Gunnuttery category archive

Jay Bookman writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

According to some, the primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that citizens have enough firepower to overthrow the federal government, should it become necessary to do so. If the government ever loses its fear of such a revolt, the theory goes, our liberty ends and tyranny begins.

Let me be blunt: That is mythological claptrap. But like a lot of mythological claptrap, it can push weak-minded people — the Timothy McVeighs of the world — to do stupid and dangerous things.

And whom does he cite as his authority? Justice Scalia.

Follow the link for the evidence.

Click for a larger image.

Mary Jo Mellone asks, “What about my right–to be let alone?”

I don’t own a gun. I am in the majority in this nation, and I feel discriminated against because I have to concede my rights to a minority that oppresses me in the name of exercising its rights.

I cannot go comfortably to the mall, parking lot, church, hair salon — it is hard to keep these mass shooting scenes nicely lined up in memory — because somebody who is sure the world is out to get him can arm himself and then go out and prove his point. Even the last refuge of our peace and tranquility, the national parks, are no longer either; you can pack heat, and I have to sit next to you on the tour bus.

Hazard County, indeed.

At Psychology Today, Jonathan Gottschall examines the credibility of claims that violence on television, in movies, and in video games leads to shootings. A nugget:

Second, the evidence that violent media promotes violent behavior is actually pretty shaky. Violence is a great—perhaps the great—staple of the entertainment economy. As a society we guzzle down huge amounts of fake violence in television shows, novels, films, and video games. And yet, a determined fifty year search for real-world consequences of fictive violence hasn’t found conclusive evidence of a causal linkage. Some researchers argue that the more violent media we consume, generally speaking, the more likely we are to behave aggressively in the real world. But other researchers disagree, picking studies apart on methodological grounds and pointing out that many hundreds of millions of people watch violent television and play violent games without developing the slightest urge to kill. As scientists like Steven Pinker point out: we consume more violent entertainment than we ever have before and yet we’ve never been at lower risk of a bloody demise. The more violent entertainment we’ve consumed, the more peaceable and law-abiding we’ve become.

Video games don’t kill people. Gun nuts kill people.

Visit, politely. (Link fixed.)

A 17-year-old boy shot himself in the chest this morning while handling a gun at an East Side home.

(snip)

“The victim was visiting a 19-year-old friend and they were handling a handgun when the weapon discharged, hitting the victim in the chest,” Sgt. Sammy Morris said.

Die it with the NRA’s miracle malarkey diet:

When an outbreak of food poisoning occurs, nobody says that dying from one’s dinner is the inevitable price of eating.

(snip)

When the subject is gun violence, though, the National Rifle Association has been feeding the country a similarly poisonous line for decades: that if mass murder is the inevitable price of the Second Amendment, then so be it; that the only permissible answer to gun killings is more guns; that any effective clamp-down on firearms would undermine freedom — including limits on assault-style weapons that can mow down multiple victims in one clip — and that anyone who advocates such a thing in the wake of the latest massacre is “politicizing” tragedy.

Read the rest.

PoliticalProf asks a question.

Steven M. spotlights the WATB in gunnuttery (emphasis in the original):

. . . we completely ignore one of the main drivers of the gun culture — possibly the most significant one: Guns are fun. Lots of people want guns just to have a rip-roaring good time. And if you deprive them of this fun, they bawl and whine like spoiled children.

Do please read the rest.

The movies will be ever so much more exciting once it fully blossoms.

Celebrate, politely.

A New Year’s celebration crashed into Norfolk prosecutor Brent Johnson’s driveway last week.

Specifically, a 9 mm slug fired during holiday revelry dented his car and came to rest in his driveway.

Incensed, Johnson pocketed the slug and showed it to friends and colleagues. “If that 9 mm had struck a human being in the head, there’s no doubt it would kill them,” said Johnson, a veteran attorney and Army Reserve officer.

The article goes on to list numerous other examples of gunnutty expressions of joy and happiness during the holiday.

Once you start keeping track, you will find that, in real life, antics like this and others more deadly far outnumber examples of good guys winning High Noon shootouts and claiming fair maidens.

The High Noon shootouts fill gun nuts’ fantasies as they find fulfillment fondling their Glocks.

But they are still and only fantasies.

More often than not, relying on guns for personal safety does not turn out the way gun proponents predict.

It rebounds, sometimes in unspeakably sad ways.

Despite what the NRA tells you, Hitler did not confiscate all the guns in Germany.

The first half of the article chronicles gun nuts’ numerous recent invocations of Godwin’s law; if you’ve been paying attention, you can skip it.

The last half gets to the history.

At the very least, check out the penultimate* paragraph.

___________________

*Despite what some persons seem to think, “penultimate” does not mean “more than ultimate.”

Really.

According to Myron Pitts, results of a recent survey show that NRA members are not nearly so hostile to at least some regulation of gun sales as are the leaders of that lobbying group. A snippet (emphasis added):

Seventy-four percent of NRA members support requiring a background check for anyone who buys a gun (emphasis mine).

Seventy-nine percent support requiring background checks on employees who work for gun retailers.

Seventy-four percent believe gun permits should be granted only to people who have completed gun safety training, and 68 percent believe permits should be denied to people with violent offenses in their past.

You never, ever hear this kind of thoughtful moderation, however, from the leaders who speak for the group’s 4.3 million members.

The survey numbers suggest that the NRA leadership – extremists such as LaPierre – are speaking for and fighting for the gun lobby, not the gun owner. Every solution they are likely to propose to address the issue of mass shootings will always involve adding more guns to the equation, not fewer. That’s because the gun lobby wants one thing: gun sales for its manufacturers.

Click to read the rest. It’s now behind a paywall. You are free to search for it.

Thom parses the actions and writings of the founder to determine the intent of the 2nd Amendment and finds that fomenting the overthrow of the government not part of it.

Be polite to your neighbors’ pets.

It was just after 9:00 p.m. Thursday when police say someone walked into the Sims’ family backyard, unclipped the dog, and shot her in the head multiple times in an alley behind the house.

Viewed historically, it’s all about the white to bear arms.

Tony Norman explains:

A few months into Ronald Reagan’s first term as governor of California, 24 members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense marched into the state Capitol in Sacramento brandishing .357 Magnums, .45-caliber pistols and 12-gauge shotguns.

They were an orderly militia of black people, both men and women, demanding recognition of their Second Amendment rights. They wanted to protect themselves against what they called a racist white establishment and police state.

(snip)

It didn’t take long for the Gipper to become a believer in the kind of selective gun control that would keep guns in those pre-semi-automatic days out of the hands of black folks already partial to leather jackets and black shades.

Read the rest.

History matters, folks. It illuminates the present.

The Supreme Court refuses to hear a case to overturn a Georgia law against guns in churches.

Gun nuts will have to leave their graven images at home.

MOAR guns is the answer.

What was the question?

Oh, yeah.

How can we increase sales?