Piers “Muskets” Morgan liked to shoot his stupid mouth off about the Second Amendment an America’s love of guns, much to the love the Progressives who watch CNN and much to the disdain of the rest of America.
I don’t understand it, but Progressives have this masochistic desire to have foreigners tell us how much they don’t understand and don’t like America’s gun culture. Nothing gets a Progressive off more than having someone with an accent telling them how much America sucks.
Guns are not a part of the culture of my homeland, except perhaps for the occasional Bollywood movie in which the bad guy meets his demise staring down the wrong end of a barrel.
It’s no wonder then that every time I visit India, my friends and family want to know more about America’s “love affair” with guns.
I get the same questions when I visit my brother in Canada or on my business travels to other countries, where many people remain perplexed, maybe even downright mystified, by Americans’ defense of gun rights.
…
I walk around with some trepidation, but I’m determined to strike up conversations. I begin with this question: “Why do you want to own an object that can kill another human being?”
The answers are varied, but they center on three main themes: freedom, self-defense and sport. The first type of response is rooted in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which allows for the ownership of more than 300 million guns in America. How many other countries have the right to bear arms written into their very foundation? It’s unique and because of that, foreigners often have trouble grasping it.
…
I ask what the Second Amendment means to [Brickell “Brooke” Clark, otherwise known as the American Gun Chic].
“It means I can live my life without anyone overpowering me,” she says. “It makes me equal with everyone else.”
The great equalizer. I never thought of the Second Amendment in that way. Self-protection, I discover, is a huge reason many Americans own firearms.
When it comes to guns and self defense, you think that a woman from the rape and acid attack capital of the world would want to be able to defend herself.
Take Chloe Morris. She was born in Atlanta to Filipino parents; on this day, she’s brought her mother along to hear Trump, the first sitting President to speak at an NRA convention since Ronald Reagan.
Morris is 35, petite and soft-spoken, but she’s fierce about her opinions on guns.
“I’m 5 feet tall and 100 pounds,” she tells me. “I cannot wait for a cop to come save me when I am threatened with rape or death.”
Like I said.
So what did she find at NRAAM. The same thing that most Progressive SJWs find.
Few people here look like me. Most appear to be white and male.
Many view the media, including my employer, with disdain — and they do not hesitate to let me know.
No shit, I wonder why?
I meet Chris Styskal at a booth set up by the NRA Wine Club. Yes, a wine club for the almost 5 million members of the organization.
She sounds surprised that NRA members like to be classier than drinking a case of Keystone Lite and smacking their wives around.
“George Washington’s army fought off the British with rifles,” he says. “They overthrew an oppressive government.”
His statement gives me pause. The gun laws in India stem from colonial rule, when the British aimed to quell their subjects by disarming them. Perhaps my Indian compatriots should consider the right to own guns from this perspective.
This is the first intelligent thing this woman says, and I think she was being sarcastic about it.
Styskal, 41, earned a degree in psychology from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and tells me the prevailing belief that gun owners are not educated is simply wrong.
I have a PhD in engineering and work in the firearms industry. My existence might actually make a CNN reporter shit themselves if they ever met me.
I hear gun proponents express a dislike for big government. They stress individual liberties over the collective. For people who live in more socialist countries, it’s another obstacle to understanding American gun culture.
Freedom, it’s a hell of a drug. Once you get a taste of it, it’s hard to quit.
After interviewing a bunch of people who explain their love of guns comes from a love of freedom, she says this.
Rubeck’s words remind me of a friend from Iraq who wished she could own a gun during Saddam Hussein’s rule. After he was overthrown, she slept with an AK-47 under her pillow at the height of the insurgency. She has always spoken of her love-hate relationship with guns. She wants to protect her family, but she is tired of the eternal violence plaguing her land. She wishes now that every gun would disappear from Iraq.
Again, how guns are treated in America versus a non-Western shit-hole steeped in sectarian violence.
It’s not just gun rights. It is a culture of peace and tolerance that makes gun rights possible. The majority Americans own guns without the faintest desire to kill everybody of a different race, ethnicity, or religion as themselves.
She finally ends her “gorillas in the mist” foray into the NRA.
What I hear from speakers at the NRA convention, though, is that a peaceful world is a utopian fantasy — and that the need for guns will always exist.
Very, very true.
I leave the convention trying to reconcile what I’ve gathered on this day with the philosophy of nonviolence with which I was raised. I am not certain that vast cultural differences can be bridged in a few hours, but I am glad I got a glimpse into the world of guns. I have much to consider.
So in Whitefish, David LeBleu has been fighting to bring Syrian refugees into the city. This has not gone over well with the locals. LeBleu responded with a march for refugee relocation.
LeBleu and about 70 pro-refugee activists, many from out of town, gathered in a park there with signs reading “Friendship not fear!” and “Stability, opportunity, peace for ALL.”
Note the “many from out of town” part. I would guess that maybe 69 of the 70 were from out of town, and most of those were from out of Montana.
As it turns out, LeBleu him self is a fucking New Yorker from Long Island. He’s a retiree who decided to take up carpet bagging in his retirement. He, like many others, have decided to despoil the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states by permanently relocating to small ski resort towns, then imposing themselves on local politics.
Montana Sen. Steve Daines summed up the problems facing Mr. Quist the other day in a tweet, which is apparently how politicians get their message out these days. “Rob Quist,” tweeted the senator, “is FOR gun registration, FOR Bernie, FOR sanctuary cities, & FOR a single payer health system.”
Yep. He’s a Sanders fanatic. He also wants to register “assault weapons.”
But he believes that efforts to increase public safety are being derailed by gun manufacturers, questioning the need to own assault rifles.
“They’re only meant to kill people,” he said. “So maybe there should be some legislation to register those types of things. You register your car to drive, why not register guns. I know that’s a touchy subject for a lot of people, but I think we definitely have the right to bear arms and as I say I’ve been on many hunts myself where I’ve brought home an elk that fed our family and that’s an important thing for Montanans.”
This is an issue that hits close to home for me. I watched it happen in Rapid City. A handful of wealthy Liberals from California would buy property on the edge of Black Hills National Forest, then work to end the gazing rights of ranchers that had been there since the 1880’s.
It was hard for LeBleu not to read some letters to the editor as personal attacks.
“How long do we have to tolerate leftists from other states coming here to bring ‘refugees’ from alien cultures to our cities? Cultures so far removed from our own that assimilation is impossible,” said one in December.
Yes, take it personally. I don’t think this guy was just talking about the refugees. I remember a family from New York having a conniption about people being allowed to carry guns on the sidewalk of downtown Rapid City.
The cultures the costs is alien to the Great Plains. I know, I’ve lived in both. I just didn’t have the hubris to look at the people of the Dakotas and say “I’m from a state that touches salt water, I’m right, you’re wrong, and I’m going to change everything about the way you live.”
I hope for the future of Montana, Quist goes down in flames.
I’d hate to see Montana go the way of Colorado. A once free and beautiful mountain state, over run by carpetbaggers.
Let’s make no bones about this, once you appoint yourself the arbiter of how many children a family is allowed to have, you have taken position of committing genocide. Time is your gas chamber. There is no moral difference in ending the lineage of a people by killing their children versus stopping them from having any. Limiting a birth rate to below replacement, just stretches the genocide out over a few generations.
Of course this begs the question, hoe does someone like Bill Nye propose to punish the unacceptably fecund? Are parents to be jailed? How does that stop them from reproducing again? Is compulsory birth control required? Sterilization?
The Left argues ceaselessly that abortion bans are a form of control over women’s bodies and is therefore bad. Yet telling women and families that they cannot have children is not the control of women’s bodies, or at least it’s not the “bad” kind of control.
In less than a minute, Bill Nye transformed himself from a partisan hack to a petty tyrant taking a position of soft genocide.
No one, no one, no one has the right to dictate the makeup of my family. Past dictators have tried to do that to my people before. I will not let it happen again. I don’t care about the reason. Not for the Vaterland. Not for Mother Earth.
I love good science-fiction and political satire. The over-the-top nature of of sci-fi and satire highlights and magnifies issues in real life.
In the world of literature, George Orwell is the king of political satire with Animal Farm and 1984. Animal Farm was modeled on the Soviet Revolution and 1984 on the worst aspects of Stalinism.
A close second to Orwell is the story of Harrison Bergeron in Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. It is impossible to read Harrison Bergeron and not think about affirmative action and its ugly cousin of checking one’s privilege. It is a world in which the attractive, the strong, and the smart, are forced to be hobbled so that they are no more capable than the lowest common denominator.
On screen, the champion of science-fiction and political satire is Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. To this day, The Masks is one of the most eerily disturbing episodes of a TV show to tackle the weakness of the human soul.
I am a huge fan of old radio sci-fi like Lights Outand Dimension X, especially the works of Arch Oboler.
As a passionate lover of sci-fi and satire, I have come to the conclusion that Liberals/Progressives cannot write sci-fi or satire. When they try, it falls flat on its face. The more they try to us it to highlight what they believe is the absurdity on the right, the more they focus the mirror on their own failure.
Case in point, the movie Elysium. In a nutshell, it is supposed to be a movie critical of America’s immigration policy. However, on earth in 2154, America has open borders and Los Angeles has turned into a crime ridden, third world, desert shit-hole where Matt Damon is the last white guy who speaks English. Why should I be in favor of a policy that clearly destroyed southern California so badly that people had to flee off world to get away from the hellscape?
EconPop does a great breakdown of why Elysium sucks.
That is a very long winded intro to the main point of this post.
Today I was dealt a one-two punch combo of truly shitty sci-fi satire.
First, it is free Cinemax week on my TV. I took the opportunity to DVR some movies, and finally got a change to watch them.
The movie was supposed to be a dead on prediction for the 2016 election and beyond. Eight minutes in, the Senator who is obviously supposed to be a sexy version of Hillary Clinton (don’t think about that too much) says that the annual purge puts money “into the pockets of the NRA and super rich.”
Seriously. To the writers of The Purge: Election Year, the NRA, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization is a group the profits off genocide. It is clearly stated in the movie that the purpose of the purge is to save money for the rich by killing off the poor so they don’t need welfare, healthcare, public housing, etc. However, by the time we get to Election Year, it is the working class that are getting purged, and so a senator for “the people” is campaigning on ending the purge.
This of course begs two questions:
Why would a clearly homicidal, tyrannical, goverment (the New Founding Fathers/NFFF) allow the people to have free elections in which they (the NFFF) could lose?
Do the rich not want mechanics, construction workers, pool cleaners, garbage men, and the myriad of other working class jobs that make society function? What is the point of being super rich in a nation if you can’t get a service tech to chance the oil in your Mercedes because the service tech was purged?
None of this was thought through though. It didn’t need to be. The rich white men of the NFFF, clearly modeled on Trump, hire a bunch of tattooed neo-Nazi/white supremacists, clearly alt-right Trump supporters, to kill Sexy Hillary and her supporters. And the NRA profits from it.
Except…
In 2017, the masked militia committing random acts of political violence goes by the name Antifa. They are far from being clearly Trump supporters. In fact, the people they target for violence are… Trump supporters.
Following the beating that they took at the hands of some on the [alt-] right who fought back, it seems that Antifa is looking to get their hands on some real ordnance with the intent of inflicting casualties on those who don’t hold fast to Far Left ideology.
The Purge may be coming true, but not by the people against the people the movie claimed. It is the mirror opposite.
The second bit of hysterically bad sci-fi prognostication for the day was the adulation of Hulu’s adaption of The Handmaid’s Tail.
Harper’s Bazar said of the series “‘THE HANDMAID’S TALE’ IS THE FEMINIST HORROR STORY 2017 NEEDS.”
Good Magazine said “New Hulu Series The Handmaid’s Tale Is Must-Watch TV For This Moment.”
The New Yorker said “WE LIVE IN THE REPRODUCTIVE DYSTOPIA OF “THE HANDMAID’S TALE.”
To the deep thinkers on the left THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS RICH MEN BEING ALLOWED TO BUY SEX SLAVES FOR IMPREGNATION. Yes, they said that.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, gays are executed. The New Yorker calls that a “Pence Prequel” and the AV Club says it’s “Pence’s dream.”
Tell me exactly when Pence called for the execution of gays?
The Left is so unhinged on this issue when Senator Marco Rubio condemns the torture and execution of gays in Chechnya, Towleroad shits all over Rubio because he is a Republican. When you are so far Left that you attack a Republican for condemning the torture of your people (it’s a gay magazine), you’ve lost your fucking mind.
There is a place where women are sold as sex slaves, forced to cover their bodies, forced to undergo genital mutilation, and gays are executed. It is called the Middle East and it occurs under fundamentalist Islamic regimes like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
NOT IN THE UNITED STATES OR THE WESTERN/CHRISTIAN WORLD.
The Handmaid’s Tale is the 1984 of America under Islamic control.
Fuck if feminists didn’t march on DC, led by Linda Sarsour, who is an advocate for Sharia Law, which is the Islamic legal system that empowers ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Iran to oppress women as much as they do.
The Left is all but worshiping a Hulu sci-fi series that projects what they think the Right wants while defending the religious ideology that actually wants to impose this dystonia lifestyle.
Trying to wrap my head around this is going to give me a stroke.
These people are the worst parody of themselves. The targets of their attacks are themselves and they don’t realize it.
The Right Wing of The Purge is Antifa. The Right Wing of The Handmaid’s Tale is Islam. These people take aim at their enemies and then shoot themselves.
The sad part is that the Leftists who watch this shit from inside their echo chambers are too ideologically blind and stupid to understand that.
In my last post, I wondered if Ezra Klein of Vox was retarded.
I can assure you that Francis Clines of the New York Time is.
Francis visited the NRA Museum in Fairfax Virginia. It is a beautiful museum, go if you have the chance.
It is full of guns (obviously), with various levels of significance. Some are historic for the role they played in shaping our history – guns of various wars. Some are significant milestones in firearms technology. Some are unique, like the revolver that was the only remains of NYPD Officer Walter Wheeler and found below the rubble of the twin towers. Some are significant for the role they play in shaping our popular culture.
Is that how Francis sees the role of the NRA Museum? Nope.
The film star [John Wayne] stands tall at the National Rifle Association’s National Firearms Museum — true, only as a cardboard cutout of himself. But the cardboard fantasy of the good guy gunning down the bad guy is what makes the museum work as an enjoyable escape from the life-and-death reality of American gun carnage.
Really? As, a firearms enthusiast, I enjoy seeing important guns from history. Much the same way that as a space enthusiast, I enjoy going to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum.
Francis feels that the NRA Museum should be a guilt trip reminding you about all the criminals and gang members who are killing each other.
There are thousands of ingenious, gleaming rifles and handguns in displays about America’s gun-rich history of colonialism, immigration, expansionism and vigilante justice. But it is the gallery devoted to Hollywood and its guns and good-guy shooters that best illustrates the power of fantasy now driving the modern gun rights debate.
Being a rational adult, my belief in gun rights isn’t shaped by John Wayne or even John McClane. It’s shaped by my reading of the works of our founding fathers.
Maybe this fixation on Hollywood as real life if why Liberal politicians love celebrity endorsements.
“Go ahead, make my day,” Clint Eastwood growled famously to a movie bad guy before dispatching him — kaboom! The museum narrative identifies the actual movie guns, not the actors, as having the “starring” roles in assorted western and terrorist-fantasy shootouts. The gallery includes some of the blank rounds actually fired in movies, as opposed to the live rounds bedeviling real life beyond the film screen.
I’d argue that ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan’s S&W 29 was a star in Dirty Harry and Magnum Force. I would disagree that gang members in Chicago, shooting each other over drug territory, are committing almost 1,000 homicides a year because they watched too many Clint Eastwood movies. One has nothing to do with the other.
During a visit, the difference between “acting” and “acting out” necessarily comes to mind. Why is there no stream of gripping films about the thousands of troubled Americans with easy access to guns who can lethally act out their darkest grievances on family and society day after day?
There are. They are the bad guys. The one Harry Callahan shot was called Scorpio. Generally the good guy shoots the bad guy. Or throws him off the top of Nakatomi Plaza.
The N.R.A.’s latest priority is rooted in its ultimate fantasy that society will be safer if ordinary Americans are allowed to routinely pack a pistol.
This is part of the campaign to make gun possession ubiquitous among ordinary citizens. All states permit some concealed carry, but under vastly different safety controls. That is why opponents wisely fear that national reciprocity is a ploy to sell more guns and undermine stronger local and state gun controls.
Oh dear God no. Not “ordinary citizens” being allowed to exercise their Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms and defend themselves beyond their doorsteps. That’s something only those blessed by goverment can do. That and illegals and criminals in sanctuary cities.
Gun safety researchers count more than 900 people killed by concealed-carry gun owners in the past decade, with only a tiny fraction of shootings ruled self-defense. Many of the deaths were suicides, and 31 were in mass shootings by concealed-carry owners.
Deep blue Chicago does in year or an angry Muslim does in a day what 14 million people with CCW permits take decades to do. Nobody is perfect, but it seems that the CCW track record is way above average for good behavior.
The N.R.A. headquarters here keeps up a fresh drumbeat for the reciprocity legislation underway in Congress, 30 minutes away from the gun museum, with more than 160 co-sponsors signed up. President Trump, who supports the idea, is scheduled to address the association’s annual leadership forum on Friday in Atlanta. Both sides in the gun debate are keyed up for something John Wayne-like from the president.
And here is where Francis ties two disjointed thoughts together into one retarded conclusion.
John Wayne isn’t why there is a push for national CCW. It is the lawlessness that Liberals like the NYT editorial board allow when they defend sanctuary cities, rioting in Baltimore and Ferguson, and condone Antifa. We are tired of being told that the police are there to defend us by the same people that undermine the ability of the police to defend us because “the police are racist.”
We can’t trust you to protect us so we are going to protect ourselves. Not because we saw somebody do that in a movie, but because that’s what our Founding Fathers said.
When the NYT is relying on “they watch too many John Wayne movies and think they are all cowboys looking for a gun fight” as the penultimate argument against national CCW, they’ve gone full retard.
I was sort of half-assed reading it, when I came across a doozy of a statement that made my head reel and my nose start to bleed.
But Singapore isn’t a free market utopia. Quite the opposite, really. It’s a largely state-run health care system where the government designed the insurance products with a healthy appreciation for free market principles — the kind of policy Milton Friedman might have crafted if he’d been a socialist.
What the fuck was that? If Milton Friedman was a socialist?
That’s like saying:
The Wealth of Nations is the book Ezra Klein would write if he didn’t have shit for brains.
Here is Milton Friedman giving a Nobel Prize winning tear-down of Socialism.
So the article goes on to explain how the Singapore system works with mandatory compliance. Like Social Security on steroids.
Then I got towards the end of the article and read this.
Singapore manages a nanny state beyond anything Americans can imagine, or would permit.
Despite the country’s wealth, only 15 percent of Singaporeans have cars, because the government makes car ownership prohibitively expensive. There’s virtually no illegal drugs or gun crime in Singapore, in part because drug dealers are executed and guns are outlawed. Cigarette and alcohol taxes are enormous by American standards. As Matt Yglesias said in our episode of The Weeds discussing Singapore, “If you imagine America with no guns, less booze, much less drugs, and radically less driving, our public health outcomes would soar.”
No wonder the stupid shit-weasels at Vox love Singapore so much. It’s a totalitarian state that takes your guns, booze, cars, and freedom and in return taxes the hell out of your for healthcare. It’s a big government lover’s wet dream.
It’s not about healthcare, it’s about tyranny.
Sure, our healthcare system needs improvement, but wanting to impose the system of a nation that practices summary executions and caning, that deserves a big ‘ol ‘Murican “FUCK YOU.
It’s their right. I’m not going to stop them. The thing is, it’s boring. It’s not brave to tease Christians, they don’t get violent with you when you mock their religion. The Left doesn’t like them. No one in high society will defend them.
Counting coup was a Native American tradition of showing bravery by touching an enemy before striking them.
This sort of thing is like counting coup with a golden retriever. Not dangerous at all.
I’m inspired to get a theater off Broadway and do a show I’ll advertise as “the next Book of Mormon.”
It will be a comedy about the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam, done as a comedy based on the idea that the schism was the result of jealousy in a gay love triangle between the founders of each sect and Muhammed.
Of course Muhammed will be as effete a gay stereotype as I can make him.
For some reason I doubt the NYT will call it “brave” even though I’d have to spend the rest of my life in hiding afterwards.
