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.)