I caught this on the interwebs today:  “Let’s send our gun-packing watercooler warriors to fight ISIS.”

How about not.

It is a turd sandwich of an article.  It starts with an obnoxious title and ends with a statically inaccurate character defamation of gun owners, with a big, deliberate constitutional misinterpretation turd right in the middle.   Of course it went all the way, with the usual condiments of ignorance, contempt, and anti-gun hogwash.

Let’s take a bite, shall we.

The author opens by referring to gun owners as “watercooler warriors.”  It’s a snide insult to gun owners, especially to those who have served in the military.

Skipping to the end, the author states:

Many of America’s most aggressive hawks are presumably already armed, and have spent years practicing their marksmanship against doves, deer, ducks and other domestic enemies. This is a magnificent chance for them to put it into action against foreign enemies too.

Meanwhile, many of our gun owners have a surplus of aggression that needs an outlet. They manage to shoot and kill about 30 U.S. citizens every day, meaning we suffer our own “Paris attacks” every few days at the hands of a few of our own citizens. 

Again, it’s the same anti-gun BS that gun owners are aggressive and trigger happy, just waiting for the first chance to shoot someone.

As Mark Twain famously wrote:  “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  I don’t know if the “shoot and kill about 30 U.S. citizens every day” statement is accurate, but the way he approaches it is not.  Assuming the number is accurate, those shootings are not evenly distributed across all law abiding gun owners.  It’s not as though 30 random law abiding gun owners a day decide to kill someone.  The overwhelming majority of shootings are concentrated in certain areas and socioeconomic groups (criminals be committing crimes).  This video breaks the numbers down much better than I can do a write up here.  The point is, the vast majority of law abiding gun owners will never shoot anybody, ever.

Alone, these insults to law abiding gun owners are the same thing that we see all the time posted on the CSGV Facebook feed.  But what really makes this article is the total lack Constitutional accuracy.

Most gun owners know they have a constitutional right to “keep and bear arms,” but they may not realize the government also has a constitutional right to draft them to serve in the country’s defense.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep arms to maintain a “well-regulated militia” for the security of the state, meaning a force of citizen-soldiers that the federal government can send into battle. Anyone availing themselves of the right to keep and bear arms is thereby making themselves available for the militia.

While the author is accurate in that the US Constitution gives the Federal Government the power to “raise and support Armies” that is not part of the 2A.  It is Article 1, Section 8, to be specific.  The “well regulated militia” has nothing to do with the Selective Service system, which was founded in 1917.  The US Supreme Court made it clear that the “right to keep and bear arms” was an individual right and that “a well regulated militia” does not mean a military force.  At best “a well regulated militia” is just the pool of potential conscripts in the US.

SCOTUS looked at the 2A twice in recent memory, Heller and McDonald, and at no time came to the conclusion that the right to possess guns was had in exchange for military service.  The right to keep and bear arms was affirmed to exist for the purpose of defending oneself.

Going to the heart of the issue, our Founding Fathers made it crystal clear why they believed in the right of the people to keep and bear arms: TO DEFEND THEMSELVES FROM THE TYRANNY OF THE GOVERNMENT.

The idea of drafting gun owners and sending them to war might sound controversial today, but it would not be to the Founding Fathers. It’s exactly what they recommended. They believed in citizen-soldiers rather than a professional army.

At the very least, [Obama] could require registration from everyone who owns a semi-automatic assault weapon such as an AK-47. Why not? What sort of patriotic American owns an AK-47 and high-capacity clips and yet refuses to answer his country’s call when asked?

No, wrong again.  The national defense and power to raise an army and navy is established in the Constitution.  This nation was born because of a Government trained and equipped military.  It was lead by General George Washington.  It was equipped and trained, largely by the help of France.  Its soldiers were paid and its officers commissioned by the Continental Congress.  Remember, the Minuetmen were not part of the Continental Army.

The United States Government has never sent Americans, armed with their personal firearms, into war.  Not even when war occurred on US soil, e.g. the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Mexican-American War, etc.  The idea of citizen soldiers did/does not exist as a means to fight wars overseas.  It existed/exists to defend the American people from their own government if the normal process of a redress of grievances has failed.

Oh, and thanks for questioning our patriotism and implying that we are cowards, asshole.

But in the author’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion, he seems to overlook the fact that selectively drafting people based on political ideology and sending them, untrained, and inappropriately equipped to fight and die halfway around the world, is EXACTLY why the 2A exists.  To stop the government from pulling that type of bullshit where it targets citizens for death or exile for disagreeing with the government.

Even with his last sentence, the author has proven he wrote the article while self-administering a naked eye colonoscopy.

Why not deploy them against ISIS?

That’s what gun owners have been asking, in reference to attacks on US soil.  If Paris (twice), Mali, Israel, or Kenya has shown us anything, it’s that between the first cries of “allahu akbar” and when the police end the killing, terrorist can rack up quite a body count.  Concealed carriers have  cut short mass shootings in the past.  But why do I believe that this idiot is fan of gun free zones.  Sure, he wants to send gun owners to Syria to defend America, but I doubt would want CCW permit holders to defend him or themselves in his local shopping mall.

In the end, this is nothing more than the same anti-gunner fantasy to wipe out American gun owners that Miguel has been chronicling for years.  The only difference is, rather than suggest that the US military do the killing, he wants ISIS to do it.  It’s clear from his obvious distaste for gun owners.  All 727 words of this digital poop-spear boil down to “just send those fat, gun owning, knuckle-draggers to Syria to get wiped out by ISIS.”

I came across this article posted on the Book of Face: “Let’s deport the white males.”

The premise is pretty much what you’d expect.  The mass shootings in Columbine, Aurora, Charleston, etc., were all done by white males.  They are worse than Islamic terrorists.  Let’s deport the white males and import Syrians.

Here’s my question, and I mean it honestly, directed to the Liberals on Facebook who posted this article with such glee.  Why do you hate so many of your fellow citizens so much?

The author justifies his statement by listing the following mass shootings: Columbine, Aurora Theatre, Sandy Hook, Tucson Massacre, Roseburg Massacre, Charleston, Oak Creek Sikh Temple shooting, San Ysidro McDonalds Massacre, UT Austin Tower shooting.

I used Wikipedia to look up the body count for each one of these shootings and added them up.  I came to a grand total of 125 dead and 162 wounded.  These figures include the perpetrators of the shootings either as dead or wounded.  This list spans from August 1, 1966 with the UT Austin Tower shooting by Charles Whitman to October 1, 2015 wit the Umpqua Community College shooting.  That is 49 years and 2 months.

I’ll concede that the above list is not a comprehensive list of shootings by white people, and that 125 killed and 162 wounded is still a tragically high number.

But still.  I lived in Chicagoland (not in Chicago proper, but well inside in the Chicago-Joliet-Naperville MSA) in 2012.  I was there when the homicide rate in Chicago spiked to over 500.  I remember when the weekend shooting stats would come out Monday morning.  Memorial day weekend, 2012, grand total was 56 shot, 12 killed, 44 wounded.

I left Chicagoland in early 2015.  As of this posting, the total so far is 432 killed, 2,689 wounded.  About three-quarters of both the victims and the shooters in Chicago are black, and on average 90% male, and that most of the shootings occur in neighborhoods that are on average 94% black.

Given those numbers, we can reasonably conclude that black males have killed about 300 people and wounded some 1,800 people in Chicago in 2015 alone.

I WOULD NEVER USE THE ABOVE STATISTICS TO EVER TRY AND JUSTIFY DEPORTING ALL THE BLACK MALES IN THE USA.  SUCH A CONCLUSION IS MORALLY REPUGNANT.

The author of the Salon piece used a much lower body count, stretched over half a century to justify an astounding level of bigotry and hatred towards white men.

It should go without saying that this article is equally viciously ugly and morally repugnant.  Even if it is intended as a joke, it is awful, and makes me wonder why is it that Liberal jokes are always mean spirited affairs about disposing of people they disagree with?

(Remember the “joke” video No Pressure about blowing up people – including children – who don’t believe in global warming)

For an ideology that claims to be about tolerance and acceptance, it really seems to be full hate a nastiness.

So one more time, I would like to pose this question, why do you hate so many of your fellow citizens on the bases of their race and gender, that you want to expel them from your country?

Several of you were offended at my last post.  You are right, it is not fair to judge all citizens of Europe based on the actions of your governments.

I do stand by my criticism of those governments and the anti-Semites that support them.

France was attacked by ISIS. France is now, quite reasonably, bombing the shit out of ISIS in Syria.  So when Palestinians go on a stabbing or bombing rampage in Israel, perhaps the French government should not be so quick to criticize the Israeli response in the West Bank and accuse Israel of genocide.

I’ve been following the news on the ISIS shooting in France and the European response.  I haven’t had the chance to post in a few day, it’s been a very busy time at work.  I’ve been wrestling over what to write about regarding the attacks in France.  I really haven’t been able to hammer out a distinct thesis, so this post will be a little stream of consciousnesses.

I feel for the victims of terrorism in France.  It is horrific whenever innocents die at the hands of evil.  Speaking of innocents dying at the hands of evil, is this a bad time to mention how the Vichy government rounded up French Jews and handed them over to the NAZIS for extermination?  Or that perhaps France is the most antisemitic country in Europe right now, and that the remaining population of Jews in France is headed out the door?

I am watching in real time as the people who have oppressed and slaughtered my ancestors in the Diaspora get murdered by the people who oppressed and slaughtered my people in our native land.

Now that France, and Europe as a whole, has just begun to experience what Israel has experienced for the last 60 years, – e.g. en masse Islamic terrorism – you’d think they’d have more sympathy.  NOPE.  French bodies weren’t even cold before some Swedish asshole politician goes ahead and blames Israel for the shooting in France.  And of course the EU (lead by France) is plowing ahead with mandatory labeling of imported goods Juden Made in Israel.

Following the Copenhagen shooting at the Great Synagogue, Benjamin Netanyahu suggested it’s time for European Jews to leave for safety in Israel.  European leaders responded indignantly.  Not of course at the knowledge that European Jews are being stabbed left and right, but that Netanyahu mentioned that publicly.  Then there was the shooting at a French Kosher Deli and just today a Jewish teacher was stabbed.  It is obvious that the Jews of Europe are no longer welcome there and it is time for them to leave.  Oh yeah, and Spain pretty much just violated every tenant of international law and diplomacy to put out and arrest warrant for Netanyahu and several other Isreali politicians because Israel had the audacity to defend itself.  No European state would be so bold as to issue arrest warrants for the leaders of Islamic nations that support terrorism.

I’m not saying that the people of France deserved what happened to them, I’m just saying my sympathies are tempered by history.  As a member of Western Civilization, I am naturally inclined to side with Western Civilization in a moment of crisis.  In the choice between Europe and Islam, I’ll support Europe.

Irony of ironies is that what is happening in Europe right now is the result of the worst ancient and modern European conditions combined.  Europe is perhaps the most tribalistic society on Earth.  France, Germany, Great Britain, these are new concepts.  European nationalism is just tribalism with flags.  The tribal names of Europe are the ones we studied in high school history: Franks, Goths, Teutons, Celts, Saxons, Slaves, Norsemen, etc.

For more than two millennia, the continent of Europe has been at a nearly constant state of tribal war.  They’d kill each other for a while, then a peace would be brokered by marrying one tribes princess to some other tribe’s prince. and that would hold for a few generations, then the process would repeat.  Every once in a while, the Europeans would take a break from killing each other to to kill some other tribe from the Middle East – the various wars between the Greeks and Persians, Romans and Persians, the Reconquista of Spain, the Crusades, etc.

Most of the tribalism finally ended in the beginning of the 20th century with WWI, which was just the most high stakes game of Family Feud every played.  European tribalism was mostly replaced in the 1930’s with political allegiance to Fascism, NAZISM, Communism, etc.  Tribalism didn’t go away completely, as no amount of political allegiance could make a Jew a German (or Pole or Frenchman) leading to the Holocaust.  Once Communism ended, the tribalism resurged with the Yugoslav Wars and the balkanization of Eastern Europe.

All of this tribalism explains how the Muslim immigrants are treated.  That is, they are not integrated into European society.  They are segregated and always made to feel like outsiders.  They is one of the reasons why there are so many Islamic radicals who are naturally born Europeans.  Just to be clear, the Islamic world is every bit as tribal as Europe.  I can’t tell a Sunni from a Shiite, but they doesn’t stop them from massacring each other over that distinction.  Ask any soldier who served in Afghanistan, every culture there hates every other – the Farsi, Pashtun, Uzbek, etc.  Then there is the oppression of the Yazidi, Kurds, etc.  So it’s not like the Muslim immigrants to Europe want to integrate either.  Tribalism.

At the same time, Europe feels guilty about the Holocaust (as they continue to be antisemitic, re-branded as anti-Zionism)  so they have crafted a lot of “multicultural” policies to protect their ethnic and religious minorities (except for the Jews).  So the Europeans treat radical Muslims with kid gloves as they simultaneously exacerbate their radicalism.  It is a perfect storm of tribalism and left wing multiculturalism.  As more Europeans get raped and killed by European Muslims, and as more cities are overrun  with refugees, a strong right wing nationalist movement is building in Europe.  But unlike the Jews of Europe, the Muslims have some fight in them as many want to build the Caliphate in Europe.  Convert or die.

Knowing my history of both Europe and Islam, I am afraid that this crisis will end in Gas Chambers.  The only thing I’m not sure of is, who be getting marched into them.

I think I’m running out of it. 

Miguel quoted the article Race and the Free-Speech Diversion – The New Yorker in his post below.  I started reading it, and there is one paragraph in it that sticks out in my mind.

“These are not abstractions. And this is where the arguments about the freedom of speech become most tone deaf. The freedom to offend the powerful is not equivalent to the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. The enlightenment principles that undergird free speech also prescribed that the natural limits of one’s liberty lie at the precise point at which it begins to impose upon the liberty of another.”

I have one response: BULLSHIT!

I would now like to cite precedent:

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977)

The American Nazi Party wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois.  Why?  Because Skokie had the highest percentage of holocaust survivors of any city in the country (1 in 6 residents).  They were denied the right to march.

The NAZI Party sued and guess who came to their defense.  The ACLU.  Who was their lawyer?  Burton Joseph, a JEWISH lawyer who’s parent ran a business as caretakers of Jewish cemeteries.  The Supreme Court found for the NAZI Pary in a 5-4 decision.  Who was one of the Justices who argued for the majority decision?  The first African-American Justice to the US Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall.

THAT IS THE BEST OF AMERICA RIGHT THERE.  A Jewish lawyer defending the freedom of speech for NAZIs, upheld by a black Justice.  Two minorities who showed their mettle by proclaiming the right to freedom of speech and peaceably assemble was more important than feelings.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

What does the NYT have as a retort?  Safe Spaces, were only certain opinions, races, or sexual orientations are allowed.  The NYT is doing a damn fine job upholding the great Democrat tradition of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”  

Update:

The protest group Concerned Student 1950 – named for the year that Mizzou admitted its first black student – has just instituted segregation  on campus.  George Wallace would be proud.

I think in the last 48 hours I have come around on the issue of campus carry.  It might in fact be a bad idea.

On principle, I believe that every law abiding citizen in entitled to the right to defend themselves.  It is a natural right, a primordial right.  The gazelle has horns to defend itself from the lion, the porcupine has quills to defend itself from the coyote, I have a gun to defend myself from who or what wants to do me harm.

In practicality, college students in the last couple of days have proven to me that they shouldn’t have so much as crayons and safety scissors.  Owning and carrying a gun is a big responsibility.  These kids have demonstrated a level of emotional and intellectual vacuousness that is causing time and space to warp around them.

Students at Yale, the No. 3 college in the country, are protesting and pitching a hissy fit because the wife of a dean of one of the colleges at Yale had the audacity to suggest in an email that maybe the school shouldn’t be policing what students wear for Halloween and that students had the right to express themselves.  This is how one student described the response to an email defending the right to freedom of expression:

“I have had to watch my friends defend their right to this institution. This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, who are losing sleep, who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns.”

Let that sink in… students, at the No. 3 college in America… kids who are supposed to grow up to be Congressmen, Senators, and captains of industry are losing sleep and having breakdown because of an email that said “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious… a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”   If this is the standard for behavior at the No. 3 college in America (I’m gonna keep driving that point home), what should my expectations be for the kids that come in below that.

The answer is … worse.  So there are were three – at least two of which were unconfirmed – reports of racist activity on the campus of the Univerity of Missouri.  The student body had been protesting for days and forced the resignation of the college president.  From this there have been rumors spreading of every bit of hostile activity on campus, the Klan showing up, etc.  None of which have been proven true.

One professor decided not to cancel class and continue with a scheduled exam.  He emailed his students with the message: “If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them.”  He is right of course.  For the transgression of believing that his students were made of sterner stuff, he was savaged online and resigned while his character was impugned by the media.

Emboldened by the kerfuffle at Mizzou, students at Ithaca College are protesting for the resignation of their president for… reasons that I can hardly understand since it didn’t seem like anything actually happened there.  And the students of the University of Michigan are protesting in solidarity with the students from Mizzou and are causing havoc just because they can.

Speaking of solidarity for a moment, why does it not surprise me that the same people protesting for safe spaces on college campuses are also in solidarity with the Palestinians and anti-Israel anti-Semites (note the “Boycott Israel” bag)?

Here’s the thing.  I live in Alabama.  In 1963, black students faced attack dogs, fire hoses, and police with night sticks for the right to go to class.  They went face to face with ACTUAL Klansmen, screaming n****r in their faces, for the right to go into a lecture hall, listen to a professor, and take a test.  Today, the hoax of an unconfirmed rumor about the KKK on campus makes these students demand a professor be fired for not canceling class.  This is so far past irony it is headlong into insanity.

These kids broke me.  I want to trust them as adults.  They are old enough to drive, old enough to vote, old enough to go to war.  But after all this, I can’t trust them with anything more intellectually challenging than a sticker book.

(I’d of normally said coloring book, but I’m afraid it would be a micro-aggression against the color blind and people who can’t color inside the lines and they will go on Twitter and threaten to burn down my house.)

And speaking of sterner stuff, civil rights, bravery, and gun rights.  Here is a picture of Charleston Heston, the former president of the NRA, of “from my cold dead hands” fame, marching on Washington D.C. for Civil Rights in 1963. Fo those who love to call the NRA racist, there is our former president putting his career and personal safety on the line to take a stand for civil rights.