Friday, February 15, 2013

REALITY HAS AN ANTI-NRA BIAS

I see from Michelle Maliin's Twitchy that various right wingers find this cartoon about murdered Navy SEAL Chris Kyle "disgusting and sickening":





We're told:
As always, the Left's anti-gun zealots can't restrain themselves from bathing in the blood of the dead ... even (or perhaps especially) when that blood was shed by a former Navy SEAL who served his country honorably.
Odd words coming from right-wingers, who've politicized the death of the U.S. ambassador and three others in Benghazi every minute of every day for five straight months.

Look, when politics addresses issues that involve people dying, it's impossible to have the debate without politicizing death. The right just wants to have a monopoly on the politicizing.

And with all due respect to the deceased, the point made in the cartoon is accurate -- deaths occurred on that shooting range in Texas despite the presence of all sorts of "good people with guns."

****

But the minds of gun absolutists are made up -- we mustn't confuse them with the facts. Another fact we're not supposed to bring up is (as George Skelton of the L.A. Times points out) that fighting real or alleged government tyranny with your huge personal arsenal doesn't actually work, as we learned once again this week:
Dorner case shows folly of arming oneself to combat government

The nutty notion that a citizen can be heavily enough armed to fight off the government went up in smoke near Big Bear Lake....

As of this writing, it's not clear what suspected killer Christopher Dorner had in his arsenal. But it was enough to hold off law enforcement in Tuesday's shootout until someone upped the firepower, literally, by lobbying incendiary tear gas into the cabin where the axed cop apparently was making a last stand against the government.

The government virtually always wins.

Dorner could have read up on Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge. Or the Branch Davidians near Waco.

...Guns to overthrow tyranny, irrational. That's why our founders gave us the ballot box.
You don't have to agree with what happened in any of these incidents to recognize that if you push the government too far, the government can shut you down, with extreme prejudice. You'll never, ever get to live out your infantile Walter Mitty fantasy of being a citizen tyrant-slayer. And don't even try to bring up asymmetric guerrilla war in, say, Vietnam or Iraq -- those were places where the insurgents and guerrillas knew the terrain and the language intimately, and we didn't. This is America. It's the government's country, too. So, gunners, spare me that argument for the gun-market free-for-all you insist upon.

(Skelton article via the Political Carnival.)

8 comments:

Bulworth said...

Stop the presses! The wingnuts are disgusted and offended by something.

Of course when dirty effin hippies complain about something, we are dismissed for promoting political correctness and told to manup.

When the reichwing is offended, why, a great wrong has been created and something must be done rightaway to address their butthurt.

Grung_e_Gene said...

Dorner is the dream case for the NRA. He's a veteran whose been *wronged* by the government and took 2nd Amendment Remedies into his own hands.

And! He's black and scary!!! He proves what Ann Coulter and Senator Chuck Grassley and the Right repeatedly state about gun violence, that it is only a "blacks on black" problem.

Thus the conclusion is we need more and more guns!!!

Victor said...

I love the right wingers - all "RAH! RAH! SIS-BOOM-BAH!!! YAAAAAAAAAAAAA, TEAM!!!" when it comes to the military and its toys, and the lead-up to wars, and the wars itself.

But then, want to cut every VFW program in sight for returning veterans of their idiotic wars and occupations.

But you can't call the "hypocrite's," because, well, "YOU'RE THE REAL HYPOCRITE" when you call them that.

Sick and twisted motherfeckers, the whole lot of them.

BH said...

Steve, thanks for a clear statement of your 2nd point, i.e., the entirely delusional nature of the gunners' notion that their private arsenals are some kind of hedge against guvmintal tyranny. I have always wondered whether any of these idiots have any real idea of what even a single Abrams tank, for example, can do in terms of firepower, and just how ridiculous such considerations make their "anti-tyranny" arguments.

merlallen said...

I keep telling the goobers that if the government wants their guns, they will have their guns or their corpses. Either way they lose and we win.

Examinator said...

Sadly “no matter how well people nurse their grudges they NEVER get better.”
And that goes for both sides.

What Americans fail to fully understand is that repetition serves no real purpose but to entrench prejudices.

It's time that We acknowledge that the Constitution is a flawed document in that permitting excess only leads to (surprise surprise) more and greater excess/extremes.
A few years back a man committed suicide by jumping into an active volcano... it made front page news everywhere.... within 12 months there had been 10 copy cat suicides. The authorities closed public access to that volcano. Surprise surprise there hasn't been one reported since.

The point is that for every well story of graphic mass murders it entrenches the appeal of such actions to the disaffected. e.g. Dorney.
Likewise that for every wannabe (narcissist) preacher to get attention he has to come up with a 'more' extreme (new grabbing) rhetoric/stunt to get notoriety.

There are three key commonalities here, one is simply the notion that the end justified the means;
The second is that *I * (we) have the RIGHT to IMPOSE my/our views/ perceived welfare on others;
Because the individual (me, we) are more important (exceptional) than the rest.
A corollary of the last one is that I/we know best ….regardless of ANY EVIDENCE to the opposite.
Look at the other Democracies world wide... ideas like linking minimum wage to the CPI; universal health care; fire arm control; excessive hate speech ; control over banks; libel laws; EPA, Food labelling; universal suffrage and the list goes on and on. None of these countries have gone tyrannical nor Communism or even socialist. This notion that only one side (us) has all the good ideas is preposterous.
Yet we persist with what is BS that what makes, made America great. Demonstrably that isn't true.
Like wise History has shown time and time again it is extremism that causes a state to collapse.
Extreme rights is by definition Chaos and often tyranny not freedom. I've made the challenge several times on many sites to objectively prove that wrong. So far none have succeeded. Simply put because the PURPOSE / OBJECTIVE of societies is survival of the species and therefore mutual benefit of the majority.
In statistical terms that is 1-2 standard deviations of the mean …...Not including the extremes.

Examinator said...

part 2
The notion that The USA is the land of the free is demonstrably/ therefore fictional. The key is moderation and proportional. Simply put that means laws to enforce the majority which means the extremes either conform to the range of be prepared to suffer the consequences. It seems to me that many Citizens have been manipulated by their selfishness to the point they have neither security nor freedom. All because those who are more sociopathic have a deep and effective weapon against us ...our emotions. And the ballot box is progressively becoming yet another tool of the manipulators to (ab)use. How can every person be equal under God if each state decides on who can vote and who can't based on some arcane self serving logic.

Assert that it is 'our culture' therefore that what made us great make as much sense as the Maori of NZ claiming that cannibalism and internecine war is their culture they should continue such practices today. Well most of our ancestors did too. Then again you haven't seen my sister in law...in this context she's an argument for vegetarianism. ;-(

Seriously folks its well past the time when we started to be sensible and have real conversations in line with the greater good.
And that includes reeling in the power and the rhetoric of 'capitalism' 'religion' 'firearms', absurdly aggressive hate speech in line with the basic *point/ purpose * of society. I see no reason why the tools and toys created by humans should *drive/ control * us. And even less reason that the sociopathically inclined should be able to use our humanity against us.
We could start by accepting that we aren't exceptional just 350 million of 7.5 billion and act accordingly.
PS CIA I've moved.

Ten Bears said...

The whole thing reads like a Von Damme movie.