Brilliant Argument Regarding "Gun Control" And Cultural Bundling!

[Selene]

These two (2) quotes do not appear in the article, however, they are signifiers[new word ?] of the disparate viewpoints on "gun control."

Warning: Strong language and the F word appears...no, not firearm, or, freedom, the ... well you know...

Love this man...

"In short, is not liberty the freedom of every person to make full use of his faculties, so long as he does not harm other persons while doing so? Is not liberty the destruction of all despotism -- including, of course, legal despotism? Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self- defense; of punishing injustice?"
-- Frederic Bastiat
(1801-1850) [Claude Frederic Bastiat] French economist, statesman, and author. He did most of his writing during the years just before -- and immediately following -- the French Revolution of February 1848
Source: What Is Liberty? "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (1848)

Hate this marxist alcoholic killer of children...

"Waiting periods are only a step.
Registration is only a step.
The prohibition of private firearms is the goal."
-- Janet Reno
US Attorney General

The author explains:

Gun Talk Is Cultural Talk, And Culture Matters

First, we'd have to stop framing the debate in terms that suggest "I hate you and everyone like you. I hate how you live your life."

Most of our talk about guns is cultural signalling. We use guns as shorthand for a bundle of ideas. I saw this on my Facebook feed last week:

I'm sure this felt good to the people who made it and distributed it, and to the like-minded people who saw it. But it didn't persuade anyone — other than, perhaps, a few more people to vote Republican. It's a classic example of guns-as-culture. In this bundle, guns mean Republican, guns mean conservative, guns mean not liking President Obama, guns mean religious, guns mean socially traditional, guns mean rural, guns mean football and Nascar and using fewer than five words to order coffee. The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

He then gives an equal and opposite example and then asks:

A lot of this is deliberate. We use culture-bundling to get out the vote, or to associate one policy position with another one. It's as American as apple pie. But is it working for you here? Reasonable gun control advocates, how far will you get with the message "a vote for reasonable gun control is a 'fuck you' to the hicks"? Gun control opponents, for how long do you think you'll thrive with "allowing gun control is like allowing gay marriage"?

This is key, the "terminology gap," it is similar to the missile gap in the cold war which was satirized in the great movie Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) - the "mine shaft gap:"

That's because there's a terminology gap. Many people advocating for gun control mangle and misuse descriptive words about guns. No doubt some of them are being deliberately ambiguous, but I think most people just haven't educated themselves on the meaning of a relatively small array of terms. That's how you get a debate framed around gibberish like "multi-automatic round weapons" and the like. You get people using "semi-automatic" and "automatic" without knowing what they mean, and you get the term "assault weapon" thrown about as if it means more than whatever we choose to make it mean, which it does not.

For example:

If you don't understand these terms already, why should you care? You should care because when you misuse them, you signal substantially broader gun restrictions than you may actually be advocating. So, for instance, if you have no idea what semi-automatic means, but you've heard it and it sounds scary, and you assume that it means some kind of machine gun, so you argue semi-automatics should be restricted, you've just conveyed that most modern handguns (save for revolvers) should be restricted, even if that's not what you meant.

The author then uses dogs to make his point:

It's hard to grasp the reaction of someone who understands gun terminology to someone who doesn't. So imagine we're going through one of our periodic moral panics over dogs and I'm trying to persuade you that there should be restrictions on, say, Rottweilers.

Me: I don't want to take away dog owners' rights. But we need to do something about Rottweilers.
You: So what do you propose?
Me: I just think that there should be some sort of training or restrictions on owning an attack dog.
You: Wait. What's an "attack dog?"
Me: You know what I mean. Like military dogs.
You: Huh? Rottweilers aren't military dogs. In fact "military dogs" isn't a thing. You mean like German Shepherds?
Me: Don't be ridiculous. Nobody's trying to take away your German Shepherds. But civilians shouldn't own fighting dogs.
You: I have no idea what dogs you're talking about now.
Me: You're being both picky and obtuse. You know I mean hounds.
You: What the fuck.
Me: OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I'm not obsessed with vicious dogs like you. But we can identify kinds of dogs that civilians just don't need to own.
You: Can we?

Because I'm just talking out of my ass, the impression I convey is that I want to ban some arbitrary, uninformed category of dogs that I can't articulate. Are you comfortable that my rule is going to be drawn in a principled, informed, narrow way?

Then he analyzes the President's "speech" Sunday night:

Last night the President of the United States — the President of the United States — suggested that people should be deprived of Second Amendment rights if the government, using secret criteria, in a secret process using secret facts, puts them onto a list that is almost entirely free of due process or judicial review. Because we're afraid, because they could be dangerous was his only justification; he didn't engage the due process issue at all. But he was merely sauntering down a smooth, comfortable, well-lit road paved by most Republicans and Democrats before him since the rise of "tough on crime" rhetoric and especially since 9/11. The President — and other Democrats — may hope that Americans will trust progressives not to overreach in restricting rights. That hope is patently misplaced; Democrats and mainstream progressives haven't been worth a squirt of hot piss on due process or criminal justice rights for more than a generation. In the Great War on Terror and the Great War on Drugs, they're like Bill Murray in Stripes: mildly counter-cultural and occasionally a little mouthy but enthusiastically using the same weapons in the same fight against the same perceived enemy.

Prior to this he notes that:

Rights Matter. Too Bad We Suck At Discussing Them.

Seven years ago in District of Columbia v. Heller a bare majority of the Supreme Court agreed that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to bear arms. Plenty of folks like that; plenty of folks don't. But even if we had a consensus about whether or not their interpretation is correct, we'd still be talking past each other, because we're terrible at talking about rights.

I hear "my right not to be shot outweighs your right to own a gun." This strikes me as perfectly idiotic. But it's no more idiotic than an imagined right not to be criticized or offended, which is far more popular in modern America.

I really like this writer's approach.

https://popehat.com/2015/12/07/talking-productively-about-guns/

A...

[Brant Gaede]

You have a right to get shot.

[Selene]

Barack Benito Barry Hussein O'bama has just employed all medical personnel as the Stasi...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2015-33181.pdf

And they do it through a regulatory rule change to the HIPPA 1996 Law...

Nice touch...

So Gulch if you read this Doctor...are you going to follow orders?

A...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here's a theory about Obama's tears on his gun control presser that I have not heard anywhere.

 

First, the video:
 

 
Now notice that right after he finished wiping his tears, he said the following:
 

And, by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago everyday.

 
Bingo.

 

Obama is crying because he knows his buddy Rahm Emanuel might lose his power over this.

 

 

All right, all right. That is a low blow.

 

Actually, I tend to agree with Trump, that Obama's tears are sincere and he probably means well. He's just misguided (seriously misguided).

 

And that makes me think that Trump has another word for the misguided leaders of America right now.

 

Morons.

 

Michael