doing they were declaring their support for gun restrictions as a legitimate means of dealing with crime. Thus was the pro 2A movement being used to buttress anti 2A precepts
How batshit crazy is THAT? The enemies of liberty have us contradicting ourselves, doing their work for them. On one hand we pretend to stand up for the constitutional principles, while on the other hand we call for strengthening a system which systematically denies people their constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Will someone please point out to us that article in the constitution which authorizes government to keep lists of people for the purpose of denying them certain constitutionally protected rights?
This sort of thing is why Neil Smith refers to the NRA as the country’s largest gun control organization.