The Right’s Irrational Arguments Against Gun Control
March 25, 2013

 
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Patriot: Yesterday vs TodayLast week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he would be dropping the “assault weapons ban” from the Senate’s bill to ban Assault Weapons. If that’s not insane enough, how about his reasoning for doing so: Because it would fall “well short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.” AND WHOSE [bleeping] FAULT IS THAT, YOU PIECE OF [bleep]?” (Reid argued he has only around 40 votes. But I GUARANTEE you that if he only needed TEN more Senators instead of twenty, you’d find a LOT of people wouldn’t want to be on the losing side of that vote. Translation: It’s easier to oppose a bill you know has no prayer of passing.) So where does that leave Gun Reform? The argument against Gun Control goes something like this: Criminals don’t obey laws, ergo, we shouldn’t pass any laws prohibiting weapons of war from our streets because the only people affected by these laws are good law-abiding citizens… you know, the way murderers obey laws against murder. And we can’t keep a national registry of “what gun belongs to whom” so we can trace a weapon used in a crime back to its owner, because when you start keeping a list of who owns what gun(s), it just makes it that much easier for Obama’s Stormtroopers to target your suburban 3-bed 2-1/2 bath split-level with garden-gnome  for a drone strike, or descend from the sky in black helicopters to bust down your front door and take your guns away!

Yes, these seem like perfectly sane & rational arguments to The Right.

As you well know, Democrats have been pushing for filibuster reform ever since the GOP wildly abused the power during the first two years of President Obama’s first term. When Senator Reid had the opportunity to do something about it in 2010, many of us were appalled when he said “No”. Upon retaking control of the House in 2010, Republican Senators had backed off a bit, knowing that they could let a few bills they opposed slip through, confident in the knowledge that their colleagues in the House would kill it for them (without incurring the bad PR of being obstructionist asshats). But the problem didn’t go away entirely (not by a longshot), and 17 months later, Reid took to the floor of the Senate for mea culpa, stating that his critics were “right” and he was “wrong” not to have reformed the filibuster when he had a chance.

So color everyone shocked when Reid balked at the opportunity YET AGAIN to reform the filibuster last January. His reasoning for doing so was basically a promise from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that Republicans would be on their best behavior. Honest & true! We double-pinky swear! So of course, Reid caves, and the GOP goes right back to their miserable obstructionist ways (what is it with Democrats who keep looking for a glimmer of conscience in Republicans?) Personally, I wonder if some Conservative Power-Broker didn’t threaten the lives of Reid’s family if he didn’t back off filibuster reform. I certainly wouldn’t put it past them.

Anyway, back to Gun Control:

If you listen to The Far Right on ANY issue, fear & paranoia reign supreme. But what kills me is that this is only true when DEMOCRATS control the White House. Which is nuts because the biggest violators of the Constitution, personal privacy and civil rights were The Bush Administration with Republican control of both houses of Congress. I keep an ACLU flier from the 2006 election pinned to my corkboard entitled, “It’s Been a Tough Six Years for the Bill of Rights”, marking just a few of the ways one-party rule under Bush violated and outright eschewed the Constitution at every opportunity, hand-picking lawyers that would tell them that what they wanted to do was legal, and firing those that did not. Yet it’s the Democrats that keep them in constant fear of “Big Brother” coming to take their hunting rifle away and have an “illegal alien” gay-marry them to a donkey… oh, and tax them to pay for it.
 

Bush supported more Gun Control than Obama

As I noted on here a few weeks ago, when you ask a Right Winger for their position on a buzz-word that the Right has demonized… like “gun control” or “ObamaCare“… they flat out oppose it… not just mildly… but violently & irrationally, and base their reasoning on a plethora of misinformation they heard listening to Glenn Beck or Fox “news”. But then ask them how they feel about individual items IN those bills, and they’re all for it! Opponents of “gun reform” attend huge rallies across the nation, yet 87% of them support “background checks”, 82% support “temporarily” suspending the license of a dealer that can’t account for the whereabouts of 20 or more guns, and 81% disagree with the NRA that juveniles convicted of a serious crime needn’t wait ten years before being allowed to buy a gun (yes, the NRA opposes preventing gang-bangers from buying guns.) The NRA is in total misstep with its own members quite simply because the NRA doesn’t exist to represent the will of its members. It exists solely to represent the interests of gun manufacturers.

Listening to NRA President Wayne “Guns don’t kill people, violent video games do” Pierre blather on yesterday about how “gun laws” are used to oppress legitimate gun owners… and yet we should be “enforcing the laws already on the books” (because law enforcement has become too lax?) makes my head hurt. These aren’t rational people. There’s a reason the Republican leadership pushes “home schooling” and “faith-based education” (where you accept everything you are told on faith.)

And Democrats like Reid need to stop listening to them.
 


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March 25, 2013 · Admin Mugsy · 4 Comments - Add
Posted in: Crime, Guns & Violence, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Insanity, Seems Obvious to Me, Unconstitutional

4 Responses

  1. Grant in Texas - April 11, 2013

    Didn’t take long to equate the local Lone Star College knife attack with the gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary.  A “letter-to-the-editor” in the Houston Chronicle today wondered when President Obama was going to fly the families of the Houston knife attack to Washington.  Talk about apples to oranges.  The big difference is that nobody was killed in the knife attack here upon 14 students.  Few were even hospitalized and the two initially “critical” are now in good condition.  Recently a man attacked school children in China and stabbed nearly two dozen students and NONE died there, either.  Imagine what might have happened if the deranged student here in Houston had had an assault weapon with a backpack full of high volume magazines.http://www.chron.com/opinion/letters/article/Letters-Welfare-recipients-child-sexual-abuse-4425081.php

  2. Mugsy - April 12, 2013

    The sad irony is, this incident is almost the perfect example of how the equation changes once guns are removed from the picture.

    Had this kid used a gun, we might instead be looking at 28 dead students in a fraction of the time instead of just 14 wounded kids whose parents will have better things to do than attend their child’s funeral this week.

  3. Grant in Texas - April 12, 2013

    Only two days after the campus stabbing in Cypress, TX, the Republican legislator from Cypress, had his gun bill come out of committee (7-1 vote with NO debate) that will allow students/staff to carry guns onto our public campuses.  He says it is a self-defense measure that will
    help prevent campus shootings and assaults. Opponents argue that
    allowing guns into campus buildings, particularly classrooms, only
    increases the chances for violence.Fletcher’s bill gives the
    state’s public universities and colleges a chance to opt out of the
    provision if they first consult with students, faculty and staff.
    Private universities could opt in. For campuses that still ban weapons,
    the bill reduces the penalty for a violation by concealed handgun
    license holders from a felony to a misdemeanor.Today’s newspaper has a profile of the deranged young man who stabbed 14 students who said he had fantasized about cutting people since elementary school.  He also had a Hannibal Lecter mask and also fantasized about cutting off people’s faces and the wearing them as masks.  He also fantasized about cannibalism and necrophilia.  However, under our current laws he could have armed himself at any gun/knife show. 

  4. Dave - July 17, 2014

    Weapons of war huh? Every gun type to date has at once been standard military hardware. Take a Remington 750, produce a high capacity magazine in a home work shop and bingo, you have an “assault rifle” but I hear nobody going after this type of firearm simply because they don’t produce magazines in such capacity for them. Call them what you will, I have every damn right to own them, and if you are really concerned about taking away our liberties because you think it’s justified due to illegal uses, why aren’t you going after handguns, which are used in the vast majority of gun crimes? I guess it’s easy to pick on the black rifles because they have a bunch of stuff on them of which you are completely ignorant. HAND GUNS are used way more in crimes than any of the semi automatic rifles. So, what is your actual motivation for banning rifles? Either way, you’ll never do it. There are far too many of them and they couldn’t all be taken…further more you pass the laws to ban them, or features they contain, and you’ll succeed at creating a whole lot of outlaws overnight (just like in Connecticut.) You’re all ignorant fools, and I hope somebody takes the rights which are important to you, from you.

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