From the great Herschel Smith:
As for Gottlieb, I always knew that the “stupid” act he played after support of Manchin-Toomey was a ruse. He has a deep character flaw that enables him to support totalitarian measures. We all have our flaws, but this one runs deep and dangerous. In fact, read again his excuse for supporting universal background checks. Basically it boils down to this: if you don’t voluntarily agree to it, they will do it anyway. Or by way of analogy, if you don’t give a pick pocket you money, he’s just going to take it anyway.
Someone please try to convince me that isn’t what he is saying, because it looks to me like it is. And that’s puerile and childish reasoning, and in this case I think he advances it not because he really believes that it is logically compelling, but because he is frightened, or a publicity hound, or something dark. As I said, I don’t know exactly what, but the character flaw runs deep in Alan.
Gottlieb appears to want universal background checks, despite his Washington state initiative that, on the surface, opposes them. The very short text (pdf) of his I-591 manages to include language completely unnecessary for the stated purpose of the measure — and it’s language that virtually invites the federal government to try again to impose the very UBCs he supported last year.
Gottlieb just wants background checks and the inevitable firearms registration on on terms that he considers favorable — even as everybody else in the gun-rights movement (even the normally limp and compromising NRA) draws their line in the sand in front of UBCs. And “favorable” means favorable to Gottlieb in some way.
What Gottlieb is up to, nobody really knows. The only thing anyone can be sure of is that whatever he’s up to will benefit Gottlieb. That’s been his way of business for a very long time.
One Jewish gun-rights activist I know calls Gottlieb a Kapo. The Kapos were prisoners, sometimes Jews, that the Nazis used to help them rule others in the concentration camps. The Nazis couldn’t do it alone, so they enlisted sellouts — men interested in saving their own skin and working to their own advantage — to help them rule and destroy their fellows.
Per Wikipedia:
The system was also designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS guards. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos. Many prisoner functionaries were recruited from the ranks of violent criminal gangs rather than from the more numerous political, religious and racial prisoners; those were known for their brutality toward other prisoners. This brutality was tolerated by the SS and was an integral part of the camp system.
Prisoner functionaries were spared physical abuse and hard labor, provided they performed their duties to the satisfaction of the SS guards. They also had access to certain privileges, such as civilian clothes and a private room.
Yep, that shoe fits. When Gottlieb supported (and even claimed to have helped write) last year’s Manchin-Toomey-SCHUMER bill, he repeatedly cited petty privileges that the bill supposedly granted, ignoring the principles and rights it would have slaughtered and the millions of gun owners it would have put at risk.
And this is the man to whom JPFO’s weak, tired, willful, and (in one case) quite possibly senile board members sold Aaron Zelman’s legacy. That they sold it “on the cheap” and without even considering better options makes matters worse. But a Gottlieb-owned JPFO, cheap or dear, is a travesty and an abomination.
Poor Aaron. He must be so weary from rolling and rolling in his grave.
