Posts Tagged ‘gun control’

by baldilocks

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that a goodly portion of the 2020 Democratic Party candidates for president are working for Donald Trump.

At the Democratic-primary debate in Houston [on Thursday], Beto O’Rourke formally killed off one of the gun-control movement’s favorite taunts: The famous “Nobody is coming for your guns, wingnut.” Asked bluntly whether he was proposing confiscation, O’Rourke abandoned the disingenuous euphemisms that have hitherto marked his descent into extremism, and confirmed as plainly as can be that he was. “Hell yes,” he said, “we’re going to take your AR-15.”

O’Rourke’s plan has been endorsed in full by Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, and is now insinuating its way into the manifestos of gun-control groups nationwide. Presumably, this was O’Rourke’s intention. But he — and his party — would do well to remember that there is a vast gap between the one-upmanship and playacting that is de rigueur during primary season, and the harsh reality on the ground. Prohibition has never been well received in America, and guns have proven no exception to that rule. In New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, attempts at the confiscation of “high capacity” magazines and the registration of “assault weapons” have both fallen embarrassingly flat — to the point that the police have simply refused to aid enforcement or to prosecute the dissenters. Does Beto, who must know this, expect the result to be different in Texas, Wyoming, or Florida? (…)

Unwittingly or not, O’Rourke and his acolytes have stuck a dagger into the exquisitely calibrated gun-control messaging on which their party has worked for the better part of 20 years. No voter can now say he wasn’t warned.

Many of my Facebook friends are still anti-Trump – some of them are conservatives who are trouble by the president’s in-your-face demeanor. Others are slightly left of center liberals. But since O’Rourke came out of the confiscation closet, some of them are talking about sitting out the 2020 election or doing what many of us did in 2016: holding their noses and voting for Donald Trump

My friends understand that it’s all fun and games until the government starts seriously talking about mandatory “buybacks.”

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on FacebookTwitterMeWePatreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar !

Or hit Juliette’s!

by baldilocks

Dennis Prager:

Our age loves scientific equations. Here’s one you weren’t taught at college but which affects you as much as the law of gravity:

GI – W = E

Good Intentions (GI) minus Wisdom (W) leads to Evil (E)

Prager uses an example that’s obvious — at least to the sane.

Communism, the greatest mass murder ideology in history, was for almost all its rank-and-file supporters rooted in their desire to do good. (This was rarely true for its leaders, whose greatest desire was power.)

The many millions of people all over the world who supported communism did not think they were supporting unprecedented levels of mass murder and torture or an equally unprecedented deprivation of the most fundamental human rights of a substantial percentage of humanity. They thought they were moral, building a beautiful future for humanity — eliminating inequality, enabling people to work as hard or as little as they wanted, providing their fellow citizens “free” education and “free” health care. They were convinced that the moral arc of history was bending in their direction and that they were good because their motives were good.

That’s why leftists have such moral contempt for those who differ with them. Because those on the left are so good, only bad human beings could possibly oppose them.  (…)

The problem with communists and with leftists who don’t consider themselves communists is not that none of them mean well. It’s that they lack wisdom.

As Thomas Sowell would put it, such people fail to ask this question: “And then what happens?” Should someone ask question, the wisdom-less doer of good will give a rainbow and unicorns answer, and that answer will be a revelation.

Take Robert “Beto” O’Rourke and his promise to institute mandatory “buyback” of AR-15s and other firearms should he become president.

“No. I don’t see the law enforcement going door to door. I see Americans complying with the law. I see us working with gun owners, non-gun owners, local, county, state, federal law enforcement to come up with the best possible solution. I have yet to meet an owner of an AR-15 who thinks it’s OK that we have these kind of mass killings in this country,” O’Rourke said when asked by the Washington Examiner about specifics of his plan.

When pressed further about how he plans to enforce his proposal for those who would not comply, he responded, “How do you — how do we enforce any law? There’s a significant reliance on people complying with the law. You know that a law is not created in a vacuum.”

Got that? He won’t use the enforcers to enforce such a law, but the law will be enforced.

Magically.

Beta Male is an easy target — if you’ll pardon the expression — but it’s clear that his “plan” is a perfect example of Prager’s equation. Does O’Rourke want to do good? I doubt it and think that he and other politicians who would forcibly disarm law-abiding Americans have tyranny as their ultimate goal.

O’Rourke knows that his proposal would lead to lots of dead bodies but he’s too big of  a coward to admit it, much less admit that the body bags would be a feature rather than a bug, from his point of view.

President O’Rourke presiding over a disarmed America would have enormous power.

It’s certain, however, there are some voters who do want to do good and who would vote for him or for one of the other Democrat candidates who are promising — as president — to confiscate private firearm property. Such voters want there to be no more mass shooters ever and believe that if the government just takes the tools away, mass shootings will simply stop happening.

Magically.

And it is here where the dearth of wisdom is most glaring among all good-faith advocates of gun confiscation: they think that government can fix humans. This notion has remained pervasive over centuries.

On the contrary, we human beings cannot change our flawed and sinful nature. Politicians can’t. Laws can’t. We can only be mindful of our individual natures and attempt to protect ourselves against those who abandon themselves to their sinful natures, mass shooters being among this number.

Those who are without wisdom believe that humankind is innately good — in spite of the evidence to the contrary that each one of us observes every day.

The perfect sinless, gun-less world that the doers of good say they want is promised by God, But He has conditions which a lot of them aren’t willing to meet. They’d rather let politicians like O’Rourke do the dirty work for them.

And that road will end in the same place it has all the other times.

O’Rourke has no chance of becoming president in 2020, but the front-running Democrats want to take the guns, too.

P minus G equals D. I’ll let you figure out what the variables indicate.

(Thanks to Bearing Arms)

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on FacebookTwitterMeWePatreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar !

Or hit Juliette’s!

 

by baldilocks

It’s fun to watch as several of the remaining Democrat candidates for the presidency try to outdo each other in their proposals for disarming the law-abiding.

Kamala Harris creates a problem, then promises to solve it.

Elizabeth Warren’s plans for presidential gun confiscation involve executive orders coupled with nagging the American public to death.

“We will make change, we’ll figure out what works, and then we’ll make some more change and some more change.”

Warren added, “I will take executive action in every corner, with the Department of Justice, with ATF, to move as much as I can.”

And Beta (spelling intentional) tries to top them both:

O’Rourke’s plan lists a number of reforms, including the buyback [sic] program that would remove all banned assault weapons from private ownership — a proposal that goes further than any presented so far by the Democratic field.

(…)

“Beto is calling for a mandatory buyback program for assault weapons and a voluntary buyback program for handguns. To create a funding stream for buybacks, Beto will increase the excise tax on gun manufacturers and fines imposed on gun traffickers, and will enable ATF to purchase any banned assault weapons presented to the agency. Individuals who fail to participate in the mandatory buyback of assault weapons will be fined.”

Beta, sweetheart, straight-out threatening to kick down our doors would be more honest and sound less weaselly.

Honestly, its a toss up as to which one of these I’d like to see lose to President Trump in 2020.

And you may think I forgot about the other Democratic Party front-runner, the former vice president, but I have not.

He would certainly lose to President Trump also, but it has been painfully obvious that Joe Biden is declining in cognitive capabilities. I don’t want to see that final melt down happen in public. Even Biden doesn’t deserve that.

But the others aren’t much smarter. A smart candidate who wanted to take all the guns wouldn’t be so open about it.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

Follow Juliette on FacebookTwitterMeWePatreon and Social Quodverum.

Hit Da Tech Guy Blog’s Tip Jar !

Or hit Juliette’s!

In election 2018 New Hampshire did what it tend to do every two years on the local level flip control. The Democrats took the majority in the state senate 14-10 reversing the previous margin while in the house the 212 to 167 GOP edge became a 233 – 167 Democrat majority. However Governor Chris Sununu managed to keep his seat as governor.

The New Hampshire being just as left as other leftist or more with refugees from Massachusetts regularly pouring in was anxious to push a radical agenda in the state and the governor has been a veto machine with 51 to his credit.

His three latest are of particularly interest, because with Dayton and El Paso in the news NH Democrats, as Granite Grok reported decided that 39 days after passing three anti-gun bills but not sending them to the governor it was time to strike!

The motivations for sending the legislation to Sununu’s desk at this exact moment is evident to anyone with an IQ above room temperature, on its face alone, not even accounting for the fact that they trampled all over their own minimum wage presser and messaging by doing so, which only adds to the transparency of the exercise.

The substance of these bills has been covered many times already, so I won’t go into it again, other than to remind you that the Governor only has three more days now to decide to Veto, Sign, or allow to become law.

It was a smart plan, you have the national media pushing this stuff bigtime, a moderate gop governor in the state house and hints nationally that the president might even consider some new gun laws. I’m sure there were many who thought that Sununu would allow these bills to be come law with our without his signature…right up until the moment he didn’t:

Late Thursday afternoon, without pomp and circumstance, Governor Sununu held true to his campaign promises and killed the latest and last 3 gun control bills of the year, despite mounting pressure from the press and the Democrats.

The Governor has frequently and repeatedly announced his support for leaving the gun laws of our state as they are, saying “Look, I think the laws we have on firearms in the state are pretty darn good and I’m not looking for any additional restrictions at this time,” to reporters in February.

Turns out he meant it.

As the group progun NH put it:

The governor is right, we don’t need new laws just so politicians can smile and pretend they did something when in fact they did nothing good at all. ProGun NH thanks the governor for his steadfast support of law abiding NH citizens and keeping New Hampshire one of the safest states in the USA.

With the president due in the state in a few days the importance of the governor’s decision can’t be overstated.