Quote of the Day
It’s interesting how gun ownership is the only thing I can think of where many people feel comfortable blaming you or trying to make you feel guilty for the actions of others. Like yesterday, comments to the effect “kids were shot at a water park because you gun nuts won’t give up your toys!”
We don’t do this with anything else.
When a drunk driver wipes out a family (10,000 drunk driving deaths per year!), nobody guilts you for having a couple beers that day. Because they know the drunk driver’s crime does not mean you are irresponsible or criminal. Between all causes, alcohol kills around 2-3x as many people as die in gun-related causes annually.
STDs kill thousands each year, but aside from the very religious, few try to publicly shame the sexually promiscuous for those deaths.
Heart disease kills…more people than anything else. Nobody is protesting at McDonalds.
And guns, while they can be used for monstrous crimes, also have considerable social utility for sport and self-defense.
[and]
There are probably many more examples. Just an interesting phenomenon.
[and]
I should clarify that I mean human activity.
Obviously, people often blame entire cultural, racial, or religious groups for the crimes of one of their own.
Maybe therein lies the answer though. Gun ownership is made into its own sort of caricatured ideological identity by the people who despise it.
That’s wrong of course. As @davidyamane says in his new book, “guns are normal and normal people use guns”.
Kostas Moros @MorosKostas
Posted on X, June 16, 2024
Grouping people makes it easier to demonize all of them by the characteristics of a few. It is an easy “solution” to a difficult problem. Democrats are communists… give them free helicopter rides. Republicans are ignorant… send them to education camps.
I prefer, but certainly contribute my share of inappropriate group shaming, to judge people as individuals.
Commies are all the same, no shame in stigmatizing that.
Reminds me of some old friends I had, one was a philosopher and one was an artist. The artist one was going on vacation & requested help tending to his vegetable garden for a few weeks, in exchange for however many vegetables people wanted. Well our philosopher friend pipes up, “and he’s a socialist, so if you see anything you like inside his house you can go ahead and take that too.” I know it kind of sounds like a table, but this actually happened to me once.
I tend to hang out with a lot of misfits and weirdos.
I’m told the fashionable term now is “neurodiverse.” Personally, I identify as a misfit weirdo and my pronouns are fuck/off.
I’m going to have to remember this for one or the other of my Leftist Brothers and their Stalinist Wives. Of course I may never get invited there again, so until I figure out how to store a table saw in the volume of a clothes hamper in my apartment, discretion is the better part of valor.
Get a tabletop model?
Those are terrible for actually using though.
I would probably replace my kitchen table with a contractor saw,. Take the fence off, crank the blade down, cover with tablecloth when not in use.
Anything to avoid contact with the in-laws.
“It’s interesting how gun ownership is the only thing I can think of where many people feel comfortable blaming you or trying to make you feel guilty for the actions of others.”
Yes, and there are only two types of people making those arguments.
People to ignorant to be in the conversation in the first place.
And people so evil they will tell any lie or use any device they can to disarm you for destruction.
Our failure to concede this point, our normalcy bias if you will. Is what the communist relies on most heavily. (As there is so few elite ones.)
They live and work toward our outright murder.
And we just refuse to believe anyone is that evil/stupid.
We go out of our way to find the flaws in their logic, praying they will listen to reason.
When obviously no reason or logic was used to make the argument in the first place.
satan must be laughing till he pisses himself.
Gun control is a murderous lie. “Shall not be infringed” was a shouted warning from the passed millions dead from it.
But here we go again.
A sub-type of the ignorant are the very emotionally-driven useful idiots who feel, not think, and guns make them feel icky.
I agree mostly. But they seem to have no problem with them when they control them.
“Icky” never applies to the enforcement caste in government. And most of those same useful idiots smiled in approval when they murdered Lavoy Finnicum.
So, I try to never forget who their useful idiots for. Cause their whole life is politics. And everybody knows that political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
I was halfway through and was thinking loudly “YES THEY DO! ‘White privilege’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ and the other leftist talking points.” Glad to see he caveated that sort of thing.
Commies and control-freaks will group people together and guilt-by-association however they find useful. Drive a big truck, then you must hate the planet. Must ban big trucks.
Have more than two kids, then you must hate the planet, because we are overpopulated already.
Go to church, you must be some morally up-tight controlling person who wants to strap a religious straight-jacket on everyone and make the Handmaiden’s Tale reality.
On the other hand, he’s wrong, in a way; guns and gun ownership -IS- a symbol of a certain type of mindset WRT self-reliance, and therefore anti-State positions. I’d bet I have more in common philosophically with a fellow gunnie than most of the people in my profession, on my street, attend my church, and certainly more than with my typical government representative.
If any one complains about how many children someone else has, I have to remind them of how the Social Security program works, and SOMEbody has to have the children to pay for his Social Security payments.
Yes, I’m working up to be a really popular person for stupid, crazy leftists (but I repeat myself) to be around.