The only benefit to society of guns is population control.
StillLooking
November 24, 2012
Comment to Obama should now push for gun control
[Yes. I’m sure over population was of such concern the authors of the Bill of Rights made sure it was appropriately addressed.—Joe]
the nation is founded on evil…anyone can see that
Smooth Kobra
Tweeted on November 29, 2012.
[This pissed me off pretty good.
My response was:
@smoothkobra I’ll take you to the border with all your stuff that fits into my SUV if you NEVER come back. @Gay_Cynic @anothergunblog @TL671
He doesn’t deserve to live in this country and with that attitude he certainly isn’t going to make this country a better place.—Joe]
@revenant0202 My apologies to your wife! Is it impotence? Three inch penis? Or just pathetic? @linoge_wotc @moronwatch @nakedaxiom
Nick (@WarriorBanker)
December 1, 2012
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.—Joe]
This is the conversation the gun lobby wants you to be having.
Dan Gross
President of the Brady Campaign
November 2012
In response to the question, “Would you, at a moment when a stranger is shooting at you, prefer to have a gun, or not?”
[I find it very telling that Gross avoids the question. This is especially true because I recently finished listening to (and then purchased the hardcover version) Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception.
This is an excellent book. The title is a bit misleading because the book is about detecting deception which doesn’t necessarily mean lying. But “Spy the Deception” or even “Detect the Deception” just doesn’t have the “ring” to it that “Spy the Lie” does. Also of note is that the authors are former CIA officers.
Gross is being deceptive. He does not want to discuss the truth. In the famous words of Col. Nathan R. Jessup, Mr. Gross, “You can’t handle the truth!” And because Gross cannot handle the truth his organization is, and rightly so, doomed to the dustbin of history.—Joe]
People don’t trust government to do what’s right. They are very attracted to the idea of a nation of individuals, so they don’t think about what’s good for the collective.
Tom Mauser
Gun-control activist.
November 2012
The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control)
[It’s good to have him explicitly say it. Mauser (how ironic!) is opposed to a nation of individuals and individual rights. The collective is what is important.
Mauser is opposed to not just a specific enumerated right called out in the Bill of Rights, but the very foundation of this nation. He should move to a country more closely politically aligned with his views. I’m thinking North Korea would be appropriate. The United States Constitution clearly was designed for people totally different from him.—Joe]
It’s my first gun show. I’m trying to keep an open mind about the firearm fetishists who frequent these death markets.
Christopher Evans
November 14, 2012
The Plain Dealer
How to buy guns, cheap: Christopher Evans
[H/T to Robb.
Let’s just say I’m “skeptical” of his claim about trying to keep an open mind.—Joe]
We must repeal the Second Amendment, demand the peaceable surrender of all handguns, and hunt down and destroy all those who do not comply.
Philip Wilson
November 27, 2012
Comment to Gun Control, RIP.
[This is so you know the attitude of those who oppose freedom and the Bill of Rights.
And Wilson, you should take point on that hunt.—Joe]
Not all the media is in the tank for Obama. It’s a heck of a situation, though, when Pravda is the one hold out.
David Hardy
November 26, 2012
Not all the media is in the tank for Obama
[Even excluding Pravda it’s a slight exaggeration to say that all the media is in the tank for Obama. But it’s close enough to be funny.
The most interesting part of the article is that Pravda is touting the free market and criticizes Obama and the U.S. for repeating the USSR mistake of going down the Marxist path.—Joe]
In Boston, we had a name for the city’s laws about self-defence weapons, from pepper spray on up: “Call 911 and Die.”
danceronice
September 2, 2012
Comment in a forum with the topic of Gun control: you for or against?
[Yup. There is also a book by that name.—Joe]
The Left insists the Nazis are a great evil. It is misdirection. They are the same –Totalitarians. We must resist them both, communists and fascists. They will always be with us. We must never relent.
Kit Carson
November 22, 2012
Comment to The “Hollywood Holocaust” and Other Cold War Myths
[H/T to Glenn Reynolds who was going to get QOTD with his post but a lot of other people already quoted him.
Reynolds claim brings up an interesting thought:
Refusing to hire Communists is on the same moral plane as refusing to hire Nazis. Which is to say: It’s a good and admirable thing.
To the best of my knowledge it is not against the law in the U.S. to discriminate in hiring based on the politics of the job candidate. The communists and Nazis both used party membership in hiring to great effect. I wonder how much it is being used by the left now in jobs and if it can be openly used. I know one rabid Obama supporter who changed her name on Facebook because she believed it was making it difficult to get work.
If employers openly hired and purged existing employees based on their politics what would be the result? Could that turn our collapse into socialism around? Or would it inspire laws such that employers could not discriminate or even required discrimination based on loyalty to the socialists in this country?—Joe]
Health insurance will soon be extinct. Unlike other members of the species – property and casualty insurance, life insurance, liability insurance, auto insurance – political predators have been steadily killing off health insurance over the years. Soon it will cease to exist, allowing for more intrusive regulation of behavior.
Jeffrey Singer
November 16, 2012
Jeffrey Singer: Health insurance an endangered species
[H/T to Barb L. via email.
I’ve heard it claimed that Obama Care has to have been specifically designed to destroy the health care industry. Singer explains why the health insurance industry will be destroyed.—Joe]
This battle for ‘common-sense’ gun control laws pits emotion and passion against logic and reason. All too often in such a contest, logic loses. So, expect more meaningless, if not harmful, ‘gun control‘ legislation. Good news – if you’re a crook.
Larry Elder
From Thinkexist.com.
[I have been unable to determine when he said this. While true 15 years ago expecting more gun control legislation is less and less a good bet. I’m skeptical it is because logic and reason suddenly are winning contests against emotion and passion. I expect it is because we are accumulating more emotion and passion on our side.—Joe]
What we’re really talking about is a wonderful day set aside on the fourth Thursday of November when no one diets. I mean, why else would they call it Thanksgiving?
Erma Bombeck
From Quote DB.
[I hope everyone had a nice turkey day. I spent it with son James, his wife Kelsey, my parents, brothers, Uncle Darrell, Aunt Alice, and brother Doug’s children Amy (and Nate and Jared), Lisa (and Kevin) and Brad.
We had way too much really good food and stuffed ourselves.—Joe]
Since nanny Bloomberg has chosen to limit his citizens self defense option his failure to call in the Guard is failure to live up to his obligations as their nanny.
tdiinva
November 19, 2012
Comment to Bloomberg F-Bombs Request for National Guard Aid.
[Via a link from Sebastian.
It’s a fundamental problem of being a nanny with a scope larger than a few children. Just because a nanny is an appropriate solution in some situations does not mean is is possible to scale it up and make it work at a much larger scale. If it did work we would see both biological and manmade systems organized much differently than we do. Both evolution and the free marketplace would have created systems with central control to dominate over those systems that pushed the decision making to the lower levels rather than pushing it up. Your brain doesn’t control the details of cell metabolism and your web browser doesn’t control how the mouse determines if it has been moved.
I’m channeling Thomas Sowell as best I can with the following.
The problem is one of information. You, a fully functional adult, know more than anyone else about your situation and what is best for you. You know a lot more about your family than people not in your family. You know more about how to do your job than people that don’t do your job. You know more about your community than people outside your community. And you know a lot more about your situation than does the mayor of your city, the governor of your state, and the president of the country. Central planning fails because the people with the most information about the situation are not making the decisions.
Even if it were possible for all the information needed for making optimal decisions were to be communicated to the central planners they cannot process the information nor come up with innovative alternatives that the individuals and small groups closer to the problem can.
One might be tempted to say that central planning failed in the past because of this fundamental problem but we have much better communication and processing power than we did even a decade or two ago. Central planning can work now that we have computers. Those people are wrong.
Even ignoring the obvious SkyNet dystopian scenarios look at the way engineers solve control problems in complex systems now. Heinlein was a visionary in many ways but “Mike” the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress will never be implemented as Heinlein envisioned it—handling payroll, air flow, mass launchers, communications, and a thousand other things.
Whether it is a large software program, a cell phone network, or a sewage treatment plant the far cheaper, better performing, and feasible solution is to delegate “authority” to very small subsystems to solve the issues that are local. The video driver in your computer is given a command to set the background to a color and output text at certain coordinates on the display. The video driver “knows” how to control the chips of the graphics board to change the color of the display and what address in memory corresponds to the coordinates of the screen. The local cell tower “knows” signal strength of your phone, the number of other cell phones it is handling, and communicates with nearby cell towers to enable a clean handoff such that you don’t have a service interruption as you move from location to location. The components of the sewage system control air and water flow rates, agitation, and chemical balances without knowledge of the price of electricity or the growth rate of the town it serves.
At each subsystem level the information and the resources are available such that they can do the right thing to operate their area of responsibility in a manner that is a tradeoff of performance, time to implement, initial cost, and operating cost.
Bloomberg and other central planners do not and cannot have the information to even approximate optimal decisions and they deny resources to those that do have the information. The result is a dystopian world that has the potential to be just as catastrophic as one where “SkyNet” has all the information and resources to create Elysium but instead makes the decision to destroy humanity.—Joe]
Isn’t looking for real or literary meaning in a Tweet the modern equivalent of mining for diamonds in a goat’s ass?
Rivrdog
November 19, 2012
Comment to Quote of the day—DarthWeiner75.
[He’s got a point there.—Joe]
I guess since you can’t walk around with your dick hanging out #opencarry is the next best thing. #juvenile
DarthWeiner75
Tweeted on November 17, 2012.
[It’s another Markley’s Law Monday! Via a Tweet from Linoge.
It’s “interesting” that someone would consider the exercise of a constitutionally protected right “juvenile”. Would he consider exercise of your right to not incriminate yourself “being a sissy”? Or maybe “freedom of speech is for crybabies”.—Joe]
Of all the classes of men, I dislike most those who make their livings by talking—actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. All of them participate in the shallow false pretenses of the actor who is their archetype. It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause of the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.
Henry Louis Mencken
From Minority Report, H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks, Knopf, 1956.
[It would seem to me that the appreciation of the applause is an important item. If the talker causes the listener to think and contemplate it would seem to me that you have an entirely different species than if the talker stirs the emotions with the intent to generate applause.
Still, I understand his point. I get particularly annoyed at actors and politicians that know how to “work a crowd” but know next to nothing about the topic they are pontificating on.—Joe]
Increasing taxes won’t increase their total tax revenue. Politicians have tried this for decades. It doesn’t work. The only way to increase tax revenue is for the economy to grow… and higher tax rates do not pave this path to prosperity.
Ron Paul was spot on. Economic ignorance abounds. And all the Talking Heads in the mainstream media blathering away about the Fiscal Cliff are only reinforcing his premise.
Bottom line– the Fiscal Cliff doesn’t matter. The US passed the point of no return a long time ago.
Simon Black
Guess what they’re NOT cutting in the Fiscal Cliff…
November 15, 2012
[H/T Tyler Durden.
I’m headed for a cabin in the woods this weekend. What are you doing?—Joe]
Guns owners are disrespectful of authority. A failure to rely on authorities is an invariable sign of improper and overly independent attitudes. The mere fact that they gather together to talk about guns at gun shops, gun shows, shooting ranges, and on the internet means that they have some plot going against us normal people. A gun owner has no right to associate with another gun owner.
Therefore, to help ensure our right to happiness and safety we must ban and seize all guns from private hands, and forbid NRA-based criticism towards people who are only trying to help. Searching the homes of all NRA members for any guns and pro-gun literature will go a long way towards reducing crime.
jack burton
November 14, 2012
Comment to Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough.
[I’m pretty sure this was sarcasm. But I don’t know for sure.
Regardless, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ!—Joe]
For people like myself who are not satisfied with the justifications for carrying dangerous weapons, it sometimes seems that your viewpoint isn’t important when it’s a right guaranteed by the Constitution. Keep in mind, the Constitution has been changed before and can change again as long as you’re willing to put your efforts in the right place in Washington to get laws changed.
Rachel Elmalawany
November 14, 2012
Columnist: Gun control doesn’t control enough
[Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, the constitution can’t be changed “in Washington”. It takes quite a bit more than that.
Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, the entire Bill of Rights was a qualifier for agreeing to the constitution to begin with. If one of those items are nulled out the agreement to form a union is nulled.
Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, that if you were to successful in repealing the 13th Amendment you would encounter, and rightly so, “stiff resistance” in the implementation. There are probably just as many people that would resist the implementation of a 2nd Amendment repeal as there are that would resist a 13th Amendment repeal implementation.
Keep in mind, Ms. Elmalawany, there are about 220 million people in the U.S. that don’t own guns. There are about 80 million people who do and who consume about 10 billion rounds of ammo each year. That’s what we do for practice. Please don’t attempt to verify our level of resolve or the quality of our practice.—Joe]