The Boogeyman

The NYTimes’ “Room For Debate” feature – which generally gathers a bunch of liberals and a token conservative or two to laboriously discuss issues – currently features the question “Is the NRA Still Invincible”.

This time, the series features a piece by Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, who notes, quite correctly, that it’s a matter of trust – and that as people trust government less and less, they are forced to trust themselves more and more.

“But that’s just paranoid!”, the left will respond.  “Government is…all of us”.

No it’s not.  Government is a bureaucracy that serves, primarily, itself.   And its actions, and indeed its statements, are less and less trustworthy as we go.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

As Reynolds points out – in 2008, Barack Obama pointed out that “we’re not coming for your guns”.  Last week, though, he listed as his model for gun control Australia – which carried out a gun confiscation that was incredibly draconian by Western standards.  And even when they stay out of the realm of specific proposals, it doesn’t help that whenever they open their mouths, they’re lying.  Every time.  No exceptions.

Is the NRA invincible?  It’s irrelevant; in many states (Minnesota included) the NRA is a marginal player.  It’s the people that make the Second Amendment human rights movement a juggernaut.  Not invincible, mind you; we came within a cat’s whisker of losing the Second Amendment 40 years ago.  We can’t let our guard down like that ever again.

5 thoughts on “The Boogeyman

  1. “There’s scientific consensus on guns — and the NRA won’t like it”
    http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hemenway-guns-20150423-story.html
    The first problem with the story is that the “scientists” in question are social “scientists.” Witch doctors. They don’t study the natural world, they study human behavior. The author of the story is also a social scientist. The rest of the op-ed is strawmen, arbitrary criteria, and useless statistics.

    They wanted to know whether strong gun laws reduced homicide rates (I said they did); and, conversely, whether permissive gun laws lowered crime rates overall (I said they did not). I discovered that in their news articles journalists would write that I said one thing while some other firearms researcher said the opposite. This “he said-she said” reporting annoyed me — because I knew that the scientific evidence was on my side.

    Not just evidence, the scientific evidence!
    Scientific evidence like-

    My first step was to put together a list of relevant scientists. I decided that to qualify for the survey the researcher should have published on firearms in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and that he or she should be an active scientist — someone who had published an article in the last four years.

    These are arbitrary criteria. The “scientific journals” are social science journals, which have miserable standards for peer review. He mentions the names of none of them. Are they American? Foreign? Who the Hell knows? And why four years? if you used the same method, but included data from 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, etc, and compared them, that would be interesting.
    This is garbage, meant to let morons say that “science” proves that . . . what exactly? The author mentions these mysterious people who disagree with him, but he doesn’t say who they are, or what they disagree about.

  2. And from our local paper:
    “Our Willingness to Tolerate School Shootings”
    http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/commentary/their-views/our-willingness-tolerate-school-shootings
    The most remarkable thing about this is that it was written by a professor of English. The statements tend to be absolutes, as in the head line.
    “. . . our culture has reached a point where it’s impossible to be safe unless you have your own weapon.”
    How can you write crap like this and look in the mirror and tell yourself “I am a professor of English. I teach young people to communicate using words!”

  3. Social scientists are to scientists like astrologers are to astronomers — lots of trendy, technical sounding babble and no foundation.

    Any field where less than 25% of the research can be replicated has to have less credibility than a coin flip, yet still we spend billions of dollars and risk millions of lives on those results.

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