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After Newtown shooting, it’s time to have that ‘national conversation on guns’ (Codrea)
Examiner ^

Posted on 12/15/2012 6:18:01 PM PST by Red in Blue PA

To anyone who may be persuaded that “a national conversation” on guns and violence in society is needed, rather than automatically accepting the assumptions of those who think it ought to begin with calling for more citizen disarmament edicts, answer one question first:

If you saw someone methodically murdering children and you could get your hands on a gun, would you use it to stop him?

Yes or no? There’s no time for equivocation. Every second you hesitate, another innocent is being slaughtered.

If you answered “no,” you’re an irredeemable coward, unfit for the company of free men and women, and deserving of the slavery you accept and would impose on your betters. We will hold no conversation with despicable domestic enemy wretches the likes of you. Go away, leave us alone, or bring it on. We will not disarm.

If you answered “yes,” then ask yourself since when it’s in anyone’s interests to bare his throat to someone who would slash it? And just as being armed, trained, prepared and willing can discourage an individual aggressor, do they also not, as Thomas Paine observed, “keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property”? Would not “horrid mischief … ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them”?

(Excerpt) Read more at examiner.com ...


TOPICS: Front Page News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: banglist; codrea; sandyhookgundefense; shallnotbeinfringed; shooting; youwillnotdisarmus
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To: Red in Blue PA

“If you saw someone methodically murdering children”

I’d use what ever weapon I had at hand to kill the scumbag. If that was my hands or my teeth, I’d use them. He’d probably kill me, but maybe it would give kids a chance to get the heck out of there.

Locking down and cowering in place seems like something for cotton-tailed rabbits, not humans. If there is no one to stop the maniac (e.g., an armed guard or teacher), then kids running to safety seems preferable to providing groups of kids for the slaughter. Maybe we ought to revisit this ‘roll up and play dead’ strategy for dealing with school shootings. As well as the silly ‘gun free zones’ which only apply to law-abiding citizens and not the locos.


21 posted on 12/15/2012 7:05:29 PM PST by Betis70 ("Leading from Behind" gets your Ambassador killed)
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To: Red in Blue PA

We had a family discussion on the issue today:

Dad, to 11-y/o daughter: “What’s the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun?”

Smart 11-year-old daughter: “A good guy with a gun?”


22 posted on 12/15/2012 7:06:26 PM PST by AbnSarge
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To: piytar

The thing that always strikes me about that drawing is that it’s highly unlikely that a 6 year old mind and hand produced it!


23 posted on 12/15/2012 7:08:03 PM PST by loboinok (Gun control is hitting what you aim at!)
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To: 2nd Amendment
All competent Americans have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms

Therein lies the rub. Who sets the rules? Does a xanax preclude one from owning firearms? It may not now, but if you let's the camel's nose under the tent, you know darn well that in 5 years or so, new mental health provisions will be coming.

There should be ZERO laws to own a gun. Anyone who proves they cannot and uses their gun to even threaten violence will get a 10 year minimum. No pleas bargains and no parole. Recidivists commit 80%+ of crime, though admittedly not they types of massacres we witnessed in CT.

Prohibition did not work.

The "war on drugs" is not working.

And gun laws do not work,...in fact, looking at empirical data such as Cook Country IL and Wash DC, they are have the OPPOSITE effect.
24 posted on 12/15/2012 7:08:05 PM PST by Red in Blue PA (Read SCOTUS Castle Rock vs Gonzales before dialing 911!)
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To: Red in Blue PA

No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.

Samuel Adams, letter to James Warren, 4 November 1775

Let us contemplate our forefathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us from the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that “if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom,” it is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.

Samuel Adams, 1771


25 posted on 12/15/2012 7:14:12 PM PST by seowulf ("If you write a whole line of zeroes, it's still---nothing"...Kira Alexandrovna Argounova)
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To: Red in Blue PA

I do agree with you. Perhaps I said some of the things I said to draw out a sane position on the present situation. You are aware that the antigun onslaught is coming in full force. We must deal with it as rationally as possible. We must, at the same time, show absolute sympathy for the 20 babies that were hunted down like cowering puppies and shot by this maniacal demon.


26 posted on 12/15/2012 7:18:20 PM PST by 2nd Amendment
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To: Red in Blue PA
BTTT

Why the Gun is Civilization

A Nation of Cowards


Pacifism: The Ultimate Immorality by Raymond Kraft

Last week, Jack and Jill Pacifisto were walking home through the park after dinner with friends, during which they had spent a few hours discussing the immorality of violence and war and their commitments to send more money to progressive activists over the next year. Suddenly, Tony Thug stepped out of the shadows and pointed a pistol at Jack and said, “Give me your wallet,” and, pointing the gun at Jill, “Your purse.”

“What?” asked Jack, incredulous, “Hey, we don’t want any trouble. We’re pacifists. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

“Not my problem,” said Tony, “Gimme your money.”

So Jack and Jill did, and then Tony said, “And now gimme your watches, rings, jewelry, everything worth anything.”

“Hey,” said Jill, “This is my wedding ring!”

And Tony said, “Not my problem.”

Jack and Jill handed over their wallet, and purse, and all their jewelry and Rolex watches, and then Tony shot them both twice in the chest and picked up the loot and stepped back into the shadows.

As Jill lay dying she whispered, “Jack? Why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you have a gun?” Those were her last words.

“I couldn’t,” whispered Jack. “I’m a pacifist.” Those were his last words.

A few days later, Bill Thaxton and his wife were walking home through the park after dinner, when Tony Thug stepped out of the shadows.

“Give me your wallet, your purse,” said Tony, pointing his gun first at Bill, and then at his wife. He did not know that Bill was an old lawman, and had been a Marine sniper when he was young, and was active in the Single Action Shooters Society and had a concealed-carry-permit. Tony assumed that the old man was just an old man with some money and a few credit cards in his wallet walking home from dinner.

“Sorry, friend, I don’t like guns, and I don’t want any trouble,” said Bill.

“Not my problem,” said Tony, “Gimme your wallet, your purse,” he said, waving the gun at Bill’s wife, “Rings, watches, everything.”

“And what if I don’t?” asked Bill.

“I’ll shoot you both. Her first,” said Tony, pointing his gun at Bill’s wife again.

“Well,” said Bill, “Okay, honey, do what he says.”

She tossed down her purse. Bill reached slowly for his left lapel with his right hand and then, like lightning, did a cross-draw with his left and came out blazing with his trusty little 9, nailing Tony three times.

As he lay on the sidewalk dying, Tony Thug was heard to mutter, “Damn, I shoulda stuck with the pacifists . . .”

An acquaintance wrote me last week to tell me proudly how he had been a pacifist since the ‘60s. His letter set me thinking about pacifism, which is the ultimate and vilest form of immorality.

If you are Hitler, or Saddam, or Osama, or Ahmadinejad, your desire to kill those you dislike is at least honest and open. You wear you hate on your sleeve and we know who and what you are. But the Pacifist wears his refusal to resist evil as if it were a badge of honor, and claims it as a sign of his or her absolute moral superiority. The Hitlers and Osamas are at least honest about who they are, the Pacifist is not. Not even to himself.

The German Pastor Martin Niemoller wrote a poem circa 1946 about the quiescence of German intellectuals in the face of the Nazi rise to power that has become famous. Translated, it reads:

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent,

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists

I did not speak out,

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews

I did not speak out,

I was not a Jew.

When they came for me

there was no one left to speak out.

The Pacifist says something like this, but, unlike Niemoller, without apology. He says:

When you come for my allies

I will not fight you,

for I am a Pacifist.

When you come for my countrymen

I will not fight you,

for I am a Pacifist.

When you come for my neighbor,

I will not fight you,

for I am a Pacifist.

When you come for my mother,

my father, my brother,

my sister, I will not fight you,

for I am a Pacifist.

When you come for my wife,

my husband, my son,

my daughter, I will not fight you,

for I am a Pacifist.

When you come for me,

I will not fight you,

for I am a Pacifist.

The Pacifist claims that he (or she) is too good to fight against evil, and this is the catastrophic intellectual and moral failure of Pacifism. In the guise of being too good to oppose evil, the Pacifist invokes the ultimate immorality by aiding and abetting and encouraging evil, on the pretext of being too pure, too wise, too sophisticated to fight evil, thereby turning the pretense of goodness and purity into an invocation and license for evil to act without opposition.

The moral stance of the Pacifist is, unwittingly perhaps, homicidal, genocidal, fratricidal, suicidal. The Pacifist says, in effect: “There is nothing good worth fighting for. And there is nothing so evil worth fighting against.”

The Pacifist is willing to give evil free reign, because he or she thinks or feels that fighting against evil is even worse than evil itself . . . an intellectual and moral equivocation of monumentally staggering proportions. In order to be a Pacifist, one must hold that Nazism or Islamism or Communism or any other puritanical totalitarian ideology that seeks to slaughter or oppress all the Jews or all of any other race or tribe is no worse, is not morally inferior, to the existence of Jews and Judaism, or whatever other race or tribe is the whipping boy of the day.

To be a Pacifist, one must hold that acquiescence to a Jihad that seeks to destroy Western Civilization is no worse than Western Civilization, even though the Jihad seeks to extinguish intellectual freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and ultimately even the freedom to be a Pacifist.

As the English philosopher Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The Pacifist replies, “I am so good that I will do nothing, I will hurt no one, even if that means that good will be destroyed and evil will win. I am so peaceful that I will not discriminate between the goodness of good and the badness of evil, certainly not with enough conviction to take up arms, literally or figuratively, against the triumph of evil over good, of totalitarianism over freedom, of barbarianism over civilization.”

And so the Pacifist, perhaps unthinkingly, unwittingly, mistakenly, is deeply mired in his intellectual confusion, but surely and unequivocally, the epitome of evil itself, For the Pacifist devoutly believes that by refusing to fight against evil he is affirming that he is good, too good and pure to oppose evil, too good and pure to fight evil, to good and pure to kill evil. But in the end, he is the enabler without whom the triumph of evil would not be possible.



27 posted on 12/15/2012 7:18:50 PM PST by EdReform (Oath Keepers - Guardians of the Republic - Honor your oath - Join us: www.oathkeepers.org)
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To: 2nd Amendment

“As an owner of many firearms, I would give them all up if I thought [THAT GIVING THEM UP] would save the lives of these precious kindergarteners.”

Your grammar is corrected. Now please explain your logic.


28 posted on 12/15/2012 7:23:44 PM PST by elcid1970 ("The Second Amendment is more important than Islam.")
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To: 2nd Amendment

>>show absolute sympathy for the 20 babies that were hunted down like cowering puppies and shot by this maniacal demon.

The hand-wringing has already begun on that front. I heard a caller from Newtown saying something to the effect of “This boy had a mental illness, he wasn’t evil. Saying he was evil (in reference to our governor’s comments) is just wrong. The acts might be evil, but he had a meeeentaaaal illlllness (just like my son).”

Later, the host quickly cut off a Haitian woman (based on her accent) from Hartford who mentioned that God and the Bible being taken out of the schools was a bad decision.

Surprised that it was on PBS?


29 posted on 12/15/2012 7:23:50 PM PST by Betis70 ("Leading from Behind" gets your Ambassador killed)
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To: FlingWingFlyer

“It’s time for SCOTUS to get off its @$$ and “decide” that the Second Amendment is an individual right guaranteed to EVERY AMERICAN and that it doesn’t have anything to do with hunting or the National Guard. Enough beating around the bush.”

Right you are. Put this non-issue issue to rest once and for all so we can move on.


30 posted on 12/15/2012 7:29:43 PM PST by MichaelCorleone ('We the People' can and will take this country back...starting today.)
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To: elcid1970

It doesn’t take much logic to understand this: Jesus said suffer the little children to come unto me. “If anyone hurts one of these let a millstone be hung around their neck” “Unless we have the faith of a little child. . .” I really enjoy my guns. I understand their purpose and the judicious melding of wood and metal and the role they play in both my country’s freedom and my protection. I just said that if it was theoretically possible to bring back all of the innocent victims of gun crime, then I would willing give up my firearms. I know this is not possible and would accomplish nothing but more violence so i t is a moot issue. Don’t get your primers and powder up in a tight wad, We have to engage our fellow citizens on these issues.


31 posted on 12/15/2012 7:37:23 PM PST by 2nd Amendment
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To: Windflier; Tzimisce
They’re going to disarm us.

They are damned sure going to try. Legislatively at first and by executive order and force when that fails.

I didn't see Tz say he was ready to surrender...he was merely stating an opinion that he perceives as inevitable.

The communists are going to try and disarm us...as you suggest will they succeed? Isn't that what the DREAM act was all about? Stuffing our military with foreigners with no loyalties to us who would not question an order to draw down on and shoot citizens.

They are not going to let go of this...ever. They will keep on it until we are disarmed. Maybe not in your lifetime or mine.

32 posted on 12/15/2012 7:39:17 PM PST by Ouderkirk (Obama has turned America into an aristocracy of the unaccomplished.)
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To: Red in Blue PA

It’s time to have that national conversation on the unhospitalized, free-roaming mentally ill.


33 posted on 12/15/2012 7:44:52 PM PST by livius
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To: Tzimisce
Tzimisce wrote:

They’re going to disarm us.

Molon Labe. . . .

34 posted on 12/15/2012 8:04:51 PM PST by Salgak (Acme Lasers presents: The Energizer Border. I **DARE** you to cross it. . . .)
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To: 2nd Amendment; elcid1970
1. As an owner of many firearms, I would give them all up if I thought they would save the lives of these precious kindergarteners.( I do not think this would happen)

You would need to be sure that disappearance of your (and possibly all other) firearms would prevent all such violence, from now on and forever. Otherwise it devolves into a classical movie hostage situation. The bad guy takes a hostage and tells the lawman to drop his gun. He does that and the hostage is released. However the bad man immediately grabs another hostage... and the lawman has no gun anymore.

In other words, a permanent sacrifice for a temporary relief is not a fair trade. You give up all that you have, but the opponent remains free to do his evil deed again and again. What is to stop him now? What can stop a lunatic from getting a job as a school bus driver and then wrecking the bus? Will it help if you surrender your driver's license while being guilty of nothing?

It is emotionally understandable that we want to do *something*, but logic tells us that the action should be of help. In this case, IMO, nothing short of daily psychiatric tests could have helped because if he couldn't get his hands on the gun he'd just [...] perhaps no need to give them ideas. The US society has more psychos than any other; but all large countries have their own mass murderers; even Norway didn't escape this fate. It's what some humans are.

IMO, the best action one could take is to severely restrict violence in products of Hollywood. A modern TV viewer is more desensitized to death than a soldier in an army 100 years ago. Death should never be for fun and profit.

35 posted on 12/15/2012 8:06:45 PM PST by Greysard
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To: 2nd Amendment

“I just said that if it was theoretically possible to bring back all of the innocent victims of gun crime, then I would willing give up my firearms.”

Pie in the sky. Your firearms have nothing to do with gun crime. Giving them up is an illogical meaningless gesture that signifies nothing. There’s no cause & effect, no connection.


36 posted on 12/15/2012 8:21:38 PM PST by elcid1970 ("The Second Amendment is more important than Islam.")
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To: Ouderkirk
"They’re going to disarm us."

They are damned sure going to try.

I know they're going to try, but that's not what Tz said. My reaction is to the the unequivocal doom and gloom in his post. Go back and read it, if it wasn't clear to you. It's all there.

Posts such as that are a covert attempt to get others to succumb to the evil which seeks to enslave us. Pure and simple. Sometimes the poster isn't even aware that they're trying to pull others down to their level of fear and terror, but I assure you, they most certainly are.

No matter whether they're aware that they're creating that effect, it remains that they are, and I will object to it every time I see it here.

37 posted on 12/15/2012 8:23:28 PM PST by Windflier (To anger a conservative, tell him a lie. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.)
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To: Red in Blue PA
Excellent article. Changing the argument to arming and training teachers as the conversation starter.

Earlier today, I received a facebook petition titled, We must have this conversation, from a teacher friend. I said teachers should be armed. She was aghast. I asked her how we could trust our children with them if they couldn't even trust themselves with a weapon? Of course no answer except she would never want to have a gun.

Oh, I also wrote I was offended at these groups who planned to exploit the shooting for their own agenda. That one received quite a few likes.

38 posted on 12/15/2012 8:30:45 PM PST by Betty Jane
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To: unixfox

History is crystal clear, if there is compromise on this issue then our children and grandchildren will assuredly become victums of an oppressive government. No. This will not stand.


39 posted on 12/15/2012 8:31:15 PM PST by Obadiah (How do you know that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't a muzzle flash?)
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To: FlingWingFlyer
The SCOTUS has made that decision. The left would love you to believe otherwise but the individual right to keep and bear arms has been upheld by our top court.
40 posted on 12/15/2012 8:32:56 PM PST by oldenuff2no
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