The second sentence is a direct refutation of the first. What if it had been illegal for his mother to buy it? Where would he have gotten it then?Victor Laszlo, April 02, 2013, 08:53:53 pm
That gun wasn't bought illegally, and it wasn't bought by a criminal. I mean, what if the kid had no hands?
How would he have pulled the trigger? Thinking up mitigating circumstances and then trying to wring a law out of them is exactly what people are trying to do.
We aren't talking about "criminals" in the sense of Vincent and Jules from Pulp Fiction, we're talking about mentally ill white kids mostly. Do you think they have the money and connections to buy a pile of assault rifles from the cartel?
I sure don't, but I'm arguing the laws here. One perceived solution for keeping guns out of the hands of crazy white kids is to keep the guns out of the hands of
fucking everybody. I don't cotton to that, and besides, you can't do it.
Part of the intent of restrictive laws is to slowly, like over a generation, reduce this country's collective boner for guns. There really is little justification for private gun ownership. Hunting I suppose, and home defense depending on where you live, but neither of those requires automatic firing and 30-round clips. Really, what legitimate non-boner reason could you possibly have for owning an M-16?
I completely agree that that is the aim of gun-control legislation. Yes, remove the boner, and once the boner is gone, they can just remove the guns themselves. Gun-rights advocates are aware of the long-game trying to be played here. The immediate aim is to make gun ownership such a goddamn expensive hassle that nobody bothers. Then, when our grandkids are in the mindset of "oh, this gun-ban legislation won't affect
me because I don't
own a gun," it'll get passed through and even the
option of legal gun ownership is completely off the table and then I guess we'll live in a utopia of good feelings where people aren't shitty to each other and no violent crime occurs ever. I mean, I can give reasons for gun ownership important to me and then someone else will dismiss those reasons as insufficient. Luckily for me, I don't
need to play the justification game because it's a right. The second amendment is in place so that the people can violently oppose their government if need be. The hunting thing is actually a good monster cockogue between gun ownership and the presence of law enforcement. I mean, hunting is no justification for gun ownership either. Nobody has to hunt for their food anymore. We have grocery stores! It's not the wild west! If you're hungry and you want some venison, go to a restaurant! Why does anybody bother hunting at all? It's easy to do that with just about any reason someone could come up with to try and justify gun ownership. So let's take this to its logical conclusion and put up a straw man who owns guns but who can think of absolutely no reason why he should. The straw man
still wins, because he doesn't have to
provide a reason.
If we lose gun rights, we will never ever get them back. Never. Not ever. Zero percent chance. I know some folks would be fine with that, but I'm not. The world is not a place where you can pretend your safety will always be assured with no effort on your own part. The fact that you think even an appreciable fraction of the guns in private ownership are configured for fully-automatic fire is telling, as is calling clips "clips." Current gun legislation is going after
semi-automatic operation. After that, they'll go after pump action, then lever action, then bolt action, then break-top/single-shot firearms, then anything else designed to strike a primer on a cartridge. Because of the 1986 manufacture-and-transfer law it's already quite prohibitively expensive to own a fully-automatic or select-fire firearm. Well, legally, anyway.
As far as the armed guards in schools bit, I wonder if anyone at the NRA think tank considered whether a high school student would be smart enough to locate the old guy in the USS Ticonderoga hat with the bulge under his jacket and just shoot him first. Hey look, free gun!
We're pretty much all in agreement that the NRA is retarded. Their school-posse idea is retarded. Their rhetoric is retarded. The image they perpetuate is alienating and confrontational and it makes gun owners suffer because we get lumped in with it.