Tag: linkery

Quote of the Day – Mad Mike Edition

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Via email from Firehand, Michael Z. Williamson has today’s QotD:

First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I’m not black.

Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I’m not gay.

Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I’m an atheist.

When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I’m a legal immigrant.

Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.

Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong.  So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.

~~~

Or you can commit seppuku with a chainsaw.  I really don’t care anymore.  This is the end of my support for any liberal cause, because liberals have become anything but.

Go, Mike!  (RTWT)

Quote of the Day – .gov Efficiency Edition

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Stolen shamelessly from Sharp as a Marble, this comment by DustyDog:

If gun confiscation happens, it won’t be a shoot out. You’ll get 3 letters of advance notice filled with dire threats. Then a final warning (which will arrive a week late), and two late notices, full of threats. You’ll hear that the people running the database can’t keep track of how many weapons were turned it, so if you turn in anything and get a clean card, you’ll in the record as having no guns. So you drive to the location to find out it was misprinted on the form. You call and google, and find the right place. You’ll go through a humiliating pat-down for knives and drugs, but they won’t take the gun or ammo you have in your hands – that’s somebody else’s job; wait in line. You’ll wait in line all day long, to be turned away.

You’ll come back earlier tomorrow, wait all day, and turn in a gun.

When you turn in your gun, you get a receipt with no unique code. They throw your gun in a completely unsecure box, in an unsecure room. “It’s easier now. When the door was locked, the guns would pile up until there was no more room. Now, the boxes are always empty in the morning.”

The next week, you get a letter saying that due to a database crash, the government is not sure if you turned in your guns. You’ll be ordered to fill out a form, under threat of imprisonment. You’ll have the option of affirming that all your guns were turned in, or that they were not.

If you affirm, you’ll get the same letter every six months. If you refuse to affirm, you’ll go on a waiting list. Two to five years later, a guy with a high school diploma will show up to take your guns. You won’t need a gun to kill this guy, a ten-year old could beat this guy down. He won’t have your name right and the names of guns on his list won’t be the names of guns ever actually made; the records are obviously all mixed up. If you tell him your name is Juan and you’re renting from [you], he won’t be back for another 2 to 5 years.

That’s pretty much how Canada’s attempt at long-gun registration went, before they finally gave up.

Quote of the Day – “PRECISELY!” Edition

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From Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned:

By now many of you have seen this video where Joe Biden admits gun control won’t be effective at stopping crime or mass shootings. Well, that’s because the purpose of gun control isn’t either of those things. To say that they want to turn millions of gun owners into criminals is not really accurate. What’s accurate is that they already think you’re a criminal. They just want to be able to punish you for it.

“All Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun” – Mao

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Via Instapundit comes this Captain’s Journal entry on When Did the Left Fall Out of Love With Guns? Pullquote:

Yes, the left still loves guns. There is no other reason for the fawning acceptance of the vulgar SWAT raid tactics in which innocent men like Mr. Eurie Stamps get shot and killed. These tactics are repeated all across America every day.

The left just doesn’t love guns in the wrong hands, and anyone who isn’t an agent of the state is the wrong hands. Listen to Representative Jim Hines (D – CT) tell you why high capacity magazines are still necessary in government hands.

There is absolutely no justification for weapons that were made for the explicit purpose of killing lots of people quickly to be in the hands of civilians.

Let that wash over you again. “Killing lots of people quickly” and “civilian hands.” The two don’t go together.

I’m reminded of two previous QotD’s here.  One that now resides at the masthead of this blog:

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them. Moshe Ben-David

And this one from Glenn Reynolds himself just a few weeks ago:

Governments exist, historically, for only one reason: Because they’re really, really good at killing people.

And governments are bound and determined to achieve and maintain a monopoly of force.  Ours is no exception.

As Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his 2003 dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer,

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

We forget that at our peril.

It CAN happen here.

Quote of the Day – David E. Young

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From his On Second Opinion Blog, The Mason Triad Context of Second Amendment Development and Purpose: Barriers Against Power in All Forms and Departments of Government:

The citizens in 1789 relied on flintlock firearms just as the soldiers of a period army. At that time, a standing army in time of peace was the face of tyranny. Today, the face of tyranny is just as common in the world, but is much more intrusive and dangerous, and is usually referred to as a police state. Americans have the constitutional right and duty to prevent the establishment of any police state in the United States. The people must keep their government under their control, which is accomplished, not by fighting, which is only a last resort, but by making certain that violations of the Constitution by those at the helm of government are challenged and reversed.

In the modern world, government raised forces, whether troops or police, are not armed with flintlock firearms. Police forces always carry modern arms. The purpose of such arms is self-defense. Every American citizen is guaranteed the same right by the Second Amendment. In order for Americans to keep their government and its forces under their control, as the Constitution guarantees, the people, at a minimum, have the right to keep and bear the same type of arms that police are provided.

RTWT. David has the distinct advantage of being able to make his point quickly and with ironclad references.

Quote of the Day – Samizdata Edition

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From Samizdata a couple of days ago:

Let’s see – Native Americans were wards of the state for a century, and, until the recent casino boom, were the most impoverished, addiction ridden, unemployed group in society; the family farmer has been the object of endless state programs to save him for most of the 20th century, and his numbers have shrunk from over half the population to under 2%; black people were “adopted” by the modern welfare state about 50 years ago, with the result that the black family has shattered, perhaps irreparably, and the male part is massively either in prison or unemployed, while the female half now has a 75% or so rate of births out of wedlock, and single parent families struggling with poverty lead to homicide from gang activity being the primary cause of death for young black males.

The wars on poverty and drugs continues to decimate the very populations they were supposed to help, the federal education programs have overseen a massive decline in the competency and educational achievements of our youth across the board, and catastrophically poor literacy rates among the minority communities.

The Fed decided to massively aid the housing market, to assist people in buying homes, and within a few decades, the housing and financial markets collapsed into a recession which we are still struggling to climb out of, and return to a semblence of our former economic levels.

And so now, the progressive state under the current progressive regime is going to come to the aid of the struggling middle class?

Yeah, that will work out just fine…

– Samizdata commenter ‘veryretired’

And NOW they’re going to take over HEALTH CARE!

What could possibly go worng?

Echoes

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Today Michael Bane posted The Rabbit Hole and said (among other things):

As I have said for years, the controlling word in the phrase “gun control” is control, not gun. I’ve followed with interest many of the threads on various forums arguing about “terminology”…if, for instance, we all agreed to call black rifles “modern sporting rifles” or we were careful to never refer to firearms as “weapons.” I used to agree pretty wholeheartedly with those arguments, but over the years I’ve come around to a different view. Our enemies aren’t antigun, they’re anti-people-with-guns. It’s not the guns they hate…it’s us.

—

The reason there is no middle ground (and Mike Thompson, now would be a good time to take notes) is this war is between two fundamentally opposed world views. After living in New York City and spending a lot of time in California, I’ve come to see the fight as one between the adults and the perpetual children of the Nanny State.

I think it’s worse than that.  Back around 2004 ex-blogger Ironbear from the now-defunct blog Who Tends the Fires wrote something I’ve quoted repeatedly here:

It would be a mistake to paint the conflict exclusively in terms of “cultural war,” or Democrats vs Republicans, or even Left vs Right. Neither Democrats/Leftists or Republicans shy away from statism… the arguments there are merely over degree of statism, uses to which statism will be put – and over who’ll hold the reins. It’s the thought that they may not be left in a position to hold the reins that drives the Democrat-Left stark raving.

—

This is a conflict of ideologies…

The heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.

One of the few things Patrick J. Buchanan has ever said that I agree with is that “Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Interesting that more people seem to be awakening to the idea.  Sad that more haven’t.

Edited to add:  Read also Michael’s earlier post, A Certain Kind of Peace. Excerpt:

The point that I want to make here is that just because we have the facts on our side doesn’t automatically mean that we win. Every word that Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama in the last election has proven to be true, yet you’ll notice that BHo is the President and Mitt Romney is a future trivia question on Jeopardy. This is not a debate, and we are not a debating society. This is an all-out war for the soul of the United States. I don’t want to win this debate; I would rather borrow this quote from Conan the Barbarian (channeling Genghis Khan of course), “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

Facts are indeed weapons of this war! We must have those weapons at our fingertips (and I’ll do my best to help in that arena), but weapons alone do not win a war. Strategy wins a war. And in this war we need to be thinking of ourselves as guerrillas facing a large, heavily funded, absolutely ruthless oppressor.

Quote of the Day – Glenn Reynolds Edition

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Actually, he gets two.  First up, this one, from his post on Gun Control Politics:

Resort to theatrical efforts at emotional blackmail is an admission that you have no intellectual arguments. Which is par for the course with the smarmy Diane Sawyer, of course, and with the even-smarmier gun control movement.

I would ask “have you no decency?” — but we already know the answer to that.

Which presents me the perfect opportunity to insert this video clip of the “smarmy Diane Sawyer” from 2007:

http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
The second quote is from an older post having to do with the civil war in Syria, but it has more a more universal applicability:

In a revolution, if you’re not willing to die or kill for your beliefs you’re basically irrelevant. Tweeting doesn’t count.