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| -Land of the Free |
| The conservative evasion on guns |
| 2015-10-05 |
| More gun grabbing garbage, this time from E.J. Dionne. President Obama spoke some of the most important words of his tenure last week in response to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. “This is something we should politicize,” the president said. “It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.” And so Obama has. Just saw a graphic from an award winning short story writer about killing anyone with an NRA sticker on their vehicle. Obama's politicization has had the intended effect. This is something we should politicize. His statement was remarkable for violating the etiquette as to what a leader should say after another slaughter by a deranged gunman and the conventional wisdom about how politicians have to pretend that they are not engaged in politics. Puleez. Obama has been violating "etiquette" for incidents that should be out of his purview since he took office. The Upmqua massacre was just another show for the cheap seats. But Obama was forcing us to face reality. It’s politics that has rendered our nation powerless in the face of butchery. There have been at least 142 school shootings since the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, and Congress has done nothing. It’s politics, as Obama said, that makes the U.S. “the only advanced country on Earth that sees these kinds of mass shootings every few months,” and politics that leads our learned legislators to pass laws barring the government from “even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths.” We reduce gun deaths by having armed citizens. The cops can't be everywhere, but an armed individual can be. “Politicize” is the right word for another reason: We will not act until politicians start losing elections for opposing even the most modest gun safety measure. We will not act unless political parties that block action lose their majorities. Yes, I am talking about a Republican Party that has completely aligned itself with the interests of gun manufacturers and gun fanatics. E.J, no one gives a sh*t about gun safety. Your customers -- the left -- want to kill gun owners, and everyone else are doing everything they can to get armed in the face of such incipient hostility of the government and their supporters. I have criticized timid Democrats for doing the NRA’s bidding, and they need to be challenged in primaries, even if this means putting some of the party’s seats in Congress at risk. But it is the GOP that is institutionally tied to those who insist that gun rights supersede all of our other rights. And I cordially invite House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to prove me wrong. Engaging in politics also means unmasking rationalizations that may sound plausible but are merely intended to justify pathetic pandering to the forces of evasion and inertia. The most debilitating dodge is to claim that nothing can be done, that nothing works. The gun lobby specializes in isolating a given incident and declaring sagely that this or that particular solution would not have prevented it. And the gun lobby is arguably correct. News flash: No law will ever solve every problem or create heaven on Earth. But it is a straight-out lie to assert that stronger gun laws make no difference. Here is the conclusion of a study released in August by National Journal: “The states that impose the most restrictions on gun users also have the lowest rates of gun-related deaths, while states with fewer regulations typically have a much higher death rate from guns.” State laws could be even more effective if they were matched by federal laws that made it harder for guns to get into the wrong hands. Guns are already difficult to get into even serfs' hands. The last two massacres were from young men who abided by the law, I.E. they were law abiding citizens with evil in their hearts. The laws did not prevent a massacre, but something else: they should never prevent anything. The law is for prescribing punishment for illegal deeds; not preventing illegal or evil acts. Politicians who go on about American greatness should be ashamed of saying that the United States is the one and only nation that can’t act effectively to solve a problem every other free and democratic country has contained. Every other "free and democratic" nation has its own unique sets of circumstances. Ours is that the United States is the arsenal of democracy, filled with armed citizens the grand majority of which would never consider an armed and hostile act perpetrated on the unarmed. Conservatives might usefully listen to former Australian prime minister John Howard, who has noted that he led “a center-right coalition” whose parties represented “virtually every nonurban electoral district in the country.” In other words, his party is a lot like our Republicans. Spineless? After a psychologically disturbed man killed 35 people in Tasmania, Howard championed state bans on the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons by Australia’s states, along with a federal ban on their importation. He also sponsored a gun buyback scheme that got almost 700,000 guns — the statistical equivalent of 40 million in the United States — off the streets and destroyed. “Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control,” Howard wrote in the New York Times shortly after the Newtown killings. Politicizing this struggle means being unrelentingly candid in calling out an American conservative movement that proudly champions law and order but allows itself to be dominated by gun extremists who deride every gun measure that might make our country a little bit safer — no matter how many mass killings we have. E.J, I will bet you twenny bucks that nearly every "conservative writer -- because that is who we are speaking about -- has never touched nor owns a firearm of any kind. They just know that more firearms laws will not work, even if they had merit, which they do not. Gun laws only makes government safer with all the armed thugs they have on their side. It does nothing for the average serf. Conservatives all over the world are aghast at our nation’s permissive attitude toward guns. Is a dangerous and harebrained absolutism about weaponry really the issue on which American conservatives want to practice exceptionalism? |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #6 Cecil was shot with an arrow |
| Posted by: 746 2015-10-05 23:13 |
| #5 Dion approves of President Obama's decision to "politicize" the Oregon shooting. However, a more accurate term would be "exploit". |
| Posted by: DepotGuy 2015-10-05 14:02 |
| #4 When the dentist shot Cecil, the Left blamed the dentist. When a gangbanger shoots a three year old, the left blames guns. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2015-10-05 12:19 |
| #3 Whenever there is any kind of shooting, the game of the left is to blame Pubs, white conservatives even if they have to distort the truth. At one time this distortion of the truth was known as lying. In the world of the left, seldom do you read or hear of someone defending themselves or their loved ones with a firearm. For the left, it is an Alice Through the Looking Glass Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle Dum reversed kind of world: Up is down... |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-10-05 12:13 |
| #2 Just look at Chicago to see how well very restrictive gun laws work. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2015-10-05 12:03 |
| #1 Doesn't sound very conservative to me. |
| Posted by: Daffy Bumble3715 2015-10-05 10:52 |