A crazy nut in Arizona goes on a shooting spree, wounding a Congresswoman and killing several people – including a nine-year old child.
Normal people immediately have two thoughts – grief for the victims and a visceral desire to catch and punish the thug.
A lot of people in Washington, however, are not normal. And I can’t think of any better example than this passage from a Politico article.
One veteran Democratic operative, who blames overheated rhetoric for the shooting, said President Barack Obama should carefully but forcefully do what his predecessor did. “They need to deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” said the Democrat.
Let’s set aside the absurdity of linking the Tea Party with someone who likes flag burning and books about communism and national socialism and instead ask whether anybody still believes in personal responsibility?
Jared Lee Loughner is the one that deserves blame, period. I don’t care whether he’s a Nazi, a communist, a Democrat, or a Republican. I wouldn’t care if he attended a MoveOn.org event or a tea party rally.
It’s convenient for the Left to blanket demonise “violence” as “bad”, so they can conflate the actions of this nutball with anyone who so much as talks about the use of force for ANY reason, (while hypocritically failing to properly admonish wars in the Middle East and asinine laws enforced at gunpoint mind you).
The irony here is that liberty-minded people don’t talk about violence explicitly enough. We’re so busy trying to be PC that too many of us wind up tip-toeing around the subject. Anyone who supports Second Amendment rights advocates “violence”, (ie. the use of force), UNDER APPROPRIATE CIRCUMSTANCES. And there’s no reason to apologise for that. There are plenty of damn good reasons to use force – up to and including the lethal variety.
The Left is using the shocking nature of this shooting to tautologically argue that “violence is bad mmkay?”, (and by extension guns). You mean violence is unpalatable? Undesirable? A nasty business that should be avoided if there are other options? Well duh! Sure it is. But that’s not the point.
The problem in this case was not that this guy’s actions were “violent”, or that he used a gun, (and it’s high time someone pointed out that he could well have used a knife, pencil, or a million other things to lethal effect – on Giffords at least). The problem is that his actions were criminal – actions that cannot be justified in a court of law, and disproportionate by any standard. The issue comes down, as you point out Dan, to personal responsibility.
The obvious counterarguments are situations where violence IS justified. If Giffords had an armed bodyguard who gunned down Loughner on the spot, nobody would be decrying the “violent” nature of HIS actions, or the fact he used a gun to carry them out. Likewise, if I saw a cop beating the hell out of John McKenna, and the only way I could put a stop to it was with a two-by-four, I’d be more than happy to justify my use of force after the fact.
We can’t stand around hanging our heads sheepishly and mumbling under our breath about this stuff. I’m sorry, but if the Brown Shirts start pulling Jews from their homes in the dead of night, I’m grabbing my gun. And if some nutball doesn’t understand the simple concept of appropriate use of force for what it is, (just as many police seem to have trouble grasping it), that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be talking about it in the first place.
Violence is a reality, and if we all stopped living in La-la Land and faced up to that, maybe we wouldn’t be in the position of realising after the fact that locked cockpits and air marshals are a good idea. Ever ask yourself why we ever stopped using them in the first place?
Maybe if the average citizen learns not to have an irrational bias agaisnt using justifiable force when appropriate, we can altogether avoid the Capitol-storming kind this deluded clown seemed to think he was engaging in.
I’m also sick of playing this game where we try to see who can publicly cry the most tears. It sets up an environment where you’re the bad guy for telling every anti-gun pinko and child-groping safety monger to take their exacerbating Orwellian “solution” and shove it. I for one ain’t playing their stupid game. It’s time to stop worrying about talking about this stuff “too soon”, and start worrying about talking about it ‘too late’.
[…] Dan Mitchell A crazy nut in Arizona goes on a shooting spree, wounding a Congresswoman and killing several […]
No. Right wing tea party supporters are all crazy nuts. They aren’t intelligent enough to understand the world. Ever wonder why intelligent people never support them?
The worst, and most disshonest behavior is exhibited by the right-side of politics. The behavior of such people is often literally terrorism by very definition. For example, the right-wing people calling for Julian Assange’s murder (assasinatuon) are literally terrorists.
America has a lot of terrorists.
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