Dim-Free Zone
By Mitch Berg
In the Strib, William Robiner recycles a tired old idea for solving gun violence:
We should demand that our federal, state, and local leaders…muster the courage to quell the violence here by standing up to the gun lobby, and outlawing assault weapons and handguns. Why wait any longer to liberate our campuses, neighborhoods, and places of worship of the guns that make them unsafe?
When faced with the need to answer such dim addled bilge, after years of answering it over and over and over and over again, the question “Good Lord, why?” springs to mind. “Because gun bans never work”, of course, is the answer, backed by ample statistics showing that the gun-totinest places in the US (the rural west) are by far the safest; that “shall issue” laws have at worst caused no harm, and at best have cut violent crime rates; that banning guns increases violence.
But occasionally one encounters a new lie that the left uses in its insane drive to disarm the American people. Robiner doesn’t disappoint; put another way, Robiner disappoints:
Our nation’s strategy for securing peace in other parts of the world includes ridding violent societies, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, of the widespread weapons that undermine their peace.
Robiner is an idiot, of course; in most of Iraq, every family is allowed a fully automatic AK-series assault rifle as defense against bandits and thugs. The coalition is trying to get things like RPGs (anti-tank bazookas) and explosives removed from the population. To compare the two is to Fecke the facts.
The Virginia Tech shooter used a Glock 19 semi-automatic weapon and a Walther. In less than 10 minutes he fired approximately 170 bullets. In the face of such firepower, do even the most ardent technophiles really believe that quicker communication systems could deliver people to safety?
Well, if they did, they’d be stupid!
Do those counting on the mental health system to provide a safety net lose confidence when they hear mental health professionals readily acknowledge their limited ability to predict violence?
They should lose confidence indeed!
Restricting gun control efforts to them is ineffective.
As, history shows is, are efforts to restrict gun “control” efforts to the law-abiding!
The incident at Virginia Tech was foreseeable in the sense that if such handguns are available they will, at times, be used on innocents. It will happen again on U.S. campuses, on the streets, and even in places of sanctuary.
Even though they are mostly “gun-free” today!
No, Mr. Robiner, absolute gun bans on school grounds didn’t save a single life in the United States.
But armed, law-abiding citizens did.
Far from Robiner’s myopic, totalitarian solition, it’s time to get more guns out into the hands of the law-abiding – and thence out onto the streets.
June 1st, 2007 at 6:46 am
The rural west is so safe cause they have nothing worth stealing. NYC, by contrast, has strict gun laws and is the safest big city in America.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:24 am
What about DC? Has had repressive anti-2nd amendment rights laws for decades and isn’t exactly a garden paradise.
June 1st, 2007 at 7:50 am
Cause it’s a poorly run city whose business area is dominated by bigass marble buildings that don’t generate local tax revenue? And cause the people who live there can’t go ask their Congressman or Senator for help cause Republicans don’t think the people who live in DC deserve democratic representation?
June 1st, 2007 at 8:11 am
“The rural west is so safe cause they have nothing worth stealing.”
Ah, more of that non-discriminatory, non-prejudicial and completely informed rhetoric we’ve come to cherish from AC.
June 1st, 2007 at 8:17 am
I suppose people rustle cattle.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:08 am
angryclown said:
“cause the people who live there can’t go ask their Congressman or Senator for help cause Republicans don’t think the people who live in DC deserve democratic representation”
So only those naughty Republicans use their (what must be) absolute power (which they must have held since the creation of the district) to oppress the people of DC (who must be forbidden by law to move elsewhere) in this way?
You really must on vacation from your “base” in “reality”. 😉
June 1st, 2007 at 9:45 am
Ah, more of that non-discriminatory, non-prejudicial and completely informed rhetoric we’ve come to cherish from AC.
Well, you know the old saying – “the most irritating New Yorkers are the ones that aren’t originally from New York”.
Clown’s south-Jersey roots are showing. In fact, for all his Manhattanite airs, I think he still commutes into the city for his job at the Klown Placement Agency from New Brunswick or Basking Ridge or Edison or someplace like that.
Or so I’m told.
June 1st, 2007 at 9:46 am
Republicans don’t think the people who live in DC deserve democratic representation?
As opposed to the Democrats who, in controlling Congress for 50 years, knocked themselves out to bring representation to the District?
June 1st, 2007 at 9:56 am
Mitch slandered: “Clown’s south-Jersey roots are showing.”
Angryclown easilty brushes away almost all the insults directed at him in this forum. And in contrast to Swiftee, who thinks it’s appropriate to post his kids’ high school grades, Angryclown prefers not to share personal details with vicious wingnuts. Nonetheless, let Angryclown make the record perfectly clear:
Angryclown is not from Jersey.
Angryclown has never lived in Jersey.
Angryclown will never live in Jersey.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:14 am
Is Jersey too good for angryclown?
Do they have some statewide restriction that prevents angryclown from crossing the border?
June 1st, 2007 at 10:26 am
Yeah, bitchieclown…DC sure don’t have no money.
I just happen to have my hotel bill from my last business trip to DC. My room taxes were 14.5%, soaking all those out-of-towners that go into those marble buildings.
They have the money. They just don’t chose to spend it wisely.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:41 am
Dave said: “My room taxes were 14.5%, soaking all those out-of-towners that go into those marble buildings.”
They tack that on cause you out-of-towners always “forget” to tip your hookers.
Troy queried: “Do they have some statewide restriction that prevents angryclown from crossing the border? ”
Not at all, Trojan Man. Angryclown has traveled through New Jersey many times on the way to places that are not New Jersey. Also, Angryclown enjoys The Sopranos, which is set in New Jersey.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:05 am
This is not the first time I’ve gotten the image of AC as Gary Busey in the movie Carney.
SPLASH!
June 1st, 2007 at 11:23 am
Don’t hockers already “get” the “tip”? But I digress.
If banning guns will stop gun violence, then banning matches will stop arson…right-o? Perhaps some enterprising young Lib in the State legislature will submit a bill next session. We can do away with arson, if we just get rid of those darn matches…
June 1st, 2007 at 11:31 am
Yes, new york city is surely a garden paradise. Guns have been difficult at best to obtain, and no one can carry one legally, and because of that, NYC has been the safest big city for decades. Cause and effect.
Why not just ban them all. Pass a constitutional amendment. There is precedent for such action. Look at all the problems the 18th amendment solved. And the Volstead act. Why, for 13 years this country had completely solved its alcohol problem. No one got drunk and beat their wife, no crime was committed that was alcohol related. It was truly heaven on earth. Must as I imagine NYC is right now. Since I am in the middle of Kansas, I dont know that for sure, but I take the clowns word for it. We still have our firearms as we have to fend of the indians, and the cowboys in town from driving cattle up from Texas. You know how it is. Anyway, in 1933 that damn socialist FDR was president when the 21st amendment repealing the 18th. And we, (well at least the clown) has been drunk ever since. Why was it repealed after 13 years of bliss? Probably due to those damn neocon republicans.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:43 am
Wow, really good point, Dave!
Now put your hat back on it.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Come on clownie…if you and your Lib buddies want to ban guns because criminals use them…we need to ban matches to…because criminals use them. I’m not the guy who actually WANTS to ban either….but you seem to be willing to. Or would you just settle for tougher matchstick licensing?
June 1st, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Angryclown doesn’t want to ban anything that poses the slightest possibility of accidentally blowing your fool head off, Dave. Buy as many guns as you can. Angryclown also suggests you keep a pet tiger, which you should feed only sporadically.
June 1st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Ah…I see. So guns just “sporadically” go off. Must be those little gremlins I can’t see. So tehn I should not have any matches in the house…as they too could “sporadically” go off too! Absolutely, clown-boy, both are dangerous and could “sporadically” attack me! Like my pet tiger, Nibbles.
June 1st, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Dave,
Remember when arguing with liberals; physics is haaard.
June 1st, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Reading’s hard for wingnuts. Check to see if Angryclown ever said that guns “sporadically go off” as our dull-witted friend Dave claimed. Three times, cause he thought it was so funny.
Dave, try something that’s a little easier for you to follow than Angryclown’s witty, insightful posts. Hmmm…what’s a good book for wingnuts who are kinda slow?
Hey! Ever read “My Pet Goat?”
June 1st, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Check to see if Angryclown ever said…
No, you did say “accidentally”. But then you compared a gun with a hungry tiger, as if guns have wills of their own.
Which perhaps in the comedy-obsessed Clown household they do – I can see comic handguns, looking almost hand-drawn in their frenetic mania – gamboling about the Clown house with refrigerators that slam their doors to the beat of the rhythm provided by Clownito’s magically-animated drum set…
…until hunger and an innate craving for blood compel the gun, almost against its’ own will (!), to shoot the picture of Grampa Clown (yes, in the face, as the photo of Gramma Clown looks on in mute horror), hoist it on a spit, and cook it in the living room, while the other appliances hide under the also-animated beds, couches (COUCH (Grumpily): “Hey, you punk chair, get out of under me”) and other major furniture, warily watching the rogue animated gun picking its teeth and smoking profusely out its eye-crowned muzzle.
Cuz I’m here to tell ya, guns just aren’t like that.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Tell that to Harry Whittington.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:32 pm
That sounds like “Pee Wee’s Playhouse”.
Is angryclown actually Paul Ruebens?
June 4th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I’m thinking more like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”
Plplplplplplpleeeeeeease!!!!!!!111!11!1!11oneone!!11!!