After Gun Control Marches, ‘It’ll Go Away’ vs. ‘We Are Not Cynical Yet’ – Which group do you think is more likely to vote? . . .
For more than a month now, the questions have ricocheted down this Main Street culled from a Norman Rockwell dreamscape — past the dueling barbershops and the outdoor broom sale and the mural with the horse — quietly at first, when the Florida massacre was still fresh, and then not so quietly.
Why would this time be different? Why should it be?
“Every time something happens, everybody’s hollering,” Garland Ashby, 77, the owner of an estimated 75 guns, said of the recent protests over gun control, rubbing at his cigarette stub from a park bench in this town of 4,200. “A couple of months it’s in the news, and then it’s gone.”
The ‘Nice Girl’ Who Saved the Second Amendment –
(Joyce Lee) Malcolm looks nothing like a hardened veteran of the gun-control wars. Small, slender, and bookish, she’s a wisp of a woman who enjoys plunging into archives and sitting through panel discussions at academic conferences. Her favorite topic is 17th- and 18th-century Anglo-American history, from the causes of the English Civil War to the meaning of the American Revolution. Her latest book, due in May, is The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold, a biography of the infamous general. She doesn’t belong to the National Rifle Association, nor does she hunt. She admits to owning an old shotgun, but she’s unsure about the make or model. “I’ve taken it out a couple of times, but the clay targets fall safely to earth,” she says in an interview at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School in Virginia, where she’s a professor who teaches courses on constitutional history as well as on war and law.
She is also the lady who saved the Second Amendment — a scholar whose work helped make possible the Supreme Court’s landmark Heller decision, which in 2008 recognized an individual right to possess a firearm. “People used to ask, ‘How did a nice girl like you get into a subject like this?’” she says. “I’m not asked that anymore.” She smiles, a little mischievously. “Maybe they don’t think I’m a nice girl anymore.”
Groupies Shower School Shooter with Love Notes and Sexy Selfies – Why not? No one seems to be blaming him. It was obviously the gun’s fault . . .
Despite his alleged involvement in the massacre — or perhaps because of it, depending on one’s point of view — Cruz has been receiving support in the form of mushy letters, sexy photos, and cold hard cash (in the form of commissary credits) from folks who are probably best described as groupies.
Ghoulish Facebook groups have appeared, rife with folks who want to befriend Cruz romantically or platonically. Some seek to help him avoid the death penalty, as the New York Post has reported.
Dems seize on gun control heading into midterms – Well they don’t have the economy, foreign policy or healthcare as issues and the whole Russia thing is totally played out . . .
Democrats are vowing to embrace gun control on the campaign trail this year, seizing on what they view as a shift in political winds while recognizing that Congress is unlikely to pass any new reforms before November.
Strategists say it’s a smart move given there is more public support for gun reform than ever before following a deadly mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in mid-February that sparked anti-gun violence rallies in cities across the country last weekend.
But gun reform –– which has long been considered the third rail in Washington politics –– also risks alienating certain voters, especially in some of the GOP strongholds that Democrats are targeting this election cycle.
On gun control, when did we start trusting youth instead of experience? – When they presented themselves as useful, telegenic tools with which to forward a dearly held agenda item for the left . . .
In the past month, however, America has decided it would rather steep itself in the nascent wisdom of a bunch of young people who have yet to graduate from high school. TIME Magazine has dubbed them the “school shooting generation,” and they have been lionized with worldwide media coverage before, during and after national demonstrations.
Sure enough, there’s an excitement to seeing a young generation of Americans get so involved in pressing issues of the day. (Although kids the age of the Parkland shooting survivors have been fighting in American wars going back to the nation’s founding, and doing so without the gratification of having a Twitter hashtag named after them.)
The gun control kids are emotional, telegenic, and frequently wrong. But they’re attractive because they represent the promise of new ideas and unexpected possibilities. Like the child rulers from centuries ago, they have been imbued with a magical ability to affect societal change before they’re even allowed to go see “Get Out” in a movie theater.
The Fake Gun Control Debate – A little more intellectual honesty on both sides wouldn’t hurt . . .
If you look at the gun debate through the Persuasion Filter, you see people who are pursuing their own self-interest as they see it at the expense of other people. But humans can’t say that directly. To do so would make us appear to be bad people in the eyes of society.
For example, anti-gun people know that some people would be safer with guns in the house for self-defense. I know a single mom with two teenage daughters who gunned-down a documented sex offender who broke into her home in the middle of the night. No charges were filed. She was safer with a gun, and she knew it. That’s why she had one. So the anti-gun folks (the most extreme of them anyway) would accept a world in which my friend and her daughters were sexually assaulted in their own home so long as it makes their own risk a bit lower. But they can’t say that. So instead, they point to England and say whatever works there would totally work here. That might be true. But it isn’t rational. There are too many differences to be confident we’d have the same outcome.
Many pro-gun folks feel safer owning guns. Or they might simply enjoy guns for sporting purposes. They might also prefer gun ownership to lower the risk of a despot taking over, or simply because gun ownership is a freedom granted in the Constitution. But the unspoken part of those preferences includes the knowledge that some number of innocent people, including children, will die because of current gun laws. To be fair, guns will save some people as well. But no doubt about it, some innocent people will die whenever guns are easy to obtain.