"Fact" of the day...

My thermonuclear device never killed anyone...

Weapons don't kill people

Another dumb "pro-gun" argument: guns "don't kill people".

Nope. weren't designed to kill, which is why one of the safety rules is "never point the muzzle at something you wouldn't want to destroy".

Of course, can't forget these if you are going to use the old cliche about guns and people:

Tom Tomorrow Asks...

A question that is always on my mind in a society where it is considered "normal" to walk around carrying weapons:

If you had actually read Robert Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon,  you would know that in the "Armed Society" which is considered "a polite society" that there is the custom of dueling to keep societal order.  Someone can  wear distinctive clothing to show an unwillingness to duel, but this results in a lower social status.

That may sound appealing to you, but it's science fiction and fantasy to everyone else.

Something to think about:

From Salon:

Death threats. Think about that for a moment. Is there anything that says you have lost the argument more loudly than that? When you make death threats in place of arguments, it’s because you know your argument’s laughable. A joke. Increasingly that is what the so-called gun rights organizations have become. A sick joke. And everything Raymond said — about their hypocrisy, their cowardice and their hostility to freedom — is absolutely true.

As I have said before, gun loon arguments do not stand scrutiny, which is the major reason I don't pay too much attention to what you have to say (not to mention I've pretty much heard them all and found they are Bullshit).

After all the reason that gun violence research cannot receive federal funding is that the law says that “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” And this was in reaction to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Arthur Kellerman and colleagues called “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home,” which presented the results of research funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

That study found that keeping a gun in the home was strongly and independently associated with an increased risk of homicide. The article concluded that rather than confer protection, guns kept in the home are associated with an increase in the risk of homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

So, is this yet another thing you lot are afraid of?

Better to keep your mouth shut...

But, this person opened it and confirmed himself to be a total fuckwit on the Esquire forum.  He thought he would be clever and delete the second comment, but it had already been screen capped:

No, asswipe, we think about your type all the time.  We do count on people like you since you are the type of asshole we think shouldn't have a gun because you are irresponsible. You make our job easier by making statements like this.

And you are dumb enough to make a statement where admit you are irresponsible.

What would your friends say if you said stupid shit like this to them?  Or are your friends assholes like yourself?

I'm a nice guy and redacted your info, but you know who you are.  Live with your stupidity.

I know it must be tough being you.

Gun extremists and intimidation

From Chris Hayes "All In"

People unclear on the issue

Meet Mike Lynn, from Memphis, Tennesse, the spokesperson for Fathers for Gun Violence [1]:

Nothing like using fear and emotion to make your point.

He asks a question which he should have thought about before he made this phone call:

"Are you guys for real?"

But, from his phone message--it sounds as if he is indeed for gun violence.

The type of person we really want walking around with a gun.

[1] Before you people go apeshit for me giving his "personal information"--he already does that in the video--if you actually watched it.

If you actually understood it.

Not Our Words

The victims of gun violence spout "pro-gun" cliches:

The Pro-Gunner's Guide to Derping (not that you really need it)

Teabaggers/gunloons need a reality check. Here it is.

I keep trying to make this point, but some of these people are too thick to get it.

We didn't call the thing the "Grid Square Removal Service" for nothing!

Another stupid "pro-gun" cliche bites the dust

Repeating lies does not make them true

Let's start with

Guns save lives 

Seriously? What concrete proof do you have for this statement?  Looking at the news, there are far more examples of guns doing what weapons do, which is kill or cause serious bodily injury.

I'm open to proof that guns save lives, but right now there is precious little proof this statement is anything but BULLSHIT.

The US doesn't have a gun problem--it has a mental illness problem/crime problem/texting problem

Again, give me a break.  Are you telling me that other countries don't have these issues as well?  Guess what? they do, but they don't have the gun problem the US has.

Guns are inanimate objects/tools

Yes, they are.  Although, calling them tools is a bit disingenuous since they are actually weapons and as such have the purpose of killing or causing serious bodily injury.  That's why there is a big difference between hammers, swimming pools, cars and all those other false analogies to firearms.

Firearms are weapons.

Anyway, we are seeing loads of empirical evidence to the fact that the US has a serious gun problem, but people are in denial and coming up with all sorts of piss poor reasons for doing nothing about the problem.

Denial ain't a river in Africa, but the US sure is deep in it.

Or is that shit creek?

True Confession

I know that the usual gunloon belief is that people who are "anti-gun" have no experience of firearms, hate guns, or are just "bigoted against guns".

In fact, I've noticed that whenever anyone who is a gun owner comes out for anything which might be remotely considered to be "reasonable" the gunloons shoot him down (e.g., background checks).  I can give you examples of Smith and Wesson's agreement with the Clinton Administration where S & W agreed agreed to were; to sell guns with locks, to build the locks in the weapons within two years, implement smart gun technology, and take ballistic fingerprints of its guns.  Or Former Field and Stream Editor, Dick Metcalf Supporting gun control with this statement:

“I bring this up,” he wrote, “because way too many gun owners still believe that any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement. The fact is that all Constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.”

The pro-gun side will call the people who admit the US has a serious problem with firearms all sorts of nasty name: including "sheeple".  Bus, isn't the term "sheeple" referring to people who follow and don't think?  Isn't it implying a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty?

Anyway, I bet you wouldn't guess that I was once one of the gun rights fold?

Yep, serious gun rights.  Maybe on the verge of militia movement.  What happened?

I grew up.

First off, I'm probably a LOT better traveled than most of you.  And guess what?  Lots of other countries have guns!  Yeah, they do.

As for the Second Amendment, I actually looked into it and its history.  I didn't bother with the books by the pseudo-scholars.  Does the term taking things out of context have any meaning to you?  trust me, that is what they do.  And if you think for yourself, you will see that. For example:

The current gun control debate has resurrected a quote allegedly from George Washington that goes like this: "A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.”  The quote is floating around on Facebook and on various anti-gun control blogs like "Ammunition Depot"  and "Famous Second Amendment Quotes."  Sometimes the quote has a source, usually the Boston Independent Chronicle, January 14, 1790 but usually is just attributed nakedly to George Washington.

The actual quote comes from Washington's address to Congress on January  8th, 1790 and goes like this: "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a Uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent others, for essential, particularly for military supplies."  Note that the quote has nothing to do with gun rights and is clearly concerns properly equipping the military.

That is not a unique example of how the gun rights crowd distort the Second Amendment historical roots.

Anyway,you need to go beyond your own comfort zone here.  Because if you really want to believe  in the gun rights version of the Second Amendment, because that's the way you want it to read, then you are going to have a serious problem dealing with the truth.  But, that's what the gun rights people want you to do--accept lies.

You are going to actually have to read the primary sources and do some historical research on your own.

It requires actually thinking for yourself.

Let's toss in a well meaning home maker who lived near my mother getting murdered.  Not really anyone who was close to my family, other than she lived near my mother.  Then, there are too many other innocent people who get shot.  They may not die, but they drain on the public's resources.

Is my having a gun really that important?  Is it rally the best method of home defence?

Anyway, I have really looked into this topic. I have considered most of your arguments and found them to not be valid.  Especially if the only reason why you believe in gun rights is that is the way you want it to be.

Life is tough, man, grow up if you just want your guns because...

So, I am not really an "anti-gun bigot".  If I were bigoted, I would still be on the "pro-gun" side.

The elephant in the room.

We're all reasonable...

A Message from the Canada Party

A Message from the Canada Party:


Betcha Greg doesn't watch the whole thing before opening his mouth!

So you've found an obscure law and you think it proves your point???

In this case, The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the complete text of this document can be found here.

The proper name of this is An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, and also known as the Freedom Ordinance or "The Ordinance of 1787", was an act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, passed July 13, 1787. The primary effect of the ordinance was the creation of the Northwest Territory, the first organized territory of the United States, from lands south of the Great Lakes, north and west of the Ohio River, and east of the Mississippi River.

OK, do you see a few problems here with trying to claim it is law under the US Constitution?

Next we come to the part that the gunloons like to claim supports "their" position, Article 3, which they quote only part of the article, which is:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

The hope is that people who say that the syntax of the Second Amendment means that the proeme (prefatory clause) controls the "operative" clause will be confounded.

Nothing of the like here since the above is only one sentence of Article 3, which says in its entirety:

Art. 3. Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.

Now, do you see some additional problems with trying to analogise the Second Amendment to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787?

If anything it helps make my point that laws can become obsolete due to changes in the Institution.

You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about this document here.

As for the grammar of the Second Amendment--I've posted this several times before, but it needs to be repeated since some people can't get their minds around the concept.

In the case of the Second Amendment, the first clause announces the purpose (from Adam Freeman's Clause and Effect) :

The best way to make sense of the Second Amendment is to take away all the commas (which, I know, means that only outlaws will have commas). Without the distracting commas, one can focus on the grammar of the sentence. Professor Lund is correct that the clause about a well-regulated militia is “absolute,” but only in the sense that it is grammatically independent of the main clause, not that it is logically unrelated. To the contrary, absolute clauses typically provide a causal or temporal context for the main clause.
The founders — most of whom were classically educated — would have recognized this rhetorical device as the “ablative absolute” of Latin prose. To take an example from Horace likely to have been familiar to them: “Caesar, being in command of the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence” (ego nec tumultum nec mori per vim metuam, tenente Caesare terras). The main clause flows logically from the absolute clause: “Because Caesar commands the earth, I fear neither civil war nor death by violence.”

Diagramming the Second Amendment, one should end up with something that expresses a causal link, like: “Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” In other words, the amendment is really about protecting militias, notwithstanding the arguments to the contrary.

In his Rudiments of English Grammar (1790), Noah Webster writes that “a nominative case or word, joined with a participle, often stands independently of the sentence. This is called the case absolute.” Webster gives several examples, including, “They all consenting, the vote was passed.” He explains, “The words in italics are not connected with the other part of the sentence, either by agreement or government; they are therefore in the case absolute, which, in English, is always the nominative.” Grammatical independence, to Webster, is not about political self-determination, it's all about the nominative case. But he would acknowledge without hesitation that the vote would not have passed without the consent of the voters.

Webster’s readers would have had no difficulty recognizing that the Second Amendment also begins with an absolute. They would have studied the absolute in school, and they had probably been tested on it in a federalist-era version of No Child Left Behind.

Any educated federalist also would have learned in school that government, in grammar, merely refers to the case of a noun – its inflection as a nominative, dative, genitive, accusative (or, in the case of Latin, an ablative). As Robert Lowth, the author of the most widely-studied school grammar of the time, put it, “Regimen, or government, is when a word causeth a following word to be in some case, or mode.” For example, prepositions cause the following noun or pronoun to take the dative case. Or as the schoolbooks liked to say, prepositions govern the dative. That’s why we say, “Give the gun to me,” not, “Give it to I.”

Anyway, since the clause "a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state" announces the purpose for the right, We need to go back to the citation from Blackstone regarding the “proeme, or preamble” since it is part of a larger section that consists of “observations concerning the interpretation of laws.” 1 Blackstone at 58. One of those “observations” was: “BUT, lastly, the most universal and effectual way of discovering the true meaning of a law, when the words are dubious, is by considering the reason and spirit of it; or the cause which moved the legislator to enact it. For when this reason ceases, the laws itself ought likewise to cease with it.” 1 Blackstone at 61.

If anything, this argument works best on people's historic ignorance, as does most of the gun loon argument.

The Last Hand Gun On Earth

Take an old movie serial, add a new voice over by the Firesign Theatre and you have some very funny stuff.  In this case, the gun loon’s nightmare: Big Brother’s henchmen come for the last handgun on earth.

“To think people used to sleep with these things under their pillows.”

It costs too much to reduce something by 100%

It seems a lot of "pro-gunners" are clueless that the goal is not to eliminate gun violence, but to significantly reduce it.

Yes, other countries may still have gun violence, but it isn't the same amount of gun violence as the US.  Only third world nations have gun violence rates similar to the US.

Tom Diaz's Response to A Coward's Threat