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Gun nuts don’t care that you’re afraid: How Second Amendment fetishists created a terrorized society the headline at salon.com proclaims in their usual spiteful style. Writer Gary Legum [above] has penned an article – inspired by the Colorado Springs spree killing – that continues the nasty tone. And how. He begins his diatribe by playing the race card . . .

The guy carrying the rifle, later identified as 33-year-old Noah Harpham, was white. Would the cops have responded right away if he was black? If you think the answer is, “Of course not, they would have respected his Second Amendment right as an American and a citizen of Colorado to walk around a quiet suburban neighborhood on a Sunday morning waving an AR-15 around like Russian paratroops are dropping from the sky,” then I want to know when your visa is expiring and you will be returning to your home country.

For any gun fetishists reading this and pressing the Caps Lock key in anticipation of typing ALL LIVES MATTER in the comments, here’s an example of how cops in America treated a black guy wandering around an Ohio Wal-Mart last year while carrying a BB gun he’d picked up in the toy department. Please keep your piehole closed until you finish the entire column.

So a white American shouldn’t have the right to keep and bear arms (openly) because a black man can’t exercise that right without police intervention. Harrison Bergeron much? Anyway, I read the whole column on behalf of “gun fetishists” everywhere. Here are the proverbial money shots:

Let’s a) institute New Deal-level funding of mental health centers all across the country and make sure our citizens know that help is available, and b) start empowering the authorities to confiscate – yes, confiscate – guns from alcohol-and-drug-addicted rage cases like Noah Harpham as a precautionary measure. And I mean let’s be active about it. No waiting for a relative to get worried and report they are worried someone might harm himself or others. You’re going into rehab or a psychiatric ward? Great. The cops get to come by your house and take away all your guns while you’re there.

This is one of those “be careful what you wish for” deals. Mr. Legum singularly fails to understand that the prospect of firearms confiscation would keep armed Americans from seeking psychiatric help. Nor does he seem to know that Americans committed to a mental institution become prohibited persons. Here are the ATF’s notes on question 11f of ATF form 44473:

A determination by a court, board, commission, or other lawful authority that a person, as a result of marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease: (1) is a danger to himself or to others; or (2) lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs. This term shall include: (1) a finding of insanity by a court in a criminal case; and (2) Those persons found incompetent to stand trial or found not guilty by reason of lack of mental responsibility.

Just so you know: the Colorado Springs shooter had not been committed to a mental institution. Which is why, perhaps, Legum adopts the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s anti-gun agitprop strategy of calling anyone who isn’t a convicted felon who shoots someone illegally a “good guy with a gun.” And then dismisses the very idea of armed self-defense against killers.

Nothing quite puts the lie to the arguments of gun enthusiasts who advocate arming civilians like the fact that there was apparently no other civilian with a gun in the vicinity to take on the shooter. And if there had been, they would not have done anything until after Harpham had shot his first victim. Because until that moment, he was just another good guy with a gun exercising his right to wander around his neighborhood with a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Which is the damn point that gun control advocates are always getting shouted down for making. It would be nice if we could at least make a minimal effort to keep someguns from getting into the hands of “good guys” like Noah Harpham before they become bad guys like Noah Harpham.

Well, OK, maybe there is something else that can put the lie to that argument about arming civilians. But not in the way I think gun enthusiasts wish.

The link takes you to a freep.com story about the woman who fired on a Home Depot shop lifter in Detroit. Illegally. As for the thousands of annual defensive gun uses, not one word.

An armed society is a polite society, or so I keep being told. HA HA HA HA HA! We’re an armed society now and I don’t see evidence we are getting any more damn polite.

A writer who labels Americans who cherish their gun rights “fetishists” (and warns readers not to use caps lock) calling for a more polite society. I guess Legum doesn’t “do” irony. At least not intentionally. I wonder if that’s a sign of mental illness.

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62 COMMENTS

  1. I’m sorry I’m late, I was feeding the Unicorns on the back 40 acres of Utopia with Rainbow water.

    Please lead the confiscatory charge into a home yourself tough guy. Other than that, please, pretty please, STFU.

    Seems the anti’s are getting more uppity aren’t they?

    • I have to agree. Any politician who want’s to confiscate firearms must be the first through the door. Especially at my place. 🙂

      • I’ve often been caught saying that *voters* who vote for malum prohibitum laws/politicians should be mustered in the middle of the night to be point on raids to enforce the sh!t they vote for.

    • I think if anything the antis are getting frustrated and this is evident in the hatred and vitriol seen in their online posts.

      And “they” say firearm owners are unbalanced.

    • “Seems the anti’s are getting more uppity aren’t they?”

      That’s just the result of them wedging the stick a few inches deeper into their own crap holes.

    • “I’m sorry I’m late, I was feeding the Unicorns on the back 40 acres of Utopia with Rainbow water”

      That’s the funniest thing I’ve read today. Thank you.

      Steve

  2. Losing makes them more and more unhinged. Good. Let’s lay it all down.

    It doesn’t really count because no one actually reads salon, but the more vocally crazy they get the better for us.

  3. Have no doubt about it. Modern liberals are fascists. They absolutely will not brook anyone dissenting from their orthodoxy, and they now seek to criminalize contrary views – whether on gun control or climate change.

    Guys like this one would have absolutely no problem with rounding up people like us and killing us. He’d justify the murders as being for the greater good, just like the Bolsheviks and Nazis.

    • I suspect you may be more right than wrong.

      What gets me with these people is, what is wrong with – and what seemed to happen to, our constitution?

      Why can we not all agree to follow a set of well understood rules equally among all in our society? This seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable request; if you don’t like the rules set out in the document, there is a process available within the document to change it.

      We need to have rules that apply equally to all men in order to have a civil society.

      The fact that these people see it as acceptable to throw the constitution out in order to get what they believe is correct greatly concerns me.

      I am willing to be as fair as I expect anyone else to be when dealing with me. This is not reasonable?

      If you are tossing one rule from the constitution out for your purposes, it would seem to be that the whole document is up for grabs.

      This is not acceptable at all.

      And then we get to the next point; the thing they are trying to do to me and my family. Take away my ability to protect myself and my family (and from all free men in the civil society).

      No.

      • Why? When’s it’s up to the Central Committee to decided who gets and who doesn’t, the decision tree can’t be codified. Some will get and some won’t “because I say so”. Collectivism and the Rule of Law are mutually exclusive.

    • Agree with your points, except Nazi’s, like the author and like Bernie Sanders are “National Socialists”. Check it out, they are commonly referred to as fascist because the academics want to thrust them into the far right. They are just a more “successful” version of socialism.

    • The snippets of this guy’s rant posted here are hilarious. The guy is emotional and unhinged; I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been crying while he wrote this article.

  4. I just love it when smug little beta males suggest confiscating firearms. They know damn well that they personally don’t have the balls to confiscate so much as their sisters’ underwear. So I guess that they expect government thugs to do their dirty work for them.

    I wonder how the boys from the G will feel about being used to settle personal grudges against decent people with guns by people who hate people with guns.

  5. Pre-crime much, Mr. Legum? Funny how all of us “ammosexuals” (whatever that means, but I suppose it is another form of the fetishism to which Mr. Legume refers) are guilty until proven innocent, that we are “paranoid” because crime “only happens in our heads.” Umm, yeah. And then, in a grandiose illogic, he suggests that all guns should be banned because someone wasn’t there to stop a guy no one in his right mind would suspect of on the verge of going postal? Okay then.

    • Yes, mass shootings and other “gun violence” crimes are such rampant problems that we need to curtail the rights of law-abiding citizens and confiscate their property on the left hand while if, on the right hand, you want to own a gun to protect yourself then you’re paranoid because suddenly these crimes are so incredibly unlikely.

      • “Why is it that whenever a crime is committed with a gun, Democrats want to take guns away from the people who didn’t do it???”
        –William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)

  6. Anything that appears in Salon should probably be discounted and ignored straight off; they’re a nasty neo-Marxist online tabloid that revels in weird radical fembat politics, racism against white people, and any wacky story they can find about sexual perversions. They’re basically SJWs on steroids and would, given the power, revoke 2A completely and if not bound by the laws of demographics, physics and time, set about confiscating all our firearms and ammunition.

    If you wish to read even more of this cretin’s scribbling:

    http://wonkette.com/author/gary-legum

    If I was a writer and I was reduced to scrawling my own feces for an online site with that name I’d kill myself.

    • Good gravy, this guy writes like he’s a 12 year old. No thinking occurs here, all i see is personal attacks, potty mouth humor and generalized insults.

      Do these people ever stop for just five minutes and try and rationalize all this bullshit they believe? To actually connect some dots, do some math?

      I thought progressivism was supposed to be for the rights of the people governed by their society. Do they ever consider the fact that pretty much all they talk about doing is take from people; take their money, take their rights, take their ability to choose…

      Why do so many people fall for this stuff?

  7. Wait a minute, are we an “armed society” if there was nobody around to stop this guy, as our intrepid gun grabber was so fond of pointing out? I’d say that means we have a long way to go before we are an armed society, but facts and gun grabbers are water and oil.

    • No, we’re not. But we *should* be. The guy may still have been able to shoot one person (maybe not, I wasn’t there), but would then have been shot dead, saving 2 lives. The police should have arrived only to carry off the bodies.

  8. The fact that guys like this, spouting such irrational drivel, are given space at Salon and other media outlets makes me glad there are 100’s of millions of firearms in citizen’s hands.

  9. Don’t let anyone (especially anyone IN REHAB) read Salon, because people in-rehab (those seeking and needing rehab) dimes to dollars are Salon readers.

  10. The one brain cell I have that excretes empathy for people who don’t deserve it, almost feels sorry for Mr. Legum.
    To vilify millions of people that he has never met? I do believe he therefore must be mentally unstable and must be committed to a proper mental facility for the deranged.

    • I’m thinking it’s about”white privilege” he feels a certain way so logic, the Constitution and reality be dammed, just Mr. and Mrs.America turn them in.

  11. He’s right about one point. Here’s one gun nut, who absolutely does not care if he’s afraid!

    Does he expect me to come to his house and kill all the spiders? To look under his bed for the boogie man at night? When did I become responsible for his irrational fears?

    If he cannot process facts and data, with logic and reason, I really don’t care if he’s afraid.

  12. Salon isn’t worth the trons it’s written on. Another blog-o-rama trying to pass itself off as news and relevent commentary. Like Wonkette, I don’t usually peruse the articles, but every now and then a headline draws my attention, and despite better judgement, I start to read it. I generally feel stupider afterwards. Like I’ve actually lost brain cells. There is a lot of pent up angst at Salon; some of them really need to find a hobby that doesn’t involve a keyboard or screen. Mr Legum (Mr Peanut) is certainly no different. I think he needs to head to Starbucks and help himself to a hot, steaming cup of STFU.

  13. I would like to take this opportunity to provide the full quote from “Beyond This Horizon” by Robert A. Heinlein, from which the ever popular “An armed society is a polite society” is derived.

    “Well, in the first place, an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life….But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things that kill off the weak and stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both….But don’t expect human institutions to be efficient. They never have been; it is a mistake to think that they can be made so…”

  14. If these people really hate our country, our rights, our culture so much, why don’t they STFU and head for Cannada or Europe en masse. Isn’t that the socialist utopia that they long for? Seriously, get your shit and get the f#ck out. Problem solved.

    • I’m living in Toronto temporarily and I’m always amazed at the lack of freedom here. There are shootings reported daily on the news, yet the general population of sheep seem to think there isn’t any crime. Then last week I heard a police officer in charge of an amnesty program talking about going to homes and “relieving people of the burden of a firearm that may have been handed down as a family heirloom”. Every gun “turned in” is compared to crime data and yet, not once in ten or so years has a gun that has been “turned in” been linked to a crime. Must be because there isn’t any crime in Canada…

  15. Put a picture of the author next to photos of any of the other recent spree shooters, and you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.

    I guess it’s true when they say antis hate guns because they can’t trust themselves with them…

  16. This Legum guy hides behind tough sounding rhetoric and nasty invective to try to make himself appear to be something he is not and never can be. He only inspires loathing and disgust like the squirming things found under overturned rocks along the edge of a stagnant pond…in fact I think I’d prefer those squirming things to him. At least they are not pretending to be anything but what they are.

  17. Meanwhile, in reality, the mainstream big media outlets is who actually created a “terrorized society”. I put that it quotey marks because I personally don’t feel terrorized at all. The oversensitive busybodies that can’t accept that life isn’t all rainbows and puppies are the ones who are terrorized.

  18. In my fairly extensive online experience, nothing intelligent ever follows the words “gun fetishist” or “ammosexual”. Never, in the history of gun rights discussions.

  19. No, I don’t care if anyone is unreasonably afraid. If they don’t have just cause to be afraid, it’s their mental problem.

    I hear this line over and over: the claim that anyone who isn’t white can’t open carry a rifle without being shot. It is never backed up by evidence. Gang members don’t walk around with ARs on their back. Hell, according to actual statistics (link) armed ones usually don’t even own holsters. Police don’t walk around looking for minorities to shoot without provocation. Racial injustice does exist, but the best example these assholes can come up with is dirtbag Michael Brown and fictitious stories about his actions. Remember the Chipotle Ninja photo? Hispanic guy. I’ve seen footage of quite a few “people of color” openly carrying weapons. Nobody opened fire on the “Justice for Michael Brown!” rifle troop. Anyone openly carrying firearms in a city can expect to be talked to by police. It doesn’t matter the color of their skin, but how they conduct themselves. A holstered or slung gun is not justification to shoot someone. That’s murder.

    That reminds me, I hate rhetoric like “I had to shoot him! He had a gun!”. My response: “You shot a 93-year-old man in the back of the head without provocation! You didn’t even know he was carrying a concealed weapon!” Or “You murderers shot an unarmed man!”. Yeah, but he was choking his wife to death. In headlines, anyone who carries a weapon deserves to be shot, and the unarmed are innocent.

  20. How do the facts of no armed bystander being present and their not being able to engage the spree shooter until he actually committed a violent crime in any way “put the lie” to the notion of allowing people to arm themselves in self defense?

    There weren’t any police right there, either. Had there been, they couldn’t have fired on the shooter, either, until he had committed a violent crime. Sooo……shall we disarm the police? What kind of asinine point is that?

  21. He doesn’t seem aware that being addicted to illegal drugs already empowers police to confiscate his guns, and lock him up for having them.

  22. “Gun nuts don’t care that you’re afraid”

    Damn, right, skippy.

    Nobody cares about your feelings, and your feelings do not trump everybody else’s rights.

    Now that we’ve straightened that out, why don’t you shut up and go away?

    • They won’t go away. Ever. That’s the problem. I don’t care whether they are afraid, but I’m happy to know about it so I can keep an eye on them.

  23. Gun “fetishists” don’t care that you’re afraid. Allegedly.

    Gun alarmists don’t seem to care that stuff happens and you want to be prepared. Other people can/do/will be bad, therefore “for the greater good” you must be disarmed. Only no one is coming for your guns. They just want to ban all the most popular and populous ones. Also we can’t trust the police, but you MUST trust ONLY the police.

    The hypocrisy is like an iceberg. You can only ever see the tip of it, but believe me it’s all under there.

  24. You can’t have freedom and security at the same time, liberals and many others don’t seam to understand this. I hate to put it like this but….shit happens. Someone will always fall through the cracks and people will die just the same. This crap happens over seas and the media reaction if measured proportionally from deaths in say a suicide bomber in some war torn country to the death of a bunch of kids in a quiet and wealthy town would indicate that all lives aren’t really equal to the anti-gunners, the media and to the average joe.

  25. Confiscate the pens, pencils, and computers of everyone in “journalism”. What, we can’t do that? First amendment, you say? Really. So there is an amendment that protects the right to say stuff. Imagine that.

  26. “… [armed citizens] would not have done anything until after Harpham had shot his first victim. Because until that moment, he was just another good guy with a gun exercising his right to wander around his neighborhood with a rifle in one hand and a pistol in the other.”

    Right. Now let us try the same rationale on another application:

    Armed citizens would not have done anything until after John Doe had raped his first victim. Because until that moment, he was just another good guy with a penis exercising his right to wander around his neighborhood with a rope in one hand (to restrain his victim) and a scarf in the other (to muffle his victim’s cries for help).

    So, using that logic, can we proactively ban penises, rope, and scarves before a “shady” person rapes someone?

  27. Salon is the biggest garbage website on the net. Every time an article of theirs pops up it’s complete vitriol by some amateur blogger that can’t proof read or get their facts right. It’s a shame that a powerful tool like the internet is being wasted spreading misinformation and hate like that.

  28. His flawed reasoning, and self-righteousness scare me. We should take away his keyboard, and right to vote. Also, clearly free speech isn’t so much useful – he got to say his piece and nobody shut him up / shouted him down. So, clearly, free speech is useless.

    What’s that, you say? My being “afraid” isn’t justification enough? OK, well, then I’m bored with “I’m afraid, so something must be done!”-guy.

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