Quote of the day—Tim Bengtson

Let me enlighten him and other readers about what it takes to buy a new handgun from a dealer in California.

First, you must be 21 years of age or older. You must possess a “Firearm Safety Certificate,” which requires that you pass a written test and pay a fee of $25. You must demonstrate that you can safely load, unload, and handle the gun. The handgun you want to purchase must be on a list of “safe” handguns approved for sale in the state. This list is suspiciously short. You must fill out state and federal forms – fees are required.

Your gun will be registered. You must have proof of identity and residence. You will have to wait 10 days before you are allowed to take possession of your gun. When you take your gun home, it must be unloaded and locked in the trunk of your car or in a locked carrying case.

Or maybe the writer is just suggesting that we need more ineffective and unconstitutional laws that don’t reduce crime but do hinder law-abiding shooters. Yes, that must be it.

Tim Bengtson
September 3, 2015
More gun control? We have enough already
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

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5 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Tim Bengtson

  1. I like it all except for the “we have enough already” part in the title, which implies that some violation of a basic human rights is both good and necessary.

    In fact there is a binary decision everyone makes, either consciously or unconsciously. The two choices are as follows.
    Wholesale infringement of human rights by government is;
    A) a legitimate and useful means of dealing with crime and dispensing justice as long as it’s done by those who do the best job of pretending to be smart and pretending to care.
    B) illegitimate and must therefore be rejected out of hand.

    Almost always, that decision is made unconsciously, and attempts to bring it, as a decision to be made at all, to someone’s attention is usually taken as an assault on that person’s character. Which it is if they chose “A” already without thinking about it and now don’t want to be bothered with it.

    For most of my lifetime, the NRA leadership, most gun owners, practically all gun writers, and the entire Republican Party would choose “A” so as to avoid being called names by Progressives or because they were Progressives themselves. What is more valuable after all; preserving American principles and defending human rights, or being liked by Progressives? Mostly it’s been the latter.

    All that being said, newspaper editors typically add the titles to people’s letters. I’ve had it done to mine. So that’s not the big deal. It just reminded me of this issue of human rights being a binary concept, along with the fact that a lot of people fail to see it that way.

    • It occurs to me that the reason approach A is wrong — apart from the fact that it is based on a lack of principle and integrity — is that surrendering piecemeal will result in being defeated piecemeal. The various gun ban outfits have said, quite explicitly, that this is their strategy, and a lot of us have been accommodating them and suffered the consequences.

  2. I can only add that the Firearms Safety Certificate expires every five years so if you buy pistols less frequently than that you need to retake the test and pay a fee each time.

  3. The FOID brown rectangular card, because yellow stars and punk triangles were already taken.

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