Sunday, December 23, 2012

UPDATE: Anti-gun nuts, like Mayor Bloomberg, are screaming like plucked little piggies — “Wee, wee, wee! All the way home.” Some of New York City’s most liberal Democrat candidates joined their uber-liberal out-going billionaire mayor rending their garments and gnashing their teeth

The NRA, in the person of it’s chief spokesman and Executive V.P. Wayne LaPierre, has shown that it’s nobody’s lap dog waiting for somebody like Mike Bloomberg to say "Roll over and play dead" and then rub his belly and say, “He’s such a good boy! Yes, he’s such a good boy!”  —  Instead the leadership of the four million strong national association, whose members generally favor maintaining ALL of our gun rights, perked up, and barked a firm warning about some of the real causes of violence in our society; and with specificity and clarity, how best to deal with the threat of gun violence in our schools --- with properly trained and vetted armed guards


Perhaps there was too  much certainty and hubris in the vast echo-chamber world of America's liberal elites that they really did expect that even the National Rifle Association would finally have to come to heel, and be docile and compliant. Some in their loftiness probably thought that even Wayne LaPierre would have to show proper respect to the week-long eulogies of the vast Greek Chorus of the national media or to the masterful and magisterial maundering  of certain especially sensitive and enlightened leaders about much needed gun-control in this well-managed and much-shared moment of national grief.  The NRA's Friday press conference and the speech by Wayne LaPierre showed how wrong they all were.

According to Colin Campbell, a local Brooklyn pundit, who posts political commentary for a city-wide blog:  “In an announcement surprising many political observers, National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre came out swinging against both the media and a host of other entities in the wake of the recent elementary school massacre in Connecticut. In [Frday’s] extensive address, Mr. LaPierre further proposed immediately putting an armed security guard in every single school in order to guard students against future shootings. Needless to say, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has become one of the nation’s chief  voices against the NRA’s lobbying efforts, was unimpressed.”

As Colin knows from some of my comments here and over beers in various venues, I usually find his commentary to be thoughtful, thought provoking and useful for many of my purposes. His 12/21/12 post, “BACKFIRE  —   Mayor Bloomberg Was Unpersuaded by the NRA’s Press Conference” [http://politicker.com/2012/12/mayor-bloomberg-was-unpersuaded-by-n-r-a-s-press-conference/ ]  was certainly no exception to any of that. However, I’m sure that Mr. Campbell knows equally well that there are lots of things, big, small and in between, upon which I do disagree with him. One such item of disagreement is over the farcical notion that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was “unimpressed” by the NRA response, in general, and Mr. LaPierre’s speech, in particular. The minuscule media mogul and municipal minister of mischief, thought enough about the masterful gunman’s remarks to respond as if the NRA leader's speech had been LaPierre's  gauntlet snapped smartly across the  regal Bloomberg cheek.

Mr Campbell reports that the New York Mayor said this:  “The NRA’s Washington leadership has long been out of step with its members, and never has that been so apparent as this morning... Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe. Leadership is about taking responsibility, especially in times of crisis. Today the NRA’s lobbyists blamed everyone but themselves for the crisis of gun violence. While they promote armed guards, they continue to oppose the most basic and common sense steps we can take to save lives – not only in schools, but in our movie theaters, malls, and streets. Enough. As a country, we must rise above special interest politics.”  Those words were  like the mayor's quickly rubbing his smarting cheek, taking up LaPierre’s glove, and calling for LaPierre’s and Bloomberg’s Seconds to make the appropriate arrangements.

In the same post, Campbell also mentioned the pathetic “me toos...” of three 2013 city-wide Democratic Party aspirants, Comptroller John Liu, Public Advocate Bill deBlasio and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who feigned the routinely lame liberal outrage that one might expect in times like these. What neither Liu, deBlasio, Quinn or Bloomberg even attempted to do was address  Wayne LaPierre’s main rhetorical point   —   “THE ONLY THING THAT STOPS A BAD GUY WITH A GUN IS A GOOD GUY WITH A GUN.”   Until people like Liu, deBlasio, Quinn, Bloomberg, Schumer, Gillibrand and Carolyn McCarthy can rebut that one line, remarks like Bill deBlasio’s, “Only the NRA would have the audacity to claim the solution to horrific school violence is to put more guns in our schools. Through divestment, through tougher laws and through a national movement, we are going to take the gun lobby head-on and win..”  will be seen as the empty rhetoric that it is.



5 comments:

Galewyn Massey said...

Speaking of anti-gun nuts, New York's Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo is already talking about legislative proposals that would legalize the CONFISCATION of guns lawfully owned by law-abiding citizens in the State of New York.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/336373/cuomo-confiscation-could-be-option-eliana-johnson ;
http://times247.com/articles/cuomo-confiscation-of-assault-weapons-is-an-option

Will this anti-gun frenzy soon infect what's left of the GOP "ruling cabal" in the NYS Senate, including the likes of Brooklyn's own Republican-Conservative State Senator Martin Golden?

Vincent Nunes said...

This statement is attributed to either Colin Campbell or to having been stated by Mayor Bloomberg, "Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe."

This statement fails in both instances.

The NRA hasn't, didn't and never had anything to do with creating any such "problem"; obviously, those NRA members are registered and are acting as responsible members of society. The "black market" is where any such "problems" exist. It wouldn't exist without the prohibition that is in place. In every instance of prohibition, a "black market" fills the vacuum of supply and demand.

In the other instance, the "paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe" would be the responsibility of those who murdered John Fitzgerald Kennedy before our eyes at Dealey Plaza; who murdered Martin Luther King, Jr. from those bushes in front of Jim's Grill; who murdered Robert Francis Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, leaving Sirhan Bishara Sirhan as the patsy; who circulated the Black Panther Coloring Book and later, crack cocaine in the Black communities (which spread to every other community) and called Gary Webb a liar; who are actively attempting to take away our only means of defending our freedom with what is looking more and more like a psy-op than a mindless massacre - the blame falls squarely upon their souls.

"Man has only those rights that he's willing to defend."

I heard that on an episode of Law and Order.

Simply put, without the power to enforce the 2nd Amendment, the remaining amendments may as well have been written on toilet paper, for all they would be worth if we stood defenseless against tyranny.

The passage of the NDAA mandates that we stand at the ready.

Galewyn Massey said...

Update: The facts show that the Liberal Main Stream Media’s attacks on the NRA’s plan proposed by Wayne LaPierre are mostly a dishonest ad hominem attack on him.

LOOK AT THIS:

The “NRA Plan Is So Dumb That 1/3 of Public Schools Already Use It”
according to a post by Jim Hoft in the Gateway Pundit Blog on Monday, December 24, 2012
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/12/nra-plan-is-so-dumb-that-13-of-public-schools-already-use-it/

According to Jim Hoft, “On December 21, NRA President Wayne LaPierre issued a statement on the Newtown shootings. He proposed armed security on staff at all US schools. The liberal media blasted LaPierre for proposing cops in public schools but forgot that Bill Clinton proposed the same thing back in 2000… And one third of all public schools already use it.”

Hoff then noted that, “National Review reported: Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days…”

As I pointed out earlier, former Education Secretary Bennett had “suggested” the concept of such a plan in the week before LaPierre’s speech.

Needless to say, there are many libertarian concerns about any “nationalized” program that looks like a bunch of armed TSA-style guards running metal detectors in our schools. [More about that and the Ron Paul-style opposition to the NRA/LaPierre plan in a future post.]

Galewyn Massey said...

For a differing view about defending Second Amendment Rights, take a look at: Adam Bates, a freelance writer, who had this item posted on The Daily Caller blog on December 23, 2012, “Opinion – The NRA vs. the Second Amendment” http://dailycaller.com/2012/12/23/the-nra-vs-the-second-amendment/#ixzz2G8kjtuc2

This is how Bates kicks off his opinion piece: “As a civil libertarian and a gun owner, I understand all too well that tragedies like the Newtown mass murder invariably mean a new wave of assaults on our most fundamental rights as human beings. 9/11 brought us the TSA, the Patriot Act, and the War on Terror, and every mass shooting brings out the same authoritarian coalition calling for an end to video games, movies, secular education, and, of course, guns. I have written in the past about why we should cling most dearly to our rights in times of crisis, but have only recently caught on to a much more deceptive (perhaps unwitting) foe of our right to bear arms: the National Rifle Association....”

Mr. Bates then catalogues the NRA’s long history of supporting myriad governmental restrictions on the citizenry’s right to bear arms. He notes that the NRA trades off the unrestricted right of U.S. citizens guaranteed under the constitution in pursuit of the interests of certain gun users and the American firearms industry. He believes that Wayne LaPierre’s recent speech is completely consistent with the NRA’s real longstanding positions that conflict with the constitutional rights of all Americans to keep and bear arms, but rather favors more and more governmental employees in need of more and more firearms.

Adam Bates concludes by saying this: “This conflict flows from the fact that while government arms deals, shooting sports, and hunting are the lifeblood of the firearms manufacturing industry, those are not the reasons that our Founders saw fit to explicitly acknowledge each citizen’s right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution. While the Second Amendment certainly and incidentally protects the ability of people to hunt and enjoy their weapons, the true purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure the capability of the citizens to withstand the onslaught of a tyrannical government.”

Galewyn Massey said...

NOTE: As to the “NDAA” referred to above by Mr. Nunes, it is feared by many that the U.S. Government has authorized the indefinite detention of American citizens by the American military on American soil for various reasons.

It’s been reported that the Senate recently passed a version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that was stripped of a prohibition against the indefinite military detention of US citizens on American soil by an 81-14 vote on Friday, but only after a furious dissent on the chamber's floor by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who called it an "abomination."

Top Senators in support of the bill dismissed Paul's charges as bogus, claiming that language in the NDAA preserves Americans' constitutional right to trial by jury. Only when they ally themselves with foreign terrorist powers, they said, do Americans abdicate their rights as citizens.