Category Archives: Quote of the Day

Quote of the day—Dennis Henigan

Posted on by

For the NRA, it was not supposed to be this way. After the Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment granted a limited right to have a gun in the home, the NRA bragged that it was just the “opening salvo” in a legal war to use the courts to dismantle the nation’s gun laws.

Yet three years, 400 legal challenges, and “millions of dollars in [NRA] legal bills” later, all the gun lobby has had to show for its efforts is a growing body of case law affirming the right of the people to have strong gun laws short of a total handgun ban. Just last week, the same Texas judge who was previously overruled for ruling that domestic abusers have a right to own guns threw out the NRA’s lawsuit claiming that teens have a right to buy semi-automatic handguns. Never before have so many courts so cogently affirmed the constitutionality of so many strong gun laws in such a short span of time.

Dennis Henigan
October 6, 2011
How Many Second Amendment Cases Will the NRA Lose?
[The NRA is mostly a strawman in this context. SAF is who the Brady Campaign should be (and probably is) worried about.

The total number of victories is a poor metric of how the battle is going. More important is how many Supreme Court victories each side has to their credit. In the last three years, how’s that been going for you Dennis?

Gloat while you can Dennis. I’ll be saving these words for your eating pleasure a few years from now.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Independent Democratic Conference

Posted on by

PROPONENTS OF A MORE REFINED FIRST AMENDMENT ARGUE THAT THIS FREEDOM SHOULD BE TREATED NOT AS A RIGHT BUT AS A PRIVILEGE – A SPECIAL ENTITLEMENT GRANTED BY THE STATE ON A CONDITIONAL BASIS THAT CAN BE REVOKED IF IT IS EVER ABUSED OR MALTREATED.

Independent Democratic Conference
September 2011
Page 34 in CYBERBULLYING—A Report on Bullying in a Digital Age
[I love the word “refined”. It makes the proposed degradation of a specific enumerated right so much more palatable. It’s a lot like “progress” and “liberal”. All very nice words. Surely reasonable people can agree we would all be better off if the government were to punish those that were divisive.

Via Thirdpower and Eugene Volokh.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Richard Samuel Najjar

Posted on by

…[P]olitically motivated entities like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun (formally Handgun Control, Inc.), the oddly named Violence Policy Center, and Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Handguns rely on discredited studies that were rejected elsewhere, or by pulling numbers out of thin air to craft an argument while they attempt to smugly and piously stand in the way of continuing reforms. Gun control was a failure. Gun control is dead. It’s time to bury it once and for all.

Richard Samuel Najjar
October 1, 2011
Comment to Cause and effect or coincidence? Gun control scrapped …crime plummets
[The only nit I have to pick with this is I wouldn’t say gun control is dead. As long as there exists an anti-gun organization with fulltime staff or an electable politician that supports gun control we have work to do.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kelsey Leal

Posted on by

I come from a family of liberals. We believe that people that don’t work should live better lives than those that do.

Kelsey Leal
October 3, 2011
[Kelsey is my soon to be daughter-in-law.

This was in response to me giving her a bit of a hard time about not even recognizing the name of the Cato Institute. When I explained it was a Libertarian think tank part of her response was the quote above. It achieve the desired results. I was speechless.

She says she was joking—mostly.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Kaveman

Posted on by

I am willing to perform the duties of CEO for your organization for minimum wage and a few photos of Sarah Brady in a thong and an unlimited supply of Kleenex.

Kaveman
October 1, 2011
I will be the next CEO at Brady
[I considered applying also but (plagiarizing from Joel) I have minimal experience as a male bovine excrement engineer and zero experience as a equine excrement engineer.

Even if I had the requisite experience and even if she promised to never model her thongs in my presence I would need far more than minimum wage to hang out with Sarah Brady.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Handgun Control, Inc.

Posted on by

Both Handgun Control, Inc. and the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, the sister organizations sponsoring the symposium, predict a long but ultimately successful battle to reform one of the most dangerous industries in the United States.

Handgun Control, Inc.
October 8, 1997
GUN INDUSTRY EXPERTS PREDICT FAR-REACHING REFORMS; POINT TO TOBACCO AND OTHER INDUSTRIES AS PRECEDENT
[How are those reforms working out for you? It’s been 14 years now. Has it been long enough yet?

Oh, that’s right. It was Handgun Control, Inc. that did the reforming.—Joe]

Quote of the day—dogbreath

Posted on by

I think you are giving them far too much credit – their generally not well endowed with either a brain or a p…Glock. But there is an assload of money involved. Absolutely.

dogbreath
September 27, 2011
Comment to NRA’s “Single Issue” Is Obama, Not Guns
[Nice! Dogbreath invokes Markley’s Law, says we have small brains while saying “their” instead of “they’re”, and attributes the motivation to protect a specific enumerated right to making money all in just two sentences. That is impressive.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ubu52

Posted on by

Isn’t the smallest form of government a dictatorship? Is that really what Libertarians crave?

Ubu52
September 29, 2011
Comment to The Mind of the Left.
[I suppose it could be very ignorant question. After all, even if you were to grant that a libertarian dictatorship is technically possible the smallest form government would be no government at all or anarchy.

But I think I smell a troll.—Joe]

Quote of the day—John Dewey

Posted on by

You can’t make Socialists out of individualists — children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.

John Dewey
From Accuracy In Media
[Ahhhh… yes. The collective society. The good of the collective is more important than the good of the individual. The individual must not think for themselves. Except of course the dear, enlightened, leaders who decide what is best for the collective and just happen to live lives of luxury.

What the “intellectuals” need to understand, if history has any lessons to be learned on this topic, is that the “intellectuals” are the first to get the bullet in the back of the neck and occupy the mass graves in the woods. Look at what Stalin, Pol Pot, and communist China did.

It may be that it “won’t happen here”. It may be the government of the collective will put the “intellectuals” in positions of power and that when the shooting starts it will be individualists who first occupy the mass graves. But when the shooting stops it will be because the individualists ran out of collectivist “intellectuals” as targets. Not because we ran out of ammo or individuals.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Brian Malte

Posted on by

Not only are you stripping the right of the local municipalities to protect safety but you’re also asking them to adhere to gun laws at the state level that don’t even exist.

Brian Malte
Director of mobilization for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
September 27, 2011
Lawyer keeps local gun laws in his sights—Lawsuits against Evansville and Hammond demand communities comply with state measure
[“Protect safety”? “Adhere to gun laws that don’t exit”? What in the world does that even mean?

I suppose it’s possible the reporter had the crap for brains and messed up the quote but I doubt it because the quotes from the other people in the article weren’t just word salads. It could have been deliberate maliciousness by the reporter but usually the bias is against gun owners.

It’s true that we are sometimes our worst enemy but it may be more so for our opponents. We don’t always act as a team and give conflicting messages to the public and the politicians. We have people that sometimes say things that which, while true, can be exploited by our opponents. They have crap for brains and it shows.—Joe]

Quote of the day—President Obama

Posted on by

I’m determined because there’s too much at stake. The alternative I think is an approach to government that would fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st Century and that’s not the kind of society that I want to bequeath to Malia and Sasha, and your children and your grandchildren.

President Obama
What President Obama saying to his donors
September 25, 2011
[What President Obama isn’t directly saying is that the U.S. Constitution is crippling his vision of a utopian society.

And while I say that’s a good thing the battle has mostly been lost. I fear the majority of people in this country will have to learn the lessons of socialism and perhaps even communism for themselves.

—Joe]

Quote of the day—Ry Jones

Posted on by

I’m willing to bleed in order to own a world record.

Ry Jones
September 23, 2011
[It turns out there is a relatively easy path to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records. I questioned the wisdom of Ry’s method, which involved explosives at close ranges, and the quote above was him assured me he did not share my concern.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Sebastian

Posted on by

If the other side really wants to understand why they continuously lose, they have to understand this: their side can’t get mojo without buying off sympathetic people on the left to shill for their cause. I would not let NRA, or any other gun rights group I believed in, buy words from me. Every penny they spent on that would be money that isn’t going to keep lobbyists on my elected representatives like a pitbull on a poodle. If the gun control extremists want to understand why they can’t get any traction, they need to look no further than the fact that they even need to throw money at people to have a voice at all.

Sebastian
September 23, 2011
What is the Purpose of the Media Matters Tagline?
[It’s also worth noting that traction is difficult to come by when you are nothing but a hot air balloon.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Mike Jensen

Posted on by

I’m all for shared sacrifice.  But I think it should be shared sacrifice of those responsible for this mess in the first place.  So instead of punishing the super rich, who didn’t spend us into oblivion, let’s have shared sacrifice among those responsible for this mess.

I propose this:

  1. Collect the name of every member of Congress—Republican or Democrat—who ever voted for a federal budget that included a deficit.
  2. Determine which of these members are still living.
  3. Add the names of all living presidents.
  4. Increase THEIR taxes.

I propose that we tax all former members of Congress at a 50% flat tax rate.  Former presidents would be taxed at a flat 75% of annual income.  Finally, current members of Congress and the current president would be taxes at 100% of their annual income.  Any other Americans who would like to can volunteer to join either of these groups (time to walk the walk, Warren!).  These tax rates will stay in effect until the debt is erased and we have a balanced budget.

How about we stop coddling those who caused this problem in the first place?

Mike Jensen
August 30, 2011
Coddling
[Yup. Those responsible should be the ones to pay the price for fixing the problem.

And if insufficient progress has been made by the time their term in office is over consideration could be given to auctioning off their body parts.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Harvey Ruvin

Posted on by

Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective.

Harvey Ruvin
Vice Chairman, ICLEI.
The Wildlands Project
[I wish I could find the original document which contains this. I can find lots of references to it but without the actual document and context I’m hesitant to speculate nearly as much as others have.

In any case, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Weerd Beard

Posted on by

You see the antis claim that these guns and practices would result in MORE violent crimes. Just the opposite has happened.

But they’re attempting to spin this as a victory…I guess to the legions of the VERY VERY stupid.

We are blessed to have opponents such as these!

Weerd Beard
September 19, 2011
Fails of the Antis
[As near as I can determine we have three types of opponents:

  1. The evil.
  2. The ignorant.
  3. The intellectually challenged.

The evil use the intellectually challenged and the ignorant to further their agenda but fortunately there are not that many evil people currently in positions of power and/or they are keeping a low profile. They have not been a significant threat in recent battles. There probably is no cure for evil except to recognize it and to remove them from positions of power.

The ignorant are less able to remain ignorant with the Internet. They are very quickly informed once they publically show their support for gun control. That they vote without becoming visible or becoming informed is probably the biggest threat they pose to us. Probably our best weapon against these people is for us to come out of the closet and to take these people to the range.

The intellectually challenged can be transformed into gifts to our cause. Every time they say something stupid we can (and do) broadcast it for others to see and point out the stupidity. Who wants to be on the same side as people who say such stupid stuff? So, yes, we are blessed to have opponents such as these!—Joe]

Quote of the day—Paul Krugman

Posted on by

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do.

Paul Krugman
September 19, 2011
Decline in manufacturing capacity is probably only the beginning of the bad new: Paul Krugman
[He is apparently oblivious to the irony as he goes on to say, even though the U.S. Government is broke, “For the time being we need more, not less, government spending, supported by aggressively expansionary policies from the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad.”

Krugman believes that budget austerity is the equivalent of “bleeding the patient” when sane people would recognize it as reducing the hemorrhaging. One has to wonder if Krugman is practicing doublethink, doublespeak, or both. In any case he has crap for brains if he thinks the majority of the people will believe him.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Bruce Schneier

Posted on by

Given the credible estimate that we’ve spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security (this does not include our many foreign wars), that’s $62.5 billion per life lost. Is there any other risk that we are even remotely as crazy about?

Bruce Schneier
September 15, 2011
Crypto-Gram Newsletter
[Some people are that crazy about guns. But for the most part I think Schneier has it nailed.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Charlie Beck

Posted on by

We are a modern civilized community, and we should work on peaceful solutions to end criminal behavior.

Charlie Beck
Los Angeles Police Chief
September 16, 2011
Gun control bill in Gov. Brown’s hands
[Since the people that work for him are on the front lines of the criminal behavior modification efforts Beck should be consistent. He should order all of his police officers to not carry firearms in public.

Other advice for Beck might include having his police officers hold hands with the criminals and sing Kumbaya.

While he is evaluating how that turns out the rest of the country will be packing heat and questioning his sanity.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Carrie Severino

Posted on by

I’m not sure exactly what these folks are pledging to do. Are they living constitutionalists pledging fealty to the Constitution on the day they sign the pledge? Or some future Constitution the exact substance of which they don’t even know when they sign the pledge? Is each person pledging to their own Constitution which just doesn’t change to them? Unless, of course, they are all pledging to a Constitution that actually has a definite, knowable, unchanging substance — in which case I look forward to joining them in celebration of Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia’s service at the next Federalist Society convention.

Carrie Severino
September 16, 2011
More on the Living Constitutionalists’ ‘Pledge’
[People who “believe in a living constitution” haven’t thought things through. Do they also believe in “living contracts” where the terms of the contract change without all parties to the contract agree to the changes or even being notified that the contract no longer means what it says? To say, “we have a living constitution” means we have no constitution.—Joe]