h/t Instapundit
... "two armed 'polygamist' women dressed 'like ninjas' were subdued by a sword-wielding man during a home invasion." I've written about polygamists, ninjas, and sword-wielding men, but I think this is the first time even I have seen all three combined.
Moved to Opinion because while it was a blog report about a story, the blog post was really the writer's response to the story. Had the link been to the original article with the poster's opinion highlighted, I would have left it on Page 3: non-WoT. That said, go to the link and read the whole thing, dear Reader. Darwin's body may be long dead, but his spirit certainly lives.
Via Bearing Arms, the proprietor of which said this piece has to be one of the dumbest editorials he has ever read. From the gun control crowd, that's saying something.
I'm sure I lost a lot of readers right off the bat with my headline, but for those of you who are willing to hear me out (and if you are still reading I am going to assume that you are), let me explain my position to you. Position being: grab ankles and ask not to push too hard... at first.
Gun control is an absolute joke in this country. Background checks are all well and good, but if you can turn around and sell the gun to your neighbor without one, they're utterly pointless. Assault weapons being sold to the general public is ridiculous. Nobody needs an AR15 to shoot a deer. And this whole open carry movement just terrifies me. 1) You don't get to determine how a gun, a piece of private property is used.
2) You don't get to determine which gun is used to kill a deer.
3) If open carry terrifies you, I have a suggestion: get a gun.
I don't understand the writer's last point. If people carrying guns terrifies the writer, wouldn't it be better to know of whom and when to be terrified? Open carry allows this, whereas with concealed carry one would need to be terrified all the time on general principle. There's a reason there are medications for that, and locked wards.
It seems to me that while some people are so adamant about their Second Amendment rights, they've forgotten all about my First Amendment ones " specifically my right to life. Sorry, that should trump your “right” to sling a semi-automatic weapon over your shoulder and sit in the booth next me at a restaurant. Huh? Right to life? I guess reading that pesky Constitution was a bit too much research for this editorial. Your remark hits at a controversy within the gun owning community: under what circumstances should you go into a private establishment with a rifle over your shoulder? I'd say condition four, because as such, if you insist on openly carrying a rifle in the open it should be clearly safe. Handguns are different. But that's a different discussion from sitting in a restaurant booth next to a nervous 20-something woman with a rifle slung on your back. My bet is that that it would be so uncomfortable to eat while carrying your rifle, you may not want to do it again. YMMV
Gun control is a political platform utilized by both parties to pander to the masses and garner votes. It sickens me that human lives are the cost of winning an election nowadays. Elections in the United State have yet to cost lives, but if control advocates keep pushing to first take away guns, that may be a cost.
Because this is a column, inherently an opinion piece, I'm not going to pull out a bunch of stats and quotes to support my cause (although they are abundant.) But there is one that I can't let go. The majority of people I talk to seem to think that President Obama is “out to get your guns” when in reality, the first Bush administration had stricter gun laws. The comedy gold begins here
In fact, two of the most critical gun control measures that ever passed took place in the 1990s: 1993's Brady Bill and 1994's Assault Weapons Ban, both passed by a Republican president (George H.W. Bush) with the help of strong vocal support by former President Reagan.
The reality is that our forefathers in 1791 had no idea about the weapons technology we would have in the future. The notion that the constitution
...which should have been capitalized. Where are those layers of editors and fact checkers when they're needed?
is static is absurd. This is why they are called "amendments"
...comma needed, but do go on, dear...
so that they can be amended to keep up with the times.
Mass shootings have almost become common place in today's media, and every time one happens the same rhetoric is replayed: "Now is a time of mourning, and not an appropriate time to discuss gun control." "Almost". Love that bit of legerdemain.
So, my question is: when is the appropriate time? When do we as a society decide to finally catch up with the rest of the modern world and say enough? What exactly are you defending with your “well regulated militia?” Because I guarantee that whatever you may have in your personal arsenal is a joke compared to what the most well funded military on the planet has to bring to the field. Actually, the modern world should catch up with us with regard to guns. And I doubt this individual could tell a tank from an infantry fighting vehicle, so the concept of Fourth Generation Warfare would be totally lost on her.
Well, there was that little incident with a beheading at the workplace the other day, where the second head remained attached to its body because there was a supervisor with a loaded gun in the vicinity. Militias don't merely practice march-countermarch techniques in order to get to set-piece battles more quickly.
As much as I would like to, I am not calling for the complete disarming of the American public. What I would like to see are some reasonable restrictions put into place. I'd like to see "reasonable restrictions" removed because they are so draconian for a nation that is supposed to be free.
For starters, registration. This seems obvious to me. When you sell your car, the registration of the car follows it from owner to owner " it should be no less for firearms. Licensing to own a gun would then logically follow. I don't have a problem with hunting rifles or family heirloom pieces either. You don't, but as laws get drafted a natural tendency among legislatures in the US is to pass laws that affect the broadest cross section of people, and pass laws that are as Constitutional as possible. That means that "hunting rifles" won't be exempt. IOW, you get gun control.
I'm not overly fond of handguns, but I've learned to pick my battles. This “open carry” nonsense has to stop. Everyone wants to strap on a six shooter like Wyatt Earp, but they forget that the gunfight at the OK Corral took place because Earp was trying to enforce the town's ordinance banning guns. Another bit of straw man arguing. I know of no one and I know personally three concealed weapon holders, who would act like Wyatt Earp. It is a conscious choice to take your own responsibility to defend yourself in the face of an ever increasing hostile state and national government to individual rights. And leading the charge to destroy those rights are this individual, who knows history like the back of my hand.
America, for all her technological advances, is in reality a very young nation. Perhaps in time, as our country grows in age and experience, we will finally see the error of our ways and begin to make amends. If we can only get through this rebellious teenager phase, we might even stand a chance. We will, missy. You probably won't...
Oh dear. Clearly she is not aware that America is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world, following only Switzerland and England. Though it must be noted that we practiced self-rule at the local and sometimes colony level for a century or more before independence, which might upset the order of the two English-speaking societies. In comparison, Germany and France, though having a longer tradition as a Volk, have been democratic only since 1946 or so, and in Germany's case it was not voluntary.
#1
The car analogy is stupid. By law if the vehicle doesn't see the street it doesn't have to be registered. And you're free to have the biggest fastest etc and use it as you wish. Oh and if you have a drivers license you can drive any car any time you want.
Typical socialist. She assumes since you disagree you must like Bush and be a Republican.
#2
The usual gun grabber diarrhetic diatribe. Got to agree. This is one of the dumbest articles I have read on this.
It seems to me that while some people are so adamant about their Second Amendment rights, they’ve forgotten all about my First Amendment ones
Your 1st Amendment freedoms are insured by the 2nd Amendment Kasie. Many brave people paid for your freedoms.
In fact, two of the most critical gun control measures that ever passed took place in the 1990s: 1993’s Brady Bill and 1994’s Assault Weapons Ban — both passed by a Republican president (George H.W. Bush) with the help of strong vocal support by former President Reagan.
These were passed under Clinton, not Reagan or Bush.
#5
If the gun-grabbers were serious about reducing gun violence, they would be working to get guns out of the hands of urban blacks. That would give you the most bang for the buck.
Note that handgun laws have little actual effect on the criminal population. See crime rates in Chicago or Washington DC for examples.
#6
If the gun grabbers were serious about reducing gun crime, they'd be taking illegally acquired guns away from gangsters. Living in a bad part of town on its own does not make the gun owner a danger to society.
#8
Any person ( I use that term loosely) wanting me to give up any sort of gun are wanting one thing. To make me a slave. And before that happens, they will learn the hard way the difference between a free man and a slave.
[SultanKnish] Say that you get a tempting offer from a Nigerian prince and decide to invest some money in helping him transfer his vast fortune from Burkina Faso or Dubai over to the bank across the street. The seemingly simple task of bringing over the 18 million dollars left to him by his father hits some snags which require you to put in more and more of your own money.
Eventually you have invested more than you ever would have ever done up front just trying to protect the money that you already sank into Prince Hussein Ngobo's scheme. And to protect your self-esteem, you go on believing that no matter what Prince Ngobo does, he is credible and sincere. Any failings in the interaction are either your fault or the fault of some third party. Anyone who tells you otherwise must be a Ngobophobe.
Now imagine that Prince Ngobo's real name is Islam.
That is where Western elites find themselves now. They invested heavily in the illusion of a compatible Islamic civilization. Those investments, whether in Islamic immigration, Islamic democracy or peace with Islam have turned toxic, but dropping those investments is as out of the question as writing off Prince Ngobo as a con artist and walking away feeling like a fool.
Western elites, who fancy themselves more intelligent and more enlightened than the wise men and prophets of every religion, and who base their entire right to rule on that intelligence and enlightenment, are not in the habit of admitting that they have been played for fools.
...The Arab Spring, the Palestinian Peace Process and every similar bid to transform the region presumed that disempowerment was the cause of Muslim violence and that, conversely, empowerment was the solution.
Give the poor dears some weapons, a country, a ballot box, free and open elections, and they'll be less likely to blow themselves up while seeking 72 virgins on the downtown express. Instead, empowering people who were violent while disempowered; only made them more violent.
Some of the best minds in two hemispheres are engaged in seeking a solution to this paradox, which isn't a paradox at all but rather a straight-line projection.
If Abdul is beheading people when all he has to work with is a sword then, if you give him a gun, he will start shooting them instead. If he's blowing up buses when he only has a terrorist group, he will blow up countries when he has a country.
Empowering Abdul does not diminish his grievances, because his grievances are a function of his capacity for violence. Increasing his capacity will increase his grievances until the entire world is on the wrong end of his empowerment scimitar.
By Andrew C. McCarthy Excerpt of an opinion piece illustrating the danger of letting your political orientation influence your foreign affairs vision.
[NATIONALREVIEW] Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.
The who? Khorasan. Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, approximately. Kinda deemphasizes the overweening Arabness of things.
There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the "Khorosan Group" suddenly went from anonymity to the "imminent threat" that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize. I've been sitting here doing this stuff for the past thirteen years, day in and day out. I read about a new group about once every two weeks. Think of al-Qaeda as the army and al-Qaeda in wherever as the divisions: the Arabian Peninsula, the Islamic Maghreb, Iraq, that sort of thing. Within each of the divisions there are umpty brigades. Each is concerned with its own internal rivalries, which is why we see Mokhtar breaking off from AQIM and becoming his own "Mourabitounes" (Signers in Blood) group.
You haven't heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn't one. Yet just today or yesterday there were condolence messages on the departure from the gene pool of its head, who was on the FBI most wanted list with a $7 million bounty on his head.
It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan -- the --Iranian--Afghan border region -- had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it. Khorasan appears to be (have been?) a group within al-Nusra, which could also be called al-Qaeda in the Levant.
The "Khorosan Group" is al-Qaeda. That's a correct statement.
It is simply a faction within the global terror network's Syrian franchise, "Jabhat al-Nusra." I just said that.
Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week's U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri ... Formerly second in command of al-Qaeda, now the head cheese, occasionally described as the real brains of the outfit. Formerly the Mister Big of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Bumped off Abdullah Azzam with a car boom in the course of one of their little disputes. Is thought to have composed bin Laden's fatwa entitled World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders. Currently residing in the North Wazoo area. That is not a horn growing from the middle of his forehead, but a prayer bump, attesting to how devout he is... , the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he's something the administration is at pains to call "core al-Qaeda." "Core" al-Qaeda is the "army" staff, located in the Pak-Afghan border area. My guess would be in Miranshah, though I could be wrong. I thought bin Laden lived the life of a gentleman farmer in Chitral.
"Core al-Qaeda," you are to understand, is different from "Jabhat al-Nusra," which in turn is distinct from "al-Qaeda in Iraq" (formerly "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia," now the "Islamic State" al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly "al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham" or "al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant"). That al-Qaeda, don't you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for "al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb," "Boko Haram," "Ansar al-Sharia," or the latest entry, "al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent." Nor with AQ in Britain, nor with AQ in Europe. They're not the same thing. You cant' confuse the whole with the part. In 2002 Jemaah Islamiyah was a significant threat in Indonesia. After the Bali bombing the Indons rounded them up and exploited the group like they were supposed to: beat hell out of the guys you have until they tell you more guys to get. Jug the cannon fodder and hang the mean ones. The only mistake they made was letting the holy man off. There were a couple lessons there: First, JI was patently a family operation. They were all married to each other's sisters or daughters or aunts or something. Second, all those Islamic arrows are expendable; we occasionally hear about JI in the news, but what we're really hearing about is JI remnants. When AQ or IS rises again it will likely be in Poso with a new cast of characters.
Coming soon, "al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine." In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if, come 2015, Obama issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through al-Qaeda in December. They're playing area offense. Remember when the Islamic Courts overran Somalia? And the Ethiopians kindly stepped in and killed as many of them as they could lay hands on? When the dust had settled approximately the same group started up again, this time wearing a false nose and mustache, calling itself "al-Shabaab." It doesn't take an Obama decree to bring one of these groups into being. Boko Haram was nothing but background noise until a few years ago. Now it's got its own "Caliphate."
Except you'll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad. You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries. Each of the tentacles has its own name, its own largely autonomous nervous system.
As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole -- a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way. So seemingly the writer can understand the actual enemy, but he quibbles over terminology.
For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That's kind of the weakness on our side, isn't it? With all that boodle lying around earmarked for the military budget, the impulse to grab the dough for donor-friendly contracts is overwhelming. But it's not just Obama. Cameron's not eager to get involved, either. The Brits are reaching the point where they can't afford to. Hollande, much to my surprise, isn't taking a lot of nonsense from people with turbans suffering from delusions of superiority, but Merkel has been trying to maintain her distance out of post-WWII angst.
That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict. If you don't train yourself to believe that, the whole concept of multiculturalism suddenly looks as foolish as it is.
For the Left, America has to be the culprit. This is the gift of the Soviets. They spent a lot of time and money developing a fifth column in this country. It's blooming while they're in the ashcan of history, at least until short attention span syndrome kicks in.
Despite its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause. As you'll hear from Obama's Islamist allies, who often double as Democrat activists, the problem is "Islamophobia," not Muslim terrorism. ...Islamophobia: the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists won't disappear, it has to be denied and purged. The "real" jihad becomes the "internal struggle to become a better person." A "better person" who chops people's heads off.
The scriptural and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism must be bleached out of the materials used to train our national-security agents, and the instructors who resist going along with the program must be ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. "Core al-Qaeda" is kind of a misnomer, since "al-Qaeda" means "the base," which it kinda sorta remains. They were designed as a whole, but with the passage of time they broke down into a confederation. Zawahiri twice told ISIL to shut down and merge with al-Nusra. Instead they farted in his general direction and established their caliphate. Splinters all over the world are scrambling to attach themselves to the board. It's that strong horse-weak horse thing all over again. It's the same kind of power struggle Zawahiri had Abdullah Azzam car boomed over.
That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces. The stupidity of using the civilian courts to handle krazed killers where much of the "evidence" is based on intel or intel information is patent. It's also an entirely separate problem.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/28/2014 13:33 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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Top|| File under: al-Qaeda
*Please note the existence of the "Islamic Thinkers Society" that seeks the goal of restoring the Islamic Caliphate to create what it calls "an ideal Islamic society."
#5
Next the Obama narrative will be: "The Khorosan Group manufactures the Kerosun heater which is a carbon-producing kerosene heater. The kerosene heater is unfriendly to the environment and the Khorosan Group is not paid up on their carbon credits. The heater causes global warming. The Khorosan group is a danger to the environment and must be wiped out." I'd bet Susan Rice came up with this narrative as she did with the video that blasphemed Allen.
#7
AQ must farm out terror franchises like the Colonel would franchise out halal chicken places.
I have the impression it works the other way round, JohnQC. Once a local jihadi group becomes big enough and successful enough they feel ready to approach the home office and offer their services.
Mr. Hawking being uniquely unqualified, out of the billions of humans now living, to make such a judgement and such a pronouncement. Which, of course, is why he could not keep himself from doing so.
#5
Steve you need a change of scenery, suggest you start humming "Nearer My God to Thee" as you ascend into the heavens. Just look upon this as an Attitude Altitude Adjustment.
#6
Mr Hawking, your theology degree -- or philosophy degree, or some sort of proof that you are qualified to give an expert opinion on anything other than physics? Expertise in one field does not translate to another field (c.f. Chomsky, and almost any Nobel laureate in economics). And the deeper the expertise, the more narrow its range. Its quite simply one of the more common logical fallacies out there: argumentum Ad Verecundiam, appeal to false authority.
I believe that the ancient Jews saw this argument, and handled it already: Psalm 14:1 "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Zawahiri
