Chicago Tribune publishes the whiniest OpEd on guns
Chicago Tribune writer Rex Huppke wrote an OpEd yesterday that was just a whinge-fest.
We should be able to eat waffles in peace — but Trump and the NRA accept this kind of terrorism
Really? This is going to be bad.
I shouldn’t have to carry a gun to feel safe getting waffles.
Nobody should.
Feel safe. Right off the bad it is about feelings. He wants to feel safe. Which means rather than harden himself against the realities of life, he wants the rest of the world to soften itself so not to hut his delicate feelings.
I shouldn’t have to hope I’m seated near a mythological “good guy with a gun” to feel safe getting waffles.
Nobody should.
What is a “mythological good guy with a gun?” Is he saying that self defense shootings never happen? Or perhaps good guys with guns are heroes of mythological scale.
Better question is, why isn’t he a good guy with a gun? And if it takes sitting next to a good guy with a gun to feel safe then why is he going on an anti-gun screed?
And I shouldn’t have to pray that a James Shaw Jr. — the young man who jumped a half-naked gunman at a Waffle House in Tennessee this weekend before that lunatic could murder more customers — is in the restaurant, ready to risk his life, while I’m getting waffles.
Nobody should.
I guess Rex here is a cowardly turd who will let others defend him because he’s to scared or worried about his feelings to do it himself.
We should be able to eat our waffles in peace. We should be able to send our kids to school without worrying that they’ll be gunned down. We should be able to go to church and not wonder whether an AR-15-toting person who fell through the mental-health-services cracks might stand up and open fire.
The actual risk of that is minimal. But while we’re on that thought, I should be able to leave my house and car unlocked. I should be able to to a major US city and not see anti-vehicle barricades separating sidewalks from roads. I should be able to turn on the TV and not see news about ISIS. I should be able to crack open a history book about the 20th century and not read about the Armenian Genocide or Holocaust.
Guess what. Evil exists in this world. Just ask the people of Toronto if they feel that someone should be able to rent a van without the fear that 10 people will end up dead on a sidewalk.
But we don’t feel that way. We can’t. This nation’s gun obsession has made it impossible, and those who stand in the way of any action that might limit access to guns — even to domestic abusers or the mentally ill — are insisting that their outlandish “right” to own any firearm they want supersedes our perfectly reasonable right to eat our waffles without toting a sidearm.
The Waffle House shooter had his FOID revoked by the Illinois State Police. His guns were taken and given to his dad. His dad gave them back to him. Dad broke the law in Illinois and is probably going to do some jail time for it.
Everything about that last paragraph is wrong under the circumstances of Illinois state law, NICS checks, and the Lautenberg Act.
There’s a word for all this: terrorism. People don’t like to use that word when it comes to guns and Americans, and some will argue these shootings can’t be acts of terrorism because they lack a singular political aim. But there’s an overarching political aim in deeming this violence acceptable: Protect the gun industry at all costs.
Random violence by insane people is not terrorism. You can’t define terrorism as “anything I don’t like.” All that does is reduce the meaning of that word an obfuscate any action that really does combat terrorism.
Also, this violence is not acceptable. What happened here was another failure by the layers goverment that says it is there to protect us. Just because you hate the gun industry doesn’t make it the industry’s fault.
And what are we really dealing with here if not terror? What do you call it when people are made to feel unsafe in the most public of places?
You need to get a grip on your feelings.
Four young people were gunned down early Sunday morning at that Waffle House near Nashville. A 29-year-old man from Morton, Ill., is the suspected shooter, and police say he used an AR-15-style assault rifle, the same type of firearm used in the Parkland school shooting (17 dead), the Texas church shooting (26 dead), the Las Vegas music festival shooting (58 dead) and the Orlando nightclub shooting (49 dead).
So what. It’s the most popular long gun sold in America. I bet there are more DUIs caused by Bud Light than any other beer, purely on the sales volume of the beer. Millions of people own ARs legally and with no malicious intent. It’s not the gun but the intent of the user.
We’re told by the National Rifle Association and the politicians they fund that the only defense in any of these tragedies would be more guns. Armed teachers. Armed churchgoers. Armed music lovers. Armed waffle eaters.
That’s not the only thing they say, but again we see how strict gun control – the Illinois FOID system – failed.
They tell us mental health care is key, but do they increase funding for mental health care? No. Do they tighten gun laws to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill? No. In fact, President Donald Trump’s only action on guns was signing a law last February that did away with a regulation President Barack Obama put in place that made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun.
The NRA doesn’t fund mental health care. The NRA has pushed for mandatory reporting of people adjudicated mentally ill to NICS. The Social Security gun control thing that Obama pushed was terrible and even the ACLU supported its repeal. Also that had nothing to do with this.
Again, everything in that paragraph was wrong.
Suspected Tennessee shooter Travis Reinking, according to Illinois and federal law enforcement agencies, showed ample signs of mental health problems. Last year he showed up at the White House asking to speak with Trump then refused to leave, saying he was “a sovereign citizen.”
He was arrested and charged with unlawful entry. That led FBI agents in Illinois and the Illinois State Police to confiscate the four firearms Reinking owned and revoke his firearm owner’s identification card. One wonders what Reinking was still doing with four firearms, including an AR-15. He had previous run-ins with authorities in Tazewell County, including an incident in May 2016 when he told sheriff’s deputies he was being stalked by singer Taylor Swift and he feared his phone had been hacked.
At that time, according to the Peoria Journal Star: “His family had told Tazewell County deputies that he had been having delusions for almost two years.”
After the federal agents confiscated Reinking’s guns, they were returned to the man’s father. According to authorities, the man’s father then returned the guns to his son.
So the system worked until it didn’t when his dad gave him back his guns.
How is that the NRA’s fault?
So the AR-15 Reinking had no business having in 2016 when he told deputies he was being stalked by a celebrity was the same assault rifle he carried into the Waffle House in Tennessee on Sunday morning. And were it not for Shaw, the hero who tackled Reinking while he was reloading, wrestling the rifle away, that AR-15 surely would have been fired more, increasing the death toll.
Yep. Also James Joyce would like a word with out about your run-on sentences.
Something is fundamentally wrong here, and everyone who doesn’t think Taylor Swift is tapping their cell phone knows that’s true.
Yes, but I think we are going to disagree with what that is.
If these mass shootings had all come at the hands of a Muslim person, the Trump administration and a good chunk of the Republican party would vehemently demand mosque surveillance and a complete ban on Muslims entering the country. We know that’s true because after an ISIS-inspired mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015 carried out by a husband and wife of Pakistani descent, Trump said this:
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
That is a different issue. However, it makes me curious why we should let people into our country who call us “the Great Satan” and chant “Death to America.” I mean, if you want to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, actual terrorists who have killed people abroad is a good start.
Following yet another mass shooting at the hands of a person with mental health problems who was in possession of an AR-15, there’s no call for a total and complete shutdown of AR-15 sales in the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
That’s not the same thing jackass. Your argument is that is fine to let former ISIS fighters into the US as long as we don’t sell them guns. Can we make sure they can’t get drivers licenses too?
Or are you saying Muslims are mindless killing machines?
The parallel with banning people from radicalized countries with poor security is not banning guns, it’s banning the mentally ill from getting guns and increasing the ability to identify those people and making them prohibited persons. Which is what we are doing. Google “Extreme Risk Protection Order.”
That’s because there are two kinds of terrorism, one the Trump administration and the gun lobby will pounce on to stoke fear and another they will ignore so as not to lose donors or damage business.
Again, a mentally ill 29 year old – eight years older than the AR buying age in Florida now – who had his FOID revoked is not a terrorist. Words have meaning.
The NRA (I can’t speak for Trump) isn’t trying to wave its hand and say “this is normal.” It’s saying “one nut case in Nashville isn’t justification for stripping rights from 150 million people.” I didn’t shoot up a Waffle House yesterday or any other day, and I’m not going to do it tomorrow or any other time in the future. Why should I lose the right to buy what I want?
If radical Islam scares you, how about after San Bernardino the US goverment forcibly converted the few million Muslims in the US to Christianity? That would save a lot of lives. It would also violate the First Amendment, but who gives a shit about the Constitution when lives are on the line. If you go by global body count, the Quran is many times more dangerous than the AR-15. We should ban the Quran first.
The truth is you don’t care about rights. You think the NRA is some sort of nebulous, evil organization out there to profit off death and not protect the civil liberties of law abiding citizens.
And where does that leave us? Eating our waffles in fear.
If you are that afraid, don’t leave the house. The truth is you are far more likely to get killed driving to the Waffle House than in it. You are far more likely to get e. coil from your Chipotle burrito because the lettuce was picked by an illegal who didn’t wash his hands after taking a shit in the field than you are getting shot in a Waffle House.
But it’s not really about actual risk. It’s about you hating guns an the NRA and wanting you cry-bully people with your feelings.
I will say to you the same thing I say to my four year old when he whines about a toy. “That is a terrible noise you are making and I’m not going to give you want you want.”
