No Liberal Backlash?

[Sherry Hawk]

Tell them, "I'm Catholic... you're going to hell."

They hate that!

Even better, get someone with long hair and a beard to meet them at the door wearing a sheet, announcing, "I'm ba-ack!"

 

[Guest]

Very true, but I was somewhat amused/shocked/disturbed by the reaction from the Religious Wrong. My neighborhood was literally crawling with Jehovah's Witnesses today, attempting to capitalize on the misery created by the VA-Tech tragedy. They came door to door, trying to 'save' people one can only guess.

Here I was, diligently trying to finish a story for Literotica, but was disturbed by a knock on the door from two JW's. I will admit that one was really hot, but the exchange was a total buzz kill and wrecked my writing momentum. Maybe a good future story though...hot JW girl gives in to Literotica author. I'll pound on her (back) door too?!

Just wondering, why did W. go to VA-Tech to honor the departed, yet he's never been to a single funeral for an Iraq war veteran. Go figure....

RW

Better publicity in Virginia, I imagine.

And too funny on your JW experience!

 

[rgraham666]

Abusus non tollit usum.

Nor does it ensure it.

"I wonder what language the Romans used to pull off the 24 karat bamboozle?" - Walt Kelly

 

[jayce1066]

How's that National Firearms Registry thing working in Canada?

Found this article from a while back:
http://www.canada.com/national/nati....html?id=ef2f258a-b6bb-4f85-b1cc-cdcdf3218c24

Some Canadian women would like the current laws changed:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2006/12/18/gun-women.html

Money seems to have been ill managed:
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Params=M1ARTM0012424

Looks like it has been a mess for years:
http://www.gov.ns.ca/news/details.asp?id=20030408002

I don't think we should try to copy the Canadian model.

 

[cantdog]

I'm not sure, Zoot, that nobody can deny that Iraq's a mess. McCain just did.

And neither party seems wicked interested in forcing Bush out of the place. You could explain the whole Iraq bill as an elaborate blame game, easy, without stretching anything. How different would it look if both parties were solely attempting to fix it so the other was to blame for us still being there in 2009?

Dems are just as much empire builders as Reps. Both sides know we want those permanent bases. That's the only thing in the whole country, besides twenty-foot walls around the green zone, that we've built there. We will not leave; we will stay in those bases. The people who rallied and elected a Dem congress were abandoned by the Democratic party long years ago, so that they too could obtain the sort of funding the Republicans do. The people are watching the Dems drop the ball in appalled silence.

Meanwhile the climate crisis goes on.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Zeb, with all respect, you can make no such guarantee. In this country it's quite easy to be convicted of something you didn't do. So while you can argue semantics, in the justice system's eyes, you would be a criminal.

I know. I have.

Being wrongly convicted and being a criminal are two completely different things. I can GUARANTY you I will not be come a criminal what I can't guaranty is that I won't be convicted of a crime I didn't commit.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I've seen too many a good guy do bad things to believe that, but hat's off to your faith, sir.

Not faith...training. I know when and when not to use deadly force. I also know my skill level when it comes to firearms.

And I know the law and believe in the law. I will not willfully break a major law. (minor traffic violations do not count) I a cop want me to pull over I pull over. I know the procedure, stay in the car keep your hands in sight and have your drivers license and insurance card ready.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I suppose someone has to say it.

Apologies first. I am not an American. I am not an American basher.


The Right to bear arms.
Deaths in the USA caused by firearms run at about thirty thousand a year - about the same as the total deaths of US soldiers during the Korean war.

Of those 30000, around 12000 are murders, 17000 are suicides. The other 1000 or so are accidents.

The total deaths by firearms for a year in Australia, Canada and the UK combined comes to 350.

We do not have a 'right' to bear arms.

Yes, but I hear the crime rate skyrocketed in Australia the year following the law baning firearms. Or is that information wrong?

 

[FatDino]

Not faith...training. I know when and when not to use deadly force. I also know my skill level when it comes to firearms.

And I know the law and believe in the law. I will not willfully break a major law. (minor traffic violations do not count) I a cop want me to pull over I pull over. I know the procedure, stay in the car keep your hands in sight and have your drivers license and insurance card ready.

In an ideal world where everything goes your way, it will hold true, Zeb. But in this world, just about anything can happen. What if some guy murders your entire family then blames it on you, the police listens to him and arrests you? What if you can escape (sounds a lot like "The Figitive" here )? Will you go confront that man? Can you assure that you won't pull your gun out or grab a knife nearby and kill him no matter what happens?

 

[Liar]

Not faith...training. I know when and when not to use deadly force. I also know my skill level when it comes to firearms.

And I know the law and believe in the law. I will not willfully break a major law. (minor traffic violations do not count) I a cop want me to pull over I pull over. I know the procedure, stay in the car keep your hands in sight and have your drivers license and insurance card ready.

As for your first point, I wasn't talking about technical skill. Being a good shot means you'll hit what you aim at, for whatever purpose, good or bad.

As for your second point, I stand by what I said and salute your faith that fate can not possibly deal you a blow that would change that.

 

[Liar]

The Right to bear arms.

Because I'm bored...

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e394/mi_liar/the_right_to_bear_arms.jpg

 

[lisa123414]

You know that if the shoe were on the other foot - if George Bush got a blow job in the White House, say - the local conservatives would be jumping up and down and hooting and screaming, slapping their asses and throwing shit like no one's business.

Don't tell me the left is just more mature than that? Is that our problem?

Here is to hoping that the liberal left does not give a damn about whether or not Bush got a blow job in the White House. I, for one, think $4M is way too much to pay for the details.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I didn't mean for this to turn into a discussion on gun control, an issue I really don't care much about, probably because no one I know has ever been killed by a gun except for an artist friend of mine who shot himself. I've pretty much given up on any sort of gun control, and I actually wouldn't mind having a gun myself. I certainly wouldn't want to be the last unarmed schmuck in a land of armed schmucks.

Something else bothers me though. I missed the entire shooting rampage yesterday, and was trying to get some information while I was driving today, but all I could find was the memorial service at Virginia Tech, so I ended up on the AM dial over in the talk radio zone. It was some show I'd never heard before and the caller was explaining to the host how this maniac shooter could have been taken care of. The caller knew, because the caller had been in a similar situation some years ago in a food court.

"All you need is for some citizens to have their guns with them. We'd have taken care of this jerk with no trouble at all, I guarantee you."

"Uh-huh. I understand."

"No trouble whatsoever. You know what I'm saying? He wouldn't have had time to hurt anyone."

"You know, you're right."

"Absolutely! That's how you handle maniacs like this. A taste of their own medicine. In fact, these guys who own places in food courts? They should all be required by law to keep forearms for just this kind of emergencies. Then there wouldn't be any maniacs like this."

"Yes," the host said. "And you know what? All the people who'll be screaming and yelling for gun control now? They just don't get it. They don't understand. They want to go the opposite direction. What we really have to do is go the other way. Make sure we get the guns in the hands of the people who really know how to use them. The responsible, law-abiding citizens. Am I right? Is that right?"

"Absolutely. Absolutely."

So I had a vision of a shootout in a mall's food court, men squatting behind concrete trash receptacles, spilled cups of diet coke and Arbee's Horsey sauce, bullet holes in the windows of Victoria's Secret and Cinnabun, staunching the blood from flesh wounds with a fistfull of paper napkins.

The next guest had some sobering thoughts.

"All the gun-control laws in the world wouldn't have stopped this guy," he said. "He did everything fair and square! Totally legal."

He was right too. But he didn't stop there.

It seems guns were getting a bad rap. If the killer hadn't been able to get a gun, he had plenty of other options. Gasoline for one. This guy was big on gasoline.

He'd given it a lot of thought—the best way to kill a lot of people by burning them to death with gasoline. He had it all figured out and was only too happy to share his plan with the host and the radio audience—just for their edification, just to show them how easy it would be to do—the way you might explain a military campaign or a business plan. He was quite proud of it, and in fact it was quite ingenious in a sick kind of way. And it was pretty alarming too, and after a while the host's enthusiasm started to wane, but he was caught. This was his listener after all. One of his audience. This was his fan. His people.

What kind of a person sits around thinking about the best way of burning people to death as part of a "what if" scenario for "our own good"? And you know he's not the only one who does this kind of thing. We all do it in this country. It even feels faintly patriotic, doesn't it? It's become part of our duct-tape-and plastic-sheeting-culture. 24 Hours. It's part of our American know-how. We're proud of it. We eat it up. It's entertainment.

It was about this time that I realzied I was smiling a mild form of the risus sardonicus. You know what that is? It's that hysterical death's head smile associated with the last stages of death by tetanus—face paralyzed, cheeks drawn back so far the muscles tremble, teeth are bared, eyes wild. The kind of smile people supposedly wore at Auschwitz as prisoners were being shot to death in the room next door and they were powerless to do anything.

There's the maniac with gun shooting people on the campus of Virginia Tech, and then there are the "good, responsible citizens", the gun owners who are only toohappy to have a shoot out down at the food court at the local mall—the people who call in to talk radio to describe the most efficient way of killing the most people to death in a given time with the least amount of gasoline, but just as a mental exercise, as an exercie in goodness, so you'll know how to protect you and your family should you one day smell the fumes. These are the bad guys and the good guys and they're both the same. A bad day or a failing grade or a girl friend's decision to dump them is all that separates one from the other.

What kind of country have we become? Where did all this fucking hatred and anger come from?

I should introduce R Graham here so he can tell us again: Be careful whom you choose to fight, because that's what you'll become.

The people screaming on the radio—it hardly matters what they're saying anymore. No one even hears what they're saying. All we hear is the screaming.


Good night all. Sleeping pill kicking in...

 

[rgraham666]

Personally Zoot, I think Nietzsche put it better.

"Beware when you battle monsters,
lest you become a monster.
And as you gaze into the abyss,
the abyss gazes also,
into you."

 

[Zeb_Carter]

In an ideal world where everything goes your way, it will hold true, Zeb. But in this world, just about anything can happen. What if some guy murders your entire family then blames it on you, the police listens to him and arrests you? What if you can escape (sounds a lot like "The Figitive" here )? Will you go confront that man? Can you assure that you won't pull your gun out or grab a knife nearby and kill him no matter what happens?

But under your example I now don't own any firearms as they were confiscated as part of the investigation and as I said before I have no control over being wrongly accused. If I had the chance to escape and confront my accuser I doubt I would take it as I would be out on bail with hours of my arrest and free to do what I like. I hope I would have the moral fiber to NOT take his life as that wouldn't do me any good at all.

I believe I would take my chances with the system as it's the only thing we have and I believe in it.

 

[cantdog]

Well, liar, I can't help it. I have a thing about authority. Criminals I can deal with--um, so to speak, that is .

I used to work a swing shift on an ambulance; at night you encounter a different subset of the populace. After ten years, you know these folks. Poor people, addicted people, wacky people, homeless people; also drug dealers, pros, conmen, cops-- all the so called bad element. They hold no terrors for me; they come into the church all the time asking for a handout. They are just people with particular pressures on them. Lotta criminals are okay. They make laws making lots of harmless stuff criminal.

Someone gone psychotic with a gun or guns is a different problem. I don't think of that kind of fellow the way I do a 'criminal.' I think the only reason criminals are in the discussion is that this has become the usual gun control discussion and people have dragged out the stock gun control statistics and rhetoric, which includes criminals every time.

At least one roomful barricaded the door against this dude, and it worked. You could bust a window and get out and away, too. If he got the drop on you, well, all you could likely do is be shot while ducking for cover the best you could, and that's the way it goes, armed or not.

The point is, the popular culture is obsessed with serial killers and wackos with guns. It's not just Taxi Driver. Nearly every cop show, they got a serial killer this week. Shows like Die Hard, Man On Fire-- most any 'action' flick-- the good guy is a serial killer by the end of the show, and we're all supposed to feel good about it. He never gets arrested and made to serve five consecutive life sentences and all that, no, far from it. He lies in the arms of the plucky girl, who in her turn is smudged with black and ripped of bodice, in the street full of lights from fire trucks and cop cars, panting, nursing his inevitable arm injury. She supports him as they walk off. The credits roll.

Maybe some fireman throws a blanket over his shoulders, whatever, but the message always is that acting this way-- slaughtering dozens of people amid crashing glass and snapped hydrants, while a den of iniquity is destroyed in a fiery explosion, crowds of people trying to get through their day have to duck and run off the sidewalk to avoid the barreling cars, all the whole cliche thing--this is all okay so long as you're the good guy.

Well, how many people ever think even the smallest accident is their fault? Who in the world isn't the good guy in their own story?

We glorify the serial killers every day, even the ones written to be the bad guys. And all the little boys in the audience grimace and narrow their manly eyes, and drop their tenor to a baritone to say They wouldn't have been a victim, They woulda blown the bad guy away, They got a right to be the good guy and save the day. Childish nonsense, cops and robbers stuff. And they give you a What If about some action-film nasty villain "threatening your family." Goes to show.

Yeah. We just got done having a Dire Manly Threat Am I thread here-- what would you do if...? And all the gruff voices came out. I'd be tough. I'd be brave.

I'd be the serial killer and go out in a blaze of glory.

Real life, as I said before, criminals are not that awful, and people just want to get by, but this sort of thing, for some reason, flying bullets and whatnot, this is the stuff of fantasy here.

This guy, they tell us, was a Korean on a residence visa. Lots of great people, including one of my friends, have such visas. That's probably another one we'll hear about, though. Immigrants, foreigners, are as bad as gays or liberals or muslims, as we all know. The government spends a good deal of time and money asking us all to fear.

Whereas this spree of his is pretty darn American, if what you know of America is the films and the novels. Right in line with any number of American books and films, even if most of the time America is pretty dull in tone.

The importance of having access to defense is not a cowboy show or a cop show scene, or anything like that. The militia idea in the amendment posited a populace which would have a certain number trained to defend the community in case of armed incursions. Not so very long before, Hurons and Ottawas with French leaders and troops had descended on Schenectady and on Deerfield, and it wouldn't be very long before parties of British were put ashore to burn the capital city.

Nowadays, despite Reagan's utter fantasy about the threat posed by Cuban and Nicaraguan troops (remember the film Red Dawn?) we are damned unlikely to face armed parties of men coming to take over Springfield.

Except that it still happens all the time. Jackbooted and flakvested black-wearing honchos storm the houses of Americans, don't they? They call 'em SWAT units.

Sure, they're police. But there are twenty five thousand mercenaries led by a man named Prince, which are America's Praetorian guard. They are called Blackwater. They operate outside the military chain of command, and forget the police chain of command. They are mostly in Iraq, getting bigger all the time, taking losses so the ordinary troops don't have to, becoming a hardened unit, an elite unto themselves. When Katrina went down, they were sent into the streets of New Orleans. This Prince fellow is a shadowy figure affiliated with the Christian right.

The French and the Hurons did a pretty thorough job on Deerfield and Schenectady, but these motherfuckers are nasty.

Since we're discussing what earthly need we might have for firearms, outside of fantasy time, that's what occurs to me.

 

[Grushenka]

... I certainly wouldn't want to be the last unarmed schmuck in a land of armed schmucks.

... our duct-tape-and plastic-sheeting-culture.

... All we hear is the screaming.

I've merely snipped a sentence that made me laugh, a phrase that merits publication (or at least a place on someone's bumper ), and a six-word sentence that chills. (Also appreciated the mention of risus sardonicus.)

What's my point? Only to say I am always appreciative of sober thoughtfulness on this forum.

 

[Stella_Omega]

Here is to hoping that the liberal left does not give a damn about whether or not Bush got a blow job in the White House. I, for one, think $4M is way too much to pay for the details.

If it gets him out of office?

evidently, it's the only impeachable offence going.

 

[temptanddestroy]

30 minutes

I heard that it only took him 30 minutes to buy his gun.

When asked on the form if he'd ever suffered from mental illness he ticked no...

well duh...


but he wasn't a criminal until he shot his first victim.


Allowing this access to guns is madness. Please, I'm just a Brit but I'm a huge fan of your country and your people. I don't want to see anyone of you (absolute strangers, I know) to die a needless death. It saddens me that horrors such as this happen.

Please get gun control.




Please

 

[kendo1]

Yes, but I hear the crime rate skyrocketed in Australia the year following the law baning firearms. Or is that information wrong?

You're correct - you are wrong.

Major gun massacres occurred in Victoria and NSW in 1987, in NSW 1991 and in Tasmania in 1996. 150 people died in multiple death shootings alone in the decade starting January 1987. Stricter gun laws have only been made in Australia after a major gun massacre. Some states did improve their gun laws in the late 1980's up to the mid-1990's, and to a degree such improvements filtered slowly to all jurisdictions. The gun death rate was noticeably reduced by 1995.

Deaths by firearms dropped by 30% in the year following the stricter gun rules.
Australians have never had a right to bear arms.

What you may be refering to was the 20% increase in armed robbery following the stricter gun regulations. How does that figure?

 

[rgraham666]

What you may be refering to was the 20% increase in armed robbery following the stricter gun regulations. How does that figure?

Because now the robbers don't need to fear being shot dead by store owners I imagine.

 

[Huckleman2000]

Because now the robbers don't need to fear being shot dead by store owners I imagine.

Either that, or a short-term flood of the black-market gun trade. "Get 'm before they're gone forever!"

Over time, I expect that blip would also go down, as guns become harder to obtain and out of reach of unorganized thieves.