Friday, January 18, 2013

Annie Ban Your Gun

"Women gun owners speak out on gun control," reports Minnesota Public Radio News. Huh, where is Minnesota? According to the public radio in this mysterious land, women are more comfortable than men with banning certain classes of firearms:
"[Women are] more sensitive and more "feely" than guys are. Their emotional output isn't to say 'you can't take mine,' it's to say, 'if I have to give mine up so someone else doesn't have to suffer, then I will.'"
What is an emotional output? More importantly, if this is really how the fairer sex thinks, then it doesn't speak very highly of them. They're not just thinking "If I have to give [my gun] up;" they're also thinking, "I want to take everyone else's [guns], too." They're like schoolyard bullies.

Meanwhile, someone named Jay Bookman is hoping for this year's Originalism Prize by pointing out that the Second Amendment is useless against a modern military, in an article called "Second Amendment is not license for treason, armed revolt:"
It is certainly true that when the Second Amendment was drafted back in the 18th century, it was plausible to believe that an armed citizenry could be a check on overweening government power. Back then, there wasn’t much difference in the weapons available to private citizens and the weapons available to the military. It could have been, and sometimes was, a more or less even fight...

If you want to rejuvate that aspect of the Second Amendment, you have to be willing to grant private citizens access to fully automatic weapons, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, grenade launchers, etc. And it’s not going to happen.
This is just cruel. The man's dangling a carrot in front of us and then yanking it away. But here's where it gets real strange:
In Iraq, for example, gun ownership is extremely widespread, with many if not most households owning fully automatic weapons that would be banned in this country. Yet Saddam Hussein had little trouble imposing and maintaining a brutal dictatorship in that country for decades. He did not confiscate guns, because he understood that such guns posed no real threat to his tyranny.
Wait---I thought fully automatic weapons were supposed to help make private citizens comparable to the armed forces. So now automatic weapons are useless against tyranny? Bookman started off writing an article in support of gun control, and ended it by admitting that it doesn't really make much difference anyway. 


1 comment:

  1. Interesting. If somone where asking those Minnesota (next to Michigan, I think, or maybe Wisconsin) women to surrender something else, e.g., "If I have to give [my child] up so someone else doesn't have to suffer, or If I have to give [my house; or my money; or my birth control pills] so someone else, etc...." they probably wouldn't be as agreeable. Maybe women really don't like guns as much as men do. I believe this is true. So what? Men don't like, generally, newborn babies as much as women do. And yet both sexes benefit from women's crazy passion for newborn babies. I think maybe the same is true for guns. I don't like guns. They scare me. But those GIs who showed up at the gates of Auschwitz and Buchenwald: they had guns, and I am glad of it. And while I think Mr.Bookman is right that the ordinary citizen, even (legally) armed to the teeth, is no match for the power and might of the American military, there is this: live free or die.

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