Post-Norway spree-killing, independent.co.uk columnist A C Grayling [above] has a thing or two to say about gun control. As in, may I have some more please? “Guns should be the subject of worldwide outrage. Their manufacture and sale should be a human-rights abuse, on which we pour vilification and horror. They should be illegal for all but properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments, provided of course that the governments in question are themselves properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in a society where the rule of law obtains.” Sounds like a job for the U.N.! No really . . .
Human-rights agencies with representation at the UN in Geneva, such as the one I belong to (the International Humanist and Ethical Union), should begin campaigning for the manufacture and sale of small arms to be universally outlawed, and governments (such as the British government) which have responsible attitudes to gun control should be urged to join the campaign.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union can’t even manage to maintain a fully operational website, never mind taking charge of worldwide gun control. This much we know about A C’s mob: “Founded in in 1952, IHEU is the sole world umbrella organisation for humanist, atheist, rationalist, secularist, skeptic, laique, ethical cultural, freethought and similar organisations world-wide.”
Laique wow! Anyway, don’t go all OMG Stop the U.N. Small Arms Treaty on me. That agreement will in no way impinge on America’s Second Amendment rights. And even if it did, it won’t. Not only did the NRA pre-torpedo it—with declared political opposition before anyone even knows what’s in the final document—but you can find implementation details at itaintgonnahappen.com. To paraphrase big Joe, how many divisions does the U.N. have?
Like all good gun grabbers, the Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford wants to pull a Josh Sugarman. Namely, demonize guns through linguistic trickery (e.g. “assault rifle”).
If we can legislate for car-seats for children, we can legislate to keep highly dangerous killing instruments out of public hands.
“Highly dangerous killing instruments”: language matters: let us no longer use the word “gun” but that phrase “highly dangerous killing instrument”, and perhaps perceptions will change. No doubt weapons manufacturers and lobbyists everywhere would regard with equal outrage the idea of severely limiting the number of highly dangerous killing instruments in public circulation, their existence being permitted only under official lock and key. What would these lobbyists argue in opposition? That highly dangerous killing instruments are for sport, for hunting (this last will not wash: killing things for sport? That is itself disgusting), for the fun of loud noises?
Awkward. HDKI? Better. Unfortunately, you could apply the same sobriquet to automobiles, safe in the knowledge that more people die from car accidents than gunfire in the “civilized” world, the Middle East (see what I did there?), Africa and wherever the two devices coexist.
And what of knives? According to wikipedia, Grayling’s sister Jennifer was stabbed to death when the former Rhodesian was nineteen. The UK has knives and plenty of knife crime. Aren’t knives HDKIs? The guardian.co.uk reports
According to Scotland Yard the number of recorded knife-crime injuries in London went up from 941 to 1,070 in the three months between February and April this year compared with the previous three months; victims in the 13-24 age group injured during knife crime increased by more than 30% between 2008-09 and 2010-11.
Let’s get to that real demon, the demon of demons, the residents of the country whose residents DARED enshrine the right to bear arms in their legal framework. No, not the UK; they did away with that “An Englishman’s house is his castle” thing decades ago. Nope, not Mexico; the right to keep and bear arms is now under military control (i.e. dead as a dodo). It’s those dirty stinkin’ apes: the proto-Breiviks called Americans.
Americans with views not too far removed from those of Anders Behring Breivik say that they “need” their guns to “defend their freedoms”, meaning against the tyranny of government and federal taxes. They should be reminded that it is the ballot, not the bullet, that is meant to do that job for them.
In fact, there are no good arguments in favour of the existence of highly dangerous killing instruments, and millions of excellent arguments against them, these being each human being, and indeed each elephant and tiger, shot to death by them. The Norwegian tragedy should be absolutely the last straw for civilised humanity on this subject, no further excuses allowed.
Anyone remember Carl Sagan’s catchphrase “billions and billions of stars”? I’d love to see A C Grayling spend the rest of his academic career writing out a million arguments against the existence of firearms. Million as in one million. That ought to do it.
The fact that Grayling’s rant was given the oxygen of publicity in a national “independent” UK newspaper tells you all you need to know about the Oxbridge elite controlling the island nation’s media, government and judiciary.
The fact that Americans still aren’t buying this type of condescending anti-gun fascism is a blessing from God. Unless you adhere to Grayling’s Secular Bible. In which case, gun rights are one of mankind’s greatest achievements.
Those poor rebels in Libya. No one told them they should be using ballots instead of bullets.
Okay, that’s fine. I don’t own any guns anyway. I own “tools of liberty”.
+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 !!
His name should be Quisling. I bet that he cuts a striking image in his flowing robes galloping on his unicorn.
“there are no good arguments in favour of the existence of highly dangerous killing instruments”
Okay then. Case closed. Here I thought there were lots of good reasons to own and use firearms, and in one sentence my thesis was demolished. I’m so impressed. I think we have to admit that that Limey pr!ck represents the essence of a “highly dangerous killing instrument.”
You’re right Ralph, I was checking the story on google and I was wrong.
Those poor elephants and tigers were hunted by humans WITH SPEARS before guns came around…twits.
Sport doesn’t necessarily involve killing. He should see for himself at Bisley. Sounds like a case of severely retarded sexual maturity to me.
“They should be illegal for all but properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments, provided of course that the governments in question are themselves properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in asociety where the rule of law obtains.”
World wide ban against knives, enforced by the UN. Some items of interest amongst the list: fertililsers, oxidisers, rocks, cricket bats, computer monitors, keyboards, motor vehicles and bare hands. One more step towards a better society through the Health & Safety policy.
“… say that they “need” their guns to “defend their freedoms”, meaning against the tyranny of government and federal taxes. They should be reminded that it is the ballot, not the bullet, that is meant to do that job for them.”
As often happen the sophistry here lies in assuming a fallacious but unstated premise, namely that civil order will always be in effect, that it will be possible to vote and the vote will be honestly counted and honored.
Yeah, and how’s that transition to utopian socialism working out for his previous country, anyways?
I tried to post this over there but I could not get in:
“if Anders Behring Breivik had carried only a knife or a wooden club, he would have been severely restricted in the harm he could do. The same would have been true at Hungerford and Dunblane, at Columbine High School and Kent State University”
“They should be illegal for all but properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments, provided of course that the governments in question are themselves properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in asociety where the rule of law obtains.”
Sir, you are aware that in the Kent State Massacre the killers were the National Guard, the properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of our government, aren’t you?
There were no “killers” at Kent State. Just National Guardsmen defending themselves.
Wow!
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Arrogant, mentally deficient, tyrannical, despots-in-training like this are the REASONS I own guns in the first place. As Blammo said, tools of liberty.
So he can think of a million reasons to outlaw guns, huh.
I only need to put forth one reason not to: The Second Amendment (at least for those of us in the US). Not a single one of his “reasons” could trump the safeguards and responsibilities that amendment protects.
Those dumb ass college whiners were throwing rocks and bottles at guys with guns, and some of them got shot. You shouldn’t throw Sh@t at people with guns, it’s that simple.
You’re off base on this one, JOE. The people who were actually shot at Kent State were far away from the melee, minding their own business. They weren’t involved in throwing anything at anyone. They just got in the way of some poorly-aimed bullets shot by untrained guys who had no idea what they were doing, led by another untrained guy who had no idea what he was doing. And I’m not down on the Guardsmen, either. It wasn’t their fault that they were tossed into the deep end. They didn’t fire on their own. They were ordered to fire by another untrained guy in the exercise of extremely poor judgment.
Um, actually, in addition to throwing rocks & bricks at the Guardsmen, someone among the Kent State protesters fired a handgun at them. This was after their previous detail, to quell union violence, where they had also been physically attacked.
The audiotapes of the event, preserved at Yale University (hardly a hotbed of right-wing conspiracies), prove that.
We know the protesters were throwing rocks big enough to cause serious damage (from their own admission), and we know someone among them fired a handgun. Until I see some proof that the crowd the Guardsmen fired into had no part in violent activity, I am not going to call them innocent bystanders.
They were the 1960’s hippie equivalent of the fake Palestinian “victims” who play dead for the Reuters cameras and then pop right up again when the photo shoot it over.
Let’s see… could’ve made a bunch of small bombs(already made a big one) to use on the island, could’ve used a machete or sword, could’ve mixed up some chemical weapons… but this moron thinks it’s guns or clubs or nothing.
Friggin’ idiot.
The ‘man’ asks the wrong question. Not “what would Brevik be without the gun”, but what would he be without the evil intentions?
Sheik Ilderim: Balthasar is a good man. But until all men are like him, we must keep our swords bright!
Judah Ben-Hur: And our intentions true!
Dr. Grayling, when you decide to enact your worldwide civilian disarmament program, I would like for you to personally come confiscate my “highly dangerous killing instruments” yourself.
Please remain consistent in your calls for ethical behavior and give me at least one hour’s prior warning before you arrive at my domicile.
An hour’s time should give me sufficient time to neaten up a bit, especially on the occasion of a visit from such a world-famous scholar, as well as to decide which of my “highly dangerous killing instruments” to present to you first.
Since he stipulated that state-owned firearms should only be under the control of governments that are “properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in a society where the rule of law obtains,” I think that it will be more fun to watch him try to disarm China and Russia, before he tries to disarm us.
Every murder since the beginning of time has one thing and only one thing in common. It was committed by a human. The tool is irrelevant without human input.
Wow, this guy is the anti-Rand. He doesn’t show – he tells. He doesn’t prove – he claims. It’s not our rational acceptance that he seeks to win, but our obedience.
And since when is the right to defend oneself from wrongfully-initiated deadly force, whether wielded by a criminal or the state, not a “human right”?
As for his claim that “there are no good arguments in favour of the existence of highly dangerous killing instruments,” I agree that there is no conceivable argument that will convince this lackwit (feel free to change the first two letters of this word to something saltier [and more accurate]; I wanted to keep this post clean for a family-friendly blog) of the need for free citizens to have the right to keep and bear arms. However, as of this posting, Jay G’s Dead Goblin Count provides 181 cogent arguments for free citizens owning and using firearms. I rather suspect that Grayling’s objection to firearms in the hands of free citizens is rooted in an objection to the very concept of “free citizens.” Unarmed subjects of a benevolent, all-wise nanny state are so much more tractable than armed, cantankerous citizens would allow themselves to be.
Further, given his position that firearms “should be illegal for all but properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments, provided of course that the governments in question are themselves properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in a society where the rule of law obtains,” I look forward to seeing the results of his attempt to disarm the governments of China, Russia and pretty much every nation on the continent of Africa. Let me know how that works out for you, Sparky….
Finally, who would be put in charge of seizing privately-owned firearms? Why, the same “properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments” that would thereafter have a total monopoly on the lawful possession of firearms. How many citizens would be wantonly slaughtered in the pursuit of Grayling’s vision? In the United States alone, I could easily imagine a death toll in the tens of millions, with both free citizens and members of “properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments” dying in heaps. (Of course, at some point, the “properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments” would cease to go door-to-door asking for firearms to be turned in, and would then resort to preemptive killing of everyone living in a home that was ever listed on a Form 4473.) As best I can tell, Grayling might well consider the death of free citizens as a feature, not a bug. After all, it’s their own fault for not submitting to the all-wise benevolent state in the first place. If killing them paves the way for content, compliant subjects to become a large majority (thus satisfying the “properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in a society where the rule of law obtains” portion of his column), so much the better. Killing soi-disant “free citizens” who refuse to be disarmed (for their own good, of course) is bound to be the best thing for society as a whole.
Or, at least, it will make things much easier for the ruling class to which Grayling clearly longs to belong.
One thing is for sure. The United States needs to pull our military out of England, Germany, Italy, and other European countries so that these euro lib-tards can start defending themselves.
PEOPLE are good and evil. Give ANY person too much power and they will fall to the evil within them. Give any small group of people power over another group of people and you will see this- it has been proven in psychology. Get a group of people and make 1/2 prison guards and 1/2 prisoners and see what happens, or get a guy to electrocute a stranger merely by having a “person in authority” giving him orders. Its been done. Humans will follow orders to kill if the authority is that of another, and we will do great evil to anyone under our total power- all of us.
Bring this to a larger scale- small numbers of persons (governments) controlling entire nations of people. These persons in power are people, just as prone to corruption and evil as anyone. Give them all the guns and you will have a bloodbath, you will have evil, you will have persons “just following orders” killing civilians under government orders, you will have TYRANNY.
THE PEOPLE are the ones who should have firearms for self defense, hunting, and to prevent tyranny. Armies should be dissolved completely- THEY are the ones trained to kill and mindlessly follow orders. Police- as long as the criminals are armed so too should they be.
All life has the right to said life and thus the right to preserve it, no government nor group of governments (UN) have the right to deny individuals their right to life, self defense, nor firearm ownership- they are all interlinked.
A blithering idiot from the Ivory Towers of Academia where Utopia and the real world never meet.
I wager that in his perfect world with complete governmental monopolies on firearms that the ovens in the concentration camps would be brought back into service. The beauty of our freedoms is that he can go through life disarmed and aloof and I hope that he never meets a thug in an alley with murderous intent. Oh wait, does he live in England? Yup, he’s so screwed given the violent crime in that “handgun free” country.
However, he needs to understand that he has no moral authority to prevent me from owning the best tools for righteous self-defense.
“A blithering idiot from the Ivory Towers of Academia where Utopia and the real world never meet.”
I don’t know about you but when I close my eyes and picture a liberal douchebag the picture of that guy pops into my head. And I consider myself pretty liberal on a lot of issues.
Has anyone seen Ward Churchill lately?
+1, I didn’t know he had a twin….
Obviously guns are the cause of all of these problems, no one was ever killed prior to the invention of firearms…
Here is a little experiment go check your gun safe and the safes of friends. Maybe the walls at your local gun store. Are there a bunch of holes in your safe or the walls from the guns shooting themselves? I’m guessing not(unless your gun is in need of a gunsmith, in which case why is your broken gun loaded). A firearm is just a tool, it is the mind of the person using the tool who determines whether it works for good or ill. Can I just as easily use a hammer to drive a nail as I could to brain someone?
In a picture perfect world with zero crime, guns wouldn’t be needed for anything more than putting delicious venison in my deep freeze and punching holes in paper. Last time I checked I don’t live in that world and I’m betting none of you do either. Maybe we should ask this guy since he seems convinced that he found it, unless its just what he sees with his head up his ass.
“They should be illegal for all but properly constituted, trained and controlled agencies of governments…”
Wait… why? I mean, if guns are illegal and making them illegal keeps them out of the hands of people like Breivik they why does the government need them? His very premise includes the implicit admission that gun laws won’t stop criminals. Which begs the question “why do you want to disarm only the law-abiding?”
It’s the never answered “Hey, why not just make murder illegal?” question.
“… provided of course that the governments in question are themselves properly constituted and controlled by democratic means in a society where the rule of law obtains.”
Ok, fine. So when the people have no weapons and the government, with its monopoly on force, decides to ignore democracy and rule of law then what? I naturally refer to Iran, North Korea, China, Syria and other such places. What’s that you say? It can’t happen here? Why not? Is there something uniquely defective about Arabs, Persians and Asians that makes them incapable of civilized conduct? Or is any group of human beings who wield unchecked power susceptable to becoming tyrannical? Which brings me back to the question of why someone would want to disarm the law-abiding.
The impulse to gun control is always, always, informed by either magical thinking or a love of facism.
Bootlickers like this never fail to disgust me.
I caught a grayling once, but it threw my hook… };>)}
I guess my smart phone screen is flaky because from the photos I couldn’t tell if this Grayling was a fey male or a very ugly female. Either way, it’s a barking moonbat!
Comments are closed.