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 courtesy

In the interest of diversity, the Washington Post has themselves a token conservative columnist. I know, go figure. Anyway, Jennifer Rubin’s out with a Lettermanesque top ten list of reasons why the president’s losing on the whole gun control thing, federally speaking. You can check out the hit parade, here, including items like the fact that he simply overreached, opposition from members of his own party, his inability to sway anyone from the bully pulpit any more . . .

. . . the bummer that no one fears him in Congress and the inconvenient fact that nothing he’s advocating would have stopped the Newtown shooting. She even adds a hat tip to the NRA and its 4 million+ members for keeping the heat on.

All well and good as far as it goes, but for some reason, the power of an enumerated right enshrined in the Constitution gets no Rubinesque love. Or the fact that, even if everything on the CinC’s wish list were implemented, the only people who’d be disarmed — rather than the criminals the bill is ostensibly aimed at — would be law-abiding gun owners. Did we miss anything?

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38 COMMENTS

  1. Usually the only thing printed in the WaPo with which I agree is Mallard Fillmore, but that is a pretty good list.

  2. The NRA hat-tip actually includes The Chosen One supporting the NRA’s first idea, armed guards.

    I’d say: Make every staff member a guard, voluntary of course. Remove the restrictions on CCW in school by staff and actually ALL law-abiding citizens. Costs nothing. And if you want to spend money, give staff the option to take additional training. A defensive carry or whatever training there is, tons of places offer it around the country and will cost a few hundred dollars. Then also pay for a few boxes of training rounds each year to compensate for when a staff member wants to go to the range. Doesn’t cost a lot, can all be done locally and you don’t need expensive administrative staff and the only additional hiring that needs to be done is a substitute teacher for a few days in case a teacher takes some days off for training.

    Actually, I’d encourage open carry as well. Just to piss on the efforts to demonize guns. Healthy exposure is not a bad thing. Make sure to have proper holsters though.

    • No, she’s not. She’s just a Republican hack and a Romney shill. She had nothing bad to say about Romney and everything bad to say about any other candidate. The WaPo likes her because she has nothing of substance to say.

      • Once again my side shows ignorance and gives ammunition to our opponnents. People like Michael Kinsley of Salon and the New Republic started calling themesleve neo-Liberals to counter the successful neo-Conservative movement that started in the 1960s.

        Stop embarassing our side with your ignorance.

        • Who’s side is that? Is this exclusively a Right Wing page? While I am right of center on gun rights, I do not truck with the entire right-wing agenda which is freedom-hating on other issues.

        • The Pro-Second Amendment side. The gun grabbers will latch on to every idiotic statement no matter what the subject to discredit us as a bunch of yokels.

          And I assume that by your statement you are a so-called Libertarian aka the Progressive’s useful idiots.

        • What do you even believe, tdiinva?

          Describe your political beliefs. You like to snipe others but I’ve never seen a comprehensive post where you lay out your ideology.

        • The left (particularly in academia) also uses “neo-liberal” as a pejorative to refer to anyone who is even vaguely libertarian. The idea is that modern conservatives and libertarians have perverted classical liberalism, hence the need for the new term “neo-liberal” to describe them.

        • And once again, conservatives show themselves to be their own worst enemies. Just like I don’t want liberals telling me what guns I can own, I don’t want conservatives telling me what god I have to believe or not believe in, nor do I want the government wasting billions putting people in prison for buying or selling drugs (both liberals and conservatives support the drug war).

          Libertarian votes are there for the taking if Republicans want them. Do they want them, though?

      • If directed at me I am a Federalist/republican (small r) in the sense of what Hamilton and Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. In other words I believe in a government with limited but strong powers in their area of responsibility as laid out in the Constitution. When I was in college and graduate school in the days before Ayn Rand caught on that was what used to be called a Libertarian. Between Friedman’s economic determinism and Rand’s radical individualism Libertarianism became what people now refer to as anarcho-capitalism. A concept as screwed up as Progressivism.

        • Yeah, if they got their way the the country would have disintegrated into a set of warring states and British would have been back. You would now be singing “God Save the Queen” at the start of the cricket season.

        • And how has that worked out for the country? Now we have an overbearing federal government that can justify almost every domestic action they take and law they pass through either the commerce clause or their taxation powers. It is run by thieves, morons, and madmen. The constitution has not stopped them. What is your solution to fixing that?

          Because showing deference to a document that has been perverted beyond repair by the powers that be, at this point, makes zero sense to me. Then again, I was never one to pine for the magical days of yesteryear when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were supposedly respected, because they never completely were even by some of those who helped ratify it (ex: the Alien and Sedition Acts).

          I also find it amusing when you lump various people, who range from disaffected Republicans to Randian cultists, that call themselves libertarians in with American protofascists. By the way, in what way are these “libertarians” the useful idiots of the progressives when they typically disagree with each other on basic tenets and what the proper role and size of government should be?

          I’ve seen you complain about how some of them support the legal recognition of gay marriage, which I believe to be a totally unnecessary distraction, and the implication was that they were useful idiots because of that.

          Finally, I’d argue that for them to be useful it’d require them to actually have power. Where are these influential libertarians that are meddling and sabotaging the efforts of your fellow travelers?

    • Ignore that MothaLova douche. Although I can’t exactly pigeonhole Rubin’s politics as conservative, libertarian, Tea Party-ish, she is a fine writer and a welcome addition to the WaPo’s anodyne leftish pages.

        • Ah yes, now we know where you get your definition of neo-con. Nazi loving Pat Buchanan. Just FYI, a real neo-con is just a likely to be an Irish-Catholic as a Jew.

        • I should have known. What’s really behind all the bad stuff in America is…

          …the JOOOOOOOOS!!!!

          This is the part of conservatism I can’t say I care for very much.

      • csmallo isn’t a conservative. He is a “Libertarian.” Just another issue where many Libertarians are in sync with their Progressive friends.

        • It says a lot a person when they are reduced to name calling.

          So what kind of government framework to you extol?

  3. Re: Rubin’s exposure of Obama’s loss of national traction:

    The gun control crowd is always going to be more successful at the state legislative level where the upper and lower houses are both population based: one person – one vote. As long as heavily populated liberal metropolitan areas hold more seats, the gun grabbers are going to focus their attention on state legislative bodies and bribe or coerce the legislators into party line compliance.

    And many of the state legislators are eager to please their party leaders, and are too fearful, or ignorant (like Rep. Diana DeGette), or both to resist the pressure from the democrat leadership and outside Democrat influences (like Bloomberg’s expensive efforts to influence election outcomes) .

  4. I think the one thing I would add is the he’s just plain wrong on his gun control agenda. Once again, they’re trying to treat the symptom instead of the cause. Guns are no the cause of the violence. Guns are just one tool used by those who would commit violent crimes. Find the cause of these criminals anger, or whatever, and we can then start talking about how to end it.

  5. I see that #7 on the list is blaming “then newfangled” comics / movies / books / music / video games. Of course if there was any reality to that thinking, we’d have thousands of mass murders every week around the world, not a handful per year. It’s always the old people who have little to no experience with a given type of media that want to blame it for societies problems, yet they always ignore the fact that the same problems existed before that form of media was invented.

    • Well if this is going to be the “Truth…” about guns we ought to be able to look at facts and reflect and discuss without resorting to all-or-none thinking ” its always the …” and divisive characterizations “the old folks…”. Thats the in-fighting the antis love to see and might even send trolls to stimulate here at TTAG to muddy the waters. Clearly Lanza and Holmes were mentally ill. Why not have a discussion about that basedon science-based studies? Heres a link to a good comment along that line in the replies to the CBS item on Newtown family members trotted out for the MSM narrative cited Col Grossmans book and the 2001 Stanford tdy on tv and video game violence and exposure to young kids. I’m NOT drawing conclusions and certainly NOT paining all gamers as one group. But I AM saying these are worth considering in the context of the “person-centric
      ” focus on mental health vs “inanimate object -centric” distraction the antis and MSM try to force in order o distract from common-sense but much more complicated solutions.

      http://www.cbsnews.com/8618-18560_162-57578052.html?assetTypeId=41&messageId=13825497&blogId=

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