The sad task of burying the dead has started and this morning President Obama is set to announce a process for trying to end, or at least diminish, the type of awful violence that descended on Sandy Hook Elementary last Friday. It is a daunting and perhaps impossible task and one that has not been made any easier by the anger and hatred, the rampant speculation and misinformation, that has spewed back and forth in the wake of the shooting. I am somewhat dismayed at the rumors that the job will be handed to Joe Biden, because I think it's going to take the power of the presidency to yield any meaningful results. We need President Obama to take charge here, not outsource yet another opportunity for leadership.
That leadership is going to be important because powerful forces are already at work to take the goal of making us all safer from mass killings and hijack it for their own agendas. We are certain to see disinformation, outright falsehoods, bait-and-switch tactics, truly awful demagoguery, and who knows what other vileness as the discussion moves forward. Hell, we already have since Friday. It's going to take political leaders with sincerity, honesty, and real decency and respect for each other to get something effective done.
Anybody know where we can find some? Anybody at all?
Sorry. I'll try not to be so cynical as I lay out a few more thoughts on this.
I have a plea for gun control advocates: Please, I beg of you, at least learn the basics about firearms before you start arguing for this or that position. If you don't know the difference between automatic and semi-automatic weapons or the different types of magazines, just for examples, then expend a little effort and learn. Otherwise you will come across as ignorant and you and your point of view, which may in fact be valid for all I know, will be dismissed out of hand by the people you are trying to persuade. This isn't a matter of being ticky-tack or nitpicking, it's a fundamental aspect of any discussion, not just guns. Airs of moral superiority are no substitute for actual knowledge.
The same goes for our supposed political and media elites. The many displays of ignorance the last few days have just been astonishing. I suspect some of them don't even care what the truth is. They have a narrative that they believe is superior to any reality out there and by god they are going to stick with it. Yeah, I think people like Michael Bloomberg are just that scary.
Speaking of Bloomberg, he had this to say on Meet the Press the other day:
"Nobody questions the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, but I don’t think the Founding Fathers had the idea that every man, woman, and child could carry an assault weapon."
Like many things he spouts, reality doesn't match Bloomberg's rhetoric here. The most common assault weapon of that era was the old "Brown Bess" musket or some close variant. In many cases, any male of or over the age of 16 was actually required to own one and be proficient in its use. While it may not have been common for women and younger children to use muskets, especially in more settled parts of the colonies, you can bet your ass that if push came to shove they did what they had to do. Regardless, there was no arms technology gap between professional soldiers and average civilian males back then.
What would the Founders say about modern assault weapons and machine guns? I don't know, but it makes for an interesting topic. I don't think it's a given that they would allow them, as most of the Founders were very practical men. However, I don't think it's a given that they would ban them either. After all, they had to be keenly aware that equal weapons technology was critical to their own then-recent victory over an oppressive government. It's easy to believe that they wouldn't want the arms gap between citizens and government to get too large.
Speaking of oppressive government, many gun control advocates scoff at the notion that Americans need to be armed as insurance against our own government. That position might be easier to buy if many of them, and/or their allies, had more respect for both the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Too often though, we hear about a "living" Constitution, which often comes across as shorthand for "It means whatever we want." Or how about the now all too common "Just written by a bunch of dead white men" meme?
That lack of respect manifests itself in a rising authoritarian federal government that acknowledges little or no constraint on its power, to the point where now it even asserts the authority to force religions to violate their own tenets and First Amendment right to Freedom of Religion.
The icing on this cake of distrust is the open contempt that so many of our political, media, and academic elites on the left have for Americans with different political views. For far too many of them now it is not enough to simply disagree, they must also be disagreeable in nasty and vicious ways. Their tools are slander, scorn, ridicule, demonization, and pure hate and they practice them with decreasing restraint. I know that no side has a monopoly on being a douchebag, but I'm seeing it a lot from the louder voices on the left these days, especially after the shooting last Friday.
The sneering and snobbery and foolishness would be tolerable if it could be ignored, but the sneerers, snobs, and fools are making escape increasingly difficult. I don't want this to sound snarky, but the best way to reduce the fear of being oppressed by authoritarian douchebags is to reduce the number and power of authoritarian douchebags(which is not exactly the current trend).
Hahaha...I know. Like that's going to happen.
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