Gun Bullies: Punching Back Twice As Hard

This is an understatement, but kudos to Ben Shapiro for publicly exposing the Left's morbid opportunism over the Sandy Hook tragedy, and using these deaths to characterize their political opponents as uncaring, heartless creeps that are so in love with their guns (gently oiling and cleaning them at night) that they are willing to sacrifice little children to this awful 2nd Amendment idol (a baffling irony in light of the Left's conception of "reproductive rights").

MORGAN: That's what I call bullying.
SHAPIRO: This is astonishing.
MORGAN: What's astonishing?
SHAPIRO: What's astonishing about it is for weeks now, you have been saying that anybody who disagrees with your position is absurd, idiotic, and doesn't care about the dead kids in Sandy Hook. And then when I say that it's a bullying tactic, you turn around and say I'm bullying you for saying that. It's absurd. It's ridiculous. 

Of course, it's easier than pointing out that Obama made a nice soapbox out of little caskets.  You could expect TIME and Newsweek to call that blatant racism.  But this guy... With the combination of the accent with the snootiness, this guy is a lieutenant on the Death Star.  The irony of a British citizen criticizing, not a mere American policy, but a fundamental right of a free people to keep the means of securing their freedoms, the recognition of which right was borne out of a British imperialism that the American Left nominally loathes!

SHAPIRO: Well, we can talk about Britain in a second. I think that the reason it's about left and right here is because fundamentally the right believes the basis for the second amendment, and they believe in the second amendment. The basis of the second amendment is not really about self defense and it's not about hunting. It's about resistance to government tyranny. That's what the founders said and that's what the right believe in this country.
MORGAN: Which tyranny are you fearing, yourself?
SHAPIRO: I fear the possibility of a tyranny rising in the country in the next 50 to 100 years. Let me tell you something, Piers. The fact that my grandparents and great-grandparents in Europe didn't fear that is why they're now ashes in Europe. This kind of leftist revisionist history where there's no fear of democracy going userpatious or tyrannical, is just that. It's fictitious.

Shapiro is making a reference to the gun registration and confiscation measures imposed by collectivist governments in Europe in order to effect totalitarian control.  Trust us. We're your government and we're only here to keep you safe.

Now, Thomas Sowell in his book Intellectuals and Society writes of the many absurdities of the gun control mania of English socialism (or Ingsoc, as George Orwell called it).  A man who lives our in the countryside (where police weren't likely to arrive quickly) arrested for stopping two burglars with a gun.  A man arrested for running off street thug assailants with a fake gun.  As well as the rise in gun crime since the disarmament of the British citizenry.  Piers Morgan might be right that neither political party in Britain appreciates the right to own a gun, but that doesn't say much for the sensibility of the country.

From Farewell to the King (quoted at imdb.com):

Capt. Fairbourne: What do you want?
Learoyd: Freedom, to be like we are.
Capt. Fairbourne: Anything else?
Learoyd: Guns. So they can't take the freedom away.
Capt. Fairbourne: Well, I'll see what I can do.
Learoyd: And grenades, mortars and mines, so they can't take the guns away

All Your Guns Are Belong to Us

“Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
   ~ Obama at Newtown vigil

Do you suppose that thousands of people's lives might be spared if we had less traffic?  Exactly how many people couldn't do work from home at least once or twice a week?  Maybe you haven't thought about it much because you just don't care who gets killed.  We could have a lot fewer youths dying (and others dying in the accidents to which they are prone) if we restricted their driving and made it harder for them to get licenses.  Are you going to make their deaths the price of the freedom to put-put-put around as one pleases?

Baseball bats are a weapon of choice for physical assaults. some say the weapon of choice.  True, you are much more likely to die if your assailant uses a gun, but Americans have a guaranteed right to a gun, not to a baseball bat.  Think of all  the people that would have not been assaulted (especially those who did not survive the attack) if the assailant had not had that bat handy.  He might have had to resort to his fists instead.   Or maybe he would not have attacked at all.  Are you going to make those deaths the price of playing America's favorite pastime?  Well, then you're sick my friend.  Bitterly clinging to your weird baseball religion.

Remember the so-called gun rights truce earlier in 2012?  When I read about that I thought, I'm sure Obama will evolve and have "more flexibility" on that issue after November.  He got up at the vigil for the dead children, and after expressing sympathy for the parents there, turned it into a simple choice between essential liberty and children's lives.  Talk about stacking little coffins into a soapbox.  Give me more money, of grandma might not get her social security check.  Give up your gun rights, or the blood of innocent children will be on your hands.

How much Fort Hood blood is on Bill Clinton's hands for turning Fort Hood into a gun-free zone?  A military base, and no one was adequately armed to stop the crazed fanatic that brought his gun into the gun-free zone.  Honestly, it's as though criminals just don't obey the law any more.

Maybe fewer children would have been burned to death in Waco if little boys at the ATF weren't given tanks to play with.  Just a thought.

Speaking of blood on an administration's hands, one commentator recently put Eric Holder's little gunwalking stunt to churn up support for gun control into perspective:

It would be as if the Bush administration had implemented a covert operation to dump a dangerous abortifacient in Planned Parenthood clinics, resulting in hundreds of women dying — just to give pro-lifers an argument about how dangerous abortion clinics are.

Well, it would be except that CNN would still be covering that now until there was a federal amendment guaranteeing the right to 4th-trimester abortions.  (Sorry, folks, but CNN made quite an impression on me this last October.)  

You gun control enthusiasts really want to make America safe?  Maybe Eric Holder can locate likely troublemakers (there are enough provisions in the revise Patriot Act--and there is plenty of information from the FBI) that take prescription meds and have a history of trouble (as the Columbine killers did), in states where all school employees are likely to be unarmed, so that no annoying Pearl High School interventions occur.  He can equip the crazies, via a man in a trenchcoat pretending to be someone from the NRA.  Several massacres of schoolchildren could occur within a very short time frame.  Instant public outrage.  

Sure, innocent lives will be lost, but any liberal who beamed as Chris Matthews rejoiced in the calamity of Hurricane Sandy can appreciate that it is all outweighed by all the good it would do!  And Holder has already demonstrated that if it all blows up and somehow leads back to him, he will simply deny Congress access to the documents through executive privilege.  (I wouldn't be surprised if the main reason for the Fast & Furious inquiry lockout is to hide the fact that the documentation for Fast and Furious is lost, disappeared in a late night shredding party.) And we know that the major news outlets will downplay the story as some conspiratorial obsession.  

And now for some more pics (too many to choose from) . . .

   

 And just in case Michael Moore thinks I've forgotten his darling animation where he completely rewrites history by saying that the NRA was sympathetic to the KKK... Here is one he'll dearly hate.  Please don't let Michael Moore pump you full of his ignorance.   This picture is much more historically... on target.  :-)

   

  

Positive Christianity: The Gospel of Socialism

The National Academy of Sciences has a plan to end the conflict over the teaching of evolution. Taking a page from Daniel Dennett's book, they want to put religions in cages. Not abolish them, you understand, just make them safe, and stop them from misinforming children about the natural world. The idea is to get anyone who still wants to believe in something to subscribe to " theistic evolution" which to the academy means that whatever some god may or may not have done, it had to have happened before the Big Bang, left no physical traces, and be indistinguishable from the random working of natural law. As the academy encouragingly points out in Science and Creationism, " Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution."  ~ Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box 

In addition to the curious redefinition of national socialism (i.e. fascism) as a right-wing mode of thought, there is linked to that the bizarre notion of the pagan Hitler being a dedicated Christian.  Hitler promoted a new brand of Christianity called "Positive Christianity." Based on the materialism of Higher Criticism, he divorced the person of Jesus from the moral and revelatory claims of the Torah and from the miraculous and divine, and reduced him to a social reformer, a social activist challenging the restrictions of society-- much like the trends in liberal Christianity and liberation theology.

"You see, it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?" ~ attributed to Hitler by Albert Speer

Positive Christianity wasn't simply a fusion between liberal Christianity and Hitler's particular social ideology. It was a neutering of religion so that the sole moral agenda is set by the Experts, by a political priesthood.  It was religion made safe by being reduced to platitudes compatible with a state agenda.   Positive Christianity is Christianity freed of negativity, and negativity is what gets in the way of the moral order of the Enlightened, a moral order that might come into conflict with the cultural objections of the people, if the people are beholden to a different moral compass.

It is well established that the political religions of Maoism and Marxism and Nazism couldn't abide the competition with the people's religions.  Is it any surprise that most of the people that are willing to reject arguments from authority and bandwagon arguments on social/moral issues are those that have their moral compass rooted in something they don't consider man-made?  Social conservatism tends to transcend religious boundaries and find adherents even in less religious people, and yet it is more often than not religious people that are willing to put up with the ridicule and shame for standing up for their "outmoded" beliefs.  They believe that the stakes are high and that they are beholden to a higher authority than the State.

So why is it that whenever traditional mores and values are asserted or traditional religious practices are followed that the progressives whoop up the crowd about the approaching Theocracy and yet Elizabeth Warren invokes the name of Jesus freely at the Democrats' secular Abortion-palooza rally which booed down their Judaeo-Christian ties?  Ironically, it is Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren's conception of Christianity that will be nationalized and imposed on all America.  It is an drive-thru abortion-based culture that will be imposed on Catholics. Free (and private--mom and dad don't need to know) condoms and abortions for schoolchildren.  Only Positive Christianity need be affirmed in public places, thank you very much.  You can talk about Jesus as social reformer but don't invoke him for any social conservative point of view. That's hate speech.  As Dan Savage says, we can "learn to ignore the bull***t in the Bible" and only pay attention to the good stuff.  The safe stuff.  The state-approved stuff.  The stuff that is in accord with the current interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

The various problems with the progressive/collectivist interpretation of "Jesus as social reformer" deserves its own entry (or three), but much of it can be summarized by the statement: "My kingdom is not of this world."