Category Archives: Quote of the Day

Quote of the day—Rolf

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They do not care about productive contributions. They are about marginalizing, hatred, bigotry, and challenging any threat to their worldview. They are like a teenager who KNOWS!!1! they are right. They have their stereotypes, and will cling to them tightly, because like a vampire fears sunlight these sorts of minds fear reality; they know outside their temporary bubble, where they imagine they are safe because the illusion has been going on for so long, they wouldn’t stand a chance, and that thought terrifies them. SO, rather than face their fears, they retreat further into their imaginary world, where the law IS the effect, where the average person is bad but government people are good, where real independence is bad and dependence is good, where things are good or evil, and where facts and ethics are all relative.

Rolf
July 14, 2014
Comment to Quote of the day—Qrys Bin Thynkn (@QrysBinThynkn)
[In this particular case I agree completely with Rolf but perhaps not in more general instances. This particular immature, name calling, bigot read my blog post about him and continued with the penis insults on Twitter here, here, and here:

The fact that you felt the need to single out my quote tells everyone that you do, in fact, have a small penis. 😉

And you still comment. LOL!! Must be really small. 😉

Do you think these small penis gun advocates realize by ripping into my post they are basically admitting they have a small penis?

Logic and facts are beyond the capability of this guy. There is no such thing as debate using facts, benefits versus hazards, or rights versus reasonable regulation. It about delivering the last lame insult.

I guess you have to play the hand you were dealt. And if that is all that you have you do the best you can with it. But it’s still a losing hand.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Qrys Bin Thynkn (@QrysBinThynkn)

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[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Mark (‏@tazcat2011).

It’s mind boggling how stupid some people are. In what universe does this even begin to make sense or have any hope of making a productive contribution to a discussion about gun ownership?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Eric Krupin

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“The Gulag Archipelago” is not beach reading. (Although Solzhenitsyn’s searingly sarcastic style makes it anything but a dry collection of facts.) The evil that it obsessively documents is so dark that even reading about it is often difficult to bear. But anyone with pretentions of understanding the world we live in needs to go through it from first page to last.

But if you aren’t willing to make the effort, here’s the lesson boiled down for you: Totalitarianism doesn’t begin with a Stalin or a Hitler. It begins with *you*, on the day that you let a government become more powerful than the people it governs. Remember that or someday it might not be the Russians or the Jews or the Serbs that the men with guns come for. It just might be you…

Eric Krupin
June 13, 2001
Comment to Amazon’s listing of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One).
[For many years I put off even considering these books because they were so massive. I couldn’t imagine the topic could be interesting enough to keep me going. I imagined it to be an exhaustingly long, dry, and difficult slog.

I was wrong. I was very wrong.

I’m not sure how Solzhenitsyn did it. I’m not sure I see it as “searingly sarcastic” although there is some of that. Maybe it’s that he didn’t do a chronological telling of his eight years in prison from his arrest, through interrogation, transport to the various prisons and labor camps and the conditions there. You get that in bits and pieces but you also get those same aspects from the perspective of numerous other survivors who were in different interrogation centers, on trains, and in different camps and prisons.

You learn about the economics of the slave labor. You learn how the edicts of production “norms” resulted in the falsification of records at the slave labor camp where raw materials were harvested (trees, clay for bricks, ore for metal, etc.), continuing through the transportation, storage and distribution facilities, and then finally having the nonexistent finished product “stolen” or “destroyed by weather”. At each stage the people responsible had strong incentives to continue the fraud and did.

The lies told for public relations were amazing. The canal built with hand labor in 30 months “without a single fatality”. There were 100,000 people who started on the project and there were 100,000 when they finished the project. Never mind the 250,000 replacements brought in during the course of the project.

Stalin wanted the canal built in 30 months and no one dared to fail in completing it on time. As in software on a tight schedule features were removed during the course of the project until they did meet the schedule. The canal was only 14 feet deep in places. Only the smallest of ships could traverse it and traffic was near zero when it was finished.

It is an amazing set of books and I agree with Krupin. Read them. And stop that from happening here.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Glenn Reynolds

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When police trespass on your property to stop you videoing them, you should be allowed to kill them, put their heads on pikes as a warning to others, sell their organs to Chinese organleggers, and use the money to buy billboards mocking their superiors for lawlessness.

It’s a modest proposal, but it would probably reduce misconduct.

Glenn Reynolds
July 10, 2014
MY LAW REFORM PROPOSAL
[I was a little surprised to see this from a law professor but I can see a case to be made for the proposal.

I suspect we would only have to have a national discussion about the merits of such a reform to effect a change in police attitude.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Michael Bloomberg

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In Colorado, we got a law passed. The NRA went after two or three state Senators in a part of Colorado where I don’t think there’s roads.

Michael Bloomberg
July 8, 2014
Michael Bloomberg Isn’t Afraid of the NRA
[The comment by Luvs2Brew addresses the facts better than anyone else I have seen so far:

First off the NRA did not initiate or even engage in these recalls until the very end. Many of us complained they were actually way late to the game. This was a grass roots recall by Coloradans who did not like the idea of our elected officials selling our rights out to out of state interests like Bloomberg.

Second, these recaps were not in rural areas where there were no roads. One was in Colorado Springs, home to the US Olympic Training Center, Cheyenne Mountain, the US Air Force Academy, Peterson Air Force Base and Fort Carson. The other was in Pueblo which is just south of us on I-25. And yes we have roads, and airports and indoor plumbing. So Bloomberg is either completely out of touch, or just a flat out liar.

I’m going with “completely out of touch” and mind boggling arrogance by someone who is unable to stop himself from lying.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Prager

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With conservatives’ obsession with guns there is no more surefire way to make oneself a god amongst the Teabilly crowd than to lure them in with a smile and an AR-15. On Thursday, Clint Didier, a Tea Party Republican, announced that he will be giving away two Ruger 2300 LC9 pistols and a DB-15 S rifle in an effort to gain support in his bid for retiring Washington Rep. Doc Hastings. Hastings is just the latest to prey upon conservatives’ paranoid ‘Yer not gonna git mah guns’ attitude. Who else has joined in this new tradition of winning over stupid people with weaponry?

John Prager
June 21, 2014
Death Dealers: Pathetic GOP Candidates Are Giving Away Assault Rifles to Buy Votes
[If the title of the article were actually true then wouldn’t they have to give a select fire rifle to everyone who agreed to vote for them? Or would it be one for each community and they would share it?

The entire article is filled with logical and factual errors. Did you catch the error above where he says “bid for retiring Washington Rep. Doc Hastings”? I didn’t know you could bid on people. Is Hasting going to be Didier’s slave if he has the winning bid?

Yet he thinks we are the stupid ones. Mr. Prager, Have you ever heard of projection?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ana Marie Cox

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Activists such as those at Everytown need to redraw focus away from the infrequent horror of mass shootings and get voters to recognize the daily tragedies of gun violence. A taller order, but just as necessary: make clear that the gun violence is not about violent people with guns – it’s about guns, period.

…

There is no such thing as a neutral position on guns, because there is no such thing as a neutral gun. Guns have one purpose: to kill things. They are no more neutral than a poison. They can be used for good or ill, but the reason they exist is to hurt someone. In the “bad guy with a gun” versus a “good guy with a gun” scenario, the problem isn’t who’s bad and who’s good, it’s that there is a gun involved, period.

Ana Marie Cox
July 8, 2014
This Is The Real Reason Gun Control Is Failing
[By this logic the police shouldn’t have guns either then because it doesn’t matter if they are a good guy with a gun or a bad guy with a gun. I have to conclude Cox has some sort of mental disorder to have their thinking this messed up.

In any case don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns away. As well as not letting clearly crazy people possess guns we shouldn’t let crazy people take our guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—smileycreek

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Food, water, shelter, and basic medical care are all basic human requirements that should never be withheld in a civilized society.

smileycreek
July 2, 2014
Comment to Income Inequality: A Desperate Situation With Real Solutions
[In smileycreek’s universe a “civilized society” is one where the government takes from each according to his ability, and gives to each according to his need.

I’m reading about just such a place in The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) and The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 2: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, 1918-1956. Tens of millions of people were murdered in an attempt to create such a society and it failed. And that is just one of many attempts that all ended in deaths of hundreds of thousands and in the case of the USSR tens of millions.

Even just this one sentence in smileycreek’s comment reveals the distortion required to believe lie of communism. The lie of communism is that people with no incentive to produce all they are able to will do so anyway. Who would willingly become a provider of “food, water, shelter, or basic medical care” if they could be forced to give it up without compensation by anyone?

The big distortion here is that is if I refuse to give my food, shelter, or (if I were a medical provider) my services to another unless I am compensated is considered “withholding”. That’s a warped definition. Yet that is also the basis of the current uproar about the SCOTUS ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. Nothing has been withheld. But the sound bite is better if it is phrased that way.

Communists like smileycreek can only win by lying. And they have lots of practice at it. It’s how government murder millions of innocent people.

Today people that openly support the beliefs of the Nazis are rightly hounded into silence and oblivion. Yet support for the beliefs of Communists is considered by nearly half of our country’s population to be the mark of decency, righteous, and “civilized society”. But the Communists of the 20th Century proved the Nazis were pikers in the game of governments murdering innocent people.

Perhaps that is the key to understanding those who advocate Communism and yet hate Nazism. To them the Nazis weren’t ruthless enough.–Joe]

Quote of the day—Sy Oppenheimer (@SyOppers)

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[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Mark (‏@tazcat2011).

This guy didn’t even bother with an attempt at a rational argument. It was just veiled threats then this. But what do you expect when this is the best they have?—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rex Haberman

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There is no 2nd Amendment issue with making the gun owners register with the government and license their guns. There is no 2nd Amendment issue to completely disarm the country except for fully licensed and controlled guns. To be more specific, the only guns that should be allowed outside of highly controlled gun clubs are ones used for legal hunting and farmers protecting their livelihood. Yes, you can own a gun, but it must be licensed. No one can own an assault gun. No one can own a pistol.

Rex Haberman
July 2, 2014
Gun Control: Saving America From Itself
[Don’t ever let anyone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.

Haberman clearly hasn’t read the Heller decision. Pistols are in common use and clearly protected. Firearms for home defense are explicitly protected. This doesn’t even touch the issue of the “chilling effect” associated with registration and licensing.

One has wonder what color the sky is in Haberman’s universe.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Greasy Tony

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The NRA are a bunch of thugs that take idiot’s money and laugh all the way to the bank.

Greasy Tony
July 3, 2014
Comment to What do Gun Control people think of NRA saying media should stop calling barbara shooter a shooter?
[“Greasy Tony” needs to do some research on the NRA and their members. It’s extremely clear his prejudice does not match my rather large sample of both NRA representatives (many women smaller than me) and NRA members. But I doubt anything so suspect as facts would change his mind. His mind almost for certain works at “a different level”.

But it’s good to know what people think of you. It helps prepare you for when they make contact with you or advocate for political action. These are not people with anything more than a tenuous connection to reality and they are bent on your destruction.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Rose City Rose

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What I propose is the following:

  1. An act which creates a new class of organization, defined by violent ideology and/or a history of three or more ideologically-driven acts of violence, the members of which will be presumed to be a danger to the public safety and therefore prohibited from owning a firearm of any sort.
  2. An act which requires all persons promoting unambiguously violent ideologies, whether as members of an organization described above or as individuals, to surrender all firearms.
  3. A rapid, active, and decisive nationwide sweep, employing the military if necessary, to totally disarm all persons known to be hostile to the peaceful process of democracy.
  4. A national hotline to anonymously report firearm possession by persons who advocate ideologically-motivated violence.

Rose City Rose
July 2, 2014
A Completely Different Proposal for Gun Control
[Progressives would qualify. Perhaps even the Democrat Party by name. But I don’t think they are who she had in mind. It’s funny how that works, huh?

Beyond the Second Amendment issues there is the due process (5th and 14th Amendments as well as common law) issue, 1st Amendment (freedom of association if not freedom of expression) and 4th Amendment issues to address. And once she gets past those there is the little problem of finding the millions of guns, taking, and preventing their rearming even if they could disarm them once.

Molṑn labé Rose. Why don’t you take point?—Joe]

Quote of the day—2Bill

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Ban all semiautomatic weapons and create a national registry of all gun owners. No need to change the second amendment, even though that would be great. We could reduce the number of guns on the street and at the very least force any would be shooter to reload more often.

Let’s start by banning all guns except revolvers, bolt action rifles and breach action shotguns. Then let’s register every gun and require liability insurance for every owner.

This proposal would pass any second amendment challenge and would even satisfy the scrutiny of the Heller decision.

2Bill
June 27, 2014
Comment to 9 signs America’s gun obsession is getting worse
[They either have not read the Heller decision or have a terrible problem with reading comprehension. The proposals would not pass the “common use” test. And even if it were to pass the confiscation efforts would be “problematic”.

Then there is the problem of registration. It’s unknown whether that would pass Constitutional challenges. You can’t be made to register in order to exercise your First Amendment rights and it seems unlikely you can be made to register in order to exercise your Second Amendment rights. The “chilling effect” would be very “pronounced”. Especially after the government just confiscated all the semi-autos.

And the difficulties in registration would be horrific. Getting “registered” for ObamaCare was and is a big mess. Getting people to register themselves and their guns when they don’t want to be registered and want the system to fail would be far more “interesting.” Canada couldn’t make it work and there would be a lot more resistance in this country.

It’s very clear 2Bill has crap for brains.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Amanda Porche

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The obvious answer would be to do away with readily available fire arms despite who it pisses off.

Amanda Porche
June 10, 2014
Comment to Bullet-Resistant Blanket Could Protect Kids Against School Shootings
[Amanda, are you going to be taking point on the team tasked with going door-to-door “doing away with readily available firearms”? Or do you just demand others do the messy, short life expectancy, jobs?

Don’t ever let someone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—People of New Hampshire

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And as it is the opinion of this Convention, that certain amendments and alterations in the said Constitution would remove the fears and quiet the apprehensions of many of the good people of this state, and more effectually guard against an undue administration of the federal government, — The Convention do therefore recommend that the following alterations and provisions be introduced in the said Constitution: —
. . . . .

XI. Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or to infringe the rights of conscience.

XII. Congress shall never disarm any citizen, unless such as are or have been in actual rebellion.

Convention of the Delegates of the People of the State of New Hampshire
June 21, 1788
New Hampshire’s Ratification
[H/T David Hardy.

Emphasis added.

The original intent of the people of New Hampshire in regards to what we now know as the Second Amendment is very clear. And it is also clear that what we have now is very far removed from that original intent.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Susie Madrak

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Do we have the ATF and BLM agents roll up in armored tanks? Do we use drone strikes? I can see the administration’s reluctance to have that confrontation — after all, it’s not as if gun control advocates were flooding the White House switchboard, screaming to ‘take them out!’ And then we do have the militia types all over the country, just waiting for an excuse to start their own local uprising. These assholes want a civil war so bad, they can taste it.

Some days, I wonder: Should we let them, and just get it over with? You know, settle the burning question about whose is bigger.

Susie Madrak
June 23, 2014
So At What Point Do We Actually Stand Up To The Gun Nuts?
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via Phil.

Molṑn labé Susie.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Pangur-Uaine

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The more guns the more killing. The gun culture is mass insanity. “Responsible gun-ownership” is an oxymoron. Any implement specifically designed to kill people is intrinsically evil. Total disarmament could save the species. Shoot the Second Amendment. The Fifth Commandment is right. Killing is wrong. Ban all weapons while we still have a shot at it.

Pangur-Uaine
June 22, 2014
Comment to Gun controversy lost on new shooting stars
[Via Jeff.

Simple solutions from simple minds.

Don’t ever let anyone get away telling you no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Althea Brown

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We should do our best to identify possible shooters and if possible, consciously work on not creating new shooters. The only way to do that is to either ban guns or learn as much about shooters as possible.

Althea Brown
June 10, 2014
Comment to Bullet-Resistant Blanket Could Protect Kids Against School Shootings
[Don’t ever let someone get away with telling you that no one wants to take your guns.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Greg Hamilton

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SheepTargets

The ultimate example of a complete refusal to confront reality. This is the answer of sheep. “Baaa, baaa, if I lay still and play dead maybe the wolf won’t eat me. I’ll be especially protected by this bright ass orange target thing. Nobody could possible figure out I’m under here.”

It’s not just that our country is becoming so divorced from reality that our solutions to problems have crossed the line to full-on completely mentally retarded, they have become completely and utterly insane.

Greg Hamilton
June 24, 2014
Facebook post about this product supposedly to protect kids from being shot at school.
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Neil Chasan

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I am for a constitutional amendment to eliminate the right to bear arms….lets have that constitutional convention.

Neil Chasan
June 18, 2014
Comment to Hillary Clinton On Gun Control: We Can’t Let ‘A Minority Of People’ Terrorize The Majority
[Sorry Chasan. The Second Amendment only recognizes and protects the preexisting right so even if you could repeal the Second Amendment we would still have that right. And even worse for you is that gun owners would vigorously defend that right in absence of the Second Amendment.

This is no different than if by some great deception and fraud the First or 13th amendment were repealed. Those rights would still exist and those rights would still be exercised if Chasan and/or his ilk did attempt to infringe those rights.

And if Chasan thinks he can take my guns and ammo then he should come on over to my place and try. It turns out he is a “neighbor” (I cross Mercer Island, where he lives, nearly every day on my way to work). But then we all know he doesn’t want to do the dirty work. He wants someone else, with guns, to do it for him.—Joe]