So far the current gun control debate has resulted in very little sane conversation and skyrocketing gun sales.
(As a bonus it’s also produced a bizarre pro Tsarist rant in Pravda: “This will probably come as a total shock to most of my Western readers, but at one point, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. This was, of course, when we were free under the Tsar.” Now that a ballsy historical rewrite. I’m pretty sure a few million serfs and victims of pogroms didn’t feel all that “free.”)
So what’s the probable outcome of the gun control debate? Stricter gun controls around the margins and millions more packing heat and no one feeling any safer.
We can’t seem to actually talk about anything important. We always scream and condescend now. It’s unnerving. On one side the Alex Jones brigade freaks the eff out and threatens revolution from their basements and imagined compounds. On the other side the smug, liberal, I WILL CONTROL YOU IF IT IS THE LAST THING I DO hall monitors cackle at the “morons” from their media lounge chairs. Nice. Angry Freaks versus Imperious Lizards.
That is what it’s come to. Once again.
Alex Jones is a deranged snake oil salesman. Piers Morgan is an interloping snake oil selling asshole who has no understanding of the American character.
I wish people who wanted to hash out the hardest issues – no matter how difficult – would rise up. I believe they were once called leaders
Great entry, John. we must become a healthy society or no amount of gun control will help, in my opinion. I agree, we have been in real need of intelligent leadership for a very long time.
Indeed. These are but symptoms of a greater malaise.
There is little ‘talking’ to be done as long as many of our citizens don’t feel safe. Whether their feelings are justified or not, no longer seems to matter. Perception becomes reality.
We once had a neighbor who jumped at shadows, she was always calling about a strange car or a strange person she thought she had seen. She died anyway, at 50, of cancer.
Many people have a sense of dread & vague unease about diffuse areas out of their control — the moribund economy, a terror threat they cannot assess, global warming, a culture growing ever more vapid & puerile, etc. So they fixate on threats, real or imagined, of a more ‘manageable’ scope — burglars, child molesters, even UN helicopters, chem-trails & assorted conspiracies, as conspiracies, however convoluted, are at heart *simple* explanations.
Like an eating disorder, which is never about the food, their responses — be it more guns as a panacea, or no guns as a panacea — are also misdirected and unhealthy. Yet you don’t just tell an anorexic they’re being silly.
To be fair, there are angry freaks on both sides – and more than a few imperious lizards to boot. One need only look at some of the twitter traffic on this issue to be absolutely stunned at the number of people who think “argument” means “childish name-calling coupled with not-so-veiled threats of violence”.
Alex Jones is, first and foremost, a con man and entertainer – in a country where 47% of households self-report owning a firearm (which to my mind implies that the real number is quite a bit higher), putting him on the air as somehow “representative” of gun owners is a disservice to rational discourse.
What really bugs me is the way even the more rational voices on both sides are willing to cook the statistical books in order to advance their point of view.
^ Like.
“What really bugs me is the way even the more rational voices on both sides are willing to cook the statistical books in order to advance their point of view.”
Whether this practice is on the rise, or just more people are falling for it, remains t.b.d. A definite trend is the lack of inquiry & scrutiny of claims, so long as they support one’s partisan view. Hence the less-than-factual “facts” of Snopes, Factcheck.org, the Truth Teams, etc. Mantra-like repetitions of the “fact” ensue until it becomes unquestionable dogma.
A common bit of demagoguery is “quote-mining” — extracting out of context a snippet from an opponent’s statements or writings to undermine their original intent. Creationists actively encourage quote mining, a practice that’s spread to global warming deniers.
I posted a link to this article earlier. IMO, it’s one of the better op-ed pieces on the national gun debate sparked by the recent mass shootings. One thing that bothers me is that the debate has been framed as the gun owners against the non-gun owners. As this article reveals, that’s not the case.
A conservative case for an assault weapons ban:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/dec/20/opinion/la-oe-burns-assault-weapons-ban-20121220
Good article.
“Gun enthusiasts can still have their venison chili, shoot for sport and competition, and make a home invader flee for his life without pretending they are a part of the SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden.”
It’s about the pretending. My neighbors who let off 15-17 rounds at a go are not hunting deer. Occasionally among the din I hear the ping of a can. That’s not useful target practice, either.
Where I part with the author is his concern that we are all denied guns when “your life might depend on you having one.” I don’t want to live in a world where my life depends on having a gun. My goat’s life, maybe, but not mine.
And, speaking of imperious lizards vs. imperious lizards:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/11/piers-morgan-accused-of-exploiting-newtown/
Unfortunately, reality may not give you much of a say in this:
http://news.yahoo.com/gunmen-los-angeles-nordstrom-rack-hold-employees-hours-202846044–finance.html
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/woman-hiding-kids-shoots-intruder/nTm7s/
On the other hand, I suppose it might just respect your wishes to the letter.
Or I could just move to one of the 67 countries with lower gun-death rates than the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
Iam one who hopes for a nation free of guns. Obama wants to get the guns out of our hands, but what about the guns he put in the hands of the Cartels? What about the many, mostly innocent lives lost thanks to those guns?
“Obama wants to get the guns out of our hands”
He’s a demagogue; he’ll say anything. He don’t give jack shit about gun control. The dude’s killed thousands of children with his drones.