When Second Amendment human rights activists saw the movie Groundhog Day, we had two reactions:
- How the hell was it that Andie McDowell was the big break-out actress from the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape, and Laura San Giacomo languished in obscurity on LIfetime movies and the series “Just Shoot Me”? [*]
- This isn’t a comedy. This is a documentary.
Repeating the same day over and over and over and over and over and over again – it’s sort of what we Second Amendment activists do. Only the cycle, at least in terms of the media’s approach to the issue, runs about every five years or so.
Because there are no new questions on this issue. Since the 1960s, it’s been the same tiny set of points, accusations, strawmen, red herrings and the odd honest question, over and over and over again.
I’ve been active in the Second Amendment human rights movement since the eighties. I’ve been through a series of cycles in media and astroturf interest in the subject; the wave of post-office mass murders in the eighties (whose main vestige today is the phrase “going postal”), the Florida “shall issue” bill, the Stockton schoolyard massacre, the Luby’s massacre and a few copycat episodes, the Shall Issue debate in Minnesota, Columbine and the small wave of copycat school shootings (including the Red Lake massacre in Minnesota), Virginia Tech, and finally the three big shootings of this past year and a half, the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings (but never, it seems over Washington DC or Chicago).
Each of the episodes had a different story. But each of them brought out basically the same set of questions, largely from media people who thought they were the first to ask the questions. They start with the simple, situational questions – “why does anyone need a thirty round magazine?” – and graduate to The Big Questions, “what does the Second Amendment really mean, and do we need it at all?”.
Every. Single. Time.
Anyway – Eric Black at the MinnPost spun the wheel this past week, writing a three part iteration of a whole long slew of the same questions about the Second Amendment that, depending on how long you’ve been a Second Amendment human rights activist, you might have lost count of the times you’ve answered.
But the goal, always, for the Second Amendment human rights supporter, isn’t to do the end-zone happy dance over past triumphs. It’s about convincing and persuading successive generations of people about the rightness of the cause.
And so as this week progresses I’ll be addressing the points in Black’s series.
Stay tuned through the week.
[*]That may have been more “me” than “Second Amendment Activists”
“Second Amendment human rights movement”
I think that concept could fuel a whole series of “Fleen” cartoons. Fooooot!
If Black were a true journalist, you wouldn’t have to address his series on your blog; he would have interviewed you to present a comprehensive (not “balanced”) look at the issue.
Night Writer FTW.
A woman cannot be more beautiful than Laura is in “Quigley Down Under.”
Night Writer if you’ve read Black’s pathetic excuse for space filling, you can see that it is nothing more than a self provided warm blankee to sooth him. His paragraphs remind me of fever raving…couple of lucid thoughts melting into delusion, pass out for a few minutes and repeat.
The poor wretch sees the sky falling, and considering he lives in an alternate universe, maybe he’s right.
Liberals say: “Okay, sure, fine, you need a standard-capacity magazine so if the government becomes tyrannical, you can resist. But having total power over everyone else in society is not a bug, it’s a feature, the ultimate goal. Why would anybody would WANT to resist a tyrannical government?”
We need a better answer for that.
.
My understanding is that Laura San Giacomo chose to go from movies to television because she had a young child born with cerebral palsy that she wanted to spend more time with. So in addition to being a great actress (loved her in “The Stand”), she’s apparently a good mother as well who knows what’s really important.
I liked “Just Shoot Me” but thought LSG was far better when she co-starred with Holly Hunter on “Saving Grace.” It seems to me that a lot of movie stars are moving to the small screen these days because that’s where the really good writing and story-telling seems to have migrated.
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