Despair and Utter Hopelessness

Welcome to today’s dose of Extremist Content. You’ve been warned.

In August of 1979, actor/director/writer/comedian/pedophile Woody Allen had a piece published in the New York Times entitled My Speech to the Graduates. For those old enough to remember, this was immediately before the election that year and Ronald Reagan was running against incumbent Jimmy Carter. The piece began with these lines:

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

Yes, it’s a funny line but remember what was being shown on TV campaign ads. Ronald Regan was going to get us into nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Carter might lead to despair and utter hopelessness, but a Regan Presidency meant total extinction. Choose well.

Flash forward to 2016. Once again we were told we had that same choice. Hillary Clinton might lead us to despair and utter hopelessness, but Trump promised total extinction.

Odd that in both cases the dire predictions did not come true but regardless, in the long run neither the election of Regan in 1979 nor the election of Trump in 2016 stopped or significantly slowed the Long March towards despair and utter hopelessness.

The end of that march seems to be approaching ever more rapidly.

Earlier this month a Twitter contributor and podcaster named Darryl Cooper writing as @MartyrMade on Twitter published a 35-Tweet long examination of why Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already. I’m only going to quote two of the Tweets here:

“The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012.

(Or the deliberate lie that he hadn’t paid income taxes. – Ed.)

This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.”

“They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.”

After the shock of the election and for the better part of five years that Regime did everything in its power – short of assassination – to prevent Trump from being sworn in, and afterwards to restrict his ability to do his job and to keep him from completing his first term.

There was no way on Earth they were going to allow him to have a second.

The Regime isn’t exclusively the Democratic Party, or even just the Progressive Left. It’s an amalgamation of oligarchs and useful idiots on both sides of the political aisle, both in and out of government.

Professor Angelo Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, a former U.S. Navy officer, foreign service officer, and professional staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate and has written extensively about the political changes in the United States over the last few decades. I strongly recommend you read his 2010 essay America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. However in a 2013 interview he gave an interesting explanation of just who “the Ruling Class” actually includes:

(T)he Democrats (are) the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners. The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society. The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.

In the aforementioned “America’s Ruling Class” essay, Codevilla says, in relation to the bank bailouts resulting after the 2008 housing market crash:

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

In his Twitter thread Cooper speaks, 280 characters or fewer at a time, of the unconstitutional election law changes, the media’s coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Department of Justice’s illegal spying on a Presidential candidate using fabricated evidence and lies to get warrants, of public officials claiming in public that they’d seen incontrovertible evidence, then under sworn testimony that they in fact did not, and of Time Magazine crowing about the “conspiracy” to “fortify the election” by government, media and private sector individuals using both private and government funds. The end result being that a significant portion of the American public no longer trusts the government – legislatures both State and federal, the President, governors or mayors, the three-letter Federal agencies, the Courts or the election process. Nor do they trust what was once known as “the Fourth Estate,” the media, now considered a Fifth Column and with good reason.

Victor Davis Hanson, former Professor of Classics for the University of California, current Senor Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, historian, author and columnist, has a thorough understanding of history, both ancient and modern, and a gimlet eye towards modern trends. Professor Hanson has been keeping tabs on the decaying social structure of the US and the world for years in op-eds, books and speeches. Generally he tries to explain what is happening today with reference to history, in a “we’ve been here before, here we are again” kind of way, but one of his most recent pieces is a dark departure. The American Descent into Madness is a disturbing read, but I can’t refute any of his points. The subtitle of the piece is “America went from the freest country in the world in December of 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?” It’s a good question. The answer should have you nodding your head and loading your firearms. Excerpt:

“In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.”

Which is precisely the same language as Darryl Cooper’s reference to a government “monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it,” and Codevilla’s explanation of the “Ruling Class.”

He refers to the mass influx of illegal aliens (yes, I said the verboten phrase) across our Southern border and contrasts it to the strong COVID restrictions laid upon American citizens and legal residents: “Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.”

He talks about skyrocketing crime – and how it is concentrated in Democratically-ruled urban enclaves, places that haven’t seen a Republican governor, mayor or city council member in decades (it would appear that at least the Junior Partners manage things a bit better):

“Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.”

This is not sustainable either.

That paragraph though reminded me of something from a while back:

Professor Hanson, July 2021:

“So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.”

In 2003/04 blogger TheGeekWithA.45 wrote some insightful things now being illustrated daily. From November of 2003:

Societies Gone Mad

To the people of my parent’s generation, World War II was a reality that they had lived through, and not a bunch of black and white movies starring John Wayne.

Books upon books were written on the subject, to help them digest and understand just how it was that something of that magnitude could actually happen, how it was that an entire European society could go insane and do what it did. (As for the Japanese society, it was insane to begin with, and thus more easily understood)

Yes, as politically incorrect as it is, I stand by what I just said:

“Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane.”

For some, it was brief and temporary, and for others, it was more or less a permanent state of affairs.

You can quote your moral relativism and chide me for my white male euro/christo/judeo centrism, but I will never, ever, ever, ever accept that it’s perfectly OK for a society to commit genocide, mass rape, enslave and/or execute conquered military and civilian people, as a matter of that society’s normal operating procedure. That is the very definition of a high end insane society.

I don’t think so much that the shock was such that savagery in a society could exist, for the people of my parents generation recognized that savagery did exist. I’ll admit, they may have passed out the label too injudiciously in cases, but at least they didn’t deny its reality. What shocked them was that an allegedly “civilized” society could go south so quickly.

“People are moving away from certain states: not because they’ve got a job offer, not because they want to be closer to family, but because the state they are living in doesn’t measure up to the level of freedom they believe is appropriate for Americans. We are internal refugees.”

The fact that things have gone so far south in some places that people actually feel compelled to move the fuck out should frighten the almighty piss out of you.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I would’ve dismissed that notion, that people were relocating themselves for freedom within America as the wild rantings of a fringe lunatic, but today, I’m looking for a real estate agent.

It is a symptom of a deep schism in the American scene, one that has been building bit by bit for at least fifty, and probably more like seventy years, and whose effects are now visibly bubbling to the surface.

Just open your eyes and take a long look around you.”

I would say the parallels are chilling if only they were unexpected.

From a January 2004 post by TheGeek I managed to save some of:

We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.

We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.

We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.

We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.

Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”

I used those excerpts in a post I titled “While Evils are Sufferable” from September of 2004. The paragraph immediately preceding that excerpt I wrote:

We’re headed toward tyranny because we won’t look at it. The signs are all there, but we won’t admit to ourselves that it’s possible. I have to agree with the Left on one thing: bloody oppression of our rights is coming, eventually. I just think it’s equally likely to be at their hands as at the hands of the Right. For decades now our government has been constructing the individual mechanisms of it, as the Geek with a .45 once wrote eloquently about.”

And I’m still quoting him today. But we can’t not look at it anymore, as Prof. Hanson shows. It’s being shoved in our faces on a daily basis with the message “Nothing to see here, move along. Conform. Obey.” The tools and mechanisms of oppression are now nearly fully assembled, and are being ever more rapidly activated.

The Regime has been spending money we cannot ever pay back – the bank bailouts weren’t the first example – and the rate of spending is accelerating. The current National Debt is $28.5 trillion dollars and climbing. That’s $28,500,000,000,000, more than $85,000 per man, woman and child in the nation (not including the aforementioned illegal aliens). And they’re planning on spending another what, six trillion this year alone? This is unsustainable and everyone knows it, but federal spending is how votes get bought, and as Thomas Sowell observed, the #1 problem of politicians is getting elected. Problem #2 is getting re-elected, and whatever is #3 is WAY down the list, but this reckoning cannot be put off forever. You can deny reality for a while, but you can’t deny the consequences.

The Regime made up the “Russian Collusion” narrative and used it to spy on an opposition candidate, and afterward an opposition President. They used that excuse to vilify anyone associated with the Administration in order to limit that administration’s ability to carry out its agenda.

The Regime made up a narrative of drunken teenage sexual assault to prevent a Supreme Court nominee from being confirmed, and the media spread the lies to the point that a significant portion of the population believes it. It’s not like that was a new thing. They’d done something similar to Clarence Thomas.

The Regime exploited a false narrative that police officers deliberately hunt and murder black men. They encouraged the “mostly peaceful” protests that burned sections of cities to the ground after they were first looted. They discouraged law enforcement and refused to prosecute the perpetrators. The “Defund the Police” movement and subsequent changes to laws relating to use of force have caused many good officers to quit or retire, leaving behind…?

Oh, and mass protests without masks was OK during the Pandemic because the cause was just. But if you want to kayak off the shore in California by yourself, you’re going to get arrested and thrown in close proximity with others in a holding cell. But that’s OK. If you’re convicted they’ll probably let you go home because of the risk of contracting COVID in incarceration.

Five governors put COVID-infected elderly into retirement homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Gov. Cuomo wrote a book about what a good job he did handling COVID and won an Emmy, but we’re supposed to ignore all those deaths on his watch and by his orders.

Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis, governing a state with comparable population to New York and a similar if not greater number of elderly didn’t enforce draconian restrictions and didn’t put infected elderly into nursing homes. Now the media treat him as An Enemy of the State, though Florida’s outcome was far better than New York’s.

The Regime worked with industry and media to spread their narratives and gaslight the American public, and they’re not at all apologetic over it. They’re shocked that it didn’t work as expected. As CNN talking head Mika Brzezinski has pointed out, controlling what people think is the media’s job. They’ve lost control of The Narrative and it frightens them.

And now The Regime has declared that basically anyone who supported Donald Trump, anyone who waves an American flag without trampling and burning it, anyone who objects to .gov action on Constitutional grounds, basically anyone who drives or would drive a pickup truck, own an AR-15 or object to the status quo is a “Right-wing extremist.” And it has declared that Right-wing extremists – all of them by definition racist, misogynist, xenophobic homophobes – are the “greatest threat” to “American democracy,” especially as they support making a repeat of 2020 as difficult as possible.

As Stalin said when he channeled Joe Biden, “I don’t care who votes, I only care who counts the votes.” When you can control who counts the votes, you don’t have to buy them anymore. This is important when you no longer CAN buy them anymore.

To this end, they have done everything in their power to silence Donald Trump, and are now experimenting with ways to silence anyone opposed to the The Regime’s aims. Effective online opponents are demonetized and/or deplatformed. One of the most popular Reddit boards was terminated because it was explicitly pro-Trump. An entire social media platform was booted off the Internet for daring to allow opposition speech. They want desperately to disarm their opposition and are looking for any excuse to seize the power necessary to do so that won’t cause too much public backlash, because when the shit finally hits the fan they want to control the guns AND the people who wield them. There are, by many estimates, 500 million to nearly a billion firearms in private hands, most of which aren’t registered anywhere. Good luck with that, but then again, reality hasn’t meant much to them for quite a while.

They have purged the officer ranks of our military of warfighters in favor of the reliably Politically Correct, and are now doing the same thing to the enlisted ranks. As a result, our Navy is a public shambles, and who knows about the other branches? They put fences, razor wire and ideologically-vetted National Guardsmen around the Capitol after the January 6 protest they INSIST was an “Insurrection,” but their weapons were empty. As someone noted, had that ACTUALLY been an insurrection, you would have been able to tell by the astonishing number of Special Elections that followed it.

They’re playing with a powder keg.

In May of 2009 I asked Bill Whittle to pen a modern version of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. To my shock he responded, but unfortunately in the negative. Why did I do that? Because as someone once noted, There is no coherent and cohesive philosophy behind the opposition to the Progressive Left or the Regime. At the beginning of 1776 the thirteen colonies of Britain were populated with British citizens, subjects of the Crown and of the belief that the current unpleasantness could be worked out. After Common Sense hit the stands, selling some hundred thousand copies to a population of perhaps three million people, they were British no more. They were Americans. They shared a philosophy of freedom.

We don’t have that today, and without it we run the risk of chaos and slaughter unlike anything seen before, with only dictatorship to follow. One more link: On July 20 Lindell Denham, a writer at Global Liberty Media, published an interesting piece entitled “Mad Max” and the Thin Veneer of Civilization. I recommend the whole essay, but this is the point of it: “Civilization may be miles wide, but its depth is measured in inches.” AKA: “Entire societies can and have gone stark raving batshit fucking insane.”

“Civilization” isn’t buildings and farmland and infrastructure. Civilization is the rules people follow to live together without killing one another too often, and those rules are being ignored, bent, shattered – all around the world but disturbingly here at home. The Progressive Left has been hard at work since at least the 1920’s making sure that the structures of Western Civ were destroyed from within. They’ve succeeded. A new “Common Sense” wouldn’t have the same effect now and for several reasons, the first being:

First, the colonists were overwhelmingly farmers and in jobs that supported farming. They all knew how hard it was to eke out a living, and how close to the edge they all lived. Prof. Hanson notes the insanity of the modern Left, and he notes that this insanity is tolerated. We have the luxury to tolerate insanity. Look at Los Angeles and San Francisco. The colonists did not. Second, the colonists were overwhelmingly literate. Estimates of between 70% to nearly 100% literacy in the colonies as opposed to England where the rates were estimated at 48-74%. This indicates that these people were not ignorant dirt-diggers. On the other hand, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy determined that as much as 14% of the adult English-speaking American population was unable to know “more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.” Another 29% can only “perform simple and everyday literacy activities.” To comprehend something like Common Sense requires performing “moderately challenging literacy activities” or more. That’s 43% of the population who can’t (or won’t) get it.

No wonder they keep saying “nobody reads anymore.”

Second, the Colonists overwhelmingly had a uniform ideology – they were almost all practicing Christians of one flavor or another. A lot of noise is made about the Founders being “Deists,” but they had a belief and they followed it. The population read the Bible (no pun intended) religiously. The Founders read Greek and Roman histories and modern philosophers like Locke.

That’s not so much the case these days.

That population was primed for it. Our population is primed against it. I would argue deliberately so.

A few days ago writer Michael Smith published on his Substack “An Open Letter to Joseph Robinette Biden, President of the United States of America,” interestingly subtitled “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…” It is, as you can imagine, a modern rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, with a long list of abuses and usurpations pretty much mirroring and expanding upon what Prof. Hanson detailed in his piece. He concludes his Open Letter thus:

Well, sir, we have rapidly come to a point where we find we are no longer disposed to suffer insufferable evils. We believe we have made the case that you, sir, your administration, and your party have no moral authority to govern the right and righteous people of this nation.

“Regrettably, we the people find we must withdraw our consent to be governed by you, your Vice President, and your entire administration and in the true spirit of the founding of this great nation, we do so assert it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security and to assure the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, the outcome of such throwing off will not be the outcome of the 1776 Declaration. The thin veneer of civilization will crack and shatter, and an attempt to seize dictatorial power will be made by someone (or several someones). They may be successful. Someone usually ultimately is. But in the interim the destruction of the United States will be thorough. They will rule over an ash heap. A heavily-armed ash heap not too interested in being ruled.

We live in the greatest time to be alive in human history. Fewer people live in abject poverty. Most “poor” people today live better than royalty did 300 years ago. Electricity, running water, hot water, personal transportation, access to the sum total of all the knowledge collected since written history began. I could go on. And we’re on the cusp of becoming a spacefaring species.

Of course it’s time to tear it all down. Human beings are a disease on the planet and it’s time to trim them back we’re told. For the planet, you know.

No, it’s not going to turn out well at all if we finally reach that point of despair and utter hopelessness. Let us pray we don’t achieve total extinction.

Choose wisely.

Quote of the Day – Victor Davis Hanson Edition

From his recent piece Year Zero at NRO, but do read the whole thing:

Gun sales are at record levels. I supposed the revolutionaries never investigated the original idea of a police force and the concept of the government’s legal monopoly on violence? It was not just to protect the law-abiding from the criminal, but to protect the criminal from the outraged vigilante.

Only police can stop blood feuds such as the ones we see in Chicago or like the medieval ones of Iceland’s Njáls saga, or the postbellum slaughtering of the Hatfields and McCoys. We are already seeing a counterrevolution — as the Left goes ballistic that anyone would appear on his lawn pointing a semiautomatic rifle to protect mere “brick and mortar.”

Without a functioning police force, do we really believe that the stockbroker is going to walk home in the evening in New York City without a firearm, or that the suburbanite in Minneapolis in an expansive home will not have a semiautomatic rifle, or that the couple who drives to Los Angeles with the kids to visit Disneyland will not have a 9mm automatic in their car console? The Left has energized the Second Amendment in a way the NRA never could, and for the next decade, there will be more guns in pockets, cars, and homes than at any time in history.

Truth

Quote of the Day – Larry Correia (Again)

This is not a short one.  I’m quoting the whole damned thing:

A friend of mine posted about seeing this: “Where are all you gun owners now that the federal government and police are attacking citizens in the streets?? Now that the National Guard is out oppressing citizens? I thought this was the moment you’re waiting for? So why aren’t you out there fighting them with your guns? You’re nothing but a bunch of fucking cowards!”
My response was the GIF of Nelson Muntz going HA HA. 😀
But I’ve seen this sentiment a lot too over the last few days, so please if you are so incredibly fucking dumb that you are actually wondering why America’s gun culture aren’t commuting into the democrat cities you have banned us from in order to get into gun fights with the National Guard on your behalf, allow me to elaborate.
Hypothetical Liberal “Ally” Who Lives in the Suburbs Which Aren’t On Fire – “Hey, gun owners! Here is some civil unrest! Why won’t you come and help us?”
Snort. Fuck off. 
“Pussies! Why not?”
Well, every single gun nut in America has spent their entire adult life being continually mocked, insulted, and belittled by the left. You’ve done nothing but paint us as the bad guys.
In Hollywood, we’re always evil, stupid, violent, malicious, redneck, racist, murderers. That’s so ingrained in the liberal religion that when “ally” Harvey Weinstein was trying to get out of being a sleazy rapist, his repentance consisted of promising to make more movies about how the NRA is bad.
In the news, everything is always our fault. If there is a mass murder, we can always count on the vultures to swoop in and blame America’s gun culture. They flog it for weeks on end, 24/7 coverage, hoping for gun control. And if the identity of the shooter doesn’t fit the narrative, it drops off the news in mere hours.
And then at the local, state, and federal level, legally speaking, the left fucks us at every opportunity. You ban everything you can get away with. You ban things that literally make no sense. You ban shit just out of spite.
When we fight back against gun control laws, you declare we are stupid because only the police should have guns (hey, aren’t those the guys you are protesting right now?)
“Stupid racist rednecks! We live in a civilized society! Don’t you realize the police will protect us?” until when your democrat cities are on fire, and you call 911 and the operator tells you sorry, the police can’t come to your house right now, please try not to get murdered… How is that strict gun control working out for you?
Then you did everything in your power to chase gun owners out of your sainted liberal strongholds. You passed laws. You banned everything we like. Forced all the shooting ranges to close. Forced most of the gun stores to close. And just generally let us know that our kind is not welcome there.
But now you’ve started some shit, YOU want US to go into democrat cities, with democrat mayors, and democrat police chiefs enforcing democrat policies which cause strife among democrats, in order to get into gun fights on your behalf?
How fucking gullible do you think we are? Like holy shit. Damn dude!
Because we all know that literally 30 seconds after a gun nut blows away a government employee on your behalf, then all the national media coverage of the riots will instantly cease (sorta like the Corona Virus coverage did) and it’ll be back to the news breathlessly reporting about right wing extremist gun nuts, and all you useless fucks would go back to whining for more dumb ass gun control.
You’ve already thrown the black community under the bus, cheering as their neighborhoods get burned and yours are safe. Seriously, white liberals are the shittiest “allies” in history, and your moral foundation has the consistency of Play-Doh. Your moral compass is a wind sock.
Just a little while ago, gun nuts had a massive peaceful protest in Virginia. Tens of thousands of people turned out to protest gun control proposals from a democrat with a penchant for wearing black face (he still considers himself an “ally” though!) They didn’t break any windows. They didn’t kill any puppies. They didn’t burn any horses. They didn’t flip any police cars or murder any security guards. They were downright boring. They were polite, and even cleaned up their litter.
Except then you called them domestic terrorists, and were super sad that they didn’t get massacred by the government (said government you are now mad at for killing people, because again, you fuckers ain’t exactly consistent)
Liberal “allies” are quick to call gun nuts the bad guys, but we’re not trying to disarm people. We want everybody to be able to defend themselves. It’s a common thing to see some meme on the internet, showing a black family shooting or posing with their guns, with some caption like “bet this offends the NRA”, which is liberal projection, because in reality in my social circles everybody is like, “fuck yeah, good for them”. And the harshest complaints I’ve seen have been about trigger finger discipline or lack of eye protection.
My side isn’t the one that wants the state to have a monopoly on force. We know the 2nd is for everybody, regardless of skin color or where you live. You fuckers are the ones who keep declaring we can’t fight the government with AR-15s because they have tanks and nukes, but then you bumbling fuckheads try it by throwing rocks?
So not only no, but hell no.

 
Can I get an “AMEN!”?

From the comments to the FB thread:

As I Have Said Repeatedly…

“Gun Control” as proposed means “Gun Elimination” – that is, reducing the number of guns in private hands to a number indistinguishable from zero.
The BBC proves my point in a 2017 piece recently reprinted on Pocket:  How Japan has Almost Eradicated Gun Crime. Excerpt:

If you want to buy a gun in Japan you need patience and determination. You have to attend an all-day class, take a written exam and pass a shooting-range test with a mark of at least 95 percent.

There are also mental health and drugs tests. Your criminal record is checked and police look for links to extremist groups. Then they check your relatives too – and even your work colleagues. And as well as having the power to deny gun licences, police also have sweeping powers to search and seize weapons.

That’s not all. Handguns are banned outright. Only shotguns and air rifles are allowed.

The law restricts the number of gun shops. In most of Japan’s 40 or so prefectures there can be no more than three, and you can only buy fresh cartridges by returning the spent cartridges you bought on your last visit.

Police must be notified where the gun and the ammunition are stored – and they must be stored separately under lock and key. Police will also inspect guns once a year. And after three years your licence runs out, at which point you have to attend the course and pass the tests again.

This helps explain why mass shootings in Japan are extremely rare. When mass killings occur, the killer most often wields a knife.

And that’s better, because reasons.  And it also glosses over the arson massacres.  The September 2001 Myojo 56 Building fire that killed 44, the October 2008 Osaka movie theater fire that killed 16, and (understandably since this piece was first published in 2017) the July 2019 Kyoto Animation attack that killed 36 and injured 33.  No, the Japanese don’t have many mass killings, but it’s not because they don’t have guns.

The result is a very low level of gun ownership – 0.6 guns per 100 people in 2007, according to the Small Arms Survey, compared to 6.2 in England and Wales and 88.8 in the US.

“The moment you have guns in society, you will have gun violence but I think it’s about the quantity,” says Overton. “If you have very few guns in society, you will almost inevitably have low levels of violence.”

Not necessarily so.  The UK has very few guns in society, and has been the most violent nation in Western Europe.  They’re trying to ban knives there now.

Henrietta Moore of the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London applauds the Japanese for not viewing gun ownership as “a civil liberty”, and rejecting the idea of firearms as “something you use to defend your property against others.”

Somehow, I don’t think that reasoning would fly in major U.S. cities at the moment.

But for Japanese gangsters the tight gun control laws are a problem. Yakuza gun crime has sharply declined in the last 15 years, but those who continue to carry firearms have to find ingenious ways of smuggling them into the country.

“The criminals pack the guns inside of a tuna so it looks like a frozen tuna,” says retired police officer Tahei Ogawa. “But we have discovered cases where they have actually hidden a gun inside.”

So, the ownership rate is somewhat higher than 0.6/100 then?  RTWT, but the next time someone says “nobody’s trying to take your guns,” tell them to fuck off.

Parking Lot Koreans

During the Rodney King riots, Koreatown in Los Angeles was a target of the rioters. The police, like they have in Minneapolis, abandoned the city. The shop owners in the area, their friends and families, defended their businesses, some from the roofs of their buildings – AKA “Roof Koreans.” Since then, anyone who defends against rioters has been termed a “Roof Korean” in the gun community.
Here are some that defended a Minneapolis tobacco store recently. Watch the video, but I want to show you a screen shot you won’t see on ABCNNBCBS or any other major news outlet:
https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ec7b2ec02f161b726f7cb08e141eea4f

The two self-confessed “rednecks” are being interviewed. The two “gentlemen of color” off to the right there also defending the store, were not. Note they all are carrying the evil AR-15 rifle, but they aren’t shooting anyone.

The Second Amendment is for everybody.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y1KDoRQ5Tw]

The Practical Result of “Gun Control”

Just over 17 years ago I wrote a two-part post, Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection?  In it, I discussed a couple of cases that proved that there is no “Duty to protect” on the part of the government — municipal, county, state or federal.  The second example was of Linda Riss, a New York City resident who was stalked by a jilted lover.  She tried to get police protection, but could not.  Until an attacker hired by her ex threw lye in her face, scarring and blinding her.  THEN she got round-the-clock protection.  She sued the NYPD – and lost. 
The dissenting judge in the case wrote this:
Linda has turned to the courts of this State for redress, asking that the city be held liable in damages for its negligent failure to protect her from harm. With compelling logic, she can point out that, if a stranger, who had absolutely no obligation to aid her, had offered her assistance, and thereafter Burton Pugach was able to injure her as a result of the negligence of the volunteer, the courts would certainly require him to pay damages. (Restatement, 2d, Torts, § 323.) Why then should the city, whose duties are imposed by law and include the prevention of crime (New York City Charter, § 435) and, consequently, extend far beyond that of the Good Samaritan, not be responsible? If a private detective acts carelessly, no one would deny that a jury could find such conduct unacceptable. Why then is the city not required to live up to at least the same minimal standards of professional competence which would be demanded of a private detective?
Linda’s reasoning seems so eminently sensible that surely it must come as a shock to her and to every citizen to hear the city argue and to learn that this court decides that the city has no duty to provide police protection to any given individual. What makes the city’s position particularly difficult to understand is that, in conformity to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense (former Penal Law, § 1897). Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her.” (My emphasis)
As I wrote at that time, this is the practical result of “gun control.” Denial of the means to defend yourself, while not providing any other layer of real protection.

This situation has raised its head again in many places, but New York in particular.  Read the New York Post piece Worse than War:  My Night Besieged by Looters and Thugs in New York.  Excerpt:

Every minute brought some new shock and a fresh surge of adrenaline: more and more of those roving gangs, some sticking around for minutes. Squad cars racing down in convoy, sirens blaring. The smashing of windows (a hair salon on the block, I learned in the morning, had been smashed in). The screeching of tires. The shouting of men: “Stop, you motherf–ker!”
Why won’t the men in blue stay in front of our house?
At two in the morning, it couldn’t be denied that one particular roving gang was roving no more; its members were obviously staking out our building. Now cackling, now going ominously silent. Should I race upstairs and bring a kitchen knife? How would this scenario play out? Would they just smash our lobby and leave? What could stop them if they wanted to take the elevators up to our homes?

Not a damned thing.  It’s a meme, but it’s a fact:

See also Joe Huffman’s Quote of the Day.

More Quora Content

I posted a link to this story of a 70 year old man defending his wife from an attacker who broke through the front door of their home.  He retrieved a firearm and shot the attacker several times.  I received a comment on the piece, to which I responded.  Here’s the thread so far:

Peter Collins: When are you going to post all of the stories of people shooting their kids, or their wives or husbands, or themselves.

You are 9 times more likely to be killed with a gun you own than to kill an intruder or mugger or other criminal.

So, this man killed an intruder – that means nine other gun owners were killed by their own guns.

The odds are against you, 9 to 1. Only a fool bets that longshot with his life.

KB: I don’t have to. ABCNNBCBS and all the other major news outlets already take care of that. What they DON’T typically report are successful defensive gun uses, leading to the illusion that they seldom happen. Even the CDC recently admitted, however, that they happen far more often than most people think.

That news was also not carried by the media beyond a very brief mention.

Now as to your 9:1 ratio assertion, do you have a citation for that, or do you “just know it’s true”? Because the last time I heard something like that, it was 43:1 from a thoroughly discredited “study” performed by a Dr. Arthur Kellerman many years ago.

PC: The media don’t cover so-called ‘defensive gun uses’ very much because they are relatively rare events. The only study, and it is on-going, of this, using actual evidence and verifying the events, finds that guns are used about 2000 times per year in the US to prevent, stop, or mitigate a violent crime. The group doing the study is not a gun-control group, and their definition of ‘defensive gun use’ is broader than I think is justified, but they follow a data-based approach and they are willing to do the hard work to find an accurate figure. If guns were used regularly to prevent or stop crimes, it would be all over the news – when it does happen, the “good guy with a gun” scenario gets huge coverage.

The figure you question came from the Miller study, a peer-reviewed and unassailable study published in one of the trauma journals.

The Kellerman study, far from being “thoroughly discredited,” is a model of excellent methodology combined with careful use of data. I am aware of no serious critique of the study from any qualified source. The conclusions from that study, though, do not really bear on the question at hand. Kellerman was studying intentional homicide only, and that doesn’t provide an answer to the question of whether gun ownership generally confers more or less safety than risk. If the results of a perfectly good study are applied to aquestion that the study did not ask, it is not likely to provide valid or valuable information.

KB: “The only study, and it is on-going, of this , using actual evidence and verifying the events, finds that guns are used about 2000 times per year in the US to prevent, stop, or mitigate a violent crime.” Which study is this? I noticed you didn’t provide a citation.

How about this one? Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control that states:

“Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, [my emphasis – ed.] although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey [my emphasis – ed.] (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use. [Again, my emphasis.]

“A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gunwielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.” [Emphasis, well, you know.]

The LOWEST estimate of defensive gun use from a credible source that I’ve EVER seen was from the National Crime Victimization Survey at 80,000 DGU’s per year, 28,000 fewer than noted in the excerpt above. That’s still over 32 times your estimate. That’s on average 219 per day. What is a defensive gun use? Any time a person defends himself or someone else by so much as THREATENING to use a firearm to stop an attack. No shots need be fired, and in the overwhelming majority of these cases, none are. No blood, no news story. But tell the people who defended themselves that they didn’t need a gun. Go ahead, I’ll wait. But The Other Side™ seems to believe that if the defender did not shoot, or more accurately, kill the offender, then it doesn’t count.

Also, I noticed that you still haven’t cited your source for the 9:1 ratio from your first comment. Got a link to that “unassailable” Miller study? I think you misunderstand what “peer reviewed” actually means.

Oh, and Kellerman? He revised his own estimate down to 2.7 times more likely. Basically debunking himself.

PC: Your “study” is a piece of paid-for propaganda that relies on nothing that anyone could conceivably call evidence.

And your slur on Kellerman? No, he revised the application of his conclusion to a different set of circumstances.

If you actually read the study, rather than the claims made by gun fundy websites, you would know that.

And when you claim the number to be between 80,000 and 3 million, you lose all credibility. If you cannot even narrow it down within 2 orders of magnitude, your numbers are clearly phony.

KB: I really enjoy these discussions. So a piece produced by the National Academies of Science is “a piece of paid-for propaganda” because you say so. Interesting. But your uncited, “peer-reviewed” “Miller study” isn’t, because reasons. Kellerman’s 43:1 conclusion is gospel, but when he revised it to 2.1:1 it’s because he used a different set of circumstances – DUE TO THE FACT THAT HIS ORIGINAL CIRCUMSTANCES WERE LAUGHABLE. He’s already been proven unreliable. Why should I trust his revised numbers?

You object to the fact that the estimates between 80,000 and 3 million defensive gun uses means they’re not credible, but ignore the fact that the absolute low end, from United States Bureau of Justice surveys that DO NOT ASK EXPLICITLY ABOUT DEFENSIVE GUN USE still represent almost 220 defensive gun uses a DAY. You simply dismiss these as superfluous.

If you’d actually read the literature — all of it, not just the stuff you agree with — you would conclude that defensive gun usage is real, it’s effective, and it’s far more common than the general public is led to believe.

And that’s why I post these stories. The New York Times certainly won’t.

At this point I expect one or more of three things in descending order of likelihood:

1) He’ll respond with more mouth-frothing
2) He’ll report me for violating the “Be nice, be respectful” Quora policy
3) He’ll go away

4) He’ll delete his thread.
That didn’t take long:

Kellerman revised the conclusion when the model for the study was revised – that’s akin to revising the number when you revise from mph to kph. If the ratio remained identical under different parameters, that would be questionable. Sorry you don’t understand how statistics work.

Your claim that the “absolute low end” is 70,000 ignores so many studies that show much, much lower numbers. I specifically cited the on-going GVA study which showed around 2000 verifiable cases per year. That’s lower than you claim is the “absolute low end.” Now, what did you say about only reading studies that support your position?

Here’s a challenge – you provide evidence of 110 defensive gun uses, in the USA, on any day in the last 10 years. That’s half what you claim is the ”low end,” so it shouldn’t be hard at all for you to prove. Not a survey, not some poll – actual evidence. I’ll accept if you provide the date, the time, the place, and the name of the victim or the person who used the gun.

So, how about it? Can you prove half your claimed l ”low end,” for any day in the last 10 years?

Oh, we’re still playing? OK. What was Kellerman’s initial model, and what were the objections to it? What was the revised model? I’m quite aware of how statistics work. I’m an engineer by trade.
The “absolute low end” is 80,000 by a survey that doesn’t specifically ask about defensive gun usage. You keep skipping right over that. Don’t you trust your government?

Your “GVA study” again is without a link to the source. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, the “verifiable cases” were media reports of defensive gun uses. Which kind of makes my point – the media doesn’t report on DGUs unless someone is shot or killed. And — if they’re covered at all — most of these reports end up on page B7 of the local fishwrap, not on the national nightly news.

Can I cite 110 defensive gun uses in a day? How am I to do this if the media doesn’t report them? If the people who stopped a crime in progress without firing a shot didn’t report it to the police? For example, the woman at the highway rest stop who confronted a man holding a coil of rope and convinced him that she was not going to be his next victim by showing him her pistol? Tell her she didn’t need it, and she was far more likely to have it used on her than to use it to protect her life. Tell that to the people standing outside a store in Minneapolis armed with rifles protecting it from rioters. It wasn’t looted or burned. Is that one DGU or twelve?

How many defensive gun uses is so low that it makes it OK to disarm the victims? Tell that 70 year old man that it would have been better to have let the attacker beat his wife to death rather than use a gun to defend her, or he could have tried to stop the man and there would be two old people dead or in the hospital. Tell him that the presence of that gun in his house made it 43 times more likely that he or his wife would be killed — not shot to death with his own weapon, but killed by any means — which is what Kellerman’s initial model did.

It’s been fun playing with you, but I think we’re done now.

It’s still going. And going.