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The Gun Grabbers’ Mask Slips
When Democrats and gun control advocates talk about “gun safety,” they mean only one thing: banning guns and attempting to confiscate them from law-abiding citizens. Sure, they may talk about “gun safety” or “gun violence*,” but what they really want are guns out of the hands of the private citizens.
Gun safety isn’t all that hard, actually. The four rules were laid out almost 50 years ago by Marine Colonel Jeff Cooper, and they’re still true today. But to the gun grabbers such as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), those rules don’t exist. All guns are capable of magically leaping off the table or out of the holster and inflicting wanton destruction, all by themselves. Any attempt, therefore, to increase gun safety that doesn’t involve turning your guns in is evil, and in their eyes, deserves ridicule. But they have now taken their opposition to new lows by opposing a federal grant to help educate kids about gun safety.
Project ChildSafe is a very successful program run by the National Shooting Sports Foundation to encourage safe gun ownership through education and safe gun storage, not through bans and government control.
The people who build swimming pools are the biggest advocates for water safety, so it only makes sense that the gun industry and gun owners are the biggest advocates for safety around firearms. After all, all we’re trying to do is protect our loved ones from both those who would do us harm, and from themselves. Obama’s Justice Department has shown a brief moment of clarity by supporting Project Childsafe over CSGV’s objections, and they should be commended for their actions.
When they’ll get around to atoning for Operation Fast and Furious remains to be seen.
* I’m still trying to parse out that “gun violence” phrase. I’ve owned guns for years, and all of mine are decidedly nonviolent and rather passive. They don’t get violent, all they do is lie there, day after day after day, until I pick them up and go shoot with them.
Published in Culture, Guns, Sports
Although Darwinian evolution works rather slowly as a mechanism to formulate social policy, it is mildly comforting to know that these CSGV people are more likely than sensible people to be in any available “gun free zone,” which means that if a lunatic starts shooting people they are far more likely to be killed than sensible people. When is the last time you heard of a mass shooting that wasn’t in a “gun free zone”?
I will keep Herr Bloomberg and his Merry Band of Idiots in mind while at the Fort Worth gun show tomorrow.
Of course, my wife might not approve if I use Herr Bloomberg as an excuse for the extra guns I bring home.
The left promotes anarchy & violence, or at least won’t go Sistah Souljah about which lives matters, while at the same time taking the salt shaker off the table & tazing the 32 0z Big Gulp patrons. Dems are masters at exploiting the inability to assess risk. You can teach someone to play black jack to achieve a neutral or slightly positive outcome over the long run in a few minutes, but you cannot convince them that driving 80 mph, with a few feet between SUVs with high centers of gravity, is not a good long term risk.
Good change in the title. Bloomberg never had a mask on for this topic.
“I’m still trying to parse out that “gun violence” phrase. I’ve owned guns for years, and all of mine are decidedly nonviolent and rather passive. They don’t get violent, all they do is lie there, day after day after day, until I pick them up and go shoot with them.”
They’re conducting a war on clear thinking. Most people don’t carefully parse what they hear and read, so they just start thoughtlessly repeating, and thinking in, these canned phrases. Same trick was used with the phrase, “assault weapon”. Any weapon can just as easily be a “defense weapon”.
Whenever any leftist whines out the “commonsense gun law” talking point, they should be challenged about “common sense gun laws” already in place.
Like the “common sense gun laws” in DC that allowed a man to be prosecuted for possession of antique musket balls and a spent shotgun shell. Or the law in New Jersey where a man was arrested for having an antique, inoperable pistol in his car. Or the laws in New York where a man’s guns were confiscated because he checked into a hospital for insomnia (which was considered a disqualifying “psychological disorder.”)
Or the Hugh Hewitt idea that you can have your guns confiscated on the basis of an anonymous accusation that you’re a threat.
I agree – from what I can tell the phrases are very deliberate and are meant to be emotional. “Gun violence” lets you get a visceral reaction (violence = bad feels) and associate it with what you want to get rid of, namely guns. The better question of how to deal with violence and weaponry in general is thus overlooked.
Add to that the stuff groups like this do like calling whatever you want “common sense” and whatever your opponent wants “extreme” and it’s clear to me the people in charge (not so much average members/sympathizers) are making power plays rather than acting from good intentions.
Very well put. I almost never like the use of the word violence in most discussions. I think it’s clearer to use “physical force”. “Violence” always conjures an image of a berserker running amok, completely out of control, and I fear that connotation arises unconsciously in many other people’s minds as well when they hear or read that word (see Ben Stiller’s character in Mystery Men).
Also the term “gun violence” ramped up right around the time that Democrats figured out that the phrase “gun control” got extremely negative/knee-jerk reactions from a majority of people. That should tell you something.