Posted on 12/26/2012 5:47:25 AM PST by Kaslin
When you argue for a living, you can tell how an argument is going for you. The evidence and my gut both tell me that the liberals have lost control of the gun control narrative.
Not for lack of trying – it was almost as if they were poised to leap into action across the political, media and cultural spectrum the second the next semi-human creep shot up another “gun free zone.” This was their big opening to shift the debate and now it’s closing. They’ve lost, and they are going nuts.
The evidence is all around that this is not going to be the moment where America begins a slide into disarmed submission through an endless series of ever-harsher “reasonable restrictions” on our fundamental rights. You just have to look past the shrieking media harpies to see what’s really happening.
Let’s start with the most obvious omen that this tsunami has peaked. President Obama thrilled his base by grandstanding at the memorial, and then promptly washed his hands of it by handing it over to a “blue ribbon commission.” Making Joe Biden its chairman was like staking a vampire through the heart, then hosing him down with holy water before burying his body beneath the Gilroy Garlic Festival.
Why does Obama want this gun thing buried? While intensely popular with metrosexual pundits, coastal liberals, and cultural bigots slobbering at the opportunity to stick it to those banjo –strummin’, God-believers out in the hinterlands, gun control remains poison to Red State Democrats.
Joe Manchin of West Virginia couldn’t resist some sanctimonious posturing, but clearly he heard enough from his constituents to sprint-back his heresy with a WaPo op-ed explaining how awesome the NRA is and how groovy gun owners are. He will never take sides against the family again.
We didn’t see the Red State Democrats up for re-election in two years out dumping on their constituents to please the media. Call it “the Fredo Effect,” and 2014 is the rowboat. We won’t hear from the likes of Senators Landrieu, Pryor and Begich until they vote “No.”
Sure, Senator Feinstein will submit her gun ban wish list to Harry Reid, who will look at it sagely, nod politely, and let it die. He’s more Tom Hagen than Fredo. He is going to retain the NRA “A” rating his website proudly showcases regardless of what Chuck Schumer thinks. What gets you hosannas in Manhattan gets you unemployed in Searchlight.
So, the politicians’ actions have spoken louder than their words, but what of the media? We lawyers always say that when your case is strong, pound on the law and the evidence, and when your case is weak, pound on the table. The furniture is splintering in Liberalland.
Their post-Newtown strategy was always to prevent an effective response from the pro-gun freedom side by both rapid action and by demonization. But the holidays and the kabuki theater that is the fiscal cliff drama meant that legislative action, their Holy Grail, would have to wait. That gave people time to think and the gun freedom side the time to react.
Demonizing those who support gun freedom was always intended as a weapon to silence them. It was also critical that we, law-abiding gun owners, become the Other. By dehumanizing us and painting us as evil, it is that much easier to strip us of our rights.
But gun freedom advocates fought back. Using the mainstream media, conservative media and especially social media – we need to understand its huge significance here – gun freedom advocates countered liberals’ bogus “facts.” Media reports about “automatic” weapons were corrected, clownish statements about “high caliber magazines” and “large capacity round” were mocked. The struggle raged over millions of Facebook posts. The average citizen saw gun banners ask “When will America control access to weapons?” and then saw several experts among his or her friends post about the significant hurdles one needs to get over to get a gun. Truth bypassed the mainstream media and became a weapon for the side of fundamental rights.
The banners overplayed their hand, losing credibility with every distortion, evasion and smear. The cries of “Blood is on your hands!” failed to resonate – reasonable Americans just did not blame the actions of a single sociopath on millions of their fellow neighbors. And it did not help when third-string celebrities and wizened literary has-beens took to hoping gun rights advocates would be shot for daring to oppose disarmament.
The gun banners also counted on a narrative that portrayed a respect for the Second Amendment. They sought only “reasonable restrictions” – why, no one wants to ban or confiscate your guns! The problem was one of memo distribution – not everybody got that memo. Mayor Bloomberg was putting out that what few guns he might graciously deign to leave in the hands of the unworthy would be starved of bullets, while Governor Cuomo acknowledged that confiscation was one of the options.
Oops. “Gun control” is a process that is designed and intended to lead to a total gun ban, and the banners are counting on people not realizing it.
Their credibility and motives already in question, the gun banners became vulnerable to a shift in the paradigm from depriving law-abiding citizens of effective defensive weapons to the idea of protecting kids with armed personnel in schools.
Suddenly, the gun banners had to argue two ridiculous positions. The first was that allowing trained educators or police having weapons in schools is a danger. The problem is that people generally like and trust teachers and cops. The second position was even worse, that armed personnel or police are somehow utterly useless against untrained, amateur creeps who seek to confront six-year olds. All over America, millions of parents noted how none of the wealthy gun banners were disbanding their personal security teams and thought, “You know, I think I’d like having a cop around my kid too.”
Frustration at the fact that their argument had not been unquestioningly accepted morphed into faux moral outrage that their opponents had dared offer any alternative proposal at all. E.J. Dionne of the WaPo was a prime example. He had to “grope for words to describe the National Rifle Association’s proposal,” yet he managed to find some: “Absurd, unbelievable, tragic, obscene,” as well as “insane.”
Note that Dionne’s righteous fury does not apply to the armed guards at the Post’s front door, surrounding President Obama, or to anywhere else other than in the vicinity of regular people’s children.
Particularly amusing are the liberals who transform into green eyeshades misers with the public purse when it comes to cops in schools. The folks who can’t spend enough dough on fudge-smeared, patriarchy-challenging performance artists suddenly become thrifty Scotsmen when it comes to doling out a few shillings to put a cop on campus.
They have been unable to articulate any coherent argument opposing putting cops in schools because there is no coherent argument against putting cops in schools. But more than anything, the mommies at the affluent Los Angeles-area school my kids attend have convinced me that the narrative has escaped the gun grabbers.
Knowing our reputations as proud conservatives – we represent diversity for our liberal friends – a pal of my wife remarked, out of the blue, that “I think my husband and I need to buy guns.” Whoa.
And as third graders sang holiday songs at their pageant while I surveyed the packed, vulnerable room, I blurted out to another mommy that I wished I could legally carry a weapon to protect those kids. And she told me that she wished that I could too. Whoa.
Gun banners, you lost the President, the senators, the social media, and now you’ve lost liberal LA mommies. You’ve lost everything. Again.
They don’t have to program people to go postal, it happens every day. All they have to do is pick a few events and take them national.
Hitler - “The task of propaganda lies not in the scientific training of the individual, rather in drawing the attention of the masses to certain facts, events, necessities, etc....”
Utter. Nonsense. The Court will always consider the telos of a law, what is its purpose, and is that purpose advanced or impeded by some proposed modification of that law. In Heller, the law for DC gun owners was deemed so onerous it amounted to a substantial ban on handguns, and not because ownership of the firing mechanism was prohibited. Clearly under the DC law you could own the firing mechanism. But the restrictions of the DC law made it virtually impossible to use the gun in those self defense scenarios which the Court saw as the core telos (purpose) of the 2Amdmt.
Thus Heller turns on that same inference of usability for lawful purposes (such as self-defense) which you seek to deny. If a law says you can own it but you can’t use it to protect yourself according to its purpose as a weapon, that law is in violation of the Constitutional provision as understood by Heller. Otherwise, you accuse the founders of idiocy, of guaranteeing a right to own and carry museum pieces and flowerpots as a defense against armed criminals.
But the founders were not idiots, and we can safely infer they meant “arms” as weapons capable of fulfilling their lawful purpose, just as Heller concludes. If it helps you, think of the bullet as a little moving part of the gun, the part that when ejected kills or injures the recipient, thus the one part most necessary to fulfill the purpose of a gun as a weapon, and therefore as much under the protection of the 2Amndmt as any other part of the weapon system we call “gun.”
Sure. The Founders were worried about bullets, large capacity magazines, TNT, RPG’s, 50 cal sniper rifles. Right. Thanks Einstein. Keep on believing.
No need to compliment my intelligence. Just read Heller for yourself. Your argument about the full range of weaponry could serve as a nice diversionary tactic for the low information reader, but it fails to address the usability principle of Heller as Heller applied it to handguns. The weapon must be able to serve its purpose, to kill or injure in lawful self defense. Else your right to “keep and bear” is an empty gesture, a right denied.
Believe whatever you like. Your choice. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said the main function of the attorney is to predict what a court will do. While I disagree with Holmes on many issues, I have used this suggestion of his to win for my clients. Based on the law under Heller, if I had a client with an ammo case, I would predict eventual victory under the usability principle. You have offered no point of law, either theoretical or case based, that would suggest otherwise. Only personal invective, which, I assure you, is unconvincing in court.
I took one of my wife’s friends out shooting so she could try out some different guns and help her decide what to buy. She never owned a gun before and ended up buying a gun after we left the range that day. She signed up for and attended basic pistol training a couple of weeks later. I like that women today are getting serious about defending themselves.
Freedom of speech may or may not protect pornography; but it would be difficult, probably impossible, to infer the monumental scale and solidity of that amendment from this one solitary inflection in its surface. The same is true of the right to bear arms. The history of its formulation and invocation makes clear that whatever its relation to the realm of individuals and the private uses they have devised for guns, [34] the amendment came into being primarily as a way of [Page 1269] dispersing military power across the entire population. Like voting, like reapportionment, like taxation, what is at stake in the right to bear arms is a just distribution of political power.
--http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Scarry1.html
While it is hard for decent people to predict what deeply evil people will set up or do themselves, it's not impossible if you think about what could possibly make you feel worse than what was just done.
I'm going to guess day care centers and/or maternity wards. Another possibility is a HUGE number of victims. That one will be harder to pull off because somebody in the victim group just might be carrying, but there's always the possibility of multiple shooters in full tactical gear.
Day care centers and multiple crazies have both been done before and both have been used in gun control attempts. I think it was a couple years ago that somebody shot up a Jewish day care center in Seattle.
Also, it may have been far enough back that was during the Clinton regime's attempts when two (maybe more) guys in full gear shot up a street in LA and did it slowly and deliberately and did not try to escape.
The police who responded were totally outgunned. IIRC one cop ran to a gun store to buy something that could stand up to the perps who ultimately ended up dead. There was never any really good follow up explanation or reporting that I remember.
For people who doubt that this could be set up, I would remind everyone that disturbed individuals are easily spotted and can be exploited by evil people "helping" them or simply befriending them and reinforcing their psychopathy and ultimately directing it.
IMO the people in power now are fully capable of doing that. After all, they watched their own ambassador get raped and murdered in real time and refused help to them for their own reasons not widely clear as of yet.
I don’t worry about giving the fiends any ideas because I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a working group on it already.
My sincere hope is that this is going beyond not working and is becoming a big enough loser for them that they shelve it. If they think enough people suspect them, they will back off really fast, but they would probably use ridicule to defeat that. Hopefully, if they do use ridicule, it gets people considering the possibility.
No doubt about it, they have think tanks coming up with ways to implement their agenda.
Remember that Bill Ayers said they’d have to “eliminate” 25 million people that wouldn’t fit in with the new utopia.
However, Heller was 5-4. What about those other four? What happens when the SCOTUS membership swings the other way?
That was my biggest fear about the outcome of the Election just past and now we are on the downward spiral to those horrible SCOTUS changes.
Forgive the rapid-fire corrections here, but...
Maternity wards have tight security in and of themselves, are on hospital campuses that usually have armed security and are usually deep inside the hospital and several floors up from the street. They’re the perfect place for a shooter to attack if he wants to be killed almost immediately after killing no one or almost no one.
Day care centers would just confirm the sense the American people have that these things only happen in “gun free zones.” Also, since day care enters are mostly private businesses, a shooter would have to assume that someone would have a weapon available.
The Jewish facility that was shot up was the office of a charity, not a day care enter. The victims were all adults. the media didn’t give a crap because the shooter was mentally ill and motivated by Hezbollah propaganda, plus they thought Mel Gibson’s drunken outbursts were more important.
Your memory about the L.A. incident is poor as well. The police were not able to kill the shooters, but they did have them boxed in and unable to use their getaway vehicle. Moreover, they were bank robbers and were trapped almost immediately, so the conspiracy theory stuff about them sticking around for no reason doesn’t hold water. And perhaps most important, it was illegal for one of them to purchase or possess a firearm due to being a convicted felon. That didn’t support a gun control narrative, it undermined it.
I don’t have any illusions that we’ve won this issue, but the average American isn’t buying the left’s arguments on it anymore. No one really believes that banning certain types of guns or making it harder to purchase them will affect felons and crazies. Almost no one believes in “sensible gun control laws” anymore. They see the people being murdered in the gun free zones and the drive bys going on in the no handguns allowed cities and they see that the same people who say we need bans now didn’t stop Columbine and told us concealed carry would make our streets into shooting galleries.
Do they want our guns? Yes. Will they try to get them? Yes. But do they now have the same credibility with the American people on guns that Bill Clinton has on marital fidelity? Yes.
I share your concern. My “prediction” assumes current case law and current court membership, and those could change for the worse. However, life is unpredictable, for both the right and the left. So I try not to be too bold in my predictions and assume conditions I really can’t foresee. Even so, there is a systemic inertia to court precedent, and Heller has a chance of surviving for a while, despite any significant change in court personnel. Time will tell.
I guess I should have made my reason for replying more clear—it was not to argue that the grabbers are winning. It was to reply to your question that the other posters didn’t answer about what they thought would be the next attack from the grabbers if/when they get more desperate BECAUSE the last attack ISN’T really working the way they wanted it to. I was basically thinking of what could be worse than killing kids and the obvious is babies.
Re your corrections: 1) I think you are correct that the incident in Seattle was a Jewish charity. Working from memory, I confused it with an attack on a Jewish day care in Granada Hills CA where the shooter was an ex-con on probation from WA state. http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/State-blamed-for-fatal-shooting-spree-at-Jewish-1212237.php
2) You are correct that the perps in the L.A. incident were bank robbers, but “A bystander alerted authorities to the heist, but the robbers didn’t run from police.
...
In surreal scenes captured on camera, Phillips calmly walked with impunity on a street, spraying bullets at dozens of police who were powerless to take him down. Matasareanu drove slowly next to Phillips, apparently urging him to get in, but Phillips kept walking and shooting.” ( http://www.ocregister.com/news/police-190326-phillips-officers.html )
The whole incident on the street lasted about 45 minutes. Phillips was finally shot by police and he then shot and killed himself. The other guy bled out and died from leg wounds from police shots.
I agree that the govenment/media perps are scoring points only with very emotional and not too bright people, but I fear that like other fanatics they may redouble their efforts.
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