Same old story
I take my friends shooting. A lot. As a political moderate who leans heavily left on social issues, most of my friends are in the same camp. Many of them, I have discovered over the years, have never fired a weapon in their adult life before they met me. Many of them note exactly what Mick says in this strip: they have an uncle, or other friend or family member, that let them shoot a rifle in their youth.
So I take them shooting and give them proper instruction on muzzle discipline, trigger discipline, stance, etc. And I watch their faces light up along the way. Because, as is noted on the Box O’Truth repeatedly: Shooting stuff is fun.
This video just cracked me up. I’m not a fan of Michael Moore at all, and this gives an idea why. He likes to twist the truth, and ignore realities that go against his arguments. For instance, insisting that the Constitution was written in the 1700s, therefore all people of a constitutional bent must want to live like people did in the 1700s.
Our founding fathers weren’t stupid. Moore’s argument completely ignores that we can amend the Constitution legally, if lawmakers, who are elected by the public, want it. And the reality is: the majority of Americans are completely AGAINST gun control. Any attempt to repeal the 2nd amendment will result in a massive backlash.
I found this video fascinating.
“Maam” Well, there goes HIS shot!
In Texas, “ma’am” is a term of respect, regardless of age.
What really annoys me about Michael Moore is the way that even when I agree with him I feel like he goes too far. Like the point you brought up: I think the Supreme Court and anyone who uses the 2nd amendment as a trump card in gun control debates should recognize that modern firearms are much more diverse and efficient than anything imagined in the 18th century. However, I have stronger opinions about the need for respectful discourse and informed debate than I do about gun control, because I think that people paying attention to and even respecting people like Michael Moore or Rush Limbaugh, who deliberately manufacture outrage with excessively inflammatory rhetoric and periodic distortion of the truth, is more dangerous than any firearm.
They couldn’t have envisioned the spread of media and the near instantaneous access to it that we have now, nor the sheer amount of people one person can reach out to with modern social media. So let’s add restrictions to the first amendment while we’re at it.
Camera’s are capable of evil, voyueristic shot’s and evil things, plus they take more then one picture now with each shutter press so we should definitely limit that… Digital ones hold more then 32 pictures at a time so we need capacity limits as well…
Now, the above is meant primarily to be facetious.
But you have to understand where and why gun owners are so adamant about preventing any of these laws to pass is simply because of the trickle down way that new legislation tends to pass on top of the old. One law passes, then another one passes because “Well that one was a good idea and passed, so let’s get this one too…
Sooner or later it’s passed to the point where even the law abiding gun owner is caught up and is illegal simply because of all the laws and the complexity of all of them. I cross a state line I might be under a whole new set of laws, heck in some states just crossing a county line. I’ve been locked up for a day because of the Assault Weapons Ban. Put in a room and told to confess to lesser charges just so the DA could get a gun conviction when I was fully within the rights of the law (I had 20 round magazines, too high for my state, but they were all 1960 manufacture, which made them legal)
If it gives me a headache trying to figure out how to be within the letter of the law, and police and District Attorneys can’t even figure it out sometimes, what’s the real point?
For instance, I’m all for anyone who’s declared mental by an institution to not own a firearm, that’s just a no-brainer for me. However the politicians manage to get their legalese interjected into the bill so it goes from:
“Anyone who’s been declared incompetent” to “anyone who’s ever undergone psychiatric help, voluntarily or involuntarily”. If you’d ever gone to a psychiatrist on your own, you gave up your right to own a gun. Can you imagine the uproar if it was a different amendment?
And as much as I hate the legalese imposed in these bills that try to get passed, I thank it at the same time. My home state tried to ban the .50 caliber or anything that fired it because “it could take down an airplane” they luckily didn’t add exemption for shotgun. My state may be notoriously anti-gun, but we’ve got a surprisingly large hunting industry that got wind of it and put a stop to it.
I might be a paranoid gun owner, but every time I turn around I’m vilified in the media, blamed for mass murders, and called some of the worst names in the book because I enjoy going to my County run range and punching holes in paper from 100-500 yards and harvesting the occasional venison steak. Can you blame me for being paranoid? lol
I can’t blame you for being paranoid, but I can blame both gun advocates and gun control advocates as groups for making people paranoid. My point is that nobody wants to have a real debate; one side wants all guns gone, the other side wants all guns available to everyone, and nobody ever compromises, which causes a patchwork of gun laws because they’re always as strict as gun opponents can get them in a particular state or county instead of being a compromise between public safety and gun rights made on the federal level (which they need to be IMO). To look at your first amendment example: I don’t think ammo limits or banning certain guns are the right approach to the problem. I brought up the differences in the capabilities of guns to illustrate that the Second Amendment is a product of a different age, where a lunatic with a sword would probably do more damage than a lunatic with a gun.
My opinion is that both sides don’t want to admit the real problem: guns don’t kill people, but people who are going to kill people kill more people if they have guns. Therefore, instead of keeping anyone from having certain guns, we should be keeping certain people from having any guns (I’d say violent crime convictions and any mental illness that can cause irrational violence should lose a person access to guns, and getting a gun license should require a mental health check-up for the same reason driver’s licenses usually require a vision test.)
Re: gun tech, remember that Jefferson was a tech nerd, and Franklin was a mad scientist. Google “Cookson Rifle” and “Girandoni Rifle”.
George, the light arms in common use at the time the BoR was drafted were on par with the light arms issued to the British Army. Saying “the Founders couldn’t have envisioned fully-automatic weapons” is like saying they should have restricted the colonial militias to longbows and spears.
Except that a mass murderer in that age would probably be more dangerous if he had a spear than if he had a gun, because spears don’t need reloading and won’t jam or explode. I still don’t think we should ban any class of weapons (see the thread on my own comment), but the analogy doesn’t work because the Founders weren’t thinking about civilian self-defense and the difference between a fully-automatic rife and a musket is more akin to the difference between a musket and a thrown rock than a musket and a spear. The Founders lived in an era where most Americans could afford a military-grade weapon and anything larger than a personal firearm wasn’t terribly hard to get or keep supplied, so they created the Second Amendment to have basically a backup army in case America’s active military wasn’t adequate to repel an invasion. Therefore, in my mind, the modern gun-control debate should only be based on the merits of either position while the Second Amendment is just a failsafe for when things get excessive.
It should be noted that Jack the Ripper never used a firearm.
A mass murderer in that age would’ve used a blunderbuss (equivalent a sawed-off shotgun), and grenades.
George, please understand, that is incorrect. The second amendment exists because of armed forces. It is protection AGAINST the police and military, and possible take-overs of both. “A well regulated militia (which at the time would mean military or police, we werent really that official, so could not have an army, but a militia), being necessary to the security of a free State (meaning that we need enforcement and military as an extension of govt), the right of the people (thats us) to keep and BEAR (defend ourselves with) arms, shall not be infringed (will never been removed, as it would remove essential liberties in the body and mind, freedom to bear and freedom to be unrestricted as allowed by law). If we have police or a military, we need the second amendment, or as the quote says: Armed people are civilians, unarmed people are subjects. If you dont have a gun, why talk? can you really get anything done? will your speech matter? Are you wasting time? We know unarmed legal protests are less legal every year, thats a fact. So did the pacifists change anything or make things worse? Ask seattle, they shoot those hippies full of rubber bullets without concern. I live in arizona, ive WATCHED cops spray a child (no more than 6 mo. old) with pepper spray, because that child was dark of skin. I have two words for those that would restrict a civilian wanting to protect himself (or herself), and they are both greek. “Molon Labe” (come and take them).
I have that tattooed on my right shoulder.
I know it’s beating a dead horse, but there’s a slight inaccuracy with the statement that the Founders lived in a day and age where military hardware was not terribly expensive or difficult to obtain. Early colonial laws often required that able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and sixty own a firearm for the purposes of being mustered as militia under the British crown at a moment’s notice. However, by 1760 most of these laws were suspended by the Crown and firearms were actually being banned in certain cities and locales. Let us not forget that gunsmiths, merchants, and those suspected of conspiracy against the Crown were also being sought out, detained, and imprisoned without trial or charges by the time things were starting to get really bad. There is record of British forces attempting to secure Colonial weapons to render Colonial Americans helpless as a prelude to the Revolutionary War.
The crackdown on firearms progressed right up to the outset of the Revolutionary War to the degree that more than three-quarters of the weapons and gunpowder used by Colonial regulars throughout the war was supplied by the French. Without their aid, the British would have succeeded in subjugating the rebellion. The Founders knew this in wanting to ensure the populace would never be so helpless in the face of any government (including our own) ever again.
By “leans heavily left on social issues”, do you mean that you feel that society should tell you what to think on social matters? Because, that is what the leftist actions tell me they believe.
Then you are coming in here with a chip on your shoulder. You’re either looking for a reason to deride me publicly, stop reading the comic, or hate me. You don’t know what my stances are, but you have already put out the idea that the “leftist actions” of others have given you an idea of what I’m about.
In that case, have a good life, see ya, door’s that way, don’t let it smack you on the ass.
Your question is absurd.
> By “leans heavily left on social issues”, do you mean that you feel that society should tell you what to think on social matters?
Not even slightly. And the question is, put simply, fucking retarded. Because I believe that social welfare serves a vital purpose in society, and a single payer system for healthcare would be a vast improvement over our current ball of fuckups, I believe “others should tell you what to think?”
Drop the chip, and we can parlay. Otherwise, have a nice life.