NO ONE and I mean NO ONE needs access to semi-automatic weapons, with the exception of trained law enforcement. They are weapons of death meant only to kill and maim. They should be banned and outlawed.
Paul Leonardo @RealPleonardo
Tweeted on Tue, Jan 29, 2019
[What is the legal difference between “banned” and “outlawed”? Anything?
I could go on with picking this apart but it doesn’t matter. For a long time I’ve been saying, “Never let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.” That was important for a while. There were anti-freedom people actively trying to sell that story. They claimed they just wanted “reasonable gun safety laws”. Almost no one is telling that lie anymore. In the last few years the progressives have stopped trying to hide their delusions about guns and gun owners. Washington state put oppressive restrictions on all semi-automatic rifles. Other states and politicians are proposing greater restrictions and even bans on semi-autos. We are seeing a widespread mass delusion about guns and gun ownership.
As I have said many times before, quoting Robert Heinlein in a different context, “Delusions are often functional.”
Although I don’t have the data to prove this, nor the time and resources to gather the data, it is my hypothesis that a certain segment of the human population needs to hate other people. Racism, religious persecution, and homophobia and related aversions to sexual preferences are other manifestations of this. The 1960’s were a turning point for racism in this country with bans on interracial marriage disappearing in 1967. The later decades saw the fading of aversions of to people of different sexual preferences and finally the nationwide legalization of same sex marriage in 2015.
It is my further hypothesis that as those other hatreds diminished gun owners become the new target. This is demonstrated by the ramping up of gun restrictions in the 1960s. The democrats could no longer continue the open oppression of blacks with the Jim Crow laws and other open discrimination so they began targeting others such as gun owners and white men. This continued as the hatred of “sexual perverts” diminished (and the corresponding hatred of the fewer and fewer people opposed to gay rights). With the legalization, and general acceptance, of same sex marriage in 2015 the political left needed another target to hate. We now see a frenzy of hate from the political left. It undisguised, beyond reason, and unsupported by any rationalization. You see the face of this in the event at the Lincoln Center regarding the Covington students last week:
“We now know the kids of Covington Catholic were the real victims of the altercation in front of the Lincoln Memorial,” the statement added. “This is bigotry and its own brand of hatred. It is an ongoing display of anti-Trump, anti-life, anti-Catholic and anti-Christian bias. These are blatant bullying tactics designed to make conservatives and people of faith think twice before standing up for their beliefs or even having the audacity to wear a ‘MAGA’ hat in public, let alone smile while doing it.”
In order to accumulate power they need a hated enemy. Gun owners fit the bill and are a significant component of their targets of hate. We are doubly hated because gun ownership is a means to resist their exercise of oppressive power.
We are in for a rough ride and it appears our best hope for survival is with the courts giving us enough time to change the culture. But if my hypothesis is correct many people will need a new target of hate. Can we make that the enemies of freedom?—Joe]
