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“A dwindling few voices in the press wonder whether better gun laws might not be a good idea,” Tim Kreider over at huffington.com writes. “And the gun lobby laments aloud that no one was carrying a concealed firearm at the scene of the crime.” Just a quick point here. Did Kreider take five seconds to wonder if any of the relatives of the 13 people murdered in the Midnight Movie Massacre wish that their loved one had been armed on that horrific night? And what of the survivors?

If they suffer from regret, do they wish society had “tighter” gun control laws—as does Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard? Or do they wonder what if . . . I’d been armed? OK. Back to Kreider’s complete dismissal of concealed carry . . .

It’s this last talking point that always amazes me. It’s so nakedly adolescent, a wish fulfillment so obviously cribbed from the payback scenes of action movies, that I can’t believe that any grown up is unselfconscious enough to voice it out loud. It reminds me of those pro-torture arguments that posit a hypothetical scenario where we have a terrorist in captivity who knows there’s a nuclear bomb set to detonate in Times Square in just 20 minutes — ! This is not something that is ever going to happen in real life; this is something that happens on 24. What happens when you have a heavily-armed citizenry vigilantly on the lookout for dangerous criminals is not the climax of a Charles Bronson film — it’s Trayvon Martin.

Surprisingly, Mr. Kreider’s been the victim of a burglary and a stabbing (neglecting to mention the fact that the knife attack happened in Crete). Neither experience is any reason to have a gun because . . .

A) ” . . . murdering someone over a piece of merchandise worth about a thousand dollars retail is insane.” (Agreed. Murder is bad)

B) ” . . . real-life violence is almost always messy and unexpected and comes out of nowhere, inconveniently hard to plan around. The perfect moment for making your stand somehow never comes.”

Unless, of course, it does. How hard would it be for Mr. Kreider to Google search “defensive gun use”? It’s this willfully ignorant “it’s all about me” perspective that informs so much of the pro-gun control rhetoric.

What of rape Mr. Kreider? Have you ever been raped? Would you have wanted to carry a concealed firearm to fight back and hopefully prevent that soul-damaging indignity?

No. No he wouldn’t.

The unmarketable truth is that there’s nothing much you can do to protect yourself or the people you love, not buying a gun or moving to a gated community or building a survival shelter. Bad things can happen any time. But mostly they don’t.

Until, of course, they do. And that is the real lesson of the tragedy in Aurora. Isn’t it?

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51 COMMENTS

  1. Yep, just wish fulfilment. The wish to be able to fight back.

    The elderly gent in the florida cybercafe, he was just wishing, I guess,
    as was the 63 year old jewlery store owner in California.

    Those were just pipe dreams.

  2. Better gun laws are definitely a great idea: Constitutional Carry nationwide would be awesome, for example. Getting rid of the NFA would rock. Expanding funding for the CMP would be excellent. Yup, there are a lot of ways gun laws could be better.

    • Hell yeah. How about instead of subsidizing food stamps, Medicaid, and Section 8 for illegal immigrants, we instead subsidize firearms training camps a la Appleseed Project and then hand out Garands at subsidized costs as well? Congress should love this, their approval rating would go through the roof.

  3. 1. There is a good reason the voices of the press in favor of more gun control are dwindling: the public doesn’t buy it. 2. Self-defense, even the use of deadly force, is not “murder.” Yes, it is “homicide” (the killing of another human being), but it is not an unlawful homicide. In all 50 states. I take it this guy is such a peacenik he disagrees with this simple statement of law–old law to boot.

  4. Wow, what a vomit-inducingly self-centered and staggeringly stupid piece of garbage. With that image and those words, it’s amazing how succinctly one can represent himself as everything wrong with humanity. You know those disaster movies where there’s always that one guy in the survivors’ group that endangers everyone due to his own stupidity, ego, and selfish tantrums? The one that’s supposed to symbolize the bad side of humanity? That’s him. Always such a downer being reminded that people like this infect the world.

    Too bad he escaped the burglary and stabbing alive; those criminals had a chance to really do some good for the world by taking him out of it.

  5. Also, what is it with HuffPo and all the anti-gun garbage theyve been piling on lately? Its like theyre hurting for topics to write about or something. Isnt there a starlet with a scandal they can write about….

  6. Tim Kreider:
    “nakedly adolescent”
    “pro-torture”
    “in real life”
    “the climax”

    I think this man is possibly unconsciously expressing a crying need for others to recognize that he is sick and needs help before he does something terrible to innocent people.

    • PS: I just checked the HP comments that follow his rant. There are just two comments so far to this story that was published online Thursday morning. The second comment by a pro 2A supporter provides links to the story about the sr citizen in Texas that came to the defense of the police office.

  7. What we have here is an illustration of the Age of the Wimp. Literature is filled with un-heroes. Media experts bleat about surrendering, not resisting, about how nothing is worth the price of fighting back. Prosecutors too often give a deal to thugs and punish good citizens.

    We’re Americans. We connected two oceans with a canal. We went to the Moon. We fought Hitler, fought Tojo, fought Stalin and his successors–and we won (along with our friends, to be sure).

    Can I hear a Bronx cheer for Mr. Kreider?

    • Ignore? I think not.

      On the reason if we ignore instead of rebutting their (him and others like him) fallacies and lies in the public eye, we will allow people’s minds to be poisoned to the point we are no longer the home of the free, and we the pro 2nd amendment (or any bill of rights or Constitutional position) are considered a terrorist threat.

  8. Nothing you can do? No. You can’t make it 100% certain that you’ll be able to prevent bad things from happening, but I still put on my seatbelt because some judicious thought can IMPROVE THE ODDS.

    You makes yer choices, you takes yer chances. Hope never to be in a DGU situation, and thankfully, it’s rather unlikely I’ll ever be in one. However, if I can improve my odds in case it does happen, cool. In the meantime, marksmanship is fun to practice.

  9. this is another,of many, complaints i have with liberals. a thousand dollar item is not worth killing over. bull. how many hours did i have to work to earn that money. hours away from my family, my home. hours that are gone, i’ll never have back. years of my life spent doing right, keeping my life squared away so some druggie can walk off with a thousand dollar investment of mine. bull. my money and my goods are worth killing over.

    • Boom. Thank you.

      The anti self defense crowd is always going on with “Stealing might be wrong but is it worth killing someone over?” There was a DGU of the day on here a while back and one of the linked articles had some commentator going on like that. I responded something like this. Bull. Cheating on your taxes or running a red light is wrong, breaking into someones house is violating a principle that’s been held as sacred by English Common law for 500 years. I don’t care if you’re planning on flat out murdering the residents, stealing their t.v., or you’re drunk and stumbled into the wrong house. Criminally forcing your way into an occupied space, forfeits your right to not be shot. There, I said it. Can we move on?

      • Living in a society that respects property rights, human rights, and the rule of law is worth both killing over and dying for, though I prefer the former. This isn’t just about the value of the item stolen, but about our responsibility to help create and defend the type of society we want to live in. Rights come with responsibilities.

    • Exactly! If a $1000 product is worth someone trying to kill you, it’s worth defending with lethal force. I wish leftists would be consistent and endorse the labor theory of value.

  10. Krieder expresses the Progressive’s attitude about crime. It is like an accident — it just happens to you. If you die it sucks to be you. The progressive’s perverted sense of lowest common denominator equality demands that armed self defense be outlawed lest some people unfairly change the odds in their favor.

    • Here’s another angle. Progressives subscribe to evolution, right? Well when an armed citizen defends themselves it is simply survival of the fittest. If some street punk tries to use force to take something from me (my life, liberty, or property), I am going to resist — and probably prevail. If the punk doesn’t survive, it’s just survival of the fittest.

      What’s the problem???

      • Can we please not politicize the theory of evolution?

        But yes, it is survival of the fittest. Humans are animals. Some act more like feral ones than others and typically need to be put down.

  11. The one thing that is good about Mr. Kreider’s piece is that it gives a very good look into the minds of those poor, debilitated souls who are too timid to stand up for their rights and their dignity when confronted by evil. I have little doubt that by denigrating those who are not like him, he is able to shield his fragile psyche from life’s realities, and deflect and demean the accompanying adult responsibilities incumbent upon all of us, lest he incur damage to his precious self esteem. There is little hope for people like that, they are an evolutionary dead end.

  12. There’s two kinds of people.

    People that life happens to…

    …and people who make life happen.

    I think we know which group Mr. Kreider belongs to.

  13. It is amazing to me that these jerks are still clinging to the Trayvon Martin story. Never mind that the story has evolved. Never mind that Trayvon Martin was a violent thug who was in the process of beating the shit out of George Zimmerman when he was shot ONE TIME at close range. Never mind that photos of a beaten and broken George Zimmerman have been released to the public.

    If George Zimmerman was a bloodthirsty Bronson wannabe out to kill a negro, why would he take a severe beating first?

  14. The Times Square scenario could never happen?

    What if, hypothetically, you captured a terrorist who had knowledge of a plot to fly airplanes into buildings in New York. Wait, that’s ridiculous, it could only happen on 24.

  15. “The unmarketable truth is that there’s nothing much you can do to protect yourself or the people you love,…”

    I call you on your BS. There is plenty that I can do to keep my loved ones safe. If YOU however, do not want to do anything and just lay down and die, that is up to you, but I’ll be happy knowing there is one less idiot that can infect the world with their stupidity. Let’s call it natural selection at work.

  16. It’called transference; because he’s a proven waste of space in a self-defense situation, everyone else would have to be as well.
    Pathetic, but that’s how the human mind works, especially for Liberal/ Progressives.

  17. Kreider said The unmarketable truth is that there’s nothing much you can do to protect yourself or the people you love which seems just a sophists way of ducking responsibility.

  18. I think he will have a tough time depriving all the “country” folk (ranchers, farmers, etc) of their firearms, whether pistol rifle or shotgun. All these genre are useful and necessary out in the country. There can be animal predators, wounded animals needing dispatch, two legged predators, (re the Carpenter case in CA). I suppose he would throw all of these people out the window or under the bus or to the wolves whichever. Personally, if I were one of these millions of country folk I would resist disarmament with all my being. They would have to kill a lot of producers to get their way in this. I don’t see it happening easily. One thing about EVERYBODY being armed or at least in possession of a gun, is that foreign attacks would very likely be deferred for a long time. Our troops would have a lot of assistance in defending our country (and it is OUR country, not his).

  19. Leftists are, at heart, Communists and for them America is the next Spain.
    There are a very few unbiased accounts of what actually happened during the “Spainish Civil War”, an unacknowladged Communist Insurgency that killed 10,000’s which was aided by a fawning Leftist Media but it is well worth learning about, as America is now in the midst of an identicle conflict.
    Kreider’s roots go straight back to that murderous well spring of hate.

  20. I have a fantasy, too. It has something to do with HuffPo and AOL cratering like the Tunguska Comet. And a weekend in Paris for me and Salma Hayek, with French pastries.

  21. BTW
    The FIRST thing the Spanish Commies did when they captured a town was to disarm the populace, followed by confiscating all food, then clothes and valulables. By this time all the preists and Nuns were dead and the churches burnt. It was then that the murders started in earnest

  22. Jimmyzline I would not hold my breath for Tim to respond about talking to him. And if he does, you will not make any progress. These folks have their minds set in concrete and until they get mugged, burglarized, raped or beaten they will never see the light or feel the heat.

  23. Well, I reckon if liberals think it’s perfectly fine to kill unborn babies, they don’t have a problem with making you defenseless as well.

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