Yesterday, I published an excerpt from an haaretz.com editorial: [American Jews] have always been among the most enthusiastic advocates of legislation that will regulate gun ownership in a reasonable way.” In my ongoing effort to understand the dangerous disconnect between Jews’ experience (Holocaust) and actions (supporting gun-grabbing pols and policies) I’ve focused on the word “reasonable.” I’m not talking about the misguided belief in “reasonable” gun control; a concept perpetuated by the United States Supreme Court (no less). You don’t have to be Bruce Krafft to know there is no such thing, logically speaking. No, the word triggered a more general contemplation of haaretz’ world view . . .
Some people (e.g., a large number of American Jewish intellectuals) believe that reason and intellect can overcome irrational emotions and naked aggression. They operate under the assumption that reasonable people who sit down for a reasonable discussion can reach a reasonable conclusion about unreasonable people, which will then have a reasonable impact on unreasonable aspects of society.
If someone within society is unreasonable—say a man uses force to steal something that doesn’t legally belong to him or kills a rival in the course of buying and selling illegal narcotics—there are reasons for that. Reasonable men can use reason to discover the reasons for undesirable behavior and take reasonable measures to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Punishment is part of the process. It also stands to reason (supposedly) that society can and should take preventative measures to stop these detrimental behaviors before they occur. Measures such as education. Economic redistribution. And yes, gun control. Regulating gun ownership in a reasonable way—despite (or because of) the unappreciated possibility of evoking the law of unintended consequences–to prevent crime.
Here’s the problem: we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. We live in a world with unreasonable people. People who are insensible to sensible arguments. People who are, for the lack of a better word, evil. Some of them ready, willing and able to inflict violence (i.e. death or grievous bodily harm) upon others for a variety of reasons—or no reason at all.
Gun rights advocates live in the real world. They know bad people do bad things no matter what good people do to stop or punish them. They realize that unbridled hatred and personal vendettas can take on a life of their own, regardless of any and all attempts to mollify misunderstanding and malice. As gun blogger Wee’rd Beard and his electronic cohorts’ recent personal attacks (From the Prick’s Mouth) prove, some people are simply beyond reason.
Gun control advocates don’t see it. They believe that reason (good) trumps criminality (evil) even when it doesn’t. In other words, gun control isn’t perfect but it’s right and just and the only reasonable alternative to (what they predict would be) the result of total firearms freedom. The Wild West. Blood in the streets. If an innocent dies as the result of gun control advocates’ futile attempts at criminal disarmament they feel . . . wait for it . . . vindicated. See? We need more gun control!
It’s sick. Elevating social justice (i.e. government control) over individual responsibility to combat criminality puts a society on a fast track to tyranny, fascism and mass murder. While I don’t doubt gun control advocates’ desire to ensure peace and tranquility, they forget that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In truth, there is no solution—“final” or otherwise—to evil. We can only guard against it, and fight it with all our might when it arrives on our doorstep. In most cases, as individuals. Preferably, with a gun.
Like I said, we don’t need any more gun control we need politician control.
Ultimately, that’s what the guns are for. For when people with that unreasonable mindset become politicians.
Or seeing how we have such large numbers of Jewish people (in business, education, and politics) trying to ban guns, perhaps it’s Jew control that we need?
I know you mean that in the nicest possible way.
You do? How do you know that?
Didnt most “wild west” towns have pretty restrictive carry laws? Or rather, didnt permit people to just tote guns around like most movies and tv shows have led us to believe…I think I remember reading somewhere that many towns had you check in your guns with the sheriff on you way into town, and then check them out when you were ready to leave.
Edit: found a picture of Dodge City, 1870s.
http://media.salon.com/2011/01/what_the-460×307.jpg
Yes Josh, some “wild west” towns had gun control. And during the time generally accepted as the “wild west” slavery was still in practice and women did not have the right to vote.
All of these practices were unconstitutional. Slavery was ended by the civilwar, women got the right to vote nationwide in 1920 and we gun owners are still struggling to get our rights.
I said that more to point out the irony in saying to de-regulate guns would cause the “wild west” like many antis love to reference. As I have continually stated on here, Im an unwavering supporter of the 2A. Sorry for any confusion.
Edit: Dear lord, I just realized how much I sounded like Jerry Tsai there.
Maybe because, such as the gun grabbers with “Shall not be infringed” the phrase “All men are created equal” has been willfully misinterpreted by people of less than good will and low moral values.
Hidden agendas, wilfull ignorance, evil intent or all of the above account for it in my humble opinion.
The people bought the line that it made them safer, just like they do now. Fear and intimidation
Actually, slavery was entirely Constitutional. What was unconstitutional was importing new slaves by that time.
Typically, the Western story is set after the Civil War and before the death of Queen Victoria (The Shootist reference there), but California during the Gold Rush would qualify, too, I’d imagine. The ban on carrying a firearm was on of the reasons for pocket guns of all kinds.
Greg, I see the western period starting at about 1850.
texas was a growing concern then and westward expansion was well under way. Slavery was practised in Texas at that time also.
Totenglocke. Slavery might not have been successfully challenged in court at the time but that doesn’t make it constitutional. “All men are created equal.” Sort of says it.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. — C.S. Lewis.
Oy, this…
I think American Jews are becoming somewhat less averse to the rights of those of us who know that indeed, happiness is a warm gun. That said, it’s a long road to change from a perspective couched in an urbanized intellegencia that views gun ownership as the territory of the unsophisticated rural know-nothing and dangerous hatemonger. It’s a culture that had lost it’s connection to its own past. A past that included small villages and farming, as well as being put (or rather, set) upon by the likes of the Czars Black Hundreds, with little or no means allowed for defense.
There is a new tradition that sprouted in the early 20th Century. The mentality that feared and despised the Czar and his anti-semetism, has over the years, been replaced by a perspective that wants nothing more than to nuzzle up to the warm teat of government. Perhaps it was that fear of the rural anti-semites in the old country that still haunts to this day, or the perceived rescue from the Cossasks by the ‘revolution’.
It’s hard to explain. Of all enthnic or religious groups, you would think post -Holocaust Jews would be the most pro Second Amendment. Well, that’s one of the things that separates American Jewry from Israelis, among other things. Mayor Bloomberg wouldn’t last a nano second in Tel Aviv if he tried to take away the rights of citizens to smoke or drink whatever grosse-gulp they wanted. And, take away their guns? Feh!
Yet, my dad was a WWII vet and a Texas cowboy. When I first told him many years ago that I was thinking of buying a pistol for target shooting, he would have none of it. So, I never told him, and we never had those fun visits to the range that we could have enjoyed.
It is a puzzlement, to quote the King of Siam. I think we’ll know the nature of the universe’s dark matter, before we know why more Jewish Americans don’t support gun rights.
I’m a Jew. I own a dozen guns and can’t wait to acquire more. The only reason the Feds won’t have to pry a gun from my cold dead fingers, is that I will be holding tightly onto something else. You never know what the Obamanation may come after next.
The term “reasonable” implies that a rational framework underpins the argument about to be made… in actuality, prefacing the argument in such a way usually means that reason is not actually being applied.
It’s a lot like statements that start off with “I’m not racist but…” which are usually followed by racism.
Here’s the rub. If you are actually making a rational argument, you don’t have to preface it with the term “reasonable”. If the argument is well made and rational it’s redundant. If it isn’t, claiming that it is doesn’t make it so.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it.”
-Dianne Feinstein
That’s what passes as “reasonable” gun control in the gungrabber-land. Adding the word “reasonable” in front of the phrase “gun control” was a piece of marketing bullsh!t designed to gull the idiots into believing that something reasonable was intended. Whenever somebody mentions “reasonable gun control,” we should all remember her words. ‘Cause whatever the gungrabbers are saying, what they mean is “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in.”
Liberals are idealists, and the notion that some individuals are just broken and some conflicts don’t have a mutually agreeable solution is seen as a problem to solve, not a reality to accept.
But there are more prosaic misapprehensions. A coworker the other day stated that the presence of a gun turns angry moments into shootings. I got him to agree with any number of truths about the shootings that typically make news, but he wouldn’t be moved off the idea that people (other than him, of course) have so little self control that if they’re mad at their family and there’s a gun nearby they’ll naturally pick it up and start blasting away.
So back to the first argument — yes, there are some people who are just insensible to sensible discussion.
Some American Jews need to re-read the part in Genesis when a man, filled with anger and jealousy, murdered his brother with a rock smash to the head. He did not use or need a gun (or knife) to commit the crime. Neither did the Romans, Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians, Cossacks, Inquisitors, and others need guns to oppress and murder Jews in the centuries before the Diaspora.
Why even consider a discussion since the gun-grabbers live in a fantasy world about guns and crime. No reasonable discussion can be had (if ever) until the anti-gunners study and acknowledge the hard facts about guns and society.
Jews are great at almost everything except self preservation. Always at a disadvantage they think they can talk their way out of trouble. Until the murders start.
Since Jewish culture is not a violent one, and Jews do well economically through hard work and education, they can mentally, if not physically wall themselves off from the world most of us live in, and seem satisfied isolating themselves amongst each other. Yet they extrapolate similarities between themselves and certain left leaning cultures that don’t exist under direct scrutiny, yet others greatly similar, they tend to dismiss or ignore.
They won’t look at reality if they don’t have to, because it’s ugly, and they have had too many ugly realities over the centuries.
“Since Jewish culture is not a violent one” are you f’ing kidding? Have you never opened a newspaper or seen the news in the last 50 years? The state of Israel is the epitomy of Jewish culture, their very own Zionist country for Jews and run by Jews, which was begun with violence, and has only grown through violence. I can only assume that you watch some very dumbed down media, so why not search google for videos of ultra Jewish Israeli settlers talking about “their” land and their god given “right” to it – trust me it is very scary, and not at all “non-violent”.
I personally don’t think a Jew is any more capable of violence than anybody else, but this idea that they are more peaceful than anybody else is ridiculous BS. Yeah, they had a bad time of it 80 years ago, but it doesn’t mean their sit doesn’t stink now. They are a religious group of people like any other, some good, some bad, no different from Catholics or Muslims in terms of how some lead a nice life, and others use their beliefs to justify terrible acts.
Very true-why look at Jews as any different from other groups?Where I grew up it was a rough neighborhood and mostly Jewish and there was a lot of violence,although most of it was not involving firearms.My father grew up there,and it was bad then also-he had a semicircular scar under his chin that he got from a fight with Italians(apparently a weekly ritual in his day) when got slashed with a broken bottle.I fought growing up-with guys from my block against other blocks-we used mostly rocks and stickball bats.
My mother’s family had originated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and her uncle served in their army-my paternal great grandfather served 25 years in the Russian army.All my family came here around 1902-06 on both sides-a lot of my friends including myself went in the service at a young age and some of us went into police work.Like me.This whole phony identification of Jews as “non violent reasonable people”is a self perpetuating myth pushed by liberal academics.And there have been quite a few holocausts,some worse than the one inflicted on Jews-the USSR and China slaughtered far more people than Hitler-that they were “their own”doesn’t make them less dead.Cambodia,Rwanda,Nigeria(Biafra),Armenia,etc are also on the list of incredible mass murder.Jews don’t own suffering any more than other victims of genocide.
I spent most of my life outside any sort of Jewish community so I guess maybe that makes me less prone to tunnel vision.
I don’t think I’d equate social justice with “government control”, unless of course, you’re referring to how it took legislative laws to end discrimination against groups like women, Catholics, Jews, Blacks, etc. Social justice in my book is far more broad.
When you promote the right of all citizens in the US to be able to own a firearm, regardless of their gender / race / religion, that’s social justice.
When a CCW holder intervenes and saves the lives of both themselves and innocent strangers, that’s social justice.
When we educate our co-workers, neighbors, and youth about the responsibility and value of firearms in our society, that’s social justice.
I think any sensible person can hold the reality that if we are to build an America where their truly is “liberty and justice for all”, we endorse both individual rights/responsibilities as well as a collective duty to build a society that all law-abiding folks can thrive in.
Criminals may be sociopaths but for the most part they the pass the “reasonableness” test. That is the big fallacy of the “why can’t we all get along” set. They just can’t understand that criminal behavior is quite rational and that criminals are good at calculating the benefits and costs of their actions. The two things that most influence their behavior are the chances of being caught by the police and convicted by judicial system; and the chances that their victims will successfully fight back. Raise the likelihood of failure and you will have a safer society. Perhaps if our anti-friends would ever sit down with a career criminal they might come to understand that their assumptions about criminal behavior are wrong.
+1
It never ceases to amaze me how people will rationalize criminal behavior – or any human behavior – based on nothing but their own projections. And that in spite of the fact that it’s something I used to do, until I finally became aware of what I was doing. I guess what amazes me is how blind we can be to our own subconscious assumptions.
+1
It’s RF’s site. He has the right to impose his rules and censor at his discretion any comments he sees fit. And since he’s trying to attract paying advertisers it makes sense to trim some of the uglier and more ignorant comments out.
Don’t get hysterical matt. Comparing a private blog to an overreaching government is a bit of a stretch to say the least.
And a proud self proclaimed racist calling for a ban on someone is downright funny.
Start your own site. You’re the IT man here with the computer skills. That way you can set the rules and if I ever show up there you can kick me to the curb.
And the truth that you keep ignoring is that it’s RF’s site. It’s his call what’s allowed and what’s not.
and I called the contents of some remarks “ugly” I said nothing about the appearance of the posters.
Reason can create a good society. Education and a good econonmy and a good healthcare system and on and on do make for a nation in which most people can live a good life and in which most will behave in a civilized manner. The problem is that there will always be some humans who through stupidity or evil will refuse to be rational. If they harm only themselves, that’s their choice. But when they harm innocent people, force is required.
When are the gun grabbers going t ostop the whole “Wild West” rhetoric? The wild west they constantly reference only existed in Hollywood screen writer’s imaginations. People just were not walking around killing each other willy nilly, as they imply.
Nowadays, there are people who obtain guns through illegal means (steal, black market etc.) and use them to prey upon regular folk. Introducing more “reasonable” legislation serves no purpose than to create more victims, since the people committing the crimes, while they are “covered” by the law, are not inclined to obey the law. Reason has nothing to do with the situation, because “reasonable” means something entirely different to them as opposed to a normal person.
For “normal” people, it’s reasonable to find a job to generate income to meet financial and material needs. For a criminal, it’s reasonable to steal said money form said person to meet the same needs. It’s all about perspective.
The gun grabbing Jewish poiticians are embracing their liberalism over their Judaism. Even a cursary look at Jewish history would show story after story of Jewish self determination against oppressors using weapons. Organizations like the JPFO are standing strong to bring Jews back to their rational selves.
I can tell you, I bring a group of new shooters to the range every week from my synagogue. Week in, week out, we show new shooters how to handle firearms safely and efficiently.
Some of these grabbers might be Jewish by name, but definitely not in action.
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