Previously I had figured that I would live the rest of my life without ever buying an "assault" rifle. This guy has maybe changed my mind:
Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.
Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.
That's after repealing the Second Amendment, of course.
This is the extra special part in my opinion:
If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.
Yeah, it's totally awesome to have the cops gunning people down. And if the people shoot back? Well, it's not like Kaul himself will try to go get those guns, that's what the hired help is for. So we lose a few good cops. You gotta break a few eggs...yada yada.
Kaul's twisted fantasy has zero chance of ever happening, but that's not the problem. The problem is the diseased mind(or soul) that came up with it and so glibly puts it out there for all to see. Because deep down I bet he, and millions of Americans like him, really would do something along those lines if they could.
Kaul's hostility to lawful gun owners is by no means alone. I've read a number of pieces in respectable sites that directly assign guilt for the Newtown shooting to all gun owners, like this one from Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:
The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.
"Complicit in the murder of those children." Does anyone think that Gopnik, having pronounced that judgment on gun owners, would actually stop there if he was granted his wish for a gun ban? Of course not. We don't let murderers off scot free, especially murderers of children. What punishment Gopnik would have in mind for the now disarmed gun owners I will leave to your imagination.
I bet Gopnik wouldn't stop there either. Perhaps uniting with the professor in Austria who recently advocated for the death penalty for global warming skeptics would be his next project. So much moral culpability and punishment to be assigned, so little time.
Kaul, Gopnik, and that professor are not cranks in the sense of being oddballs, as they all write for or work at what are considered reputable organizations. They so easily spew out their eliminationist rhetoric and express their desire for collective punishment against their political foes because that's natural to the environment they operate in. The professor got pushed back at his university because of public outrage, but Kaul and Gopnik will pay no price where they work. In fact, they are almost certainly admired for "speaking truth to power" or some such nonsense.
When that mentality no longer exists then I will be receptive to arguments that we don't need guns as insurance against tyranny. In the meantime, let's hear it for Kaul, Gopnik, and all the other vocal gun control extremists. I have a message to them from the gun manufacturers:
"Keep up the good work."
Recent Comments