Maybe I should start a new feature, instead of quote of the day. It would be hard to run out of material. Oh the many ways we are hated and loathed:
“Your group” is full of morbidly obese, chain smoking, lower economic, disenfranchised people who just look plain miserable. Gun lobbying is giving them a target for the anger and despair in their govt.
RTWT. I could stand to lose a 20 or 30 pounds, but I’m not morbidly obese. I don’t smoke. I’m on the upper end of the curve for household income, and I’m decidedly not angry. If we look pissed off, it’s because people like this just won’t leave us the hell alone. Leaving us along is all we ask. It’s pretty easy. If you enjoy life, enjoy it, and stop trying to interfere with our enjoyment.
So this gentle soul weaaps for the plight of the downtrodden and loves the poor, until they get uppity and dare to disagree with their social betters.
Then the knives come out.
Once again gun control can be summed up with: Know your place, peasant!
Let’s see:
I ran Boston Marathon, twice, and still run 4x a week.
I don’t smoke.
I have a white collar job and much better than the average area income.
I have all my teeth.
I don’t own a gadsdsen anything.
I don’t know that I look miserable, unless I just finished a long trail run in the rain.
I have a Gadsden flag. I bought it in October of 2001.
I think I’ve gained 5 lbs since I passed my last Army PFT. Don’t smoke, drink only in moderation, and doing well with the income. And leave me alone slaver.
I’m within the “normal” weight category, well above average in income, have a masters degree, have never smoked a cigarette in my life, and am a generally happy, non-hateful person. But even if I weren’t, it wouldn’t change the fact that I have a Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Of course, this email you quote suggests that weight, income, and other factors actually *do* somehow disqualify people from their civil rights.
I’ll believe they’re “liberal” when they actually start respecting people as people, and not as a sum of their individual characteristics.
If smoking disqualifies people from participating in the political process, I demand the immediate resignation of Barack “Marlboro Light” Obama.
If being fat is a disqualifier, I demand the immediate resignation of Chris Christie and that Al Gore and Michael Moore immediately be driven from the public square (if you could move them).
That’s what cranes are for.
Any comment from Sarah Brady on that smoking thing?
“lower economic”
ie “Poor people shouldn’t have guns.”
That’s what really stuck out to me, how the hell is that relevant?
Because a good fraction of gun control is classist.
That’s how may-issue works. Rich, important, and connected people *need* guns because their lives are more important than the proles.
Said-same groups are also entitled to “sporting” guns.
Hmmmm…..That is like saying all poor inner city dwellers are drug dealers and thugs.
Funny I thought Constitutional rights were guaranteed to ALL people.
I think a lot of people gave their lives to make sure that would happen and continue to happen.
Regardless whether you fat thin smoker disabled redneck urban dweller etc.
PS. Don’t Tread on Me…….Go Gadsden
What stands out for me is the notion that we are such sheep that we wouldn’t know to be upset with the government unless ” the gun lobby” tells us we should be.
If you watch, you will see that it is very important to our enemies that the “gun lobby” be thought of as a monolith. Unfortunately that is also true of some of our “friends,” who want it to be a monolith defined as a stereotype of their choice, embracing their issues.
I think that Eric Hoffer wrote, in his book “The True Believer,” that for “hate” to be a unifying agent for a political movement, all evil must be embodied in a single, easily identifiable opponent — a devil. Thus our enemies paint the monolith they want us to be, as the embodiment of every distasteful stereotype. Part of our job is to not let false friends and allies make that too true.
“….Chain Smoking, Lower Economic, Disenfranchised looking miserable…” Hmmm. Sounds like 95% of the Guys who served in the U.S. Military during World War Two to me.
Dumba$$ is dealing Three Card Monty, and still can’t win.
Smokers…You mean like this guy?
http://stopsmokinghownotto.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/barack-obama-smoking-cigarette.jpg
I would confess to being a disenfranchised, lower-income-ish person. But that’s mostly because of a stupid decision on my part: I used student loans to get a doctorate in mathematics, when I could have just gotten into computer programming immediately, and immediately started up the “salary” ladder.
For the record, in my first job after graduate school, I was making $8.50/hr (cooincidentally similar to the $8/hr I was making at computer programming before I entered graduate school). At my last job, I was making $65k before I was let go. I have gobbs of debt, with regards to student loans, I have nearly $100k, so I have severe regrets about that.
The only good thing I can say about getting my doctorate, is that I got to learn a lot of cool mathematics on the way! (I wish I could figure out how to leverage my mathematical knowledge to do interesting things to make money, but I’m still puzzled as to how I can find such jobs, when mathematical jobs seldom use any word akin to “mathematics” to describe them…)
I wish I could advise you on an immediate, prosperous path to take, but I’m retired now and out of the game. One hope I would offer is that someday people/industry are going to need people who remember how the basics (like math) actually work, and not just how to use software packages, the contents of which no one understands the first thing about.
The following is classic Old Fart, I know, but when I was in college my alma mater advertized that (in engineering) they concentrated on teaching basic principles and methods and not the fads of the moment. So, we learned a great deal of applied mathematics, working it all out with a pencil, or when a computer algorithm was called for (in those days of ten-pound boxes of IBM cards) writing our own; so that a basic understanding of the process was required. By the time my son went to the same school, it appeared the applied mathematics was taught as an “overview” of its concepts and actual implementation was done with software from the college bookstore.
A very common premise for science/future fiction novels fifty or sixty years ago was, that there was a very primitive society that used high-tech tools like nuclear reactors or spaceships, but no one had any idea how they worked; or they thought gods lived insaide them. I’m wondering if someday people like yourself who understand the basics of something aren’t going to be in demand, when almost everyone else has forgotten WHY their vital tools work, and need to straighten out why they aren’t working anymore.