He gets it, even though he’s off the ranch on campaign finance reform:
John McCain believes that the right of law abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is a fundamental, individual Constitutional right that we have a sacred duty to protect. We have a responsibility to ensure that criminals who violate the law are prosecuted to the fullest, rather than restricting the rights of law abiding citizens. Gun control is a proven failure in fighting crime. Law abiding citizens should not be asked to give up their rights because of criminals - criminals who ignore gun control laws anyway…
…As part of John McCain’s defense of Second Amendment rights, he cosponsored legislation to lift a ban on the law abiding citizens of the District of Columbia from exercising their Constitutional right to bear arms….
…John McCain has opposed “waiting periods” for law abiding citizen’s purchase of firearms.
While gun control is a dormant issue, we can look forward to it being revived if an liberal extremist like Obama or Hillary becomes President in 2009. Liberals hate individual rights - they love group rights; my pet phrasing about this is that liberals love humanity, but really can’t stand individual humans. At any rate, a right is something which can only accrue to an individual, not to a group - including gun rights, which liberals especially hate because guns are mean and people who own them are buck-toothed rednecks in flyover America, anyways (this, seriously, is the level of intellect most liberals expend on gun issues).
Now, I don’t own a gun and never intend to own a gun - guns make me nervous; but that is just me. I am very happy for my neighbors to have guns and I wouldn’t mind at all putting a sign in front of the neighborhood stating “Criminals: some of the people here own guns; do you want to guess which ones?”. I’m safer for my neighbors having guns becaue the criminals out there aren’t sure who has them - and thus they are extra careful in their criminal plans, given them less opportunity to actually commit crimes (and thus we’ve only had one robbery since I moved here - rather brazen one, at that, but understandable why it went off so smoothly - un-lived-in house in a neighborhood which, being relatively new, is used to having moving vans around…just drive up and “move” all the stuff).
At all events, John McCain understands where a right resides, and we can count on him, I think, to defend our rights.
Tags: Gun Control, individual liberty, US Constitution
February 27th, 2008
Another day, another massacre. Its getting to be like that at times here in the United States - the seemingly unending string of beserk gunmen going on a rampage. And we’ll all be sad about it. And we’ll all pray for the victims. And we’ll all wring our hands and wonder what to do - some politicians will make meaningless statements about ending gun violence, while some gun rights advocates will (correctly, in a narrow sense) point out that if there wasn’t gun control on campus, fewer people might have died. But what no one will bring up is the fact that it happened at all - and that it happened not just once, but again and again and again.
I’m a pretty good student of history - and in my knowledge of history, the lacking event from the past is the lunatic going on a bloodly, senseless rampage. Oh, to be sure, there were plenty of bloodthirsty lunatics in the past - but an Attila the Hun had at least the bad motivation of gaining wealth, power and women in his bloody rampages…our modern lunatics do it for no discernable reason, and they almost invariably shoot themselves as the final act. And its not like we haven’t had guns for a while now - we’ve had plenty of excellent firearms in this nation for quite a long time, but I can’t remember insane, gun massacres going back further than the 1970’s. This is a very recent phenomena, and we should be intensely concerned about why it started and how to stop it - because it is becoming more frequent, not less, as time goes on.
It was once very wisely said that if you’ve made a wrong turning in the road, the most “progressive” thing you can do is turn ’round and head back to where you got it wrong - to blindly push forward in the hope that forward is always “progressive” is idiotic. Somewhere along the line we, as a society, made a wrong turning in the road - we turned down the path which led to “insane gun massacres” and it is vital to our future that we turn around and get back to where we messed up, and head in a different direction.
It is my view that these manifestations of insane violence are the end product of the glorification of insane violence in our popular culture. It was back in the late 60’s that graphic violence started to become the “cool” thing in film, and that rapidly filtered into television as well - until today the amount of violence is relentless. And just as a toothpaste ad, repeated 500 times, will convince a very small (but profit-making) percentage of the population switch their toothpaste brand, so will an “advertisement” for violence, repeated a million times, convince a very small (but monstrously deadly) percentage of the population to have a go at insane violence. And the effect, I believe, is culmulative - in other words, the more violence we plug into society, the more violence we will get. So, if we don’t change, we can expect these massacres to become more frequent, and more deadly, as time goes on.
I know - I’m advocating censorship. Shrieks of horror from civil libertarians, right and left! My answer: get over yourselves. I’m sick and tired of the sacred rights of Man being used as a shield for dirty pictures and graphic violence. The men of Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Gettysburg, Belleau Wood, Bataan and Fallujah didn’t die to defend the right of purveyors of smut and violence to make money. We have to stop this - we have to, as a society, command that certain, irresponsible and destructive actions be curbed. Pardon me for not feeling my freedoms threatened if I can’t watch a man dismembered at the movies for my joyful entertainment.
We have to turn back - we have to go back to that point where we didn’t allow the widespread broadcast of graphic violence; we must go back there, and then turn down a path where we continually require people to act responsibly in what they prepare for a mass audience which will, by its nature, contain a certain percentage of very impressionable people. Mark my words - this is the only way. Now, I’ll likely be ignored - except by those who slam me for being small minded and petty. Fine and dandy. I believe my calling is to speak truth via the printed word - this is truth I have spoken. I’ve discharged my duty, and I can sleep at night.
Tags: Gun Control, gun massacres
February 15th, 2008
Its when you can aim steadily:
Jeanne Assam appeared before the news media for the first time Monday and said she “did not think for a minute to run away” when a gunman entered the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and started shooting.
There was applause as Assam spoke to reporters and TV cameras saying, “God guided me and protected me.”
New Life’s Senior Pastor Brady Boyd called Assam “a real hero” because Murray “had enough ammunition on him to cause a lot of damage.”
When asked by a reporter if she felt like a hero, Assam said, “I wasn’t just going to wait for him to do further damage.”
“I give credit to God,” she said.
Had there been an armed teacher at Columbine, there might have been less dead people. Had there been armed students at Virginia Tech, there might have been less dead people. And so on - if honest citizens are armed, know how to use their weapons, and keep strong their faith, they will prevent all manner of outrages from occuring or, if they do happen, they will greatly limit the scope of the evil. It is a foolish cowardice which ever said that the way to handle gun crime is to prohibit the citizens from carrying weapons. This tragic incident in Colorado may have one good result - it buries forever the concept that only the police should have guns.
Tags: crime, Gun Control, Jeanne Assam
December 11th, 2007
