Monday, November 28, 2011

Arizona Gun Club Offers Santa With a Gun - It's For the Children


An Arizona gun club is putting a new twist on Christmas by inviting families to pose for a photo with Santa Claus and a gun.

The Scottsdale Gun Club is hosting what they call a family event that allows people to take a holiday card picture with St. Nick, and a high-powered firearm.

Santa poses against a backdrop of an $80,000 Garwood mini-gun, and families can choose to pose with other firearms. Choices range from pistols to modified AR15s.
What can one say, but, it's Arizona.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

25 comments:

  1. It makes me want to believe in Santa.

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  2. It's just unbelievable that the parents would subject their kids to this. I mean lying to the kids about there being a Santa Claus?! What kind of monsters are these people?

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  3. Ohhhhhhhhhhh, that's just so darned cute!

    Looking at the photo I see that the tykes have been exhaustively trained in the 4 Rules. It's good to know that if that young lady's inanimate object should accidentally have a round in the chamber and accidentally go off and accidentally enter her head, just below the chin and accidentally go through her tongue, hard palate and tiny little pinkish brain that she will have had these few, precious moments with Santa.

    What? I'm being more macabre than some asswipe who thinks it's a good idea to put gunz in the hands of babies? Gee, I'm SO sorry.

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  4. This makes the same point I made earlier about confusing the difference for children between toys and firearms.

    Not my real name wrote:
    I mean lying to the kids about there being a Santa Claus?! What kind of monsters are these people?

    It pissed me off as a little kid that my parents were expecting me to go along with something I had already figured out was fake.

    I vividly remember having a conversation at age 3, sitting in the front seat of her car, at a shopping mall in W. St. Paul. The conversation arose over how much I could expect to get from the 'tooth fairy' when the time came.

    I told her to stop insulting my intelligence, I knew perfectly well there was no santa claus, no easter bunny, and no tooth fairy, etc., and that it had been perfectly obvious to me that this was a fake, and that I had never believed in it, but had gone along with it, because I received presents from both 'santa' and people with real identities, and that I hadn't wanted to get short changed by having the 'from santa' presents stop if I admitted I knew the truth.

    My mother tried to make it all about kids having fun. I pointed out that it wasn't fun when kids found out or figured it out.

    I recall my uncle threating me within an inch of my life if I told my two cousins, who were close in age to me.

    I didn't 'tell them' exactly, but I did engage them in the process of the Socratic method of question and answer that allowed me plausible deniability, while allowing them to figure it out for themselves.

    My penchant for challenging adults and/or authority, critical thinking processes and fact checking what I'm told goes back to my toddler days.

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  5. Dog Gone,

    This confirms something that I've suspected about you for a while now. You are a person with no myth.

    Your skepticism as a child was good. I was the same way. But I've discovered as I've learned more about human nature that we're narrative creatures. We need stories that inspire us. The soullessness of the modern era is a direct result of buying into the notion that we are machines.

    I'm not saying that the facts should be ignored. I do believe that we are motivated by other things.

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  6. dog gone:

    The Santa Claus myth is just an easier one to bust than the JESUS myth. Maybe if we started going around dressed like JESUS and buddha and ganesh and shiva and the great spirit and allah and the hundreds of gods that are genuine to the cult practitioners we could unyoke them from teh burnin' stoopit that is religion. Otoh, if we take away GOD, what's next? Oh, I'm so not goin' THERE!

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  7. Democommie,

    There are stupid ways to believe in religion, but religion itself is not stupid. I see that it's good that we have an incorporated First Amendment, too, with you hanging around.

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  8. So, now you've decided I'm a person with 'no myth'?

    That I am not inspired by narrative?

    I can be inspired by narrative Greg. I believe in the course of doing so that myth, or narrative, or spiritual and idealist aspects of our lives are best served by also being rigorously logical, and by not confusing myth from fact while benefiting from those lessons of myth and narrative.

    Let me share another narrative with you. In high school, while bored out of my mind in a large group history lecture in our school auditorium, one of the history teachers singled me out because I was reading during his lecture.

    Now had he simply asked me to stop doing so, or had he called me on it for being rude or inconsiderate to him while he was lecturing, I would have agreed he had a point, apologized, and sat there without reading even if I was so bored it was physically painful.

    But he was a jerk about it. I personally have never been very tolerant of teachers who tried to embarrass or humiliate students to make a point or as their method of discipline.

    So instead, I stood up-- frankly more as a dramatic gesture to make my point,ordinarily I would have remained seated - and proceeded to correct his lecture notes on the auditorium screen. I then ever-so-politely inquired if he needed any further help from me in continuing the class, or could I go back to my reading again.

    Flustered, and happy to shut me up at that point, he suggested I could now return to my recreational reading.

    I did so, having made my point

    What you describe as myth, or narrative inspiration exists all around us. Don't assume you know me from what I write here.

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  9. GC could not be more wrong.

    We, as a society, have been lured into the trap of inspirational stories. As a result, we have people who believe very complex issues and problems can be completely solved by answers that fit on bumperstickers.

    We all suffer when people view science as 'opinion' or don't 'like' statistics because it's not what they wish to hear.

    There's value in inspirational stories only so long as we recognize such fables are allegorical and not meant to impart some greater truth.

    I've always noticed gunloons tend to have a certain amount of arrested development. To them, a gun represents the respect that could never attain or earn.

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  10. You are a person with no myth.

    One cannot confuse myth with reality.

    A nation falls when it confuses its founding myth with its realities.

    Greg, you are a confused soul because you can't tell the difference between myth and reality.

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  11. Jadegold,

    I understand the place of science in this world, but science cannot tell us what we ought to choose. Science tells us about the structure of the natural world and offers us a means of achieving our goals, but it does not speak to rights or morality.

    Also, the good stories can't be summed up on a bumper sticker.

    Laci the Dog,

    You don't know what you're barking about.

    Dog Gone,

    Yup, I've had students like you--too wrapped up in their own little minds to see the important thing that was going on around them.

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  12. You don't know what you're barking about.

    Greg, it has been more clearly demonstrated that is YOU who has no fucking idea of what he is talking about.

    In fact, you just make a blanket statement without a basis in fact. You have provided no evidence to back up your assertion.

    On the other hand, I have more than proven you are a fuckwit on a myriad of occassions.

    Of course, it comes as no surprise that you would make your assertion.

    Keep babbling, greg.

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  13. "Democommie,

    There are stupid ways to believe in religion, but religion itself is not stupid. I see that it's good that we have an incorporated First Amendment, too, with you hanging around.

    November 28, 2011 7:07 PM:

    Please indicate at what point in my comment I suggested banning or outlawing religion? Or, just go on being a fucking liar.

    Religion is enabled by the willful suspension of disbelief. There is no other logical answer for what makes otherwise sane people believe in GOD--with no evidence for his existence--while simultaneously dismissing empirical evidence offered by science on a rather large list of subjects.

    On the subject of gunz I see you as being stupid, but I wouldn't want to outlaw your ownership of gunz--without some evidence that you're a danger to yourself or others.

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  14. Yup, I've had students like you--too wrapped up in their own little minds to see the important thing that was going on around them.

    Really? You've had students like me?

    I don't think you have. I don't see someone like you being hired to teach honors class students like me.

    Most of my public school teachers had PhD's in their subject of specialty. I was part of a group of brainiacs who garnered a lot of attention for our teachers by our achievements.

    How many of your students scored in the top ten for their college boards, or won medals from foreign governments for winning what were intended to be college level national competitions while your class was in high school?

    Arkansas doesn't rank very well in education compared to Minnesota. We're consistently among the top ranked states by pretty much every metric.

    So, sorry, but I doubt that your experiences compare very closely.

    And btw - I have stayed in touch with my teachers over the years,both K-12 and post secondary. I've done presentations to their classes, and periodically have coffee or dinner with them.

    I was surprised to find they have consistently thought of me as sweet all those years, despite the occasional snark. In fact, they've followed the progress of my fellow brainiacs and myself over the years rather more closely than I had expected.

    What they do consistently bring up is that we were fun when we challenged them, that they felt we were more engaged than other students - in part because we sometimes pushed back. And I was particularly pleased that when we got annoyed and cooperated to push back hard, we were favorably compared to their PhD oral dissertation experiences. They also commented on how much we were active in helping our fellow students as tutors or otherwise assisting them to have a better educational experience.

    No, Greg, I don't think you have a clue what I was like, and I very much doubt you've ever had a student like me - or would know what to do with one if you did..

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  15. Yes, Greg doesn't have a clue.

    And I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Greg to back up his ocmments, Demo.

    I've been told to be nice to him, but I really don't have any respect for Greg.

    or the fact that he is supposed to be a teacher.

    Some are told the teacher of teacher. Greg, is a teacher of fools.

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  16. I have taught high school, but I'm teaching in college now. Part of my high school experience has been with dual-enrollment students who got high school and college composition credit.

    Dog Gone,

    The kind of student that I mean is the one who can't imagine that her teacher has anything to teach her. That's you. You speak in cliches--look at the name on the comment, and plug in your standard set of responses.

    Laci the Dog,

    You don't have to be nice to me. I have no respect for you, either. You were likely told to be nice so as to keep you from making actionable statements. That is still a good idea.

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  17. GC wrote:
    Dog Gone,

    The kind of student that I mean is the one who can't imagine that her teacher has anything to teach her. That's you.


    The opposite. My teachers always said that they loved that we were there to learn, that the more they challenged us, the more we rose to their challenge, and that we in turn challenged them to teach us even more.

    The opposite of the minimum; the opposite of mediocrity, the opposite of apathy, we exceeded the material in the curricula. They've talked about teaching us being FUN, about looking forward to returning to the teacher's lounge with 'guess what they did this time' stories.

    That's why I returned to their classes - at their request. That was why I turned over any compensation for coming to those classes as a guest speaker to the teacher's organization, in support.

    You managed once again to completely misunderstand the message, to skip over the facts of it.

    But then you probably do not have anything to teach me, if you cannot reason better than you have demonstrated here.

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  18. Is a Gun Club having a picture day with Santa, who is not holding a gun, really much different than a Kennel Club doing the same thing with their dogs?
    I'm sure there are plenty of young kids who ask Santa for their first hunting rifle or a BB gun. As a matter of fact, they made a movie about it - "A Christmas Story."

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  19. "As a matter of fact, they made a movie about it - "A Christmas Story."

    November 29, 2011 12:13 AM'

    And what did we learn from that heartwarming tale? That Ralphie would lie to get his BB gun and that when he had an accident with it that he would not inform the authorities.*



    * Do I need to put the "/S" sign here so that the gunzloonz won't get the vapors?

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  20. Anyone that has to harp on being a high school honor student as if that meant anything in the real world sounds pretty insecure. Forget Santa and guns - you are validating your person by high school? How old are you? Emotionally not chronologically.

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  21. I'm pretty amazed that this conversation got so off topic so quickly. The point of the post was to show how ridiculous it is for a gun club to encourage little kids to love those guns while at the same time sitting on Santa's lap. Mixing those two images is just plain wrong, not to mention giving the exact wrong message to children during the holiday time.

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  22. Japete,

    And what's wrong with Santa giving out guns? How else are children supposed to learn about them? It's like giving a child a puppy to care for. Obviously, the adult has to monitor the child, but the purpose is to teach responsibility. It's also just plain fun.

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  23. " It's like giving a child a puppy to care for. Obviously, the adult has to monitor the child, but the purpose is to teach responsibility. It's also just plain fun."

    Well, sure, I see your point. Cuz, a kid getting a puppy and finding out he doesn't like it, is exactly the same things as a six year old knowing how to fire daddy's hogleg, gettin' pissed at the kid across the street and shooting him.

    No, come to think of it, a neglected or dead puppy is a sad thing; it sorta pales in comparison to a wounded or dead child. Sorry, analogy/equivalency fail

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  24. Democommie,

    Did you miss the part about how an adult has to monitor the child? You're being stupid, either deliberately or by your own nature.

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