Taking action to prevent terrorists from having access to assault weapons would be a good start. However, it seems that in the waning days of this Congress, there is more appetite for advancing un-American and counter-productive proposals such as closing the borders to Muslims or ethnically profiling whole communities.
To reiterate what Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has testified to Congress, that with the current threat picture, homeland security cannot be achieved without sensible gun control laws.
Bennie G. Thompson
House Homeland Security Committee ranking member (D-Miss)
September 21, 2016
Homeland security means keeping assault weapons off our streets
[Sometimes I’m just amazed that people can say and believe the things they do. Immigration from other countries is not a constitutionally protected right. There isn’t anything more American than our country’s founding document. The right to keep and bear arms is a specific enumerated right protected by that document. Is this guy’s mind that well partitioned that he can’t connected what he wrote in consecutive sentences?
The only way this makes sense to me is that people say things with the knowledge, at some level, people will hear what they want to hear. The anti-gun politician will say they “respect the Second Amendment and they don’t want to ban guns”. The next sentence will be that they “support the banning of assault weapons”. It could be that those sort of contradictory messages work on both the receiver and the sender. They say and hear what they want depending upon individual biases of the person at that particular moment. And those biases change from second to second. For example, one second they are of the opinion that the Bill of Rights is important and should be respected. The next second they believe nothing should stand in the way of preventing terrorists from murdering innocent people. They somehow cannot make the connection that these two beliefs are incompatible.
It could be this a built-in psychological mechanism common to almost all people.
I view it as some sort of mental illness.—Joe]
Those who need to know already know what the following means. If it’s not crystal clear to you then don’t worry about it. It’s not for you. It’s more fun and games for the NSA:
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I lived in MS the first 23 years of my life. Bennie Thompson is as big an idiot as they come….
“Taking action to prevent terrorists from having access to assault weapons would be a good start.”
Speaking of idiots; that right there is about as idiotic as it comes. So you know someone to be a terrorist, and you walk up to him and say, “Please Mister Terrorist, I’ll have to take that ‘assault weapon’ from you, and then you may go on your merry way…”
In what universe would that make the slightest bit of sense?
No; the only purpose of gun restriction is to disarm the good people, criminals, politicians and terrorists being natural allies against the rest of us. Terrorists (by which we mean Islamists) are just the most recent, convenient excuse to fuck with the good people.
In a just world, if we know who the terrorists are we kill them and have done with it. Then we proselytize on the value and benefits of liberty and human rights as understood by the American founders. We don’t seek to build a permanent bureaucracy and legal system with terrorism as the founding premise.
The quote, “You will know them by their fruits” comes to mind. In this case the “fruit” is the new authoritarian system that’s being built around the dying embers of the Constitution.
The anti-gun politician will say they “respect the Second Amendment and they don’t want to ban guns”. The next sentence will be that they “support the banning of assault weapons”.
I believe this is because at some level, anti-gun folks don’t really see “assault weapons” as “guns”. They see them as WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), more akin to nuclear warheads, anthrax, and Sarin gas than “traditional” arms. Thus, at some level, their statements are not contradictory.
The cognitive dissonance doesn’t come until they need to define the term, “assault weapon”, and cannot without including a huge number of non-scary-looking semi-automatic firearms. OTOH, by the time they need to define it, it’s too late for us; they have already been elected and are free to include whatever they want in the ban.
In more general terms, whenever someone says, “I support the Second Amendment (or X) but. . .”
Everything before “but” is a lie.