Debating the GunLoons (Part Tres)
Slogans.
If the GunLoons have nothing else, they have slogans.
Here’s a favorite found on bumperstickers:
“If guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns.”
It sounds like common sense but such bromides are not always as they appear. If one thinks (an antithetical concept to gunloons) about it–both the criminal and the “law-abiding citizen” got their guns from the same place.
The Ethical Spectacle has an excellent article on this subject:
The more you look into it, though, the more it appears that the intruder and the homeowner have both bought their gun from the same person. An illegal gun in the United States, unlike an illegal drug, is not one smuggled into the country or made in a basement laboratory; it is always a gun that began its odyssey with a legal sale by a gunshop to somebody, somewhere. The gun used to kill President Kennedy was purchased by mail through an ad in the Rifleman, the NRA magazine; the gun used to assassinate the Mexican presidential candidate last year was originally purchased in a California gunshop. Colin Ferguson purchased the semiautomatic he used to kill the Long Island Railroad Riders in a California gunshop too. Patrick Purdy, the killer of five Cambodian schoolchildren in a schoolyard, also bought his weapon legally in California, and Wayne Lo, who killed a professor and a student at his Berkshire, Mass. college, bought his semiautomatic at the same sporting goods shop where I buy my lures and bait when I am in that part of the country.
This gunloon slogan is meant to mask the fact the gun lobby is complicit in allowing criminals easy access to guns.
So how would you classify me then? GunLoon? I own a 1903 Springfield rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun and a 1911. I also have no criminal record, a good salary, a job with an international company, am engaged, and I bought a new car yesterday. What part of me is crazy?
I’d love to hear your solution to gun crime, though. Should be worth a few laughs. Feckless hate-filled rantings usually are.
Comment by k2aggie07 — June 5, 2007 @ 3:22 pm
So how would you classify me then? GunLoon? I own a 1903 Springfield rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun and a 1911. I also have no criminal record, a good salary, a job with an international company, am engaged, and I bought a new car yesterday. What part of me is crazy?
I’d love to hear your solution to gun crime, though. Should be worth a few laughs. Feckless hate-filled rantings usually are.
Sorry if this is a double post. Your site is kind of slow.
Comment by k2aggie07 — June 5, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
k2aggie07: I really don’t know if you’re crazy or not; by all accounts, Tim McVeigh had no criminal record, had served his country in the Army, etc.
What’s more important is the fact I don’t know if you know which end of a firearm is which; I don’t know if you have a substance abuse problem; I don’t know if you think you’re part of some militia that’s waiting the signal to overthrow the country..the list goes on.
Perhaps you are a model citizen.
Why are you afraid to be accountable for your fiream?
Comment by Administrator — June 5, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
You didn’t offer a solution, you just listed a bunch of reasons why I probably shouldn’t be allowed to own guns. (Un)fortunately, the federal government takes care of quite a few of those buy running an instant background check every time anyone buys an assault weapon or a pistol. Phew! One crisis averted!
I am not afraid to be accountable for my firearms (plural) at all. I make no secret of my ownership and avid sportsmanship; most, if not all, of my coworkers know I have guns. Many have come to shoot with me. Its a great past time.
So, other than the fact that you don’t trust your fellow man, do you have any other reasons why I shouldn’t be allowed to carry? Because, incidentally, aside from sporting, that lack of trust is precisely why I do own firearms.
PS Please establish, vice ad hominem attacks, why guns in the hands of honest citizens (a category to which the vast majority belongs) is a bad thing?
Comment by k2aggie07 — June 7, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
Make you a deal, k2aggie07, why don’t you tell us why you’d be opposed to licensing, registration, and insurance?
I wouldn’t have much difficulty with honest, lw-abiding citizens owning certain firearms for hunting/self-defense purposes. Provided certain requirements are satisfied.
Comment by Administrator — June 8, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
In order to carry a pistol you are required to have a license (in some states — in many you simply can’t carry them at all). Why should you have to license a weapon for home defense? Do you have a license for knives? How about chainsaws? All can be used for nefarious purposes.
The simplest answer for why I don’t want to license, register and insure my weapons is that I really don’t want to pay for it. I also don’t really trust the government; its part of the reason I don’t have a concealed carry license. For one I don’t feel like I need to carry; for two, I don’t want to be fingerprinted and flagged by the government as a “gun owner”. If someone like you came to power that flag would turn into a “gun loon” and I would be “watched”.
Paranoid, I know, but unfortunately its happened before — see Nazi Germany for the most recent example.
Anyway, licensing and registration would do nothing to avert gun crime. What good does it do to have a license if you’re a maniac with no priors? These are the situations you’ve been describing. You’d get the license just as easily as you buy a gun now — with the same outcomes.
Why make it hard for the good people when the bad people are going to continue at the status quo?
Comment by k2aggie07 — June 8, 2007 @ 9:28 pm
k2aggie: First, your history of Nazi Germany is very wrong. See cite
Anyway, licensing and registration would do nothing to avert gun crime. What good does it do to have a license if you’re a maniac with no priors?
You’re trying to make good the enemy of perfect. Licensing and registration won’t solve every problem, but it may solve a good number. For example, the recent VA Tech shootings. The fact the shooter had been institutionalized may have prevented his gun purchases.
Why make it hard for the good people when the bad people are going to continue at the status quo?
Life is unfair. Let’s not forget many of these so-called ‘good people’ are good until they decide a gun is a way out of their problems.
Again, I ask: why are gonowners so afraid to be accountable?
Comment by Administrator — June 9, 2007 @ 11:44 am
And, like I said before, I am accountable for every firearm I buy. That guy who shot people at VA Tech passed a Federal Screening — he bought the gun legally! So the Federal screening should include history of mental problems. OK. I’m game for that. But why take away MY guns? I’m no nut.
Ted Nugent says it well:
“No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate restrictions or a “cult of agriculture fertilizer” following the unabashed evil of Timothy McVeigh’s heinous crime against America on that fateful day in Oklahoma City. No one faulted kitchen utensils or other hardware of choice after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught drugging, mutilating, raping, murdering and cannibalizing his victims. Nobody wanted “steak knife control” as they autopsied the dead nurses in Chicago, Illinois, as Richard Speck went on trial for mass murder.”
So what gives?
Nazi’s did not round up guns, true — but the legitimate government had anti gun legislation. It may have prevented the Nazi’s from an armed uprising, but it also prevented armed uprising against the Nazi state. Is this an argument for or against gun control? You tell me.
Good things to read:
Instances of gun laws killing innocent people.
Connections between gun laws and racism.
Gun laws limiting rights
Comment by k2aggie07 — June 10, 2007 @ 9:14 pm
Citing Ted Nugent doesn’t really help your cause. Why would you cite a racist? And let’s not forget the fact McVeigh was an NRA member and very likely gleaned the information for making his bomb from an NRA online bulletin board.
Comment by Administrator — June 13, 2007 @ 7:58 am
Rule #1 - if you can’t fight the statement, fight the source.
Comment by k2aggie07 — June 15, 2007 @ 10:21 am
Kee-rist. I see why you get banned, JG. But regardless of Nugent’s alleged racism, what about the truth of what he said? No one has called for the ban of fertilizer or kitchen utensils or steak knives.
And McVeigh got his info from an NRA online bulletin board?!? Um, got a link for that?
Comment by Mr. Bruce — June 15, 2007 @ 6:52 pm
Rule #1 - if you can’t fight the statement, fight the source.
Ted Nugent. The guy is a racist and has someyhing wrong with him. Yet, he’s offered up as a spokesman and board member of the NRA?
Mr. Bruce: Nugent’s racism is well-established, it’s not “alleged.”
The issue of kitchen utensils and steak knives is that they’re pretty poor weapons to kill lots of people; there’s a reason we send our troops to war with firearms not blenders or egg beaters.
Tanya Metaksa:
Comment by Administrator — June 16, 2007 @ 7:30 am