Respectfully Submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
When it comes to the Second Amendment and guns, it seems that President Obama can’t make anyone happy. Ever since Obama announced his candidacy for the Presidency, the NRA has screamed that Obama will be taking away the guns. This scare tactic continued when Obama defeated John McCain for the Presidency. Just what has Barack Obama done to make the NRA and gun owners frightened for their guns? The simple answer to this question is nothing. The head of the National Rifle Association, Mr. Wayne LaPierre actually admitted recently that Obama has done nothing to attack gun owner’s rights to bear arms, but claims Obama’s inaction against guns is actually a conspiracy to take away guns!! ‘ “[The Obama campaign] will say gun owners — they’ll say they left them alone,” LaPierre told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday. “In public, he’ll remind us that he’s put off calls from his party to renew the Clinton [assault weapons] ban, he hasn’t pushed for new gun control laws… The president will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail saying he’s actually been good for the Second Amendment.” “But it’s a big fat stinking lie!” the NRA leader exclaimed. “It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and destroy the Second Amendment in our country.” ‘ Raw Story
Now, before anyone thinks I am making this stuff up, the linked site includes a video clip wherein Mr. LaPierre verbalizes this alleged reverse conspiracy. Mr. LaPierre makes a point of throwing in the necessary names of alleged liberal co-conspirators to rev up his base. ‘ “Sotomayor, Kagan, Fast & Furious, the United Nations, executive orders. Those are the facts we face today… President Obama and his cohorts, yeah, they’re going to deny their conspiracy to fool gun owners. Some in the liberal media, they are already probably blogging about it. But we don’t care because the lying, conniving Obama crowd can kiss our Constitution!” ‘
The lying, conniving Obama crowd as Mr. LaPierre labels them has not done anything to harm the Second Amendment rights that the NRA claims to be at risk. I was interested in the last few words of LaPierre’s quotation above. The phrase “kiss our Constitution” appears to lay claim that the NRA and its followers own the Constitution and its protections. I could have sworn that my law school Constitutional professors taught me that the Constitution protects all citizens, but maybe I heard them wrong. But, I digress.
As the Raw Story article suggests, President Obama has actually taken heat from his own supporters over his alleged conspiracy to not take away the guns. NPR Does Mr. LaPierre provide any evidence of this bizarre claim? None that I could find. Maybe you will have better luck than me in finding evidence of presidential actions to hide President Obama’s intentions and/or actions of stealing legal guns from their owners.
I have to admit that if you read the comments section of the NPR article that details how the Left is disappointed with Obama’s inaction on gun control, you will read almost nothing except gun owners claiming that Obama’s words of inaction are actually code words that the End is Near and the Sky is Falling for gun owners! Just what will it take gun owners to ask Mr. LaPierre for evidence of his wild claims? I, for one would love to hear his answer to that question. I understand that candidate and President Obama may have stayed away from the 2nd Amendment issues for political reasons, but where is the evidence of this alleged conspiracy? I would think Fox News would be sending Bill O’Reilly’s reporters all over the country to uncover such a heinous conspiracy.
If Mr. Obama has not written any executive orders or supported additional legislative steps to control or take away guns since he has become President, just what is the basis for these wild claims? I realize that the NRA has a financial interest in getting gun owners scared into buying more guns, but are there other, underlying reasons why the gun owners are frightened so easily, when the facts do not support the NRA’s claims?
Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)- Guest Blogger
Additional sources: Gun Owners of America; NRA-ILA; Pajamas Media;
Bron,
Personally, I don’t care whether you respect my views or not, but if you don’t understand that the law is the control mechanism of society and that as such – even when talking about preserving liberty – the discussion of both control and feedback mechanisms are always going to be integral to the discussion, then I cannot reach accord with you. If you fail to realize that in discussing law and liberty that it is always the pursuit of both maximizing both liberties (me) and social necessity (we), then I cannot reach accord with you. The bottom line is your religion blinds you to the facts of both what society is and what it takes to effectively manage society to maintain peace (and ideally maximize happiness) while protecting individual liberty. If you were to frame the law to only protect individual liberties while not taking into account the common good, the system would collapse when the needs of the many outweigh the desires of the one. Conversely, if you were to frame the law to only protect the common good, the system collapses as the individual components of society wither from either lack of motivation or repression. It’s a balancing act. Your devotion to “I before we” prevents you from accurately assessing the situation let alone formulating effective solutions to problems presented. And that’s what it’s all about: effective solutions to problems that maximize liberty and promote justice and equity. The desire to control is as illusory as control itself. Society is to big and too complex a mechanism to lend itself to control. The best one can hope for is influence. Do laws against homicide prevent homicide? No, they do not. However, they do deter a great many potential homicides. Do regulations of business requiring worker and product safety prevent all worker abuses and unsafe products? No, they do not, but when properly enforced, they deter a great many abuses. You may think I have a desire to control. I do not. I have a desire to influence with the goal of maintaining peace while maximizing both liberty and happiness. This is antithetical to those who desire “control” to pervert the course of peace, justice, liberty and happiness of others for their own benefit. People like the Koch Brothers who would have the socially necessary safety nets provided and best provided by government from society in furtherance of their personal profits. The people who put “me before we” instead of considering solutions geared to “me and we”. That this conflicts with your religion (and yes, I consider Objectivism a religion) is sad, but it is ultimately a reflection of your bad choices in following an unrealistic extremist system of belief.
Gene H:
Nuance it all you want, Heinlein has taken it to its essence. People who wish to control others and those who do not.
That is all there is. Simple, elegant and straight to the heart of the matter. Even some republicans have the soul of a controller and some progressives have the soul of liberty. But then I call those people old fashioned 19th century liberals and have great respect for their views.
Well then it should be easy for you to find one, just one statement I’ve ever made that condones fascist like, or even non-liberal behavior.
We watched mespo make that claim last week, and he was less flaccid than you.
It’s without a doubt what you are, anon.
A pants load working for the Koch Brothers and/or like fascists.
It’s pretty clear where Gene is.
When I first read Adam Smith, I thought business guy, economist, dead white guy widely heralded by all these boring rich mostly annoying TV pundits, so therefore Smith must be a boring stuffy conservative.
Then I read him and found in many ways he was a radical leftist. And pretty cool. And his enemies, if any, were landlords and undisclosed secrets and secret agreements.
I wonder where he would be today in terms of liberal, libertarian, republican. Well, I do know he would be in the group of “those who have no such desire [to control others]”.
Likewise, it’s pretty clear where too many of the civil libertarian commenters peacocking in these comments actually are.
It’s bizarre after his own behavior and his days of justifying it badly that Kevin would wonder what other people think of the word liberal.
It used to not involve undisclosed privacy invasions and building up of databases and lists. That was left to the FBI and COINTELPRO but now advocated by Mike S, and OS and Gene H and many others to counter Koch’s minions and implemented by Kevin Kesseler.
Bron,
I am an independent thinker who doesn’t take my operating philosophies and methodologies from fiction writers. I’m also someone who uses adjectives in their actual meaning, not in a meaning I’d rather they have or some definition I’ve made up. As to Rand? Your unreasoning hatred of the forms of the word “collective” in all its forms stems from your worship of her blind selfish egotism. Repeat this until it sinks in: society is a collective of individuals and as such is a collective endeavor. You cannot care for the individual without caring for the collective and you cannot care for the collective without caring for the individual. That’s why Objectivism is a failed extremist doctrine, laissez-faire economics is a failing extremist doctrine and why Communism is a failed extremist doctrine. Objectivism (and ultimately laissez-faire economics) is all “me, me, me” and Communism is all “us, us, us” when the nature of reality regarding society is “both me and we”. What I am is not blinded by binary thinking. Most things in life are more complex than a binary solution and the more complex the system in question, the more true that statement becomes.
Slarti:
I know what the word means, it doesnt mean what it used to mean if that is what you mean.
By the way liberals used to believe in free markets.
Also did you know you are a little late to the party in regards to web scraping? You can buy them on-line. I just got mine, it is amazing what you can find out with it.
I figure if you have one, my side needs one to, mutually assured junk mail.
Now I know how Reagan felt in Reykjavik. 🙂
Gene H:
“Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” — Robert A Heinlein
Which one are you? I am in the latter.
Why do people Obama like sheep? He is batshit crazy.
Bron,
Liberal. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…
Don’t worry, I wont be selling anyone’s email address (let alone that of someone who trusted me enough to give me their address). As for making a pile of money – I plan to. I believe that my pragmatic, progressive empiricist philosophy is good business and plan on supporting my hypothesis by making my investors rich (I already have my first investor, by the way). We’ll see how it turns out…
“We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.” — Jaron Lanier
I would say some of us are at least the collectivists among us.
Gene H:
What does Ayn Rand have to do with me calling Obama a collectavist? She has one definition of many. The general idea though is the majority against the individual. True democracy is a collectivist notion decried by the founding fathers.
I could go on and on, but you know what I am saying.
“People have often been willing to give up personal identity and join into a collective. Historically, that propensity has usually been very bad news. Collectives tend to be mean, to designate official enemies, to be violent, and to discourage creative, rigorous thought. Fascists, communists, religious cults, criminal ‘families’ — there has been no end to the varieties of human collectives, but it seems to me that these examples have quite a lot in common. I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.” — Jaron Lanier
Bron,
Christie is “liberal?” What have you been smoking?
Elaine M.
Out of the question, I dont want another North Eastern Liberal republican after suffering through a South Western North Eastern Liberal republican.
Bron,
What about selling it to Chris Christie?
sLARTI:
you are entitled to make as much money as you want and can. I hope you make a big pile. But please do me a favor, dont sell my email address to Rick Perry or Ron Paul.
rafflaw,
When we renovated our house, we had new windows installed. You can tilt them in and clean the outsides of the windows from inside the house. They’re great!
Gene, stop trolling you moron.
Blouise mentioned sock puppets.
OS said, yes, it could be Koch
Mike S, said, yes, definitely Koch.
“A concerted effort was being made to disrupt each thread and thereby cause the topic to become unfocused. Since the days of Richard Nixon
“dirty tricks” this has been the skill and the trade of various paid members of the Corporatists. The Koch Bros”
And all three used it to justify Kevin Kesseler’s acts to violate trust on the blog.
Please stop being a dumbass troll.
AY,
But it is such a messy job. Especially doing the windows from the outside!
{W(t)=^..^ : t <= now} said:
This comment will also have an affect on every man reading the blog – it just wont scare them… 😉