Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Geniuses Who Think They Can Ban Evil

No sooner had word of the diabolically evil massacre in Aurora reached the airwaves than liberals began to exploit it politically. Waiting not even a day for the families to grieve, the likes of The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Daily News, The New York Times, mayor Michael Bloomberg and the philandering race-baiter Jesse Jackson leapt into action.

Their mission: to politicize the debate and gain some purchase for their long-discredited argument that preventing the law-abiding from defending themselves with firearms would prevent gun violence.

But consider the irony of residents of New York City and Chicago issuing screeds for more gun control. Both cities enforce draconian (and unconstitutional) bans on the right to keep and bear arms. And both cities are awash in gun violence, despite their myriad gun control measures:

Every week in Chicago, criminals kill, maim and wound the guilty and innocent alike. Last month, over a single weekend, 8 were shot to death and more than 40 wounded.

New York City is likewise awash in "illegal" guns as criminals have no problem acquiring them; this July has seen a 28% rise in city shootings since last year.

And for those liberals who believe that it is only the fact that neighboring areas -- with more lax gun control policies -- are responsible, consider the following attacks:

In Norway, a neo-Nazi slaughtered 92 innocents; Norway is a country that effectively bans guns (as do its neighbors);

• One victim of the Aurora attack, Jessica Ghawi, had narrowly survived a mass shooting in a Canadian mall in which two died and seven others were wounded. Canada greatly restricts access to firearms and, to the best of my knowledge, Eric Holder has not yet attempted to smuggle heavy weapons into that country.

Can you ban guns? Of course not: firearms and gunpowder have been manufactured for centuries and any half-decent machine shop could manufacture semi- or fully-automatic weapons.

Can you ban mass-murder? Of course not: the Aurora murderer -- who I refuse to name -- could have detonated a gasoline bomb in the crowded theater. Islamist terrorists manufacture suicide belts and recommend driving cars into crowds.

Can you ban evil? Of course not.

Cinemark Theaters, in fact, bans guns -- which is one reason why no member of the audience could open fire on the mass murderer.

But in the liberal's Utopian worldview, evil can somehow be stopped. If only society's elite -- the master-planners -- can be given enough control over human activity, they could construct a perfect government and prevent all violence. Notice, however, that society's elite are always protected by arms.

To prevent all violence requires, of course, complete control by the elites over the masses. Which is why North Korea is completely free of gun violence (at least, among the citizenry).

In the book More Guns, Less Crime, economist John Lott conducted the largest statistical analysis of the impact of firearms on safety ever performed in the United States.

He found that the gun control advocates -- who had always predicted that concealed carry permits would result in the streets running red with blood, shootouts in parking lots, and the like -- were completely and utterly wrong. To his great surprise, he found that the more weapons possessed by the law-abiding, the safer society becomes as a whole.

In fact, history has proven that the reverse is true: disarming a population is frequently the precursor to genocide. It occurred in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Cambodia under the Maoist Pol Pot. Millions paid the ultimate price for giving up their firearms -- and their God-given right to protect themselves.

As usual, the idiots in the press -- as well as their Statist sycophants like Bloomberg and Jackson -- must ignore all of history. They must ignore facts, logic and reason to claim that they can ban evil and order society to suppress evildoers -- if only they can be granted total control over you and your God-given right to defend yourself.

13 comments:

An Old Sergeant said...

Please save me from the dangers of "Big Gulps(tm)" but don't take away the illegal guns out of the hands of criminals.. That would infringe on their rights to pop their (ummmmm)acquaintances!

Anonymous said...

Perhaps a better question is "can you make mass murder easy?"

The answer to that is yes, you can, and yes YOU have by insisting that everyone no matter what their background or mantal state have unfettered access to thousands of rounds of ammunition for high powered weapons with no possible use except the mass murder of their fellow.

You and your ilk have made this the status quo. And rather than feel the appropriate shame for what you personally are responsible for (and yes, oh yes, you are, you damn well are) you "tsk tsk" those who have always knwon better and tried to save people from your, for lack of any better term, evil.

directorblue said...

@Anon - personal shame?

Box-cutters killed 3,000 people on 9/11/2001.

Fertilizer killed hundreds in Oklahoma City.

Thousands die each year thanks to CAFE standards.

What are you willing to ban in order to protect everyone?

And how many more tens of millions have to die through state-sponsored despotism before you acknowledge Thomas Jefferson's wisdom:

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

You would think that the entire 20th century would teach you progressive turds some lessons -- with 90 million dead thanks to despots who confiscated weapons.

Anonymous said...

Hey, anonymous... did this scumbag fire thousands of rounds or 100? what the f are you talking about? so he bought thousands of rounds, do you think he had the ability to touch them off on a murder spree?

chunkdog said...

I knew the gun control cockroaches would be climbing out of the woodwork seconds after this happened. But it seems he was determined to get his job done, no matter what weapon he used.

But, the fact is, this shooter dressed up like a Batman character, and mass murdered 12 people during the movie "Batman".

Since the movie itself seems to be the incentive here, maybe the gun control people should look into banning all movies instead.

Then they could follow that with comic books, cartoons, and even lunch boxes.

Why do liberals always want to blame the world, instead of blaming the actual perpetrator?

Anonymous said...

I thought liberals thought you couldn't legislate morality? Now I'm really confused.

Anonymous said...

The country is Norway not sweden

Intelligent Conservative said...

It is not possible to legislate or educate human nature out of human beings. The mass murder wasn't made easy. The theater had a policy that said, "no firearms". There are strict gun laws in Aurora. These control laws were believed to be the means to "change the behavior of humans". For anyone that thinks you can ban guns and make yourself safe, all I can say is you're a complete moron living on a different planet not called earth.

Trialdog said...

Excellent post Mr. Ross

The_Bad said...

Did the shooter have these weapons legally? As I have found no mention either way, I must assume he did not (if he did, I would assume the press would be hammering that data point in every story).

So, if the current law on the books didn't stop him, what purpose do more gun control laws serve?

QueMan said...

Can one ban liberals??? So sad but alas no...what a shame...though they do make good targets in the alternate press!!!

UpChuck.Liberals said...

@the_bad, yes his weapons were legally purchased. Everything he had was legally purchased. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

It's sad that liberals are too intent on being stupid to learn from history.

Anonymous said...

Ross said:

Norway is a country that effectively bans guns (as do its neighbors)

Easily checked, and false. Blithe lies mark empty arguments.

Norway doesn’t ban guns. They restrict and license, especially handguns, but it is not remotely accurate to say they ban guns. Anders Breivik bought his semiauto Ruger Mini-14 legally, though he wanted a higher caliber. Except for 8 he killed with an AMFO bomb, Breivik killed with legal guns.

He already had a bolt .308 and a shotgun. That’s as good a boundary between reasonable and unreasonable gun ownership I can think of. I have the same: a deer rifle and a grouse gun, and my castle is quite secure.

Ross offers the same old hubris of men who choose the sexual totem of guns over the safety of their fellow citizens. That’s a lust, and lust will fuel plenty of lies and distortions. There is no logical or statistical merit in laws that fail to prevent psychotics from buying guns enough to act on their violent delusions. Few of our fellow citizens would be inconvenienced by such laws.

And these same writers pour out vicious eliminationist rhetoric, the same rhetoric that spurs insane persons to attack. A bloody cycle.

Ross says Norway bans guns, but that’s a lie. The lie is necessary to protect Ross from his own faulty logic. Norway tries to regulate firearms in a way that balances public safety and the rights of citizens to own guns. If Norway had reasonable restrictions on gun ownership, you might not fear such restrictions. I don’t fear them.

Americans have allowed demagogues to make the gun an absolutist political philosophy, a kind of talisman. The NRA has succeeded so completely that its issues can’t even be discussed. This philosophy is a tissue of lies, cockeyed interpretations, ignorance, and privilege. To function it must be swallowed whole. But it’s delicate. When a lunatic shoots a bunch of people, hacks must scribble to defend it. That’s what you just read.

Political rhetoric is a pure freedom, and should be protected even when it encourages men like Anders Breivik, Jared Loughner, and Nidal Hasan to kill. I accept that part of this argument. What shouldn't be protected is the right of such men to multiply their power with certain guns. Some freedoms are primary and should not be subject to compromise. Gun freedom is not primary, as the text of the Amendment clearly states. Treating ownership as a nonnegotiable pure freedom endangers the safety of our citizens. My DNR allows 3 shells in the shotgun, and nobody complains. Call it 3, for the sake of discussion. We would still see lunatic murders, as well as the other kinds, but not 70 shot and 12 dead.

Ross wants us to absorb it, to dismiss it as an outlier, a ‘lone wolf’. He wants us to absorb all of them, one at a time. And we do it! We require only a few candlelit vigils, churchy scenes on TV, governors promising vaguely never to forget. People from Aurora said, wonderingly, “I never thought something like this could happen here!” The theater is 18 miles from Columbine High School. Forget!

Ross lied. Norwegians can own hunting arms, and a handgun if they do the club/certification process. Norwegians can also conduct an effective national dialogue on the conflict between freedom of expression and freedom to own firearms. We can’t. Land of the free, greatest nation on earth, and we can’t talk about it. We insist that there is no conflict even as the evidence of that conflict, and the casualties of it, pile up.

Doug Ross is in a bind every time an insane person slaughters a bunch of strangers. We all know that Holmes shot 70 people, some of whom were not even in the same room. Can’t lie about that, till later. Ross wants to keep the laws as they are, so that anyone, no matter how deranged, can quickly acquire such firepower. It’s a tough point to make, being logically ridiculous, wildly impractical, and violently unfair to the average folks who are victims of such violence. It's a bit easier if the writer has no interest in facts, accuracy, or research.

ice9