You may recall that we ran a story about Egyptians’ need to tool-up in the face of armed aggression in our This Is What Happens to a Disarmed Populace: Egypt Edition. More than a few members of our Armed Intelligentsia had little sympathy for the protestors gunned down by the government, or my argument that all people have the right to armed self-defense, no matter how odious their politics. [NB: defense not offense.] Regardless of how readers feel about the advisability of adding guns to the volatile mix in Egypt, added they are. “The violence that has engulfed Egypt in the past week has brought weapons on to the streets of the capital – in the hands of civilians – in a way that people say they have never seen before, and that shows signs of escalating,” the national.ae reports. Strangely (or not), civilians getting guns are bypassing the country’s restrictive legal purchasing process . . .
“They were attacking people with automatic machine guns,” said Shezli Nour, 41, a doorman for an apartment building. He estimated he saw 25 people carrying weapons. “It was like a massacre. I’ve been living here for 12 years and I’ve never seen anything like this – we didn’t know who was shooting whom.”
He said that he and thousands of other local residents, mustering sticks and knives, drove the throng back. But, if he had had a gun, he said he would have fired it. “If the situation continues, the people will try to protect themselves,” he said. “What will a stick do in front of a machine gun?”
He added that the authorities were not currently issuing gun licences, but that he planned to buy one on the black market, estimating the cost at about 700 Egyptian pounds (Dh368).
It’s worth repeating: an armed society is a polite society. OK, maybe not polite. But at least one where mutual [reasonably] assured destruction keeps the dogs of genocide at bay.
A fact that even the writer from the not-entirely-free-press-friendly United Arab Emirates acknowledges. As for the closing anti-gun quote, I’d bet dollars to Mishwy that it’s fictional. Or, at the very least, sourced with prior intent. Even if it’s not, point taken?
“It’s very terrible, it’s very new and we never had weapons before like this,” Mr Farag said. He blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for the majority of the violence. But in the chaos, the two said that there were also armed groups, not from the neighbourhood, who were setting up fake checkpoints, and robbing people and threatening them.
As police were nowhere to be seen in the melee, they were grateful for friends and neighbours on the streets – a few of them armed – to keep them safe.
“They were dealing with people respectfully and cheerfully,” Mr Farag said.
However, not everyone thought carrying a gun would help their situation. Mr Farouq, the exchange-shop employee in Zamalek, said that he would never contemplate buying a weapon.
“Carrying a gun is dangerous!” he said. “Maybe I would get angry with someone, and just pull out my gun and shoot them.”
“Carrying a gun is dangerous!” he said. “Maybe I would get angry with someone, and just pull out my gun and shoot them.”
(wow…)
Indeed.
I’ve often inferred into the logic of keeping guns out of schools the following statement:
“Dear student body, we have determined that certain of your classmates have the motive, inclination, and opportunity to murder you. While we have not remedied any of the forgoing, we have taken certain actions to limit their access to the instrumentalities of said murder.
Lunch today will be fish sticks . . . .”
The dude quoted in the article takes this to a new level by personalizing it; saying essentially: “but for my lack of a gun, I would murder someone.” Yet it is the missing gun he finds dangerous and not himself.
“Yet it is the missing gun he finds dangerous and not himself.”
Thumbs Up for that one!
“[My]carrying a gun is dangerous! Maybe I would get angry with someone, and just pull out my gun and shoot them.”
This statement is not reprehensible. While his grammar is iffy, he’s simply saying that he does not trust himself with a firearm. Maybe he’s temperamental or jumpy.
Gods know I know people who should never touch any weapon more effective than a spork.
At least he admits it, and honors his limitation.
He expressed neither the belief that others should do without, nor any desire to disarm them.
Give the guy a break.
Break given. I’ve heard exactly the same thing from NRA members who don’t carry. Swear to God.
I’d never doubt you sir, but that freaks my sh¡t.
Why should that freak your shit? What if they were a member solely to strengthen America’s freedoms, even if they chose not to excessive their right, but wanted that right protected for their friends, family and fellow countrymen? Give those people a break.
You are correct Eagle, Some folks are not comfy when something loud goes bang in their hands or at the prospect of killing something. As long as they support our cause, or don’t try to take our rights away, its all good.
The statement (if truthful) is of course not reprehensible.
Being removed from murder only by the lack of one inanimate object, is reprehensible.
Also worthy of disdain is what the declarant (or maybe the reporter) was probably implying–that he believes most people are but one inanimate object away from murder, perhaps to the exclusion of himself.
“Maybe he’s temperamental or jumpy.”
An ARAB? Temperamental or jumpy? Say it ain’t so!!!
@ Conrad
Yeah, wow. How entertaining…stranger than fiction that an Arab would become so…enlightened.
Maybe someone should send them a shipment of …bacon.
Egyptians are NOT Arabs.
Yeah, technically it’s true. But they share a language and the culture is very Arabic in nature.
If it walks like a duck…
One of the fascinating quotes out of this is the comment that the doorman intends to go and buy a weapon off the black market. Further illustration that no matter how strict the registration scheme, no matter how tight the legal arms market is people who are determined to have a firearm will find a way to go and get one. I would also be willing to wager that Mr. Faraq is an otherwise reasonably law abiding man who is acting on the primal instinct to survive and protect his own.
Now where else have we seen that…
A UMP? Really? Get down with your bad self, plaid-wearing Egyptian hipster rebel.
I’d love to have one… It’s a great gun if you can find one.
Heck yes!
I hear you can get one in Egypt.
Just did the conversion for 700 egyptian pounds…thats about $100 USD…wonder what they are buying and why cant I get anything that cheap?
Maybe they’re all buying liberators
Probably a real AK. We affluent American’s are the only ones that pay a thousand bucks for a semi auto copy. For 500 bucks he can probably have an AK, Makarov and 4 grenades.
Exactly. Depending on supply and demand, AK’s are generally available in the US$20-100 range on most of the planet.
Select fire AK’s are available in neighboring African countries for $50-60. I suppose ‘shipping and handling’ markup applies.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if Rifle open carry was a regularly seen thing?
Its legal here as long as we dont have a round chambered. Cant say I have the balls to try it though
That last quote proves that guns make people do crazy things. They can make a perfectly sane person become a homicidal maniac just by picking one up. Just getting close to a gun distorts a person’s perfectly normal mental process toward homicidal thoughts. All guns are demon possessed. The only safe gun is an exorcised gun! That should be the new rally cry.
You hit most of the salient points. Just give them time. The Administration, B-berg and MAIG just need to figure out how to spin it; they’ll get there. Soon the grabbers’ll realize that if the UN anti arms treaty had been in place none of this mayhem could have ever happened.
Those Brotherhood “protesters” who are being “dealt with” by the Egyptian military are the same ones who are carrying out a pogrom against the Coptic Christians. One could argue that the Copts should be armed, and in the short term that might help, but they are massively outnumbered and in the medium and long terms, they need to GTFO of Egypt. If the Brotherhood wins, they will celebrate by killing Copts. If they lose, they will take out their frustration by killing Copts. Either way, there’s no future for religious minorities in Egypt.
Airdrop arms over all three and let nature take its course becore us troops have to get involved, which is wwhere this is headed.
The Muslim Brotherhood had these guns and were using them all along, just with moderation. Remember these are the people who Ambassador Stevens was running military grade weapons with, they took over Libya and tried Syria.
They have largely failed in Syria so their big man in Egypt, Morsi, started running his mouth about expelling Shiites from Egypt, talking shit about the Coptic Christians, and threatening to go to war with Ethiopia if they built a dam on their part of the Nile. The MB running Egypt is kind of like the KKK running a Southern State all by itself, bad idea. What’s really sad is that the POTUS enabled these monsters.
“Carrying a gun is dangerous!” he said. “Maybe I would get angry with someone, and just pull out my gun and shoot them.”
If you cannot trust yourself with a firearm, you cannot trust yourself around whichever sex you are attracted to, trust yourself around children, trust yourself to drive, trust yourself with chemicals, trust yourself in society at large.
That is simply not true.
Some people lack the emotional maturity to go armed — like big children, as ’twere. At least he admits it.
He’s not advocating disarmament. Rather, he’s electing to not go armed.
That’s a right as well. That the first Amendment [supposedly] assures freedom of religion does not mandate that everyone have a religion. Neither does freedom of assembly preclude walking by oneself.
In like vein, the second does not mandate carrying arms.
Judge not and all that.
If you lack the emotional maturity to be armed (and just shoot people because you’re mad at them like this guy supposedly said), there is nothing stopping that same person from raping a woman because they were aroused, pouring acid on flesh or property because they were frustrated, drive into a crowd of school children because they didn’t cross the street fast enough and it made them angry.
Making a choice to forgo firearms because they’re not your thing, that’s one thing… forgoing a dangerous object because you “lack the emotional maturity” means you lack emotional maturity to handle ANY dangerous object.
Or are we working with the anti’s statement that the presence of a firearm is what causes murder in this country, because if that’s the case, we SHOULD get rid of firearms.
Carrying a knife is dangerous! Maybe I would get get angry with someone, and pull out my knife and stab them.
Well the quoted guy was supposedly a Muslim right? This is a religion where a significant number of adherents advocate women covering up because men can’t help themselves… The very word “Islam” means “submission” and historically they have been enthusiastic practitioners of slavery. Though it is worth noting that slaves in the Muslim world had much higher standing than in the Christian world, they were still slaves. Look up the Devsirme system, for example, where the Ottomans would purchase Christian boys from their families and raise them to be Viziers and Generals, they did this because they couldn’t trust their own kinsmen in the same positions.
It is just a fundamentally regimented authoritarian culture they have over there, which is what makes the modern day horde of the Muslim Brotherhood so disruptive and dangerous wherever they rear their heads. They are like the Barbary pirates on land, literally. It is really quite ironic they call themselves the “Muslim Brotherhood” because their behavior is in total contradiction to Islam in most cases.
Fug,
“their behavior is in total contradiction to Islam in most cases.”
How so?
To FUG,
Read the Koran lately ?
Anarchy in the ME, guns appearing from ‘No Where’, mass slaughter? Now we know why Amb. Stevens had to die.
It’s not about political control over there, it’s all about theocratic control.
The history of Islam is replete with settling scores through violent means.
It’s the “If a sword is drawn, it must draw blood.” provision that guides them.
The word reasonable? That rarely occurs in the same sentence with Islam.
Submission, however, is a word that regularly occurs with the word, Islam.
So even if you have a gun, you are required, religiously speaking, to submit,
to not use that gun against the religious authority. i.e. the Mus-brother’s.
Doing so is tempting death for being an apostate to the will of Islam
It would seem all religions are created in order to rule. If their first leaders, and the tradition’s first writings, do not evince that purpose, then later behavior by the organized cult will do so. Kings and presidents demand this to be so, and few can resist. It is explicit in Islam, Judaism, and became so in Christianity. Those who would rule adopt religious sentiment to their cause. The type of rule varies from Quaker meetings to Caliphates and Papacies, but I believe the core statement. Rule may be of a family, town, nation, or empire. That’s just a variation in size and manageability. Some religious views argue against being ruled by secular power, but that is simply a statement of rebellion, of desire to be ruled by self autonomously. The early history of Judaism was one of desire for expansion and conquest under kingship and priest-cult. Islam is still in that phase. Certainly Christianity went through a very prolonged phase with similar characteristics, both as evidenced by Papal and Bishop states, and by those whose princes bent Christianity to their purposes.
Unfortunately we have a choice in Egypt (and Syria, etc.) between the statists and the Islamists.
Islamist and Statist are not mutually exclusive. Nearly every statist regime has some philosophy to which it claims to adhere. King George was appointed by God; Obama is growing the state for our own good; Iran is both Islamist and Statist.
It’s all the same in the end, every statist government says the same thing: “It is my duty to force you to do what is right, as defined by ______ (God, Allah, Gaia, Marx), and as interpreted by . . . . me.”
Yes. Organized religion does seem to be the playing upon susceptibility to faith in order to get otherwise-unrelated people to cooperate in the enterprise of government, which enterprise has leaders, which leaders have desires. I wish for leaders in the US whose desire was to build a reputation of honest service and a life of modest behavior and consumption. Fat chance. At this point I’d settle for modest behavior, a Mitt rather than a Willie.
Not all religion is statist by nature. For instance Christ set the example for his followers by refusing to be made king and claiming his kingdom was no part of this world. Efforts to invoke Christ in statist policies is a perversion of his teachings. The same may be true with Mohammed, I am not well versed in the Koran. But in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood (and any other group that could be described as “Islamist”) it is clearly a statist movement. So yes it is a battle between secular statism and religious statism.
Between the two I’d prefer to see the secular statists win because they are not a threat to their neighbors (Isreal) or to their own minority Christian population.
“The same may be true with Mohammed, I am not well versed in the Koran.”
Read it. The U of Michigan has the whole thing on line. Then read the actual histories of what Mohammed and his immediate followers did when they were alive. Read some written by contemporaries and some written by historians. Read some written by Muslims, and read some by Western Academics. I’m not going to tell you what you will learn. Just read and decide for yourself if there is any moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam.
Every American should read the Koran.
Duke of Sharon, Every Muslim should read the Koran too.
DoS, I’m personally not interested enough. One of two things is true, and I really couldn’t care which. Either the good and peaceful Muslims are following the Koran, or they psychokiller Muslims are following it. There are plenty of brutal events recorded in the Bible and they have served as valuable lessons to later generations. Many people have tried to use those events to demean Christianity. Perhaps Mohammed was a good man. Perhaps not (I think the more likely). The majority of Muslims aren’t in the psychokiller group and if their belief in a higher being that they will eventually have to answer to makes them peaceable, well, at least their not atheists.
As Jesus said, you can see the value of a tree by the quality of it’s fruit.
This is ironic to me, in that, most of the AK pattern rifles we find on BDA in Afgahnistan are of Egyptian manufacture.
The US has for decades availed themselves of Egyptian arms manufacturers to provide us with Soviet-model weapons when we wish to arm foreigners with small arms without those arms being tagged as American. Often times they are not even obviously marked as Egyptian. That’s been part of the deal for a long time.
The 2 lads in the picture are being billed as civilians? Why am I having trouble accepting that as truth?
Just like South Africa, in which a euphemism for an AK is “Mandela’s credit card.”
Interesting. From columist link. Can own/carry. opern or concealed handgun (with permit). But no long gun. What about “sporting use”
“Carrying a gun is dangerous!” he said. “Maybe I would get angry with someone, and just pull out my gun and shoot them.”
This guy is obviously enlightened. A less enlightened Muslim would just pull out his gun and shoot them whether he was angry or not.
That’s harsh, sir.
Yeah, militant Islamists are a problem in the Middle East — and by extension to those who engage in relations with the Middle East — however they have their parallels. Militant Christianists are a problem in indonesia, with wholesale slaughter, forced conversion and all the other goodies.
Yeah, the 911 dudes were Muslim, but Pearl Harbor was Shintoists and Germany was largely Christian — “Got mit uns!”
Subjugation of women and religious minorities, and the ramming of religion into law are hardly unique to Islam.
Don’t believe me? Declare that you’re M’umbala (an African animist religion) in Kenya and see what happens. It won’t be Muslims fitting you with a paraffin necklace.
Some of the frequenters of this board are probably Muslim; it is after all one of the great religions.
Ever hear of Shriners? Y’know, hospitals and glasses? Funny hats? That’s the Syrian Shrine, a Muslim charity.
Not evey American — even among the OFWGs — is Christian or Jewish.
The initial wave of Israeli occupation (“settlement”) needed the British out, and accomplished ht by bombing cafés and British troop trains. Once that was accomplished, so much for Palestine.
Yeah, Iraqis shout “Allahu Akbar” when they charge, but they’re fighting occupiers, invaders. Think about it.
Soon’s y’all make this about religion, we’re all lost.
“Militant Christianists (sic) are a problem in indonesia (sic), with wholesale slaughter, forced conversion and all the other goodies.”
Care to cite something, or was this retrieved from your posterior?
And there all full autos Robert wow!!!! Hope the Christians get thousands of AKMs to protect themselves from MBH members.
It’s Kristallnacht time for the Coptic Christian community in Egypt. Those innocent victims of government violence are the ones who are burning down churches and killing innocent Copts. The Egyptian army is doing the right thing by putting down these mad dog Muslim Brotherhood thugs. If you keep on defending them I am going to lose a whole lot respect for you.
Tdiinva, your completely correct. If you are a Christian or a Jew…..hell, if your muslim, atheist, bigfoot, alien, or simply alive and breathing air….all are doomed in this sharia wannabe nightmare that is islamonazi terror. Rooting for a dictatorship shows us all the horrors of Islamism in the crap can that is the Middle East (not including tiny Israel). Makes you realize and rejoice in the splendor that is the good old US of A.
It makes me wonder if the speaker has attacked anyone in the past with bare hands or improvised weapons for angering him. This sounds like a serious rage problem. . . or else he’s attempting to demonize guns by implying that they incline one towards murder. So I guess it’s either he’s insane because he attacks people without cause or he’s insane because he thinks inanimate objects cause people to violate a basic and deep seated human prohibition against murder. You know, maybe he’s just insane.
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