Over on a site called xojane.com a self-confessed Texas liberal explains her decision to purchase a firearm. “For years, I was what we lefties in Texas refer to as, ‘A bright blue dot in a big red state.’ I believe in recycling, social services, a woman’s right to choose, and immigration. I spent a lot of time defending these things around my red friends, and bemoaning this defense around my fellow blue dots. And then I bought a gun, and everything changed. I was shamed by the blue dots and consoled by the red. I turned purple.” Well, now, hang on a minute . . .
Setting aside the question of abortion, Ms. Glasser is being disingenuous when she suggests that she had to defend recycling, social services and immigration around her “red friends.” Conservatives also believe in recycling, social services and immigration. It’s how government implements “these things” that separates the two political camps.
Conservatives believe in free market solutions for recycling, limited and effective social services, and legal immigration. They do not believe that the government should remove or discourage personal responsibility or reward lawlessness. Liberals believe in mandatory recycling, pervasive and comprehensive social services, and amnesty for “undocumented Americans.” They believe government is responsible for its citizens’ welfare and tackling the causes of lawlessness as aggressively as its manifestations.
So . . . what? Despite the Democratic Party’s official anti-gun party platform and the “blue dot” Progressive movement’s relentless attack on gun rights, Ms. Glasser can hold these views and a gun. Support the party that want to take away your gun? Uh, OK. More to the point, did purchasing a gun ownership really change Glasser’s politics, turning her “purple”? More generally, is gun ownership a gateway drug for conservative principles?
Glasser’s journey into firearms ownership started in a familiar place: criminal victimization. Burglars invaded her house five times.
As the little slips of paper with police report numbers on them piled up, I became familiar with the questions detectives would ask when they learned of my prior break-ins. “Any angry ex-boyfriends” was only a reminder that I had none worth noting. “Workers at the house lately,” just made me follow the cable repairman around like a crazy person. Everyone seemed suspicious.
I took every precaution I could think of before buying a gun. I built a better fence. I added a wrought iron gate. I got a dog, though he is more likely to lick someone to death than bite him. I put in a better alarm system. I eventually added cameras, and I could see the feed from them on my phone. I checked it multiple times while at work; if I was out of town, the first thing I did in the morning, and last thing I did at night, was check on my house.
Glasser’s realization that the police were no help lead her to buy a gun to protect herself. You’d think that the following paragraphs would complete the narrative, indicating her light bulb moment awareness of government’s limitations and the need for self-reliance. You’d think wrong.
Here’s the truth about guns that no one, on either side of the debate, wants to tell you: shooting them is fun. I’m a bleeding-hearted, left-leaning liberal and I get a cheap, easy thrill out of shooting my little .38 caliber pistol. The “I am woman; hear me roar,” thrill I’ve gotten the few times I shot an Uzi, AK, or even a Glock is enough to leave a tremble running up my arms (though in reality, that’s likely just kickback).
But the emotional component here is huge. That thrill at the range translates to confidence outside of it. And confidence was a great comfort.
People on the pro-gun side of the debate know that shooting is fun. Glasser’s obvious (to us) mischaracterization of the pro-gun position make me wonder if she’s living in a left-leaning anti-gun echo chamber, where feelings trump rational thought. Glasser argument so far: I needed a gun and … guns aren’t that bad! They’re fun!
It’s a strange pivot point for an anti-pistol protagonist, but understandable given her social milieu. If you engage a die-hard anti-gunner in a fact-based debate on the right to keep and bear arms, you eventually get to the point where you see their foundational belief: guns are icky. Glasser gives us valuable insight into her struggle to overcome her friends’ political and cultural disdain for guns.
I tried to help the blue dots understand my gun the same way I tried to help red friends I cared about understand the importance of recycling: by putting the cost in a familiar context . . .
I tell my blue dot girls, “Ladies, every day, before I leave for work, I have to hide my laptop in a new place – one that isn’t obvious to a burglar. The underwear drawer and between the mattresses, FYI, are considered obvious. And when you alternate between the sheets, at the bottom of the dirty clothes bin, or in the bathroom cupboard enough times, you start to go home at the end of your long work day and forget where your laptop is.
“And if I want to go someplace fancy, I have to allot extra time to go into my hall closet, climb on a stool, and pull down the cardboard box marked, ‘vacuum cleaner parts,’ because that’s where I’ve hidden any jewelry I care about. Not just nice jewelry, or family heirlooms, but any cheap-ass thing I like, because I’m still pissed about the loss of my $25 cocktail ring I used to wear three times each week.
“So when you live alone, in a house that has been broken into five times, and people keep saying to you, ‘Just move,’ or, ‘It’s only a matter of time before they come while you’re home,’ then you can decide that getting a gun isn’t right for you. But for now, this is what’s right for me.”
And that usually shuts them up.
Really? Glasser convinced her anti-gun friends about the wisdom of owning a firearm to eliminate inconvenience, with a small, off-hand reference to the possibility of being assaulted, raped, robbed and/or killed? Maybe “convinced” isn’t the right word. I’m thinking . . . silenced. Glasser silenced her anti-gun blue dots by shaming them. I can’t afford to live somewhere where I don’t need a gun like you can, so STFU.
How can I be so confident in this analysis? Her final paragraph.
I am happy to report that I sold the house and moved on, to a place where I no longer have to keep a revolver on my bedside table. It’s unloaded, and locked up, hidden away like my jewelry used to be, waiting for me to take it out on the range for a little bit of fun.
I reckon Glasser’s firearms purchase didn’t turn her purple. I bet she continues to cling to the liberal party line on guns and crime: making society safer is the “answer.” We should work to restrict gun ownership while removing the causes of criminality. We should change our society so that everyone can live in a home where a self-defense firearm is unnecessary. (Except for fun.)
To be fair, Glasser made a good if familiar case for gun ownership. Then she left it on the table and literally walked away, just as her friends recommended. Gun ownership could have been a step towards a political philosophy of self-reliance, but it wasn’t. She just couldn’t go there. In that sense, Glasser ended up as she started: yellow.
Sad but true-not everyone is cut out to own a gun.
Still more folks own guns with zero intention or desire to use them against another person. We should welcome them into the fold as equals instead of looking down on them for deciding they personally don’t want to or won’t take a life. The antis don’t give a piss about the politics of who they want disarmed, and neither should we .
Excellent point, ST ! I’ve never thought about it in that way before.
Note that OUR side is more accepting of her liberal views then the libs are of her gun ownership. NO surprise here. I have an old high school buddy who is now a transgendered woman in CA. She still likes big guns, fast cars and loud rock and roll and plays a mean Precision Bass. What changed? In all nonpersonal respects nothing.
Ray
“Conservatives believe in free market solutions for recycling, limited and effective social services, and legal immigration. They do not believe that the government should remove or discourage personal responsibility or reward lawlessness. Liberals believe in mandatory recycling, pervasive and comprehensive social services, and amnesty for “undocumented Americans.”
Why don’t we get state and national candidates who can forcefully change the media narrative to this instead of letting the left-leaning media paint conservatives as heartless, anti-science, selfish gun nuts?
Perhaps that’s because most conservatives are indeed heartless. And selfish. But after all, you characters have the mighty Faux News to spread your propaganda. Admittedly Faux is just a tiny drop in the sea of genuine news services, and reality and truth tend to lean liberal, but you do indeed have your own fantasy network.
Says the man who’s egotistical enough to represent himself as divinity.
Troll. All news services have become someone’s propaganda tool. Fox just decided to go for the conservative side of the market because the liberal propaganda market was overcrowded.
How does the saying go…your entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Direct from the heart of liberal fantasy land, the NY Times quotes several poles and research that it is in fact liberals who are selfish, stingy, and in that liberals viewpoint, a “tightwad” unwilling to sacrifice. Sorry to pop your little fantasy bubble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=0
‘…..reality and truth tend to lean liberal….’. Good one. Is that why progressives, or liberals, or leftists, or communists, are constantly changing their own name? Because they are so darn pragmatic and their policies keep working?
The truth is generally harsh, and not what humans would like it to be, and therefore not very compatible with most politics or politicians, and least of all those who wish to live at their neighbor’s expense by using the government to limit freedom. The truth is, it doesn’t work, no matter what they are trying to call themselves these days.
It’s also why they trendy liberal causes tend to morph relatively quickly over time as the scientific facts discredit the emotionally based rhetoric. Such as global cooling of the 70’s morphing to global warming of the 90’s morphing to the current “climate change” scenario. Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” (we’ll be suffering inescapable global famine by 1980!!) is a prime case of liberal pseudo-scientific hysteria.
I think God forgot the [/sarc] tag… I was grinning the whole time at the masterful use of sarcasm, because no one with an IQ above room temp could actually believe any of that crap… Least of all, The Almighty Himself.
It’s funny when liberals think they’re educated.
The good news is that the liberal media is dying a slow suicidal death because of their bias. 40% of the population self identify as conservative vs. 20% liberal, but every established media outlet in the country was overtly biased to the left until Fox News and the internet. Now they’re all going bankrupt and the Republicans control congress and most of the statehouses. Sooner or later the Republicans are going to learn to stop being afraid of the leftist media. The handful of people who still listen to them will never vote Republican anyway.
LOL. Nope, sorry, not gonna happen. There’s been two major political parties since the US was created. Yet for some reason you suggest we’re on the cusp of the Democrat party dissolving. Fun fact: Republicans have controlled the Senate and HoR before. Then they lost control. Then they regained it. Might we have a Republican president next? Sure. And then it’ll go back. And forth. Like it has for decades.
“There’s been two major political parties since the US was created.”
Maybe you got the revisionist textbooks, but in the beginning, there were mostly “Democratic Republicans.”
And they were opposed to the Federalists.
He’s mostly right. There was one brief “era of good feelings” when there was only one political party, but other than that there have always been two.
I made no such suggestion about the Democratic party. Unless we fall under a totalitarian dictatorship, there will always be two parties. I said the ‘LIBERAL MEDIA’ is becoming less and less relevant every day. CNN’s and MSNBC’s ratings went down the sewer pipe long ago and they’re not coming back anytime soon. Every couple of months you hear about more layoffs at the New York Times. In fact the only newspaper that’s thriving is the Wall Street Journal. Republicans are scared to death of the liberal press, but one of these days they’re finally going to realize that (almost) nobody pays attention to anything they say anymore.
Go look at the popular vote trends for Dems and Reps. Then weep (or cheer, depending).
There won’t be a Republican president in the White House beginning with 2016, unless GOP changes a lot.
There won’t be a Republican in the White House in 2016 unless both Barack O’Bama and Joe Biden die, leaving the Speaker of the House as president. Other than that, I take it you have no idea which party controls congress and most of the statehouses. B.O. is leaving a very bad taste in almost everyone’s mouth.
Like I said, look at the popular vote rather than election results – that will tell you the degree of actual support either party has. The election results are skewed by the FPTP political system and district boundaries, but they can only be skewed so much. At some point, a popular supermajority will translate to a majority in the House, and only the Senate will remain majority Republican for the foreseeable future because of the large urbanized / small rural state disparity.
I would also suggest looking up which House seats will be up for re-election in 2016, and which party has an advantage in each of them. People often forget that any particular House election is not representative of the overall trend, because it can be geographically skewed towards areas that are strongholds of either party.
‘I would also suggest looking up which House seats will be up for re-election in 2016…’
Um…that would be all of them. Representatives are elected to 2 year terms. Redistricting happens every 10 years after the census and the districts are determined by the states. So while redistricting could have helped the Republicans in the House in 2014, the districts were the same in 2010 as they were in 2006. And the only way that Republicans could have benefited from redistricting was because so many state governments had flipped to Republican.
Sorry, that last paragraph was meant to say “Senate”, of course.
For the House, the real elephant (heh) in the room is not redistricting/gerrymandering, it’s FPTP. If, out of three districts, two vote 51-R/49-D each, and one votes 49-R/51-D, you end up with two Rs in the house and one D, even though the popular support is almost even. Gerrymandering just makes it more pronounced in some cases, but those “wasted votes” will occur regardless of how you subdivide. The only way to account for them in a fair manner is by using some system that counts votes directly on the national level instead of, or in addition to, the district level (e.g. mixed-member proportional).
Between “legitimate rape” and “evolution is a lie”, most conservatives do a good job of painting themselves.
I thought evolution was a ‘theory’.
Gravity and electromagnetism are “theories”, too, in the exact same sense. Conservatives do themselves no favors with this line of argument.
Gravity and electro-magnetism are ‘facts’. 50% of the population don’t disbelieve their existence. They can easily be proven. There’s no subjectivity in throwing an object off a tall building and saying, ‘look, gravity!’ The fossil record has nothing but subjectivity. For example, I heard a while back that dogs descended from whales because there are similarities in the bones in their inner ears. So the animals crawled out of the sea, grew legs and lungs, then crawled back into the sea, kept their lungs and lost their legs, but then crawled back out of the sea and grew their legs back because their inner ears are similar. However, if you believe in a creator, then it makes perfect sense that he would use similar designs in multiple animals. Kind of like Hondas and Buicks both use overhead valves, but neither gave birth to the other. But this is the type of things held up as ‘proof’ of evolution. Until they can observe evolution (not just natural variety within a species) in the wild, or replicate the genesis of life in a laboratory, evolution will be a theory, unlike gravity and electro-magnetism.
“Things fall down” is a fact, and for a long time was perceived to be the inherent nature of things. That everything is attracted to everything else proportional to their mass is not at all obvious, and took a while to get right (notably, Ancient Greeks were convinced that heavier things fall faster, and even today this is a common misconception).
Similarly in case of evolution, “many traits are inherited” is a fact, that humans have made good use of as seen in breeding of livestock and pets. Which traits are inherited, how exactly that inheritance works, and what are the mathematical laws behind it, is something that took a while to be established.
But once established, there are inevitable consequences from them, including evolution. Simply put, if everything we know about genetics is true, there’s no way for evolution to not be happening – just like, given everything we know about gravity, there’s no way for planetary orbits to not be elliptical, even for those planets which we can’t directly observe.
And evolution can, in fact, be observed in the lab quite readily, with organisms (such as various bacteria or fruit flies) that breed fast enough that evolutionary changes in a distinct isolated trait can be observed. Since the difference between species is nothing but an accumulated difference in traits (and the boundary is largely arbitrary – nature doesn’t care about “species”, it’s an entirely human construct that stems from our desire to categorize everything), that experiment also effectively demonstrates speciation.
I’m not sure where you’ve read that dogs descended from whales, because that’s certainly not a mainstream theory. For starters, no modern species is descended from any other modern species – rather, we all have some common ancestor, and some have it more closely than others. In case of whales, the other modern species that has the closest common ancestor with them are hippos. And it’s not based only on their physiology, but now increasingly on DNA studies. Because the majority of mutations that are reflected in DNA are neither harmful nor beneficial, they stick around and become an effective “fingerprint” of DNA over time; by counting identical mutations that are preserved in different species, we can determine very accurately which splits occurred before which, and in many cases even the timescale (though that is trickier because mutation rate is not constant).
Some light reading for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
TL;DR – “Theory” used in common parlance is not the same as scientific theory. Just as with “law”.
Further, the vast body of evidence supports evolutionary theory and is freely available to test by everyone. Whereas “intelligent design” starts with an answer and tries to find evidence to fit (or altering evidence to fit). Further, the entire field of biology hinges upon evolution. Without it, we are without many of our medical advances, including vaccines.
Sorry Grindstone, but evolutionary theory starts with an answer as well. If you believe in God, or a god, the evidence fits perfectly into your belief system. If you believe that there is no god it also fits perfectly into yours. It takes just as much faith to believe in one as it does the other.
^ What Gov said.
For the record, I believe in both. Evolution is lacking and still begins at spontaneous generation. Creationism is far too simplistic and relies on God magic.
It’s far more likely that this universe is bigger and more mysterious than we will ever truly know.
For Evolution, assuming that we mean by that “macroevolution” or the idea that all life on Earth came from a common ancestor, I prefer “hypothesis” or “conjecture”, as it lacks the evidence to be considered a scientific theory (which has very different standards than the everyday usage of the word “theory”). In reality, though, the claims of Evolution are historic claims, not scientific ones, anyway.
For Evolution, assuming that we mean by that “macroevolution” or the idea that all life on Earth came from a common ancestor, I prefer “hypothesis” or “conjecture”, as it lacks the evidence to be considered a scientific theory (which has very different standards than the everyday usage of the word “theory”). In reality, though, the claims of Evolution are historic claims, not scientific ones, anyway.
Macroevolution is not a hypothesis or conjecture and it has a tremendous amount of evidence to support it. It is one of the most well-documented things in all of science. The claims are not historic, they are scientific.
^ What Gov said.
For the record, I believe in both. Evolution is lacking and still begins at spontaneous generation. Creationism is far too simplistic and relies on God magic.
It’s far more likely that this universe is bigger and more mysterious than we will ever truly know.
Evolution is not lacking and does not begin at spontaneous generation. Nor does it study how life began. It only studies how existing life evolved. How life began is a separate field of study called abiogenesis. Life would have began with self-replicating molecules forming, which are not hypothetical as there are multiple ones we know of that exist. Over hundreds of millions of years, these molecules would have grown increasingly complex, until one of them began forming a membrane, and developed into the first cell. From there, multicellular life formed as individual cells began combining together (something that also has been done in a laboratory BTW).
I get no thrill from shooting. In fact, the only thing I like about it is any improvement in skill I notice and the smell. Is that unusual?
Yes there is something wrong, you should send all of your guns to me right away!
I used to get a thrill from it in my youth. But no longer. Shooting is a pain in the a-s. It’s expensive and time consuming and I always wind up running into someone who has either a “gun-ego” problem or worse, a safety compliance problem. Then I have to clean the damn things. I still do it for skill improvement, but I hate it. I much prefer dry firing at home.
I agree, shooting used to be fun for me also. I still like guns, reading about them, talking about them, handling them…..but now I just get annoyed that it is a pain to pack up, go to the range, and watch dollars fly out of my barrel. I will never sell my guns, but they just don’t get the work out they used to, shooting has kinda jumped the shark for me.
Shooting is fun all over again. I started shooting 3 gun and IDPA. No way i could outgrow the fun competition!
I kind of feel the same way but I know I will enjoy shooting again when I live in a more rural area again. Right now I have to either go to an indoor range or drive an hour out of my way just to put holes in paper.
Yes.
Way down in our lizard brain most of us feel the same elation that pre-homo sapiens must have felt when they first created the spear. We may have been among the most handicapped of the animals – slower, with inferior senses of smell and hearing – but we were no longer the most helpless. Even the subject of this piece mentions the “ ‘I am woman; hear me roar,’ thrill”. Few things are as empowering as the realization, even if on a subconscious level, that you have leveled the playing field with the threats in a sometimes dangerous world.
“God may have made men, but Samuel Colt made them equal” and women even more so. Gun in hand you are no longer the most vulnerable prey on the prairie. We may just be punching holes in paper, but that lizard brain is saying, “That would have stopped him.”, with every good hit.
You might not even be aware of on a conscious level, but that lizard brain is smiling with every squeeze of the trigger.
I almost never go to the range alone. I’m either spending quality time with my wife or hanging out with friends. It’s not just “sharpening skills” for me, it’s a social event.
I even organize group outings with my co-workers.
I hate this Us vs them mentality. I am a liberal in a lot of ways, but support gun rights so much that I vote republican straight ticket. The problem is that those who are willing to vote republican are slowly losing ground because most people that aren’t biggots or just old don’t care about abortion, gay marriage, marijuana, and what have you. The Republican Party needs to drop all those subjects if they want to survive, and gun rights go right along with it. Because we all know the democrats want a complete ban in the end.
You’re letting ‘them’ (liberal media) define ‘us’ (conservatives). You misunderstand conservatives on social issues. First we’re not bigots. The issue isn’t whether gay people can be gay, the issue is that the left wants to force conservatives to violate their religious principals. It’s not enough that the state gives them a marriage license, anyone who has a religious objection to actively participating in the wedding ceremony must be punished. Should Quakers be forced to go to war? Should Jehovah’s Witnesses be forced by the state to take blood transfusions? Should a pro-life Christian doctor be forced by the state to perform an abortion? Should there even be a First Amendment?
You also seem to be unaware of public opinion on abortion. More people now self identify as pro-life than pro-choice. A strong majority favor limiting abortions to the first trimester, which btw is just 13 weeks, yet the Democrats are fighting tooth and nail against states limiting it to 20 weeks.
As far as legalizing marijuana, that’s much more of a generational thing than a left/right thing. Most older Democrats oppose it and most younger Republicans favor it.
Meanwhile the economy continues to sputter and the world continues to burn and soon Iran will have a nuclear bomb and the Democrats are too feeble to do anything about any of it. Still a significant portion of the population are obsessed with having to pay for their own birth control.
I’m with you on most of those social issues, but mainly I don’t really care about them either way. I give a lot of money to the saner conservation orgs, and even lobby for their issues, and I find the Repub legislators in TX are very helpful on environmental issues as long as they’re not radical.
Repubs run most of the state houses and governor’s offices now, and both houses in the US legislature. It’s hard for Repubs to win the WH, but everywhere else the Dems are dying out, for now. ObamaReidPelosi did NOT help the Dems’ popularity.
@Nick–“I hate this Us vs them mentality”
Good for you Nick that you are able to see that our country is starting to divide into Pro-Liberty Constitutional Americans against Governmental-Granted Liberty American’ts. The Winners will write history by using tools protected by the Constitution. Liberals don’t quite understand this simple fact-“That if you don’t fight for your country, you deserve to lose it to those who will”. Liberals in charge also help prove Plato’s thought on politics. “If you fail to engage in politics, don’t be surprised to be ruled by your Inferiors.”
I carry a gun in case I have to shoot an evil man, after which I would then be charged with homicide by the state, but murdering an innocent baby in the womb is a no bill from that same state. It is a sign of National Moral Decay when killing a violent criminal in America is perceived as a worse act than a mother purposefully killing an innocent baby, just because the Mom was a whore, with no self-control or personal responsibility. I am Pro-Choice for the mom not to be a slut and have personal responsibility if sexually active, not the Liberal view of I can have sex and if I get pregnant I’ll just kill the life growing in me. I have a Brother who had a beautiful baby boy at twenty weeks old who is just fine, but their first consult was with a liberal doctor who recommended to them to just cut him out. When a man believes in God, it is his duty to not be an accomplice to the killing of innocents, which I know the concept of God and not killing innocents is hard for communist leaning Liberals to understand.
I am one of the poorest conservative Americans you will meet but that does not mean I am a Classist, nor do I suffer from white guilt because I live amongst ghetto blacks. Profiling is frowned upon for cops but for me it is a no-brainier that keeps me and mine safe. It was a beautiful 200,000 split level house next to a school and church before forced liberal progressive diversity and a low income apartment complex moved in and then another. My neighborhood now is the epicenter for gunfire, and when there is a shooting in my city it is african immigrants, mexican immigrants or Blacks from ghetto cities that live in the apartment buildings. The violence is mostly contained into the apartments except for the theft, and the bonus of the violent transplanted blacks from the ghettos is at least they are smart enough to know they would not go so peacefully to their maker one block up.(MULTIPLE MEN OPEN CARRYING IS A CRIMINAL DETERRENT)
The problem with most poor people is that they are ignorant of the truth or just not that intelligent, and have no viable options but to hope that the representatives actually represent them once voted into office. I happen to live directly under Liberal Democratic and Conservative policies that turn the recipients into dependent slaves, because you are penalized to work. I don’t have ten future felons in diapers running around that I can claim a welfare check on like most of my hood inhabitants, but I am being taxed without representation for them to.
The social services are an all or nothing and are discriminatory against English speaking White American’s trying to better their lot in life after a devastating time, but welcoming to illegals and those who want dependency. Guess what both Democrats and Republicans profit off of the working poor through being financially savvy with the government programs available to profit off. The Republican Landlords catch the blame for being business man and expecting a renter to live up to a Lease contract, and if not they get kicked out. The Liberals that work for the government social services keep a steady flow of government dependents(paychecks) and are the true predators upon poor Americans. Conservatives want fiscal responsibility and personal responsibility, not continuing generational dependence for the liberals voting base at the cost of our families finances and futures. When a poor in money man is thankful to his fellow country men for help in bad times that is social services my tax monies can go to, but when those services are used as an institutional tool to steal from my country men to provide no responsibilities to generations, that is a disservice
Now I live in a city in that was once predominately conservative but has been forced to become more Liberal out of political correctness and forced multiculturalism, and now I have to carry a gun just to walk to the gas station for a pop, and I hear the word nigger used more than hello.
Preach it, brother! When I dropped religion, I found myself in a very awkward position. I found most Republican social positions were based not on the concept of liberty, but on Christian supremacy. I mean, just look at the persecution complex Mel Brooks has in the post above.
@grindstone–I don’t catch the Mel Brooks reference must be my age, since he was a Hollywierd Jewish director that allowed himself to be picked on in school and life, which aren’t descriptors of me.
“persecution complex”-I was just giving Nick an honest State of the Union from a Christian white tax payer.
Christian Supremacy- all Christians are Christian Supremacists because God says there is no God but Him. I would agree with that statement but that would be showing pride in my religion and I am humble in that respect.
It is sad that you don’t have faith but I have enough to cover you, so have no fear that you are not my brother. In a Free nation we have the freedom to associate, which is now government forced and I freely choose not to associate or pay for someone who wants to kill an innocent baby out of vanity, as that is the same cultural decay that aborts millions of black babies in the hoods. If a man finds his happiness by having sex with another man then good for them. I just don’t want to be forced by men with guns and state authority to associate with them. I have appreciation for how gay folks have now set a court precedent that will apply to gun laws on private businesses. A private business owner can not discriminate and that would include discriminating against a open or concealed carrier for exercising their rights.
You are a perfect example of the newly revealed American Reality that not all white people are racists as claimed from the Liberal Plantations but all blacks in America are. That is a persecution complex that Americans are forced into. I want equal laws as guaranteed by the Constitution, and the fact is we now have protected classes of people, who are a net drag to society.
I am not persecuted because I am poor that just means I have to work harder if I want something for my family, not like my neighbors who feel they are persecuted from hundreds of years ago, and entitled to steal from productive society.
It’s a reference to Blazing Saddles, Gov. Petomane. Which is quite an un-Christian movie, too.
Cool story, just keep that crap out of public policy.
That would actually be the CRA of 1964 that you are thinking of. Not gays, but blacks.
…. You’re kinda full of sh!t. Just saying. The “protected classes” stems from the fact that those “classes” of people have historically been specifically targeted by the majority. Recall “Jim Crow” laws? Those were the states “determining how to govern themselves”. Anti-miscegenation laws? The same arguments used to support them are being recycled today.
Yeah, because all racism immediately ended at the end of the Civil War? Study after study has shown institutional racism still exists, but because YOU don’t personally experience it means it doesn’t exist. Instead you make ignorant blanket statements that are one n-word away from open racism. You know white people are the biggest recipients of welfare, right? Probably not.
So says the openly anti-religion guy.
I’m as anti-religion as I am anti-cop, in which those who have such little security in each concept view any bit of criticism as a personal assault. No, you having your fantasies is fine, I don’t care. What I DO care is when you try to make those fantasies public policy. Then we have a problem, my friend.
It’s not me that wants to force my beliefs on others through public policy. Your criticism of me was for my belief that people (Christian or not) should not be forced by the state to violate their conscience. Particularly by being forced to participate in a homosexual wedding. I’m assuming by your criticism that you believe that an individual’s conscience is subordinate to the whims of the state. I take that not as a personal assault, but an assault on liberty.
“Gun people” wouldn’t tell you shooting is fun? Cool story, bro.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a safer, less violent society. I’m just skeptical of the ability of government to achieve that, and I laugh out loud at the idea they’re going to do it by micromanaging the least criminally inclined among us.
That chick is whack.
Guns are just a guilty pleasure for her now; a temporary security blanket for her previously. She hasn’t changed. there are a lot of liberals who just happen to enjoy shooting in one form or another and, like most liberals, are elitists about it: Well, sure it’s OK for ME to own a gun, I’m one of the Smart People…
I think she’s just nuts.
i will say this as a millennial and former anti gunish person buying a gun in california and seeing all the BS surrounding it in that state solidified many of my beliefs and turned me completely pro gun and pro freedom with alot more animosity for large govt than i used to have
Welcome to the America where true freedom is all that matters.
As a Gen Xer who bought his first gun in Cook County five years ago, I had a similar transformation. My first gun purchase was my ticket out of the Democratic Party. That and 10+ years of practicing employment law and watching small and medium-sized businesses get crushed by regulation eventually got me to open my eyes.
Don’t be so harsh on the lady. At worst it was two steps forward and one step back. She lost her fear of shooting and ownership. She tried various “bad” guns like Uzi’s. She enjoyed shooting. She is moving, one could argue, from a liberal to more of a libertarian perspective at least on this issue. I doubt she will be donating to the Moms. Be happy for all this.
Dipping the toe in the pool: some back off and some jump in. The more fun she has at the range the more she’ll come around.
Guns are a solid proxy for conservatism. As a liberal, I can argue and discuss the nuances of all kinds of issues with my liberal and conservative friends, but guns and gun rights are consistently a black and white issue. The implication is that your position on guns and gun rights is a solid indicator of your position on every other issue. This artificial coupling is what creates all of the angst liberal like my self experience; not because of my position, but because of the assumptions liberal and conservatives both make because of my stance on this one issue.
Guns carry so much extra social baggage that it is difficult to approach the subject without every other issue getting in the way in situations like this. The best way I have found to remedy this is to inform those who are willing, respectfully disagree with those who are not, and separate gun discussions into their own, independent box.
I have a lot more liberal friends to shoot with now.
It might be regional, but there are quite a few pro-gun liberals in PNW.
There are more hypocritical Leftists than they would like to admit there are. I know a Leftist, union steward (just putting that out there), who owns an unregistered pistol (illegal in Michigan) because he knows that not everyone else in the world can be trusted. He thinks guns should be banned, but he trusts himself so he thinks that it’s okay for HIM to own one. Just not me or you.
Good thing that hypocrites exist only on the left, huh?
This post exposes one of the weaknesses of TTAG… The knee jerk defense of conservativism. Why does this site go out of its way to do this? If it really is The Truth About GUNS, why are so many electrons wasted on immigration, abortion, etc.? If you value the 2nd Amendment, having a post a day that alienates persuadable lefties by waxing poetic about Al Sharpton or immigration is counter-productive…
Which TTAG website are you reading? I don’t remember any topics about abortion, etc.
In every 4th post there is some sidebar comment taking the conservative position a non firearms issue…
And look at the comments…
I see people making comments like that when expanding the conversation about conservative topics, but no articles by Farago on abortion.
Anyone who frequents TTAG knows that Unknown Prosecutor is full of $#it and not even smart enough to shut up once called out for a big lie, just ignore the dumb@$$..
Comments are a function of the audience, and like it or not, pro-gun is much more a conservative thing than it is a liberal one (and I say this as a liberal), so the audience is proportionate to that. Add the fact that the parties keep polarizing at an insane rate, with the growing hostility whenever there’s any discussion to be had across the divide, and you get the picture.
But yes, this particular article – not the comments, but article itself – is very much an example of what you’re saying. It’s not about gun rights at all, it’s about why conservatives are good and liberals are bad. Meh.
Okay, stop it with the “we’re getting more polarized” stuff. American politics have always been polarizing. In fact, today it is much more civilized than it used to be! Some of you need to read more history.
That we’re getting more polarized is a plain fact as evidenced by cold hard numbers, whether it’s the Congress or the populace at large.
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-visualization
http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/
My personal Facebook page has over 2,000 friends. I make no apologies about being liberal, and regularly discuss the evil that are Republicans and the conservative agenda. With that said, I own firearms, and many, many of my friends do too. Got a few liberal friends with NFA weapons, and quite a few that were in the military anywhere from PFCs to one motorcycling retired Admiral. Frankly, most of us see that our major threat would be a zombie apocalypse of roaming, thieving conservatives and militia-types wanting to steal our food and the oil from our part of Texas, and we are more than prepared to dispatch evil Republicans.
Conservatives also believe in recycling, social services and immigration
Speak for yourself.
Liberals think we should all be equal at the finish line.
Conservatives think we should all be equal at the starting line.
Admittedly not mine. I saw it recently but can’t find the link so if it is yours or you know the link please share.
Conservatives start on 3rd base thanks to inheritance and white privilege. When they get to home plate they look down on the people that had to start on 1st and only got to 3rd.
What utter and complete BS. My dad started out on a cotton patch in the Depression. He made it up to welding supervisor. He was a conservative (he would be still, but he is deceased). He was not unusual in that regard.
Same here. Both of my parents were born in the depression and grew up dirt poor on farms in rural Tennessee. The only thing my parents gave me was a good home because they loved each other and were thrifty and sober people. I wasn’t born to some unmarried women who had six baby-daddies and who would spread her legs for anyone. That’s my “white privilege.”
I put myself through university (engineering) while working full time and raising three kids. So here I am today, on my day off, sitting on my front porch drinking coffee, smoking a cigar, and reading TTAG. I have more money saved than my dad made during his entire lifetime. I have inherited nothing except a good work ethic and a respect for God.
But even so, I also understand that in a perfect storm that all could be taken away from me, and I do not take that, nor my wonderful wife or kids, for granted. Very few people are born on third base, and I would argue that the strongest (strictest) conservatives were not.
Is this one of those ‘microaggressions’ I keep hearing about?
You seem somewhat bitter that the rewards of hard work and sacrifice can be passed down to the next generation. All men are created equal, but it is moral values and work ethic that set men apart.
Conservatives start on 3rd base thanks to inheritance and white privilege. I find that remark to be amusing. Many conservative folk start with very little. The truth is that really there are not that many wealthy people as a percentage in our population. Many times the Liberal Elite come from wealth, Kennedys are a good example.
“white privilege.” Oh look, someone else who buys into Marxist constructs propagated by the cabal of academia.
Lol. Billionaires vote Dem now. Obama got the $250k+/year vote too.
Again, “white privledge” is pure fantasy.
As a baseball fan, I would just like to point out that hitters start at home plate. Not first. I would expect better from God. If you’re going to use baseball analogies ….
Show some finesse, God! Don’t throw the big shiny spinners out there – if you’re going to troll the site, you need to work a little spoon, maybe a small popper or dry fly.
Erm, no.
Conservatives recognize that the process from First to Home usually takes a couple of generations.
Liberals (of the non-classical/not-libertarian variety) believe that First to Home is supposed to happen within a single lifetime, and when it inevitably doesn’t, cry about how unfair that is.
>> Conservatives think we should all be equal at the starting line.
Conservatives are in favor of 100% inheritance tax?
” . . .As the little slips of paper with police report numbers on them piled up, I became familiar with the questions detectives would ask when they learned of my prior break-ins. . .”
And why in the hell is this twit still living in that neighborhood? Is it liberal guilt that keeps her from moving to a safer place to live? My litmus test for a bad neighborhood is simple: if you see crowds of 14 year old’ kids in the streets, and clusters of people sitting on front porches or in in yards, stay away.
She’s not still living there. She has moved to a more upscale locale and as a consequence, keeps her gun unloaded and locked away until she gets the urge to go to the range and indulge in a little off-the-reservation pleasure.
“That thrill at the range translates to confidence outside of it. And confidence was a great comfort.”
as disappointing of an outcome as it was, this sentence is on point. 10/10 would read again.
“It’s how government implements “these things” that separates the two political camps.”
Well, I would possibly argue this, on the basis that both parties are Big Government Grape with a flavored shot of cherry or berry. Lesser of two evils and all that…
There are those of us who want to be free BECAUSE of government (the idea that .gov grants us our freedom), and those of us who want to be free DESPITE government (the idea I was free from my first breath).
“no one, on either side of the debate, wants to tell you: shooting them is fun”
Not going to lie, I laughed hysterically at this line.
“Any angry ex-boyfriends” was only a reminder that I had none worth noting. “
After reading this article, the only statement that stood out was this one. Not surprising, considering the insight into her character and what she believes, I suppose. ; )
Now that she owns one, and understands why many people – especially single women – get one, she probably will listen to arguments for second amendment rights without dismissing them or vilifying with lies those that support those rights. That’s a small step in the right direction.
Aw c’mon she’s come a long way…But I do find it hilarious that people think their upscale neighborhood is impervious to criminal activity. See: Gold Coast in Chicago with “wilding” gangs of black youts and a man getting stabbed in the HEAD in a high-end hotel. Or the little girl murdered next to Burr Ridge. Dumbazz white women clueless in their vulnerability. Just remember the vast majority of your “liberal” (I hate that word) politicians and voters want to screw you…
Sorry, I can’t take this person seriously over the cognitive dissonance between wanting to protect innocent life with a firearm while still advocating the pre-birth destruction of the most innocent of humans. Maybe gun ownership and the commensurate responsibility that accompanies it do act as a gateway to conservatism, but you haven’t walked through that gate until you believe in equal rights under the law, including the right to life.
The argument has been framed. You want gun rights but that means you support the killing of those kids at Newtown?
You know that’s not true.
The pro choice people don’t want to kill babies. They don’t want the govt telling them what to do with their bodies. There is no room for being pro choice and pro life. Why? Because politicians can’t have an issue if there aren’t sides.
You, don’t want the govt to tell you what to do with your bodies. But you want the govt to take away people’s gun rights.
You, don’t want the govt to confiscate your guns, but you want the govt to tell those women they can’t have abortions.
You are very very similar.
What’s the plan that could work for Americans?
The fight against abortion is not and never was about controlling a woman’s body, but protecting the child’s. To take a human life outside of self defense is murder, and that child is entitled to the same protection against murder as anyone else. The woman has her authority over her body, but the child’s body is not hers to destroy. Her body stops where the child’s begins.
“…and that child is entitled to the same protection against murder as anyone else”
Yes.
But no.
And yes.
I am going to go out on a limb here….. The unborn do deserve the protections afforded every other citizen. But! Like so many other issues who is setting the standard? At what level is the unborn child ‘alive?’
Some would say conception is the moment, but if you think that through just a bit there is a problem…. the embryo at conception could not survive outside of the mother so is it really ‘alive?’
Others would say birth is the moment, but that has a similar problem because there is brain activity, heart beat, awareness of surroundings before birth.
So where do you draw the line? At what point do the rights of the unborn child become equal the pregnant mother? At any point do the rights of the unborn child supersede those of the pregnant mother? And that starts into the Mother’s health issue for late-term abortion, and once you start with the exceptions you just spin right out of control because why is that exception acceptable but not this other exception.
I am not advocating for or against abortion. I am just pointing out that there is more to this issue than just pro-life and pro-choice and that the abortion issue has a surprisingly large number of corollaries with the gun control issue…. I hear many people who say they want the government to piss off when it comes to firearm ownership then turn around and say that the government should step in and control people regarding the unborn. It is, to me at least, interesting to watch because both issues hinge upon who is in charge of whom and to what level and extent.
>> but you haven’t walked through that gate until you believe in equal rights under the law, including the right to life.
We believe in equal rights under the law for persons. We just don’t believe that fetuses are persons.
Do you believe that your dog should have equal rights with you under the law? Thought so. Well, as far as I’m concerned, your dog is more of a person than a fetus. Physiologically, at least, it has a more developed brain, while embryos don’t even have a brain initially.
If you don’t draw the line at the moment it is genetically human, the next course of action is to make up some arbitrary point in time. Is a child any less human the moment before it leaves the womb? If course not, it grows gradually. The “trimester” thing is the same, only it attempts to draw a fuzzy line in the sand a bit earlier. The only way to guarantee you aren’t murdering a human is to treat them all with human dignity. Once you start trying to arbitrate who doesn’t get the right to be a person, you’ve taken your first steps down the same dangerous path that every two-bit tyrant has used to justify genocide.
As for the “viability” excuse, I hear that with some frequency, and it’s disturbing. Humanity is not defined by what you can do, but by what you are. Newborns and indeed most children can’t survive without a caretaker (most often and preferably the mother) either; are they not humans, can they be killed like animals? What of invalids, the mentally ill, or the elderly? Does a man on his death bed become something less than human in the moments before he dies? Human dignity must apply to everyone, because with rationalizations like that it can be stripped from anyone.
Robert, this is what winning looks like.
I am a liberal. I didn’t used to be – I was brought up in a conservative household, joined the military right out of high school, learned to shoot when I was about 8 yrs old, etc … – but things started to change for me in the 1990s.
Part of my change came from traveling. In addition to the many parts of the US, I also found myself in Europe & the Middle East by the time I was 25. The Mid East was the most conservative place I had ever been, and the most depressed economically, and repressed politically (especially if you were a woman). Europe (Britain, Germany, France, Italy at that time) was exactly the opposite – more liberal (or ‘socialist’ if you like) for sure, but the roads were fantastic, the public transit system easy to use, education was cheap, health care available to everyone, time off for vacations a given, wages sufficient to raise a family (even with the higher taxes) AND save for the future, a decent safety net if you lost your job, and all with very little government debt (at least when compared to the US). But most telling to me was the complete sense of freedom people had in these countries – to do, say, go wherever/whatever they wanted to. Most people thanked the US for that last bit (sometimes me, as a ‘representative’), yet I couldn’t help notice that I wasn’t feeling quite that free in my own country.
In the US I came back to, not only did there always seem to be some new law or regulation from government that made doing what I wanted to do harder, or impossible, but there was these things called ‘privatization’ & ‘deregulation’ slipping into everything that was making things that used to be cheap a hell of a lot more expensive than they used to be. My electricity company & water company got deregulated & privatized (in that order) and my bills went up, and have continued to go up, way faster than inflation. For profit colleges became a ‘thing’ in the same time period, and low & behold the cost of higher education across the board went through the roof. I went to a public school system (19070s & 80s) that did a pretty good job of educating me & my friends, but sometime in the 1990s (while I was gone) people in the US became convinced that taking tax money from that system & giving it to for profit charter schools was ‘necessary’. Now that same public school system (I live in the same area now) is less effective & constantly in financial straights. Needless to say my taxes have been going up to address these problems. And do I really need to bring up healthcare? I will only say that ObamaCare is the biggest giveaway to the private, for-profit insurance sector in history – and hardly ‘socialism’ as I saw it operating in Europe – and seems to have done nothing to stop the family breaking costs that our totally for profit health care system has had as a ‘feature’ for decades. All of this is money out of my pocket for no gain to me – usually a loss – and as we all should know by now, in this country the more money you have in your pocket, the more free you are.
The majority conservative Supreme Court has said ‘money is speech’, which would have made our Founders turn over in their graves. That same court & more than a few conservative politicians have said ‘Corporations are People’, which is an insult to human beings everywhere. And when ObamaCare came up for review, our conservative Supreme Court not only didn’t strike it down, but declared that forcing citizens to buy a private product was equal to a tax on those people. A tax! Don’t know how many of you know, but a corporation forcing citizens to pay them money was what the Boston Tea Party was really all about – the ‘taxation without representation’ thing was us having to pay the British East India Tea Co. a government mandated tax directly to them (because that company essentially had bought the British government and was using it’s influence at a time when it was in financial trouble), without that tax providing us anything in return in the form of government services or representation. Our Revolution was fought over something that our conservative Supreme Court has made the Law of the Land.
No I’m a liberal now. To keep more obey in my pocket, I have no problem with social Security and Medicare AS IS, not handed over to Wall St. or the insurance industry. I believe the government SHOULD regulate the hell out of the big banks. I think for profit colleges should be shut down, and charter schools eliminated. To get a true read on what the people want, I believe it should be easy to vote, for everyone, black, white, yellow & all the other relevant colors, and for big money (from either corporations or individuals) to be eliminated from the electoral system – period. And because I believe in individual rights, a woman’s right to an abortion is the lesser evil when compared to anyone – whether the government at the Federal or State level, OR he employer – telling her what to do about it. I don’t give a flying frig what a gay person does, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else – same as I would say about a straight person. And I believe in the 2nd Amendment, 1000% more than I ever used to when I was a conservative, because I can see more clearly now why the Founding Fathers put it in the Bill of Rights in the first place.
Left can become Right, or vice versa, socialism or capitalism can be ascendant, but freedom is only ever truly compromised by one thing – a government that doesn’t respect it’s flesh & blood citizens. That’s where real authoritarianism comes from. And it only comes when government doesn’t fear the consequences.
I don’t know how to say this so it doesn’t sound insulting. I understand your point of view, but the problem is you have reached some of your conclusions through ignorance. Your misunderstanding of corporations, and how and why the law treats corporations as people for one. That is one of the best court decisions ever made.
Your understanding of how our schools got the way they are is another, and that’s why people are beginning to opt out and choose alternate teaching institutions.
Obamacare is a third. The liberal side of the court was all for it, the conservative side against it.
I could go on.
Yes, you could go on. But like much of what you have already written, you’d be dead wrong.
Liberal people tend to travel and be to be academic and curious. Conservatives tend to accept careers that limit them. Like you became an engineer and don’t understand how a business is structured. Yet you think you do because you probably have a bother in law somewhere that is a junior accountant.
” . . .Conservatives tend to accept careers that limit them. Like you became an engineer and don’t understand how a business is structured. . .”
Ever hear of Milton Freidman, Thomas Sowell, or Ludwig Von Mises? How about Ron Paul and Rand Paul? Your comment is a perfect example of a psychological condition called “secondary ignorance”. You don’t know that you don’t know.
Liberal people tend to travel and be to be academic and curious. Some maybe do, most really do not. A lot of Liberal Arts people, of which I actually know, take the liberal course work because they either have, or would flunk out of the Engineering Courses. Academic, the liberals usually are not.
Citizens United was about federal law forbidding the showing of an anti-Hillary movie on tv before an election. The government should never be involved in forbidding political speech, ever.
Europe could spend all that money on social programs because we protected them from the Soviets.
Tuition has gone up because of government student loans and overhiring of administrators. When Rick Perry told the state schools, start working on a providing $10,000 four year degree, the liberal academics started shrieking.
And more…
I’m glad to be your ally on 2A though.
I think I will just leave this thought from Sid Phillips on page 378 of Voices Of The Pacific….
Governments needs to be controlled. People expect too much from the government, but that only promotes inactivity. A government can’t give you anything. They’ve got to take it away from you first. The amount of freedom a people has is directly related to the amount of government it has. Smaller governments mean more freedom.
Guns are not a partisan issue in Kansas.
Some modern liberals own guns, like guns and need guns — while consistently voting for people who want to take them away.
You can see why some of us who do not identify as “liberal” may be just a tad confused by such behavior.
Same way that those of us who do not identify as “conservative” or “liberal” get a tad confused by the behavior of “pro-freedom” conservatives who constantly support anti-freedom things such as government surveillance, wars of invasion, restricting LGBT rights, outlawing the ability of local governments from forming their own oil exploration regulations locally, etc.
outlawing the ability of local governments from forming their own oil exploration regulations locally, Gee, that is freedom? Let’s pass more laws and call it liberty!
You are right.
There is no such thing as a “right” for a local government to interfere with people’s rights. In point of fact, only individuals can have rights. That’s why “states rights” in defense of slavery was such an utter crock of shit.
Yeah, not like any of the sponsors of the bill receive huge contributions from oil and NG companies. Small towns shouldn’t ban fracking within city limits! It’s anti-business! So who cares about local determination?
The problem is that the choice is between those people, and some other people who want to take other things that we like away. So you have to tally it all up, and vote for the side that has a shorter list of things they want to take away that you personally care about.
The irony is that there are politicians on the right side of the spectrum that could present a reasonable compromise, such as the Pauls. But they’re marginalized by their own party for not toeing the line.
What can I say? Two party system sucks, FPTP sucks, and electoral college sucks. At this point I’d frankly support pretty much any politician, whether they declare themselves a communist or a hard-line conservative theocrat, if they make electoral reform the main item of their agenda – such that the next cycle can have an actual fair distribution of opinions on the ballots, and people can vote their conscience without having the party platform strings attached, and without playing those stupid “strategic voting” games. But neither of the major parties will ever do it because the current system is in their benefit.
The next best hope is that one of the major parties will misjudge the electorate and implode, and then either a more sane replacement steps in, or the party will reform itself from the ashes with a new platform under the old brand. I don’t see any sign of that happening for the Democrats, while all signs point at GOP being in its death throes as the wagon-circling around the hyper-social-conservative base and purge of “RINOs” and other heretics continues.
It might take a few more major electoral losses for the increasingly marginalized moderate “silent majority” in GOP to revolt, but when they do, it’ll be a big one. I don’t know how exactly it’ll go, but I expect the result to be a party actually focusing on fiscal conservatism (by which I mean balanced budgets etc, not banning welfare recipients from buying ketchup) and constitutionalism, and less so on religion and associated social issues. When that happens, there will be a large exodus of currently Democrat social liberals who are moderate-to-right on economics, and the system will rebalance itself.
Look up a site called “Kick Them All Out!”
It is a simple idea, vote out the incumbents. The longer politicians stay in office, the more disconnected they become from the people they are supposed to represent. Kick’em out and the new guys wont be as ‘plugged in’ as the old timers. It will take a few election cycles to make a difference so it is definitely the long-game strategy.
I think 99% of conservatives vote against their own self-interests. I’m not a single issue voter. While I certainly want to defend my right to own guns, I would, on balance, prefer that the government remain separate from religion, would prefer science to be taught in schools, would prefer equal rights for everyone, etc.
I hate to break to her, but stuff can happen any place, any time anywhere.
“is gun ownership a gateway drug for conservative principles?”
Sometimes. One can hope. All it takes is doubt the size of mustard seed for people to think, “If I was wrong about these people (conservatives) on this, maybe I am wrong on other issues.” That being said, plants don’t grow well in the rocks of the closed mind. They grow best in the fertile soil of the open mind.
Identifying with positions gives your power away. Read those posts above. If I was a company trying to sell you something I’d love this. See if you don’t think for yourself and identify with all 22 positions of being a conservative or the 18 of being a liberal then your just a pawn to be used.
Quit the BS. You could be a victim of “your” position because “they” think you will believe anything. If you think the only people on welfare are the black baby mommas with her legs spread then you’re missing all those white girls. Why are 22,000 vets on food stamps? See seek the truth not some white or black or pro cops or anti cops or pro gun or anti gun.
Divide and conquer always works. Unless you think for yourself.
Think Libertarian and quit being a lemming.
“Liberals believe this… Conservatives believe that…” Do we REALLY need to promote partisan BS?
I’m a conservative, and I believe if you aren’t recycling then you are stupid, and you aren’t a good steward of the the planet that god gave us. http://www.openbible.info/topics/stewardship_of_gods_creation
One of my best friends is a general contractor, lesbian, and votes republican every time.
STOP SECTIONING PEOPLE INTO “CONSERVATIVES” vs “LIBERALS”! We are far too diverse.
Sectioning is done by the political system itself. It’s all well and good to talk about common points, but ultimately people head to the polls and have two (meaningful) mutually exclusive choices on the ballot, each one with its own ton of political baggage that you may not want, but have to vote on anyway. Everything else stems from that.
And the division keeps growing. Did you know that, for the first time since there were Democrats and Republicans, we have a division in the House such that the most conservative Democrat is to the left of the most liberal Republican? If you plot them on the graph, you can literally draw a vertical line to cleanly separate the groups. Cross-party collaboration is also at an all-time low, and the trend keeps going down.
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-visualization
I just don’t understand why y’all gotta be a bunch of haters. Bottom line, there’s one more person who’s not 100% anti-gun. On balance, isn’t that a win? When you’re having a discussion about an issue, any issue, with someone who disagrees with you, and then that person comes around a little bit, do you write them off completely? No. Why do we have to have this all or nothing attitude about this issue? People can be both liberal and pro-gun, even if it doesn’t make sense to a classical conservative, and we’re sabotaging our cause by excluding people who don’t 100% agree with us.
Am I the only one amused and bemused by the notion that since she moved to a “good neighborhood,” the defensive firearm is no longer “needed” in a ready status? “Good” neighborhood = put it away?
In many news stories about a violent crime, they interview residents of the neighborhood, who invariably say, “This is a good neighborhood. This never happens here.”
I noticed that, too. Criminals know where the “good” neighborhoods are, too.
More importantly, in the case of women, the majority of their killers are people they know; typically an intimate partner, but could be a friend or family member instead. Regardless, these are people who are already in your life, perhaps by your own invitation.
None of those risks has anything to do with how good your neighborhood may be. A stalker from work, the grocery store or the bank will follow you wherever they can to attack you; deed restrictions and well manicured lawns notwithstanding.
Sheeple got sheep. I get that and it is what it is, but really, must they also vote?
Why can’t people just accept that if they’re incompetent, ill equipped, and unable to take responsibility for themselves, then they are likewise inept to select government minders for the rest of us?
Some of my fellow liberals have made some excellent points in this thread. I won’t reiterate them, and I won’t expand upon them, as they have done a far better job than I could have.
But I will state that, if conservatives could get off of social issues, and if liberals could get off of guns, we’d have a lot less to argue about. Then maybe we could elect politicians that are interested in governing rather than shouting out party dogma/rhetoric.
Also, I seem to see many more nuanced liberals than nuanced conservatives, at least on this website. It’s like, hey, liberals can like guns and accept some conservative-ish stances, but the conservatives here are straight up neo-con Republican platform.
So what I gather from the post is
A. Nobody who owns a gun is ‘really’ a liberal.
B. Liberals are irresponsible cowards.
C. The author has no understanding of liberal viewpoints.
Posts like this are why our movement is lost on the liberal youth.
So what I gather from the post is
A. Nobody who owns a gun is ‘really’ a liberal.
B. Liberals are irresponsible cowards.
C. The author has no understanding of liberal viewpoints.
Posts like this are why our movement is lost on the liberal youth.
Now, as a liberal , I would like to say these things:
* Yes, I am able and willing to compromise on everything but fundamental rights to self-defense, equal treatment under the law, and the right to disagree.
* I believe that the best solutions come from a mixture of government initiative and private support.
* I believe that some things in the public interest do not promote the private interest, even though the result would be a net gain.
* We would bicker about a lot less if Conservatives stopped harping on social issues and if Liberals stopped harping on rights issues.
* Keep your insistence on state Christianization in check and I’ll stop insisting on stricter business regulations.
* Taxes indeed are what we paid for a civilized society. Now if only everyone paid their fair share instead of exploiting loopholes and accounting tricks to wiggle out of what they owe.
* The Laffer Curve has never been demonstrated to exist.
* Money put into helping children and families through education and programs pays off later.
* We do not need more welfare; we need smarter welfare which tapers off gradually instead of all of once, thereby making it impossible to escape poverty.
* If you are going to send soldiers to war, take care of them once they’ve come back.
* Stewardship of the planet is plain common sense.
* Think of it this way: If an illegal immigrant is willing to work, stay out of trouble, and pay taxes, I have no problem with fast tracking them to citizenship. We need the broaded taxbase now more than ever.
Gun ownership definitely turns “liberals” into “conservatives”. I put those in quotes because the words have become so bastardized and laden with other meaning that it’s impossible to have a real conversation. So I’ll offer *my* definition. If by “liberal”, we mean “statist” and if by “conservative” we mean “individualist”, then yes, gun ownership is the gateway drug to conversion.
In the 21st century, the two broad sides of the political divide are over the relationship between the citizen and the state. All the social issues are so much window dressing over the core issue of what the proper relationship between the individual and the government ought to be.
Gun ownership clearly falls on the side of the individual, because it undermines/questions the monopoly on legitimate violence by the state. It’s hard to remain firmly committed to the idea that the state provides rights, that the state should control individual behavior, that the state provides for its people, and so on and so forth if you’re legally holding a lethal weapon in your hands. Because it means that you recognize that the state cannot despite wanting very badly to guarantee your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness when evil men with violent intentions are right there before you.
The Second Amendment does not grant the right to arms; instead, it codifies this radical undermining/questioning of the state’s monopoly on violence into the American tradition. It is entirely possible — even likely — to hold “liberal” positions on social issues like gay marriage or drug legalization and to own guns. I think we call such people “libertarians” in some circles. It’s also entirely possible to hold “conservative” positions and be a full-blown statist (see, e.g., pornography bans).
Anybody that walks thru the valley of death and fears no evil is an idiot. I can fight, but, I would rather shoot evil first. I only got one good pair of jeans and don’t want to scuff them up.
Owning a gun doesn’t make someone value freedom. Just look at how many evil groups around the world own guns.
Leftists aren’t anti-gun because they’re leftists. They’re leftists because they’re anti-gun. Disdain for personal freedom naturally pushes people toward that political spectrum.
“I bet she continues to cling to the liberal party line on guns and crime: making society safer is the “answer.”… We should change our society so that everyone can live in a home where a self-defense firearm is unnecessary. (Except for fun.)”
How is it not the answer? My ideal world would be exactly that: one where I don’t ever have to worry about my or anyone else’s physical safety versus another person. I just happen to think we can get closer to that in terms of violence without attempting the impossible (and ineffectual) feat of attempting to eradicate firearms, but instead by becoming a more responsible society that holds proper firearm safety, respect for a firearm’s capability, and the value of human life all in the highest regard.
Just because I believe that everyone can exist with guns and still be safe, and a given Liberal thinks that everyone can exist without guns and be safe, doesn’t mean we don’t both want to live in a better world. I just have a better understanding (read: any understanding at all) of guns to know that they’re not the problem.
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