We Had That Conversation

Milwaukee NPR wonders…

Why Can’t We Talk About Guns?
An NRA video making the rounds online has been called everything from an open call to violence to protect white supremacy to a condemnation of violence.

“The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth,” says NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch in the ad.

Subsequent NRA videos are more political but equally divisive.

The debate over guns in America has never been easy – but is it getting harder to keep it civil and useful?

We asked the NRA and Loesch to appear on this show, but did not hear back.

I expect they didn’t hear back from the NRA or Loesch because it’s extremely clear that WUWM’s anti-rights bias would make this, at best, an argument rather than a discussion. Stacking the deck with three anti-rights shills vs. one pro-rights activist, as well as WUWM’s false characterization of the Loesch video proves it.

And as a tool to reach any real understanding or agreement, it’s pointless. Those would disarm the honest demonstrably will not listen or learn. And they will lie. How do we know that (he asks rhetorically)?

Several years ago, I wrote a column for The Libertarian Enterprise. In light of this supposed call for “talk,” it seems appropriate to publish it again.


We Had That Conversation
In the wake of the Newtown murders, I see a meme popping up amongst the gun banners/victim disarmers. They say we need a “conversation” on guns in America. A common sub-argument is that pro-gun people need to stop saying “No” every time those who prefer a disarmed populace suggest more restrictions on the honest folks who didn’t kill any innocents in Newton.

We already had that conversation.

We had it in 1791, and settled the issue with the second amendment to the Constitution protecting a preexisting right to keep and bear arms. Gun banners being the whack-a-moles of civil rights violation, we had that conversation several times: Cruikshank and Presser come to mind.

More recently, we again had that conversation in 2008, when the Supreme Court pointed out that yes, the second amendment really does protect an individual right to keep and bear arms in Heller.

Chi-town pols didn’t like that, so we had the conversation yet again in 2010. The Supreme Court again pointed out that arms really are a right, and that it really is an individual right, in McDonald.

Victim disarmers are slow learners, forever doomed to riding the short bus through life, so we had the conversation yet-a-frickin’-gain in 2012: Moore v. Madigan, in which a federal judge had to lecture the poor, cognitively-challenged pols of Illinois (who have trouble even finding the short bus) in small words that, WHACK-upside the head “Pay attention, dipsticks; we told you it’s a right of the individual people, so stop screwing with it.”

And here we are: Once more, idiots who shouldn’t be on the streets without a guardian to wipe the drool off their faces, change their diapers, and keep them out of the road, are calling for the “conversation”. Like whiny children pestering exasperated parents over and over and over and over for a coveted-but-terribly-bad-for-you present, they keep ignoring the settled issue. “But China does it. Why can’t we make all the citizens helpless, too?” they pontificate petulantly. (Yeah, China does it. That’s why their lunatic had to cut up those 22 Chinese schoolchildren with a knife a few days before Newton. Guns bans sure solved China’s violence problems.)

We had that conversation, and explained in words that anyone with an IQ greater than their shoe size should have been able to comprehend: “the security of a free state”, the right to life and liberty, self defense. At this point, anyone who doesn’t—or won’t—get it probably falls into one or more of three categories:

  • whining mental incompetents
  • those with a “professional” need to ensure a steady supply of helpless victims for violent predators
  • and those with a more extensive agenda

You might abbreviate those as morons, criminals, and traitors. None of which are really interested in reasoned conversation.


Going on five years and we’re still hearing the same judicially-invalidated claims and demands from the victim-disarming whack-a-moles, reinforced with equally-disproved claims that 90+% of Americans want universal preemptively-prove-your-innocence checks (because — try not to laugh — they would have prevented the Newtown school killings), and debunked claims that gun owners are a shrinking minority.

If gun ownership is on the decline, why are firearms trainers still seeing new people coming in for voluntary classes? Why are more and more people getting CCW licenses even as more and more states are dropping license requirements?

We have facts. They have lies. Of course we don’t want to bother debating them, in a biased setting no less.

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4 thoughts on “We Had That Conversation”

  1. I’m now standing up at my desk applauding. And trying to reassure my shocked looking kitty that all is well with me, really.
    Apparently our minds are running in the same direction today.

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