2nd Encounter of the Day.... Over guns this time

[geckosfeet]

67. For dogs sake don't go out and play vigilante. And I have a grip, so to speak.

But take some personal responsibility. I'll let this speak for me since I am much less inarticulate and the author pretty much nails it for me. It's a good read if you pro or agin.

The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights

This position seeps down through the “sub-political” issues of self-defense and personal responsibility. Not-really-pacifist “pacifist” liberals, I find, often get wrapped up in a recurring ideological process of shedding and assigning guilt. I wouldn’t touch a gun. I’ll just call my paid servant the policeman to come and shoot my assailant for me. My hands stay clean of gunshot residue and other stains; he wields the horrid gun and the moral responsibility, and quandary, of using deadly force – which I’ll endlessly analyze with my colleagues over dinner. And if it really was my ass that was saved, we’ll all congratulate ourselves for maintaining our “pacifist” guiltlessness, while romanticizing the guy who did the dirty work for us. Katherine Bigelow speaks for many, who actually think there is some kind of extra moral virtue in this way of living in the world. I find a more cogent description in the Sartrian term “bad faith.”

For myself, since I neither am nor pretend to be a pacifist, if I were in some mortal danger that called for the self-defensive use of deadly force, I would rather take on myself the responsibility for using that force – moral quandary, dirty hands and all – than shift it onto someone from a quasi-professional caste created to be my absolving wet workers.

....

As one trenchant feminist promoter of gun rights summarized it: "Police forces were established to augment citizen self-protection, not to displace the citizens' right of self-protection" And, I would add, to share, not displace, citizens’ individual and collective responsibilities and quandaries in all of that.

The gun lobby seeks to protect criminals. That is the whole reason for resisting universal background checks.

Show me some proof that the gun lobby seeks to protect criminals. The gun lobby seeks to prosecute and disarm criminals so that they can go play with their guns in peace.