Shannon Watts courtesy msnbc.com

“I think there is huge value in calling a vote for this in 2014 before the midterm election so that everyone is on record with a yes or no vote on gun reform before Americans go to the polls. It is brilliant and it will remind people who is not for background checks, while this common sense legislation has the support of 90% of Americans.” – Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts in With Congress stalled, gun safety advocates look to 2014 [at msnbc.com]

82 COMMENTS

  1. Ha! And in the meantime just about every Democrat (and probably more than a few Republicans) are cringing and saying, “Wave off, abort, wave off!” They’d rather destroy the country in some other, more subtle way, that the People won’t catch on to so quickly.

  2. I will be swearing in as a US Citizen in the next two weeks and will be going to the polls in 2014 to vote against one of my US Senators for this reason (they voted for it)

      • Congrats on surviving the process and welcome. Thank you for doing it the right way. Now time to protect your new rights!

      • Thanks guys, 14 years and approx. 20K is all it took :)…………… now just how many Glock 19’s could I have gotten for that………..

        • Yeah, the process isn’t easy, is it? I wonder if natural born citizens would be as casual with the Constitution if they had to go as much effort to fully enjoy all of its benefits.

        • About 20 Glock 19s if you get them used from the forums or gun broker.

          Welcome to citizenship. I did the same a few years ago. Although it wasn’t until after I got my citizenship that I found out you can purchase firearms legally as a legal immigrant.

    • Welcome, fellow citizen! The path is rough and the task is a difficult one. Glad to have you aboard!

    • I’ve been reading TTAG for a while, and I finally had to comment. I consider Ross and others like him to be far more American than those that were born here but don’t appreciate their rights. Congratulations fellow countryman, and thank you for joining the fight.

  3. I find myself in agreement with her for once, and thinking that the Headline has one too many letters in it.

      • If they do that, call it crime control, then even the dumbest voter should start to care when they notice crime is still present.

      • If we are not careful, they are going to do to guns what they did to Smoking. It started out that there would be smoking and non smoking areas in Restaurants. It spread like a cancer after that. You can see what happened. There is a Hospital, I think in El Paso, Tx., that if you smoke, you can not work there. I mean if you only smoke at home, you can’t work there. I believe that there are some Condo’s or Apartment Building that ban smoking. It will not stop there. Pardon my French, but give these Bastards an inch an they will take a mile. If they can’t pass a law to disarm us, the are going to make it pure hell to have one.

        • I’ve seen the documents that show that antismokerism is nothing but an insidious religious cult. Every single one of the “statistics” that the antis “cited” was a total fabrication. The EPA violated their own rules and used a 10% standard deviation rather than the statutory 5%, just so they could catch enough outliers to claim a correlation. And the list goes on. The Church of Warmingism adopted their tactics; the root of the tactic, of course, is the Big Lie.

          And the grabbers are doing exactly the same thing.

          Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing “1984,” “Animal Farm,” and “The Marching Morons” being acted out simultaneously.

    • Yup, I noticed the word games this time around. Likely a DNC/Team Hussein talking points memo. Also notice how they use the words “common sense” and “reforms”. Conspicuously absent from the debate are Schakowski and Feinstein. Must have stuffed them back in the commie closet. Now they trot our “machine gun” Mark Kelly and Gabby Giffords as their new sock puppets for gun control.

  4. Yes. I would like to get on record again those elected officials that are anti Constitution.

    • You are correct, but who cares. Bring it, we saw how well it worked against them. Bring-it-on, let us all remind the people.

  5. I would like to see all of them vote on gun control. That way I could check to see who I would vote for. If they voted for more gun control, I would not vote for them. This would save me from having to dig up their voting record, to see how they voted.

    • If you can’t look up the voting records of two senators and a congressman, what are you doing tomorrow?

  6. The transition from “40% of all gun sales are without background check” to “90% of all Americans want bg check” is now complete in it’s entirety. This will be their mantra for the next couple decades.

    Shanon Watts – go sell lemonades please.

  7. The Corpse Bride.

    But not because she looks like the character in the Tim Burton movie, although she does a little.

  8. 90% of Americans…blah blah blah. The same tired refrain. Of course this is coming from the woman who can’t tell the difference between a few thousand people and a million, hence the name change of her oganization when 90% of her expected “marchers” failed to show up.

  9. “Common sense” is interesting … Usually what common sense means is what the is first solution or set of a solutions someone can think of right off the cuff without thinking about it further in order to solve a problem.

    In everyday life it means clearly logical solutions (i.e. If something is wrong it’s better to fix it sooner rather than later or else the problem will get worse).

    Yet in this case, in terms of imposing civilian firearms restrictions (aka “gun control”), the set of solutions proposed are off the cuff solutions that clearly have not been thought out in detail. Ergo, they haven’t thought about the long term ramifications of what such legislation may do.

    In this case “common sense” won’t work. Because common sense has a good reputation and the
    way most of us think and feel about the word “common sense” it is actually a sort of “hypnotic word” (I have a background in hypnosis for the record) that when we hear it is meant to disengage our logical
    minds, and is also meant to make it difficult for us to argue against an argument, and heck … who can
    argue against “common sense”?

    For this reason politicians are using this term as a rhetorical device. In this instance it becomes a “trance” word … who can argue against “common sense”?

    However, while common sense may work for every day life, if we looked in detail at the pro civilian disarmamentarianists camp’s solutions and again, thought about the long term implications, we’ll quickly see it’s not common sense to make it difficult or impossible for law abiding citizens to expediently exercise their God-given right to self defense as affirmed by the 2nd Amendment, thus
    slowly guaranteeing a monopoly on arms to criminals and government (military and police) alike.

    Perhaps Shannon Watts should educate herself in depth about what happens when gun control is implemented, after all, being the founder of Mom’s Demand Action, it would make sense, “common sense” if you will. It would be common sense for her to really investigate and explore her own “common sense” solutions.

    Perhaps it would be “common sense” for her to scrutinize the methodology of her “logic”.

    • So, per your argument, what is the best way to argue with someone who declares that something is “common sense” A phrase BTW I would love to ban since it is so abused.

      • Common sense is a dangerous word. It presumes people will buy-in to an idea, as in “we should all know that.”

        How to combat “common sense”?

        Here’s some ideas.
        Something to the effect of:

        “How do you define common sense in this instance?”
        Talk about logic.
        “You’re assuming that because something is common sense it has to work. What if something is seems to be common sense and doesn’t work?”
        “How do you know the solution is common sense.”

        I would argue it is better to win arguments on facts and logic. Many rhetoricians persuade through process, tactics, techniques, and emotions and not through facts.

        It’s terrible to lose an argument because someone used tactics and process and not logic and facts.

        Expose the weakness of the methodology that they use to win arguments (Look at the examples stated above).

        (I.e. If someone
        uses an ad hominem attack remind them that your debating
        an issue and not you, yourself. Remind them that your weighting
        the merits of each argument. A judgment of you should have no
        bearing on the truth of the facts pertaining to your position)

        I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful tutor as a youngster who, although she was a staunch democrat, taught me how to think clearly and look past tactics in arguments.

        For a more comprehensive set of ideas that you can use, and I think this should be required reading for all freedom lovers, check out the following:

        “Thinking Straighter” by George Henry Moulds
        The Propaganda Game (Distributed by WFF’N Proof) which is based on Mr. Moulds’s book.

  10. Common sense means we should ignore this.
    Since 89% of the 90% claimed are uninformed voters.
    Lets put it to a vote again before the elections.
    This way “We” would know who to vote out of office.
    Now that would make for more “Common Sense”..

    • It’s the manufactured face–apparently they didn’t break the mold. Gotta love the Fiendstein pearls.

    • Glad you mention this.

      This is from the Dem’s playbook
      “Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging”

      The link to this playbook is here:
      http://share.marylandshallissue.org/gunviolencemessaging.pdf

      Unsurprisingly, they talk a lot about winning arguments by appealing to emotions … a tactic found
      in “Thinking Straighter” and in the Propaganda Game.

      I think appealing to emotions is a cheap shot in most instances. It’s better to exhibit principle
      and talk about facts, logic, and well principles.

      These folks want to disarm us and reduce the level of choices we pertaining
      to self-defense rights more difficult. Fascinating.

      You want to counter some of their arguments? Ask them to go in depth about the mechanics by which the laws will work and ask them to provide examples of the arguments they make.

      People will often not be able to provide specific examples about what they’re talking about. Asking them to explain the mechanics of how a certain situation arises will often leave them dumbfounded.

      I’m all for intelligent debate backed by facts but it amazes me how many people have drank someone else’s Kool-Aid and never scrutinized the philosophy they’re buying into hook, line and sinker, let alone
      never examined in detail the methodology they use to think things through and come to conclusions.

      Often you’ll see they’re not logical either. Sadly, it seems to me as if that’s a lot of people.

      I can’t plug “Thinking Straighter” and The Propaganda Game enough.

      • “Ask them to go in depth about the mechanics by which the laws will work and ask them to provide examples of the arguments they make.”

        I’ve often done exactly this in the past. I’ve asked them to tell me how exactly the law or laws they’re stumping for would have prevented Newtown/Aurora/Phoenix/Insert Example Here. The most common responses I receive are deafening silence, followed closely by goalpost moving and/or conversation focus changing.

  11. Yes, go on record right before the elections. Never thought I’d agree with a grabber about anything.

  12. Hell’s yah, Moms-who-scream-do-something! Let’s get it on!

    Actually screw the voting, let’s just brawl! I really wanna spar with Bloomers, since I’ve always wanted to headbutt a mini-senior citizen millionaire, but I am absolutely not above putting my boot up some wanna-be milf’s narrow ass,
    90% of Americans want Whoop-Ass! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!

  13. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
    – Thomas Sowell.

    As for 90%, that number is an utter fiction as it didn’t poll the specifics of the Manchin-Toomey background check proposal, but only polled the faerie and unicorn concept of “every gun sale has a background check.” One you mention these checks will cost money, that folks in rural areas may have to drive long distances to get background checks, that two neighbors now can’t sell shotguns to each other, that it creates a paper trail which could be used for future gun registration, support dies off pretty quickly.

    As for the public clamoring for gun control? More polling shows that gun control is way down on the list of people’s concerns. In fact, I believe that well over 60% of those polled don’t want congress to revisit gun control.

  14. As long as the Democrats have their minions in government, we are not safe. It does not matter to me what voting record they have on any particular issue, I will vote against them until my last breath. If they were true patriots who believe in the Constitution, they would have changed parties years ago when their party started an overt pattern of defying the Constitution.

    • Outside of third parties there is no pro-Constitution party in this country to switch to, don’t delude yourself. The “mainstream” GOP has just as much contempt for our rights as the Dems do. The Bill of Rights is more than just the 2A.

  15. We here in the Formerly Free State already know the result. All of our congresscritters swim in the Kool Aid. And Maryland hangs her head in shame…

    • What a load of crap. Not one single word about the fact that the shootings took place in zones that were already “gun-free;” it’s just another ho-hum character assassination piece.

      • I don’t understand your point. The point of that article was not really about gun-free zones, it was about these “moms” being not who they purport to be.

  16. Y’know, I would be in favor of more background check legislation – so long as it would eliminate the existing system and replace it with something that actually works, maintains privacy, is simple to use and without cost to the user.

    ‘Course, while such a system is entirely within our means, it’ll never happen as that’s not the aim of the “best government money can buy” — but I’d like to see it.

    See y’all at the barricades…

  17. Eew their letting it speak on TV…
    That proposal supported by “90% of Americans” seems to have missed everywhere that isn’t NYC because nobody outside of NYC would be dumb enough to think its a good idea.

    • Weelll…. I’ve seen a “map” of the U.S. in a pizza joint which illustrated the notion — through foreshortening — that N.Y.C. is most of the U.S.

  18. We already have background checks.

    We’ve had background checks for 20 years.

    You can argue whether or not felons should be able to buy guns because it is a Constitutional right. And while that is not without validity, at this point in time it’s considered an extreme view.

    So, if you ask most people, they support background checks. That there is some screening process to keep criminals from buying guns from the store doesn’t bother them. Probably because it wouldn’t stop them if they ever wanted to buy a gun.

    But that does not mean 90%, or even a majority of Americans, support anything like her “common sense legislation”.

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