Tag: QotD

Quote of the Day – .gov Efficiency Edition

KevinLeave a comment

Stolen shamelessly from Sharp as a Marble, this comment by DustyDog:

If gun confiscation happens, it won’t be a shoot out. You’ll get 3 letters of advance notice filled with dire threats. Then a final warning (which will arrive a week late), and two late notices, full of threats. You’ll hear that the people running the database can’t keep track of how many weapons were turned it, so if you turn in anything and get a clean card, you’ll in the record as having no guns. So you drive to the location to find out it was misprinted on the form. You call and google, and find the right place. You’ll go through a humiliating pat-down for knives and drugs, but they won’t take the gun or ammo you have in your hands – that’s somebody else’s job; wait in line. You’ll wait in line all day long, to be turned away.

You’ll come back earlier tomorrow, wait all day, and turn in a gun.

When you turn in your gun, you get a receipt with no unique code. They throw your gun in a completely unsecure box, in an unsecure room. “It’s easier now. When the door was locked, the guns would pile up until there was no more room. Now, the boxes are always empty in the morning.”

The next week, you get a letter saying that due to a database crash, the government is not sure if you turned in your guns. You’ll be ordered to fill out a form, under threat of imprisonment. You’ll have the option of affirming that all your guns were turned in, or that they were not.

If you affirm, you’ll get the same letter every six months. If you refuse to affirm, you’ll go on a waiting list. Two to five years later, a guy with a high school diploma will show up to take your guns. You won’t need a gun to kill this guy, a ten-year old could beat this guy down. He won’t have your name right and the names of guns on his list won’t be the names of guns ever actually made; the records are obviously all mixed up. If you tell him your name is Juan and you’re renting from [you], he won’t be back for another 2 to 5 years.

That’s pretty much how Canada’s attempt at long-gun registration went, before they finally gave up.

Quote of the Day – “PRECISELY!” Edition

KevinLeave a comment

From Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned:

By now many of you have seen this video where Joe Biden admits gun control won’t be effective at stopping crime or mass shootings. Well, that’s because the purpose of gun control isn’t either of those things. To say that they want to turn millions of gun owners into criminals is not really accurate. What’s accurate is that they already think you’re a criminal. They just want to be able to punish you for it.

Quote of the Day – A Call to Action Edition

KevinLeave a comment

Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned writes:

We are not facing the anti-gun crowd, save Bloomberg. We’re facing the left-wing of the Democratic Party, and they mean to destroy us. They are betting this trend is real, that the country will be increasingly urban, left of center, and more in favor of gun control. They are betting the farm that we’re on our way to extinction. Are we?

Call your Congresscritters.

Daily.

“All Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun” – Mao

KevinLeave a comment

Via Instapundit comes this Captain’s Journal entry on When Did the Left Fall Out of Love With Guns? Pullquote:

Yes, the left still loves guns. There is no other reason for the fawning acceptance of the vulgar SWAT raid tactics in which innocent men like Mr. Eurie Stamps get shot and killed. These tactics are repeated all across America every day.

The left just doesn’t love guns in the wrong hands, and anyone who isn’t an agent of the state is the wrong hands. Listen to Representative Jim Hines (D – CT) tell you why high capacity magazines are still necessary in government hands.

There is absolutely no justification for weapons that were made for the explicit purpose of killing lots of people quickly to be in the hands of civilians.

Let that wash over you again. “Killing lots of people quickly” and “civilian hands.” The two don’t go together.

I’m reminded of two previous QotD’s here.  One that now resides at the masthead of this blog:

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them. Moshe Ben-David

And this one from Glenn Reynolds himself just a few weeks ago:

Governments exist, historically, for only one reason: Because they’re really, really good at killing people.

And governments are bound and determined to achieve and maintain a monopoly of force.  Ours is no exception.

As Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in his 2003 dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer,

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

We forget that at our peril.

It CAN happen here.

Quote of the Day – Samizdata Edition

KevinLeave a comment

From Samizdata a couple of days ago:

Let’s see – Native Americans were wards of the state for a century, and, until the recent casino boom, were the most impoverished, addiction ridden, unemployed group in society; the family farmer has been the object of endless state programs to save him for most of the 20th century, and his numbers have shrunk from over half the population to under 2%; black people were “adopted” by the modern welfare state about 50 years ago, with the result that the black family has shattered, perhaps irreparably, and the male part is massively either in prison or unemployed, while the female half now has a 75% or so rate of births out of wedlock, and single parent families struggling with poverty lead to homicide from gang activity being the primary cause of death for young black males.

The wars on poverty and drugs continues to decimate the very populations they were supposed to help, the federal education programs have overseen a massive decline in the competency and educational achievements of our youth across the board, and catastrophically poor literacy rates among the minority communities.

The Fed decided to massively aid the housing market, to assist people in buying homes, and within a few decades, the housing and financial markets collapsed into a recession which we are still struggling to climb out of, and return to a semblence of our former economic levels.

And so now, the progressive state under the current progressive regime is going to come to the aid of the struggling middle class?

Yeah, that will work out just fine…

– Samizdata commenter ‘veryretired’

And NOW they’re going to take over HEALTH CARE!

What could possibly go worng?

Quote of the Day – Victor Davis Hanson Edition

KevinLeave a comment

On education:

Thank God for Mississippi and Alabama, or California schools would test dead last.

Somehow, in just thirty years we created obstacles to public learning that produce results approaching the two-century horrific legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. About half the resources of the California State University system are devoted to remedial schooling for underperforming high school students (well over half who enter take remediation courses; half don’t graduate even in six years; and well over half have sizable financial aid). The point of CSU’s general education requirement is not so much any more to offer broad learning (who is to say what is “general education?”), but rather to enter a sort of race, class, and gender boot camp that allows some time off to become familiar with how the culture and politics of the state should continue.

(Bold emphasis mine.)  Excerpted from California at Twilight. And, being a college professor himself, Professor Hanson is what is known as a “primary source” on the topic.

Quote of the Day – Glenn Reynolds Edition

KevinLeave a comment

Actually, he gets two.  First up, this one, from his post on Gun Control Politics:

Resort to theatrical efforts at emotional blackmail is an admission that you have no intellectual arguments. Which is par for the course with the smarmy Diane Sawyer, of course, and with the even-smarmier gun control movement.

I would ask “have you no decency?” — but we already know the answer to that.

Which presents me the perfect opportunity to insert this video clip of the “smarmy Diane Sawyer” from 2007:

http://static.photobucket.com/player.swf
The second quote is from an older post having to do with the civil war in Syria, but it has more a more universal applicability:

In a revolution, if you’re not willing to die or kill for your beliefs you’re basically irrelevant. Tweeting doesn’t count.

Quote of the Day – Fracking Edition

KevinLeave a comment

From Dale at Mostly Cajun:

I worked for a company refurbishing a SONATRACH liquifaction plant that took that gas and liquified it and sold it to, among other places, the US, shipping it to the facility that sits behind my office, where we turn the liquid back into gas and pump it into the pipelines that spread that energy all over the country. When we were buying gas from overseas, it was thirteen bucks for a thousand cubic feet. Now it’s a bit over three. The reason for the difference is one word, ‘FRACKING’. Yeah, the same word that’s joining global warming as the word of the week for the envirowhacko movement. And make no bones about it, under the present regime, envirowhackos are at the highest levels of the government.

So let’s see if we can put a couple of things on the table: Our own government wants to shut down OUR gas production. No sweat, huh? We can still buy gas from overseas, right? AT five times the cost of what we can suck it out of the ground here. Since gas is the energy for electricity, heating, and a million other uses in modern life, prices across the board will go up. Oh, wait! That overseas gas? Under control of all manner of people that the obama regime seems to empower. OPEC? They’re one of the more stable and benign. And how’s OPEC gonna fare as one ‘stable’ government after another falls to the obama-endorsed ‘Arab Spring’?

Quote of the Day – David Mamet Edition

KevinLeave a comment

David Mamet, playwright and recent convert to the right has written an op-ed on gun control for Newsweak. Today’s QotD is excerpted from its opening:

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

Read. The. Whole. Thing.