Threats to our gun rights
29 January 2014 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dime_novel_heroCritiquing the 2nd Amendment rantings in The Cowboy Chronicle is getting to be a bad habit so this time I will skip over the four (yes, four) articles supporting nullification and skip to what the Capgun Kid thinks are the top five threats to gun owners and cowboy action shooting.
He starts with a honorable mention: Liberals. But then discounts them as a threat because “they are genetically arranged so all the visionary intelligence they picked up in college while in the company of nothing but other liberals is lacking in common sense. . . probably because they never watched westerns.”
The anti-intellectualism is palpable. Do you really believe that only liberals go to college and all the good, upstanding, moral, Christian gun owners are working blue collar jobs with trade or, at best, associate degrees from community colleges but not working in those jobs with those Communist fronts called unions? Is this really the world you think you live in?
Let me dispel a few notions. College is not full of only liberals. College professors are not some monolithic bastion of liberalism. My freshman year of college was smack dab in the middle of the Reagan era and I saw no signs of the “nothing but liberals” environment you claim. I fell in with a group of what I considered to be fairly conservative people and was shocked that they referred to me as “Mr. Conservative.” I not only watched westerns but took a film studies course on westerns. I was a gun owner. A life member of the NRA. I had a permit to carry a concealed firearm and did so on campus, in violation of university policy, thinking I was right to do so for my own safety and under my constitutional rights.
You’ve created what is called a “straw man,” a misrepresentation of your opponent that you then proceed to attack because it’s easier to do it that way than to actually address reality.
And, just to point something out, by definition, conservatism is the antithesis of visionary.
But let’s get to the details of your “greatest threats.”
Number Five: Sputnik
Well, not really Sputnik itself. As scary as the evil godless commie Ruskies putting a satellite in orbit and signaling that they had the rocket power to drop nukes on Hometown USA was, it was “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek” that were a worse threat to our cherished rights because kids turned away from westerns and instead started watching science fiction. Instead of looking a century into the past when real men were manifesting their destinies and women were decidedly not, they were being shown a bright and promising future and we all know what a threat that is to conservative values.
Number Four: John Wayne
Or rather, the lack of John Wayne. “It has been downhill since the Duke left us.”
Number Three: Celebrity bowling, golf and roller derby.
And, like any slippery slope argument, these things (which pretty much went out of fashion in the 70s) lead directly to all sorts of other horrific television such as talk shows, infomercials, on the scene weather reporters, and (OMG! WTF!) an entire network dedicated to food. Surely, Alton Brown is an unambiguous sign of the downfall of civilization as we know it.
Number Two: Italian Food.
There is a reason we should idolize spaghetti westerns. Because America has turned to foo-foo foods as seen on The Food Network, they no longer eat good, hearty Italian foods like pasta so obviously good Italian firearms manufacturers like Pietta and Uberti are still manufacturing in Italy instead of moving production to Texas; the epicenter of the world’s replica gun culture.
Wait. Really?
Number One: Bambi.
OK, you know what? I think I have to invoke Poe’s Law here. Here is someone writing parody so effectively, satirizing the anti-gunners so thoroughly that he is indistinguishable from the most delusional wingnut. This is like something from The Onion or the Landover Baptist Church, right?
Please, oh please, tell me this is a joke.
But probably not. What I’ve seen of Capgun Kid’s other writing show me that while he is likely being a little hyperbolic here and playing it up as lighthearted humor, he likely does believe that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of American civilization and only through the tireless lobbying of the National Rifle Association have we avoided having all our precious guns taken away from us.
And I see that sort of attitude across gun culture. A fond nostalgia for “the good old days.” Not surprising for a bunch of guys who dress up in costumes, recreating a time a century before we were born.
But if you really think that “Star Trek”, celebrity bowling and Disney films from three generations ago are really the greatest threats to our gun rights then you need to wake up and join the fucking 21st century.
Let me give you my list of the greatest threats to our gun rights (in no particular order).
Mass killings.
Really, this should be a no brainer. Historically, the vast majority of gun control legislation (or abortive attempts at legislation) was initiated by some tragedy. The gangland violence of the Roaring 20s and the St. Valentines Day Massacre led to the National Firearms act of 1934. The deaths John F. and Robert Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King and the race riots of the civil rights movement led directly to the Gun Control Act of 1968. The attempted assassination of Ronald Regan spawned the Brady Gun Control Act of 1993. The federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was pushed through thanks to horrific gang violence in California and the siege at Waco. Sandy Hook is the latest example. In spite of the NRA conspiracy theory propaganda, the Obama administration’s first term had virtually nothing to say on the topic of gun control. No major speeches. No minor speeches. No proposed legislation. Not even any significant rhetoric on it. The entire Democratic party had bigger fish to fry and gun control was relegated to the back burner.
And then, even when the shit hit the fan over Sandy Hook, the Obama administration was fairly reserved, making balanced statements and generally waiting to see what Congress came up with.
Which was ultimately nothing.
There’s nothing we can really do about this by way of preventing mass killings. They are going to happen and increased gun control activism will be a direct result. But what we can do is point out that statistically, these sorts of instances aren’t really on the rise and not behave like lunatics when one happens.
Nullification
You may think that invoking founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when you interpret the constitution as giving you the power to ignore any federal law you choose makes you look scholarly, but in actuality it makes you look like a secessionist, and we all know how that turned out 150 years ago. It’s bad enough when rank and file gun nuts talk like this but when it’s NRA leadership or people in elected state and federal positions, you look insane. I would venture to say you are insane. The United States is a nation of laws and just arbitrarily choosing to ignore them because you think those same laws give you the right to ignore them is defined quite literally as anarchy.
That’s right. You aren’t patriots. You aren’t conservatives. You aren’t even libertarians. You are anarchists. If you want to protect your 2nd Amendment rights you can’t destroy the rest of Constitution.
Armageddon Rhetoric
Barack Obama is not a dictator. Nancy Pelosi is not a traitor. Political criticism is not sedition. The affordable care act is not tyranny. Paying taxes is not slavery. The U.N. is not the New World Order.
Words have meaning and when you conflate a word with a particular definition with something that is equivalent to an end of the world as we know it, you distort and dilute the meaning of that word into meaninglessness. The teatards use the rhetoric of treason so often that when someone actually calls for the assassination of the president of the United States, they don’t recognize that as the crime it actually is.
Get some perspective. The majority of the proposals made after Sandy Hook, such as requiring occasional gun sellers such as myself to go through the process of obtaining a background check on the buyer in exactly the same way that all gun dealers are already required to do, is an inconvenience to me, not an abrogation of my fundamental rights as if Hillary Clinton personally kicked in my door to take my guns.
Change your language so that it accurately portrays what you mean. Use words that have common, accepted and agreed upon definitions so that the people you are trying to convince know instantly what you are talking about. If you say “treason” you damn well better have the legal evidence necessary to back up that claim otherwise you are crying wolf. That which is asserted without evidence can (and should) be dismissed without evidence.
The National Rifle Association
When the leadership of one of the largest, most powerful political lobbies in the nation uses the rhetoric of the rightest of the right wing lunatics, such as calling for more guns in schools, it makes us all look insane. Our political leadership is supposed to be the moderating influence that takes our diverse (and occasional extreme) positions and molding them into something that can influence the political thought of a nation.
Saying that Obama is “out to erase the second amendment from the bill of rights” is not only inflammatory, it’s untrue. My NRA should not use the words “treason” or “un-American.” I should never, ever, under any circumstance, hear the leadership of my NRA stand on a podium and invoke “The War of Northern Aggression.”
You are a powerhouse in politics. Stop adopting the language of the idiot extremists.
Willful Ignorance
In 1996, the NRA lobbied hard for and won a law that prevented the government from funding any research into the effects of guns on society.
What are you afraid of? If you actually believe what you say, then you have nothing to fear from scientific research. If what you claim is true, that research can only confirm that claim. Concealing it makes you look like liars doing everything you can to keep the truth from getting out. Like the lawyers of the tobacco industry saying, outright, that there is no evidence for the harmful effects of cigarettes.
So, here’s what we need to do. . . and remember, I am a part of this “we.” I am a gun owner. I am a life member of the NRA. I believe the right to self defense, and thus the guarantee to effective tools for that self defense, is a basic human right founded in millennia-old common law. I believe that the founding fathers thought the same thing and that it was so important to them that they it second in the bill of rights. As a liberal I believe in a liberal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that confers those rights on all citizens, not just some narrow, conservative interpretation of the militia.
First off, we need science. The best, most thorough data collection we can come up with. If we are right, then the data will prove that.
With the data we do have, we need to change the narrative from that of a fearful and panicky minority desperate to protect what we think is being stolen from us by an antagonistic government to a narrative of confident, mainstream Americans working towards a better society that cares about all of its constitutional rights.
Violent crime rates have been declining for 30 years. That declining rate has been fairly consistent. When the assault weapon ban went into effect in 1994 there was no dip in the violent crime rate. When the gun ban expired 10 years later, there was no corresponding spike in the crime rate. A detailed study from that time (before the research ban put a stop to that) concluded that the assault weapon ban had no effect on crime rates.
Note that: the gun ban had no effect.
There are states and municipalities with strict gun control that also have very high crime rates. Those with loose gun control with low crime rates. Jurisdictions with high gun control and low crime and vice versa. Time and again, gun control seems to have little or no effect on crime rates. Even without speculation on why this is, the lack of correlation is pronounced.
Gun ownership has been on the decline for 40 years. While gun sales rise, it seems that fewer people are gun owning, meaning that those guns are being concentrated in fewer individuals. (Collectors such as myself.) This steady decline in gun ownership is independent from gun laws. More restrictive gun laws such as the Assault Weapon Ban did not prevent people from buying guns. The repeal of that law did not cause a dramatic spike in gun ownership.
Note that: Gun ownership is not correlated with gun laws.
But what about that moth gun ownership and violent crime rates have both been trending down for the same period of time. Doesn’t gun ownership rates declining for 40 years and violent crime rates declining for 30 years imply that fewer guns mean less crime?
Well, if that was the only data we had then only perhaps. Correlation is not causality. Except that we already have the data showing that there is no correlation between gun laws and crime rates. And the data that’s shows no correlation between gun laws and gun ownership. Without these correlations, the idea that there is then a correlation between gun ownership and violent crime isn’t supported.
I suspect that something else is going on here. Something is driving the declining violent crime rate and it’s not guns or gun control. I suspect that it is not the declining gun ownership rate leading to lower violent crime rates but instead it is the declining crime rate (or even the perception of the declining crime rate) that is leading fewer people to feel the need to buy guns.
This is why we need more data. Something is going on in this country. Something wonderful. The violent crime rate is going down but with all this false attention on guns (remember the lack of correlation) we don’t know what that is. With laws in place that prevent the CDC from collecting that data we cannot know what that is. We must find out and do more of that, whatever that is.
And should we find out that we were wrong and that there is a correlation, then we must accept the truth with grace and intelligence. For example, one piece of data we do know is that in municipalities with universal background checks, the incidence of domestic violence declines. Abusers don’t turn into murderers when they have to get a background check to get a gun. This is a good thing and the imposition on us, the law abiding, non-abuser citizen is the inconvenience of waiting for the phone call to confirm that we are, in fact, law abiding citizens and the cost of paying someone a few bucks to make the call.
Too keep some dickwad from murdering his estranged girlfriend that is an inconvenience I will happily accept.
This sort of narrative is intelligent, reasoned and reasonable. It is the way thoughtful human beings present themselves with the goal of convincing people of certain policy positions.
Blaming Bambi is not.
He starts with a honorable mention: Liberals. But then discounts them as a threat because “they are genetically arranged so all the visionary intelligence they picked up in college while in the company of nothing but other liberals is lacking in common sense. . . probably because they never watched westerns.”
The anti-intellectualism is palpable. Do you really believe that only liberals go to college and all the good, upstanding, moral, Christian gun owners are working blue collar jobs with trade or, at best, associate degrees from community colleges but not working in those jobs with those Communist fronts called unions? Is this really the world you think you live in?
Let me dispel a few notions. College is not full of only liberals. College professors are not some monolithic bastion of liberalism. My freshman year of college was smack dab in the middle of the Reagan era and I saw no signs of the “nothing but liberals” environment you claim. I fell in with a group of what I considered to be fairly conservative people and was shocked that they referred to me as “Mr. Conservative.” I not only watched westerns but took a film studies course on westerns. I was a gun owner. A life member of the NRA. I had a permit to carry a concealed firearm and did so on campus, in violation of university policy, thinking I was right to do so for my own safety and under my constitutional rights.
You’ve created what is called a “straw man,” a misrepresentation of your opponent that you then proceed to attack because it’s easier to do it that way than to actually address reality.
And, just to point something out, by definition, conservatism is the antithesis of visionary.
But let’s get to the details of your “greatest threats.”
Number Five: Sputnik
Well, not really Sputnik itself. As scary as the evil godless commie Ruskies putting a satellite in orbit and signaling that they had the rocket power to drop nukes on Hometown USA was, it was “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek” that were a worse threat to our cherished rights because kids turned away from westerns and instead started watching science fiction. Instead of looking a century into the past when real men were manifesting their destinies and women were decidedly not, they were being shown a bright and promising future and we all know what a threat that is to conservative values.
Number Four: John Wayne
Or rather, the lack of John Wayne. “It has been downhill since the Duke left us.”
Number Three: Celebrity bowling, golf and roller derby.
And, like any slippery slope argument, these things (which pretty much went out of fashion in the 70s) lead directly to all sorts of other horrific television such as talk shows, infomercials, on the scene weather reporters, and (OMG! WTF!) an entire network dedicated to food. Surely, Alton Brown is an unambiguous sign of the downfall of civilization as we know it.
Number Two: Italian Food.
There is a reason we should idolize spaghetti westerns. Because America has turned to foo-foo foods as seen on The Food Network, they no longer eat good, hearty Italian foods like pasta so obviously good Italian firearms manufacturers like Pietta and Uberti are still manufacturing in Italy instead of moving production to Texas; the epicenter of the world’s replica gun culture.
Wait. Really?
Number One: Bambi.
OK, you know what? I think I have to invoke Poe’s Law here. Here is someone writing parody so effectively, satirizing the anti-gunners so thoroughly that he is indistinguishable from the most delusional wingnut. This is like something from The Onion or the Landover Baptist Church, right?Please, oh please, tell me this is a joke.
But probably not. What I’ve seen of Capgun Kid’s other writing show me that while he is likely being a little hyperbolic here and playing it up as lighthearted humor, he likely does believe that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of American civilization and only through the tireless lobbying of the National Rifle Association have we avoided having all our precious guns taken away from us.
And I see that sort of attitude across gun culture. A fond nostalgia for “the good old days.” Not surprising for a bunch of guys who dress up in costumes, recreating a time a century before we were born.
But if you really think that “Star Trek”, celebrity bowling and Disney films from three generations ago are really the greatest threats to our gun rights then you need to wake up and join the fucking 21st century.
Let me give you my list of the greatest threats to our gun rights (in no particular order).
Mass killings.
Really, this should be a no brainer. Historically, the vast majority of gun control legislation (or abortive attempts at legislation) was initiated by some tragedy. The gangland violence of the Roaring 20s and the St. Valentines Day Massacre led to the National Firearms act of 1934. The deaths John F. and Robert Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King and the race riots of the civil rights movement led directly to the Gun Control Act of 1968. The attempted assassination of Ronald Regan spawned the Brady Gun Control Act of 1993. The federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was pushed through thanks to horrific gang violence in California and the siege at Waco. Sandy Hook is the latest example. In spite of the NRA conspiracy theory propaganda, the Obama administration’s first term had virtually nothing to say on the topic of gun control. No major speeches. No minor speeches. No proposed legislation. Not even any significant rhetoric on it. The entire Democratic party had bigger fish to fry and gun control was relegated to the back burner.
And then, even when the shit hit the fan over Sandy Hook, the Obama administration was fairly reserved, making balanced statements and generally waiting to see what Congress came up with.
Which was ultimately nothing.
There’s nothing we can really do about this by way of preventing mass killings. They are going to happen and increased gun control activism will be a direct result. But what we can do is point out that statistically, these sorts of instances aren’t really on the rise and not behave like lunatics when one happens.
Nullification
You may think that invoking founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when you interpret the constitution as giving you the power to ignore any federal law you choose makes you look scholarly, but in actuality it makes you look like a secessionist, and we all know how that turned out 150 years ago. It’s bad enough when rank and file gun nuts talk like this but when it’s NRA leadership or people in elected state and federal positions, you look insane. I would venture to say you are insane. The United States is a nation of laws and just arbitrarily choosing to ignore them because you think those same laws give you the right to ignore them is defined quite literally as anarchy.
That’s right. You aren’t patriots. You aren’t conservatives. You aren’t even libertarians. You are anarchists. If you want to protect your 2nd Amendment rights you can’t destroy the rest of Constitution.
Armageddon Rhetoric
Barack Obama is not a dictator. Nancy Pelosi is not a traitor. Political criticism is not sedition. The affordable care act is not tyranny. Paying taxes is not slavery. The U.N. is not the New World Order.
Words have meaning and when you conflate a word with a particular definition with something that is equivalent to an end of the world as we know it, you distort and dilute the meaning of that word into meaninglessness. The teatards use the rhetoric of treason so often that when someone actually calls for the assassination of the president of the United States, they don’t recognize that as the crime it actually is.
Get some perspective. The majority of the proposals made after Sandy Hook, such as requiring occasional gun sellers such as myself to go through the process of obtaining a background check on the buyer in exactly the same way that all gun dealers are already required to do, is an inconvenience to me, not an abrogation of my fundamental rights as if Hillary Clinton personally kicked in my door to take my guns.
Change your language so that it accurately portrays what you mean. Use words that have common, accepted and agreed upon definitions so that the people you are trying to convince know instantly what you are talking about. If you say “treason” you damn well better have the legal evidence necessary to back up that claim otherwise you are crying wolf. That which is asserted without evidence can (and should) be dismissed without evidence.
The National Rifle Association
When the leadership of one of the largest, most powerful political lobbies in the nation uses the rhetoric of the rightest of the right wing lunatics, such as calling for more guns in schools, it makes us all look insane. Our political leadership is supposed to be the moderating influence that takes our diverse (and occasional extreme) positions and molding them into something that can influence the political thought of a nation.
Saying that Obama is “out to erase the second amendment from the bill of rights” is not only inflammatory, it’s untrue. My NRA should not use the words “treason” or “un-American.” I should never, ever, under any circumstance, hear the leadership of my NRA stand on a podium and invoke “The War of Northern Aggression.”
You are a powerhouse in politics. Stop adopting the language of the idiot extremists.
Willful Ignorance
In 1996, the NRA lobbied hard for and won a law that prevented the government from funding any research into the effects of guns on society.
What are you afraid of? If you actually believe what you say, then you have nothing to fear from scientific research. If what you claim is true, that research can only confirm that claim. Concealing it makes you look like liars doing everything you can to keep the truth from getting out. Like the lawyers of the tobacco industry saying, outright, that there is no evidence for the harmful effects of cigarettes.
So, here’s what we need to do. . . and remember, I am a part of this “we.” I am a gun owner. I am a life member of the NRA. I believe the right to self defense, and thus the guarantee to effective tools for that self defense, is a basic human right founded in millennia-old common law. I believe that the founding fathers thought the same thing and that it was so important to them that they it second in the bill of rights. As a liberal I believe in a liberal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that confers those rights on all citizens, not just some narrow, conservative interpretation of the militia.
First off, we need science. The best, most thorough data collection we can come up with. If we are right, then the data will prove that.
With the data we do have, we need to change the narrative from that of a fearful and panicky minority desperate to protect what we think is being stolen from us by an antagonistic government to a narrative of confident, mainstream Americans working towards a better society that cares about all of its constitutional rights.
Violent crime rates have been declining for 30 years. That declining rate has been fairly consistent. When the assault weapon ban went into effect in 1994 there was no dip in the violent crime rate. When the gun ban expired 10 years later, there was no corresponding spike in the crime rate. A detailed study from that time (before the research ban put a stop to that) concluded that the assault weapon ban had no effect on crime rates.
Note that: the gun ban had no effect.
There are states and municipalities with strict gun control that also have very high crime rates. Those with loose gun control with low crime rates. Jurisdictions with high gun control and low crime and vice versa. Time and again, gun control seems to have little or no effect on crime rates. Even without speculation on why this is, the lack of correlation is pronounced.
Gun ownership has been on the decline for 40 years. While gun sales rise, it seems that fewer people are gun owning, meaning that those guns are being concentrated in fewer individuals. (Collectors such as myself.) This steady decline in gun ownership is independent from gun laws. More restrictive gun laws such as the Assault Weapon Ban did not prevent people from buying guns. The repeal of that law did not cause a dramatic spike in gun ownership.
Note that: Gun ownership is not correlated with gun laws.
But what about that moth gun ownership and violent crime rates have both been trending down for the same period of time. Doesn’t gun ownership rates declining for 40 years and violent crime rates declining for 30 years imply that fewer guns mean less crime?
Well, if that was the only data we had then only perhaps. Correlation is not causality. Except that we already have the data showing that there is no correlation between gun laws and crime rates. And the data that’s shows no correlation between gun laws and gun ownership. Without these correlations, the idea that there is then a correlation between gun ownership and violent crime isn’t supported.
I suspect that something else is going on here. Something is driving the declining violent crime rate and it’s not guns or gun control. I suspect that it is not the declining gun ownership rate leading to lower violent crime rates but instead it is the declining crime rate (or even the perception of the declining crime rate) that is leading fewer people to feel the need to buy guns.
This is why we need more data. Something is going on in this country. Something wonderful. The violent crime rate is going down but with all this false attention on guns (remember the lack of correlation) we don’t know what that is. With laws in place that prevent the CDC from collecting that data we cannot know what that is. We must find out and do more of that, whatever that is.
And should we find out that we were wrong and that there is a correlation, then we must accept the truth with grace and intelligence. For example, one piece of data we do know is that in municipalities with universal background checks, the incidence of domestic violence declines. Abusers don’t turn into murderers when they have to get a background check to get a gun. This is a good thing and the imposition on us, the law abiding, non-abuser citizen is the inconvenience of waiting for the phone call to confirm that we are, in fact, law abiding citizens and the cost of paying someone a few bucks to make the call.
Too keep some dickwad from murdering his estranged girlfriend that is an inconvenience I will happily accept.
This sort of narrative is intelligent, reasoned and reasonable. It is the way thoughtful human beings present themselves with the goal of convincing people of certain policy positions.
Blaming Bambi is not.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-18 08:38 pm (UTC)http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26222578 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26222578)
Apparently not.
When Missouri lifted its permit-to-purchase handgun laws in 2007, it seems there was a significant increase in crimes. Without the background check, people were buying guns from otherwise reputable dealers and then going on to commit crimes. That strongly suggests that when background checks are in place, many would-be criminals can't find some other way to get the guns they want.
Do background checks restrict the rights of otherwise law-abiding citizens and, as such, are a threat to our Second Amendment rights? I don't think so. It seems an inconvenience and, here in Pennsylvania, it is a very slight inconvenience in that I have to wait a few minutes for the dealer to make a phone call and pay him a few bucks for the trouble. I would disagree with what I think the Missouri law was in that it gave the decision not to an impartial database but to the discretion of the local sheriff as to whether he would issue a permit. I find that too prone to abuse for political or personal reasons and agree that, if that were the case, the law should have been repealed. However, the evidence shows to me that it should have been replaced with something that kept background checks in place.
This is the sort of evidence we need, as I mentioned above, and the perhaps difficult truths we must accept should the facts not go perfectly our way.