I do love the new strategy of anti-gun advocates. If their anti-Second Amendment rallies end up being a bust, they already have their excuses lined up.
The primary excuse? They are too afraid of gun owners since anyone who supports the right to own as many firearms as they want is clearly unstable. And since gun owners might be present to peacefully oppose their rally, they must stay home for their own safety. Otherwise, she swears that there would be hundreds and hundreds of anti-gun advocates in attendance.
This excuse comes to us by a woman who says she must be “pressed” to go out in public spaces and worries that she now needs to “wear a flak jacket and helmet” when she is forced to go out. She also willingly accepts the blame that her promotion of anti-gun rallies will in fact alert the crazy gun owners to turn up. (Nevermind that gun owners already knew about the rallies and started talking about peaceful opposition days before her column ever ran. That little fact gets in the way of her “bold” stand for anti-gun policies.) She uses her column to ask those who are too afraid to leave their homes for fear of seeing a gun owner to write their Congressman instead. Perhaps she would do a greater service to suggest that they find a therapist who can help them through their extreme and irrational fears.
Many support new gun safety laws — among them men and women who own guns for hunting and personal protection — and worry mightily about the stability of some of those who argue for the right to amass arsenals of high magazine weapons.
“high magazine weapons”? Yeah, I suppose they would soil themselves if they saw a Bren.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bren_light_machine_gun
“anyone who supports the right. . .is clearly unstable.”
I think she actually has a point, but certainly not the one she intended.
After reading a lot of history of struggles for individual and human rights, both here and abroad, I’m pretty well convinced that the first people who go that extra mile for their rights are a little nuts — but that is what it seems to take. If you look at the run-up to the American Revolution, some of the things local patriots did was pretty off-the-wall. E.g., when is the last time any of us tarred and feathered a local official, and/or burned their house? And in many cases, examined dispassionately, the things they did were not justified. And yet, we are thankful for the outcome, which would have seemed ill-fated at the beginning, by any objective standard.
“when is the last time any of us tarred and feathered a local official?”
Well, perhaps a trip to home depot is in order?
I’ve been saying for a long time that the next “rally” I intend to take part in, will be one where I see the crowd already with torches and pitchforks headed for the capitol. I guess along with stockpiling ammo, people who look to the future should be picking up a couple buckets of tar and a couple down pillows.
How peculiar it is that in this day, we are forced to defend The Second Amendment as though it is violating anyone’s civil rights or oppressing anyone at all.
Dear GC cultists: The Second Amendment is not to be challenged as was the prohibition for women to vote or for slaves to be freed. Not the same thing. At all.
Cease and desist this false notion and the propagation of said notion that The Second Amendment is vile or responsible for any deaths by guns in America.
You have been warned. Thank you, and Long Live the Republic.
If the anti’s are beginning to fear us, I’d say we are making progress. We should encourage them in their fears, unfounded or not.
Remember the old saw, “Nice guys finish last”?
Look at how the bikers react to a threat to their lifestyle. Massive, loud, disrespectful rallies in violation of helmet laws. In-your-face civil disobedience gets results, always has. Another lesson can be taken from the Gay Pride folks. Their slogan; We’re Queer. We’re here. Get used to it. And the country, for the most part, got used to it, even though they may have a ways to go yet. You may find either or both of these groups distasteful but they used in-your-face tactics to successfully advance their causes. It is always a good tactic to emulate success.
“Look at how the bikers react to a threat to their lifestyle.”
I have been wishing for a good, honest analysis of how bikers got the helmet law repealed here in PA. To me it seemed analogous in difficulty to getting Constitutional Carry passed.
I believe at one point bikers rode their bikes through the doors of the capitol and up and down the stairs and hallways, but I can’t swear to that, or, that it happened in PA.
Be aware that for a number of years antigun politicians in New York have been trying to use public sector unions as their proxies. I know SEIU has been involved with pushing local laws to keep guns out of public buildings. Governor Cuomo has been trying to take this “partnership” to a whole new level.
It would not surprise me if this has been going on in other states as well.
Someone should seriously work on informing union people of the way government and government proxies’ guns were used to crush poorly armed labor organizing in the early days of their movement. The Battle of Blair Mountain makes for interesting reading, and “Matewan” is a swell movie. Both of those events went down less than 25 years before I was born, and here in the east (more or less), so to me they seem like relatively recent, relatively local history.
We also might remind them that part of the purpose of the National Firearms Act was to make machine guns too expensive for the working man, while the bosses and their thugs could easily afford the $200 tax stamp. I remember in the mid-1970s seeing the old mounts for M1917 water cooled medium machine guns in the J&L Steel gatehouse that placed all of Franklin Avenue (in Aliquippa) in enfilade, just in case those uppity steelworkers questioned their betters.
2 things:
I went to Media, PA to find their meeting, I couldn’t. I parked about 5 blocks away and walked all over the Courthouse complex outside looking for them. After not seeing them I left after 45 minutes. If they had anything, it was not in the obvious County spots.
secondly, the bikers never drove their bikes in the Rotunda in Harrisburg. They did have some up very close to the front door. As I was a part of that contingent in Rendell’s first term, they did have an excellent turn out of people, but they have a full time ABATE Harrisburg presence and lobbyist. I occasionally ride without my helmet, but it was always about choice in that case.
Thanks! I could have sworn I heard about bikes in the Rotunda, but maybe someone was just embellishing the story to include what they wished they had done. Or maybe it happened in another state?
As I said, the difficulty of getting the helmet law repealed seemed as politically difficult as say, getting Constitutional Carry passed. For all the people we allegedly have had working for gun rights here in PA (not the least of which has been the NRA) we have never made even a distant approach to that, though we did finally have a new rep introduce legislation, that went nowhere. But if I seem critical of the historical gun rights movement in PA, that’s why.
If I were still riding, you could bet I’d still be wearing a helmet, but the option not to is nice to have. Fifty years ago I loved that wind in my hair!
I’ve always challenged gun grabbers to take actual tangible steps if they truly fear CCW/hicap mags/whatever. If you really honestly believe that everyone with a CCW is about to snap and that you are at high risk for being killed by a negligent discharge/parking space rage/whatever, then a rational person would take steps to avoid that situation like wearing body armor or avoiding going shopping anywhere other than in downtown Chicago (which is very safe when it comes to risks from lawful gun owners).
I am very glad to hear the anti-rights cultists are taking action to address their concerns. It also highlights that they are freaking lunatics which is a plus.