A short video from Minnesota (which has been pulled from YouTube since the writing of this article) spotlights shameful behavior by elected Democrats, supposedly interested in conducting a “national conversation on guns.”
At a meeting, two firearms experts came forward to speak, bringing with them two common Ruger 10/22 rifles that had been cleared by security. The purpose of their presentation was to explain how the gun-control laws currently being proposed would outlaw only a gun’s cosmetic features while not affecting the functionality of the firearms in any measurable way in terms of rate of fire and accuracy.
In the video, DFL legislators simply arise and exit without explanation. They avoid learning details from the presentation about the very firearms they seek to legislate out of existence.
[…]
Would DFL Rep. Debra Hilstrom exit during expert testimony about restrictions to your freedom of speech? It would be disrespectful to the expert called forth to testify, and her constituents would likely chastise her for arrogance. Would DFL Rep. Shannon Savick simply walk away from a minister, rabbi, or imam speaking about threats to the freedom of religion? Would DFL Rep. Erik Simonson flee the room while a bridge engineer testifies that a law under discussion would leave roads less safe? Would DFL Rep. Dan Schoen bolt if a doctor testified that certain medical procedures actually pose more risk to the patient than the disease itself? Would DFL Rep. Linda Slocum leave a room in another situation to avoid a challenge to her preexisting opinion?
We must now assume they all would after witnessing this exit. They may as well have stuck their fingers in their ears.
[…]
In the video, DFL Rep. and committee chair Michael Paymar proudly expresses a contempt for hearing the facts in a technical presentation.
We have also witnessed demagoguery, with claims of a desire to want “weapons of war off the streets” per President Obama — a blatant falsehood. Military firearms are not featured in a single one of the laws proposed nationwide, as selective-fire and fully automatic firearms have been heavily regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934. They have also been banned from future manufacture for the general public since the Hughes Amendment to the Firearm Owners Protection Act became law in 1986.
These Democrats in the video, and other nationally prominent Democrats including the president, have not demonstrated a desire for a “national conversation.” They have instead demonstrably lied to constituents and bullied gun-rights advocates.
[my emphasis]
Owens goes on to detail what the presentation would have taught lawmakers unwilling to be taught — namely, that their bans are bans that, because they focus on cosmetic features, would arbitrarily discriminate against the short or the tall, or maybe against those with particular physical limitations or medical conditions that make the use of a pistol grip necessary for the safe use of the weapon, etc. (which strikes me as grounds for a lawsuit, though I’m no lawyer) — but the problem is, the argument isn’t about gun-control as a function of wanting gun-control; it’s an argument for molding and shaping and reorganizing the populace in the left’s preferred configuration. They wish us pawns to their experiments in social engineering and group herding and management, and to assure that we don’t have the arrogance to fight back, they realize that disarming us will at some point be a necessity. This is just the latest push in their socio-cultural evolutionary movement — a kind of punctuated equilibrium approach to long-term incrementalist plans, featuring opportunistic bursts after periods of relative inactivity, a crisis never being allowed to go to waste, naturally.
As JHo notes in the comments to an earlier post:
[…] to the left this has zero to do with gun control.
Stop meeting them on their terms. Ironically, walking out was the more honest thing to do. For both sides.
This, too, references something Rand Paul noted in his response to the SOTU address, namely, that since when did it become too much to ask that Congress actually read and understand what’s in the massive legislative packages they vote on?
The fact that we may need a law to compel Congress to read bills before they vote them into law is positively surreal. And JHo is correct — the most honest thing the Democrats could have done is shown that they care not a whit for any conversation on the putative issue. Because this isn’t about gun control and it never has been.
And it behooves us all to recognize that those who would take away a natural right are willing to do so based purely on their own ideological resistance to individual sovereignty, and they only use events like Newtown as an opportunity to press forward on their larger agenda: create Utopia, with themselves as its benevolent shepherds, and we as its managed sheep.
To those with eyes to see and ears to hear and noses that can detect the smell of ample bullshit, no matter how much perfume is spread over the pile, all of this should be what I like to call clarifying.
(h/t nr)
When in a representative form of government representatives cease to represent, what then are they? What happens to the forms when the forms are no longer obeyed? (Although, to be fair, they’re perfunctorily half-obeyed, at least on the part of the voters.)
that there’s no copy of the video to post tells you all you need to know about the level of Team R’s game I think
Minnesota: we’re so flyover that even Bob Owens takes a week to notice what’s going on here!
I think it tells us more about Google than about Team R.
I finally assimilated what JHo was driving at.
The Second Amendment merely serves to make explicit a pre-existing right of the people to take up arms in defense of themselves and their property. And this pre-existent right, no government can take away and retain it’s legitimacy.
There’s nothing up for debate here, so why pretend to have one?
Methinks the only conversation they’re interested in is the one where we the people clamor to become their slaves…
I’ve been wondering lately about the progg’s vision of Utopia, and if we aren’t misunderstanding them, and so perhaps misunderstanding how to deal with them, in assigning that agenda to them. Levin’s book considered.
It’s what has been compelling me to say the last couple of days that proggs really only care about the journey; the destination, this Utopia, isn’t even on their radar. It’s not even in the top million of things they think about.
I came across this interesting quote yesterday:
Collectivism, for a progg, is the direction for the next new thing, and even if they achieved Utopia, to our understanding of the thing, they would not acknowledge it as the destination. A progressive’s work is never done. Their whole being is defined by their cause of the moment, the particular cause in question considerably less defined and important than the mantle of self-righteousness that crusading for “the cause” affords them. If they ever did actually reach a destination, where their work was done and everyone was truly equal in every sense, their whole identity of being superior to those they crusade for would collapse in a smoking heap of worthlessness.
I think this is where we’re getting off track. We imagine the left thinks of Utopia like we do, and so we deal with them on those terms.
It’s like thinking middle east Muslims want American style liberty, when what they actually want is global sharia law. So we give a billion dollars to the Palestinians, thinking it will advance liberty, and all it does is validate them in their goal for theocracy.
You can’t negotiate with a terrorist and expect peace, and you can’t compromise with a progg and believe they will be satisfied.
I don’t think we do, except perhaps in this narrow sense: We know Utopia is Nowhere, so we don’t try to make the journey, correctly seeing it as a fool’s errand. The Left* also knows that, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to get there, and for the reasons you lay out.
*And I suppose I’m going to have to restrict that even further to the Vanguard or e.g., IngSoc’s Inner Party because of Sorrel and what he did with James’s Will to Believe.
Somebody somewhereDonald R. McClarey offered up a pretty good Dostoevsky quote from “The Grand Inquisitor” that’s apropos here too.Insert Mel Brook’s song and dance number here.
Another way to describe what you’re getting at is the differing mindsets of Republican and Democrat politicians when they sit down to negotiate a compromise. Republicans think like businessmen: they’re looking to make a deal where the political equivalent of goods and services change hands and everyone wins. Democrats think like union contract negotiators. The whole point is to keep the negotiations going, so nothing ever gets settled.
Lee’s observations harmonize nicely with Limbaugh’s self-professed revelation regarding ObaZma this week. And change, in the terms Wilson professed on teaching the young to be nothing like their fathers, because all is change over and over again. Stupid and absurd, sure, but they seem to believe it nevertheless.
That concluding bit of Dostoevsky also points to the neo-gnosticism inherent to leftism, which in turn brings us to Voegelin, again.
Though I don’t grasp Voegelin’s thesis (for want of study), there’s something lurking in the historicist position Hegel claimed in the absolute moment, which despite the reductio ad absurdum that historicist claim has subsequently suffered, Hegel’s followers seem to simply ignore, taking the absolute onto themselves generation after generation.
proggtardia snarls
Breaking: Democrats Move to Ban Ammunition in Wisconsin
more
link
What in the homemade fuck?
Wisconsin has bears nobody tells me anything
I didn’t get to go to wisconsin cause of they were experiencing an acute snowflake accumulation problem when I was up around there.
Someone should check on those ones from time to time, what with all the bears and snowflakes.
The previous 21 catches were just determining range and windage.
The U.S. Special Operations Command does. They just call it something else.
I suspect that draft legislation will never get past the draft stage, but it’s another illustration of just how little our would-be masterminds really know. Or more accurately, as Reagan said, how much they know that simply isn’t so.
Massive wound potential and human-killing is exactly what you want in both a self-defense bullet and a hunting bullet.
By the way, the focus on hollow-points in the news report shows that the author himself isn’t overly familiar with hunting either, as Pablo noticed. The proposed legislation bans all expanding bullets, soft-points and ballistic-tipped as well as hollow-points. In fairness to the author, I suppose you could consider a ballistic-tip to be a hollow-point with a plastic nose cone inserted into it.
Frangible is designed to breakup into dust when it hits steel. It is used because it doesn’t have fragments ricocheting and is made from sintered metal usually a copper alloy with no lead. When it hits softer than steel stuff such as flesh or wood it acts like full metal jacket and penetrates.
Somebody probably heard that law enforcement uses them and so figured that civilians shouldn’t have them too.
The only reason I can see is since the bullets are light for caliber and thus can be driven to higher velocities they can penetrate soft body armor, but so can other solid lighter weight high velocity projectiles.
Ball ammunition (i.e. non-expanding) punches nice, neat little wholes through people, doors, walls, people on the other side of doors and walls….
holes grrrr.
I don’t even want to imagine what a heavy-weight solid (say any African game round) would do tot the body beneath the armor, Geoff.
The left makes up boogie men of straw and then proceeds to pass laws against them.
Soft body armor is bullet resistant for mostly handgun rounds. Low, 800 to 1500 fps of so, velocities and medium to large bullet diameters 30 cal up. It is good up to a certain amount of force per unit area. Smaller diameter, harder material, higher velocity will cause it to fail. I think almost all rifle ammo will overload it.
Interesting that legislators get very exercised over anything they think might be used to harm police but care not a whit about us being able to defend ourselves.
Once again the Blade Runner line applies. “If you’re not cop you’re little people.”
I have no such thing but do have a Siamese Mauser I had, back in the 70s, sporterized and barreled for 45/70 which can be handloaded with 405 grain soft points at 2100 fps or so. Not quite into African specs but fine for this Continent.