I posted this nearly a month ago, is America ready to discuss the paranoid Right & their guns yet?

[Tom Rinaldo]

Last edited Fri Jan 11, 2013, 10:08 AM - Edit history (1)

It's about the arsenals, it's about preparing for combat, it's not about hunting. But almost no one is willing to raise this in national debate - with a few rare exceptions like Chris Mathews recently:

"A small but increasingly influential element of the Republican Right opposes all efforts to regulate assault rifles, semi-automatic weapons, and high capacity ammo magazines precisely because they are effective in combat situations, but no one seems willing to say it. All of the eminently reasonable comments about hunters not needing automatic weapons to bag a deer miss the point completely. The NRA tries to muddy the waters whenever they can but no one seriously tries to make a case for hunters needing semi-automatic pistols with large ammo magazines. Even the NRA knows no one would buy that line. So instead they raise the specter of "a slippery slope" that begins with machine guns banned and ends with hunting outlawed. They then shift the focus to crime and personal security, because they know only a shrinking small minority of Americans still hunt or engage in sport gunmanship.

But an insistence that individuals need access to semi-automatic weapons to protect themselves is irrational, if the threat envisioned is common crime. If the solution to street crime is arming the public with semi-automatic weapons, than the cure is far more deadly than the disease. Innocent bystanders already are killed in shootouts. No one is safer if threatened individuals begin spraying their near vicinity with a hail of bullets. Semi-automatic assault rifles are offensive weapons, designed to kill large numbers of people. A standard pistol or a shotgun is far better suited for defensive use, unless of course you are defending yourself against a hoard of heavily armed attackers

Which begs the obvious unasked question: Is that why the most unflinching opponents of reasonable gun control measures refuse to give an inch? Are they arming themselves with the weapons most appropriate for future combat scenarios? I think it naïve to assume that the answer to that question is anything other than yes. Right wing militias have been forming for decades, training for overt military confrontations. Mainstream candidates for the U.S. Senate now talk openly about “Second Amendment remedies”. Increasingly the phrase, “Government is the enemy” has taken on literal implications. And then there are the survivalists, large segments of which believe that in some coming apocalypse roving lawless mobs will descend upon rob and kill anyone who had the foresight to assemble the provisions needed to weather the collapse of civilization. Heavy weaponry will be needed, they believe, to survive that approaching crimson dawn.

Would most of the individuals now motivated to defend themselves against the specter of a full blown “Communist Fascist U.S. Government”, or the inevitable Zombie hoards, hesitate before actually turning their combat weaponry against fellow American citizens over perceived but non-existent threats? I like to think most would, if push ever came to gun. That might prevent a future slaughter along the lines of a civil war, but it doesn’t help us now. In subservience to their paranoid delusions sane gun regulations are off the table today. American is held hostage to right wing political zealotry that accepts increasing mayhem and slaughter on American streets as unfortunate but necessary collateral damage. It is time to face that reality.

December 15, 2012"

[freshwest]

1. I didn't see this one earlier, but have tried to get this conversation going. It leads back to the

days when the Constitution was written, what the real intentions and meanings of that document were to the ones who penned it and how it falls within modern day America.

I'm not sure why it's sohard to get a conversation on this - whether is is denial, secret primal fears, apathy or fear of ridicule. We have had a steady stream of things that fit into Alex Jones' world view, just couched in different themes.

Now we have the chance to see it mainstream, and only the most devoted CTers aren't denying the 'plan of the Founders to stop tyranny' and preparing to act upon it. So let's see what interest this OP garners.

[Tom Rinaldo]

2. I was glad to see Jon Stewart comment directly on this. Alex Jones is the tip of the iceberg.

We are at the point, to use a pet "owner" metaphor, where the flea population is starting to explode and it can't be ignored, it's all over us. But a lot of people stay in denial too long, and by the time they admit that a problem has to be addressed it is already way out of hand, and can no longer be managed easily.

Crazy is out of the box, crazy isn't called fringe anymore. One could say that the virulent outbreak of Birtherism was one clear warning that things were at the point of spining out of control, but one of our two main political parties refused to confront it head on out of concern they might alienate their new activist supporters.

[TheLibertarianMind]

3. I would like to contribute to the discussion.

If one chooses voluntarily to be a conscientious objector to keeping arms, or the militia/standing army, one has that right.

If one chooses voluntarily to be a conscientious objector to the militia, and still keep and bear arms, one has that right as well.

If objection is made to the type of arms the militia uses, one may exhaust every means of persuasion. If one uses coercion(threat of violence) to limit the arms of the militia that is an infringement.

I would love to disscuss means to curb violence. That being said I will hold firm to the non-agression principle.

FWIW Please no ad-hominem attacks, I'm not Alex Jones, or some Billy Badass.

-TheLibertarianMind

[Tom Rinaldo]

6. Bullets are also an infringement when aimed at ones body.

I understand purist positions, I've taken some on the left before. So I will grant you the assumption that you are no Alex Jones. Liberty always exists within a context, it can bwe revoked lawfully or illegally through vilence which has the power to negate the liberty of life itself.

No ultra Libertarian society grants an individual the freedom to kill one's neighbor if they chose because their barking dog denied them sleep. So Liberty has constraints from both directions.

Americans are under attack daily from scores of individuals with combat weapons. If we called them "terrorists" we would consider ourselves at war with them but we don't; we call them (after the fact) "deranged individuals". so they can legally walk many of our streets carrying assault weapons openly until the point where they actually pull the trigger. At that point it is almost always too late for many lives. A terrorist can not always be identified as a terrorist from causual observation - so too for a dangerous person with a combat weapon. For that reason we do not allow anyone to carry any guns onto planes - is that an "infringement"?

America is now at war, with real fatalities, with a domestic terrorist enemy. They call and consider themselves to be "Real Patriots" resisting perceived current or potential future government tyranny. There are armed movement in many nations fighting their governments. They consider themselvves to be "patriots" in their lands also. but America is a Democracy and our government is elected by our people.

I would say to you that if anyone feels that our people are best served by allowing individuals to prepare for combat against our government, and that to enable that prepartation our country needs to be awash with legally available easy to obtain combat weapons, then they may exhaust every means of persuasion to convince the electorate to keep it so. Those who differ will appeal to the electorate also.

The world has changed and always will change. The most powerful military weapon available in 1776 was a Cannon firing cannon balls. Today we have everything from the H-Bomb to pilotless drones The gap between the weapon systems citizens routhnely kept in their homes and those that soldiers used in overt war has widened immeasurably. Even the Bill of Rights didn't allude to the rights of citizens to keep loaded cannons on their lawns pointed at City Hall, and those days are long long gone.

Today if a government becomes tyranical it is brought down the way the Egyptian people did theirs. The people can not out gun the government, they undermine it through mass actions. Even in Syria guns only flowed into that nation to arm rand the government had lost legitimacy in the eyes of the world ebels after the revolution was already underway, initiated through massive peaceful protests. Ultimately the rebels have strengthened their position through the defection of government military units who brought government weaponry over to the reble side.

Public safety in America now demands public action. It isn't so much any threat caused by citizen militias that brings us to this stage. It is the fact that in the interest of preserving their right to obtain combat weapons they have defended laws that flood the nation with those weapons and through gun show loopholes allow ANYONE to just walk up and purchase them. Guns, like everything else, can and do get stolen. We are sitting on a powder keg in America and the first explosions are already going off.

[Drunken Irishman]

4. I don't know about Anerica...but hopefully America is.

And that was said in December, 2013? What's it like in December...do we have flying cars?

I keed!

[Tom Rinaldo]

5. Details, details. No flying cars yet - but personal jet packs are rumored for Jan 2014! lol. n/t

[Tom Rinaldo]

7. Case in point - from a DU LBN Forum thread:

“We have a plan: We’re going to go to the houses of local cops and burn the houses down with the cops and their families inside,” Schaeffer Cox reportedly said in August 2010, months before he would be arrested for plotting to kidnap and kill federal officials — and just a few years before he would be convicted and sentenced to almost 26 years in prison.

Cox’s sentence came down earlier this week, as part of the trial of Alaska Peacemaker Militia members, a right-wing group that was plotting to stockpile illegal weapons and take violent action against the government."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014364689

How many degrees of crazy seperate Schaeffer from Todd Palin - husband of the woman the Republican Party nominated for Vice President in 2008, or from Sharon Angle 2010 Republican Party candidate from Arizona who discussed "Second Amendment remidies" if her side couldn't win through the ballot box?

[grantcart]

8. America's ability to absorb substantial levels of violence is astonishingly high.

The US only changed on Vietnam with an extended prolong diet of nightly news stories showing the gore of war up close.

So the answer to your question is "No".

That time will come only when the level of violence and the target high capacity arms is so gruesome and overwhelming that a few key Republican politicians, like Christie, Jeb Bush, and others of that kind, not only make a few comments about it but want legislation passed and are willing to put their name on the title.

The problem is that while only a minority take fanatical points of view for unlimited personal use of weapons with extreme lethal capacity, they take that point of view with a religious passion, as can be seen by the simplistic contributor upthread who made the effort to oin DU just so he could let us know that he believes his right to own high capacity lethal weapons is something that he considers a primal right and that while he is absolutely fanatical in that belief he is in fact not a full fledged nut.

[Tom Rinaldo]

9. I know the gun industry has an obvious vested interest

Some times I wonder at what level organized gun running cartels "throw their weight" behind preserving a wide open gun market in the United States. Everything you wrote rings true but I am most interested in seeing when and if anyone of influence inside the Republican Party breaks ranks with the politics of fear that the Republican Party has attempted to harness for victory. It manifests in the gun debate obvioiusly but it is pervasive on every social front - and no one in a power position in that Party can even stand up to Rush Limbaugh while it drifts toward tacit embrace of advocates of positions that in a prior day and age might have been called treasonous.

[grantcart]

10. well a strange set of circumstances have swung our way:

First the Republican obstructionism on relief of Sandy victims has forced all of the Republicans in the NE to look for a Sister Souljah moment where they can show that they are not lap dogs of reactionaries.

Unlike their cousins in the mid west and the south they aren't worried about primaries, they are worried about general elections.

On top of this a string of barely sane nut jobs have crawled out from under rocks and make Beck look moderate and getting lots of media time.

Look for a bunch of non southern/mid western Republicans to rush to the finish line in the Republican Sister Souljah 100 Yard Dash.

[Tom Rinaldo]

11. I agree. Republicans in the North East and Mid West become more vulnerable

when the public sees their Party flashing Far Right on a national level. On the other hand though, if those Republicans can't find a way to thread the needle and keep getting elected, the core of the current Republican Party in the South, Center and Mountain States might whiplash further to the Right freed from that somewhat moderating influence.