Where laws and politics are concerned, no battle for freedom is ever won in perpetuity. But gun owners have certainly pushed freedom’s adversaries back across the Rhine, and apparently no one knows it better than Josh Horwitz.

NRA-ILA
August 23, 2013
What a Difference a Year Makes
[Horwitz is the director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence which was formally known as the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. You might think that the name change was to soften their image of gun banners but actually it was because they wanted to broaden their scope to include “assault weapons”.

And now Horwitz has dreams of, maybe, someday, getting “universal background checks” as the law of the land.

Give it up Josh. Gun ownership is a specific enumerated right and your desire for infringing that right is no more valid than denying the rights guaranteed under the 13^th Amendment if someone fails a background check.—Joe]

Once we’ve gotten that pesky self-preservation instinct under control, getting everyone to head toward utopia will be as easy as loading a cattle car.

mikee
August 22, 2013
Comment to Evil
[This is in regard to the CSGV making it explicitly as well as implicitly clear they are philosophically opposed to self-defense. It shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise to anyone. As irrational as they (or anyone) are within some restrained context their world view will make sense. I’ve seen this sort of thing in many individuals.

I’m reminded of a joke my psychology professor in college told:

Some guy is in the cafeteria holding an empty water glass to each ear. Another guy comes up to him and the conversation goes like this:

Guy2: Why are you holding the water glasses to your ears?

Guy1: It keeps the wild elephants away.

Guy2: But there aren’t any wild elephants in North America.

Guy 1: See! It works!

It is going to be very difficult to convince, in the abstract, the guy with the water glasses that he is wrong about their effects. Within his set of constraints his world view is entirely consistent. Rock solid logic.

The anti-gun person is going to be drawn to the same sort of constrained world view where their logic works. It might go something like this:

Guns are bad.

Guns are used for self-defense.

Self-defense involving lethal force must therefore be bad.

The lethal force qualifier may or may not be required.

It turns out that the concept of using lethal force for self defense is not a universally believed to be moral. I’ve talked to people that strongly believed in “proportional response” even when the aggressor was using lethal force such as a club or a knife. A gun would not be “proportional”. Somehow they believe, and sometimes explicitly state (as my cousin, who has been raped three times that I know of, once told me), that it would be worse to be killed with a gun than clubbed or stabbed to death. In their world view if there were no guns in the hands of private citizens then even the weak/disabled/elderly would not need guns because they would (almost) never have to confront someone with a gun. Hence victims would (almost) never be justified in using a firearm for self defense because proportional force would (almost) always be something less than a gun.

But, you might claim, eliminating self-defense is a long way from loading up the cattle cars. There isn’t anyone that wants to do that these days.

I would like to remind you of Barack Obama’s “neighbor and family friend” Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground who told FBI informant Larry Grathwohl:

I asked, “Well what is going to happen to those people we can’t reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they’d have to be eliminated.

And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.

And when I say “eliminate,” I mean “kill.”

Twenty-five million people.

I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees, from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people and they were dead serious.

You could now claim that that was a FBI informant that can’t be trusted.

Perhaps. But it is consistent with what happened in the USSR. They sent 10’s of millions to reeducation camps. And they sent millions to their graves in their pursuit of utopia.

How could they rationalize that? How could they believe that was a path to utopia?

Easy. My communist brother-in-law, a business professor in Chicago, indirectly explained it to me:

The good of the majority always outweighs the good of the individual.

My protestation about individual rights being violated were dismissed without concern:

You have to look at the big picture. The good of the majority is more important that the individual.

He views me as narrow minded. He claims that I “can’t see the big picture”. My examples of tens of millions of innocent people murdered by their own governments in the last century were dismissed with:

We just need to have the right people in charge.

It’s all so simple, logical, and blindingly obvious to these people. This is why they think there is something wrong with us. This is why they want “reeducation camps”. They really believe that despite the grinding poverty and mass graves of all the communist utopia that it is always the fault of a few greedy/selfish/ignorant/stupid individuals that their utopia fails to materialize. Reeducate those that are willing and elimination of the rest and then mankind will finally achieve equality, peace, and social justice. How can it be a high price to pay to dismiss the so called rights of an individual when the achievement of a peaceful forever is so close? What about the rights of the billions of others and the billions more to be born in the future? Don’t they have a right to live in utopia?

The cattle cars will be filling up soon. It’s for the greater good.

My belief is that the greater good will be achieved by small pieces of precisely placed rifling engraved copper jacketed lead in the heads of the so called leaders and intellectuals who give the orders to load the buses and trains*. They think I’m just a narrow minded bigot who can’t see the big picture. But they mistake the narrow focus for narrow mindedness and underestimate the clarity of the picture at a distance with my Leupold scope.—Joe]

* One could make the case there is a compelling reason why liberals are so opposed to individual transportation.