Some Venezuelans are realizing something that we Real Americans have been tryihg to explain to Califorians, New Yorkers, New Jersey-ites and Connecti…cutters (?); that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has nothing to do with hunting, and is only coincidentally about self-defense against criminals.
“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”
Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all – except government entities.
Chavez initially ran a months-long amnesty program encouraging Venezuelans to trade their arms for electrical goods. That year, there were only 37 recorded voluntary gun surrenders, while the majority of seizures – more than 12,500 – were by force.
…just a tad too late.
Liberals scoff when Real Americans talk about guns being a bulwark against tyranny.
Perhaps because they’re OK with tyranny.
Have bump-stocks been outlawed in the great soc@list paradise too?
Asking for a friend…..
oh loook another attempted threadjack by Emery.
Gun control in Venezuela turned out badly because they didn’t have TRUE socialism.
In a correctly run socialist system, Vanegas would not be bad-mouthing the common-sense measures to fight crime that were reluctantly adopted by people who give tirelessly of their time and knowledge to fight against the insult to their nation by the capitalist imperialist Yankee regime. In a correctly run socialist system, Vanegas would have been buried in a mass grave long ago, shot by the only people allowed to have guns, the secret police.
Can’t happen here. We’re Americans. We’re much smarter than brown people who talk funny and didn’t even go to Macalester, much less Harvard. We’ll do socialism right.
I think that their is a more important lesson to the Venezuelan catastrophe than “socialism bad.”
Instead, look at what has happened in Venezuela as result of the factionalism discussed in Federalist 9 & 10.
In Venezuela, a majority of voting citizens in democracy essentially gave themselves 100% of the political power. In other words a faction gained dictatorial power simply by using the power of majority rules.
Thus “pure democracy” destroys republicanism. With pure democracy you don’t have a self-ruling people, you have the faction of 50% + 1 ruling the faction of 50% -1.
That is, if you have a population where 51% of the voters are protestant and 49% are Catholic, and people vote on religious lines, you don’t have protestants and Catholics working together to rule the people, you have a protestant government ruling protestants and Catholics.
Smart fellas, the founders.
Perhaps because they’re OK with tyranny.
Only because they each think they’ll be the one in charge.
The question here is whether the millions of refugees that have crossed into Columbia and other countries through Venezuela’s porous border are willing and able to visit illicit arms markets in Columbia and Guyana to take the fight back there. Question #2 is whether those who might be willing and able to take their homes back can agree on enough to make a coherent movement. Question #3 is whether there would emerge a leader strong enough to keep the movement “on task” and able to pick up more weapons from defeated Venezuelan Army forces.
Or is it just blowing off steam at this point?
Regarding bump stocks, isn’t it great that our new President has much more of a clue about how weapons can become fully automatic than the old one? But that noted, it’s also worth noting that you can make any semi-auto with reasonable recoil fire in that manner without one.
MBerg asks “Perhaps because they’re OK with tyranny.”
Are you serious? We are talking about people who believe the state should force nuns to pay for contraception, and that calling a man with a penis a “man with a penis” is a fireable offense. Also, they want to take your guns.
Orwell believed that the goal of totalitarianism was not ideology, because ideology amounts to rules that restrict the power of the totalitarian state. The goal of totalitarians is arbitrary power. They will find out what you believe that they cannot or will not make you do, and then make you do it.
But I though Obama was coming for your guns…
First they come for our bump-stocks, then they will come for our Viagra. Sad
Trump borrows $12 billion from China and EU to subsidize impact of US trade war against China and EU. Starting to look like an emerging market. The spoils are given to political backers and key support bases while the majority of the population loses out.
I have a couple of friends that hail from Australia, Emery. Ask them what happens when guns are confiscated from law abiding citizens by power mad liberals/progressives/Communists. Hint: violent crime, especially home invasions, are up almost 50%. And, guess what Mayor of Simpleton; over 50% of the perpetrators of those crimes have guns. Just one of the reasons they moved here and became citizens. But hey, make sure that the “guns are banned from this house” sign in your front yard is clearly visible.
When I see a Emery post I noow think of Charlie Browns teachers, annoying trombone.
You should also be banned from using Dr. Strangelove as your avatar, you dont have enough of a sense of humor and irony to use it.
If self-trolling isn’t yet a recognized literary genre, it needs to be.
POD: How’s your 401K coming along?
S&P down 4.8% for the year. If the market doesn’t recover, this will be Wall Street’s worst year since the 2008 financial crisis.
Dow and S&P also down 7% this month – on pace for their worst Decembers since the Great Depression
Dow and S&P also down 7% this month – on pace for their worst Decembers since the Great Depression
I wonder what happened last month that could have caused such a drastic downturn of the markets….
Speaking of bump stocks….
https://babylonbee.com/news/tragic-every-single-bump-stock-in-nation-suddenly-lost-in-boating-accident
Bill C: The stock market usually runs about six months ahead of the economy.
It annoys me when people use the stock market gyrations as anything more than a secondary indication of the economy. That Emery uses the inevitable downward slide of a nearly 10-year old bull market as some sort judgement on Trump is just about par for the course with all his other predictions.
My biggest problem with bear markets is having enough money to take advantage of them. I’ve prepared for this slide and I’ve been waiting for months for it to happen. I only hope this is more than a head-fake like last spring.
And I still like Trump over all the alternatives.
The stock market usually runs about six months ahead of the economy
Rhetoric. It’s all about the delivery. Sound convincing, like you know what you’re talking about, and people might believe you. Unless they’ve seen your lies before.
Hey Emery,
Your hero Barackus Obamanus I was taking credit for the great rise in the market last month, so it’s actually his fault then that it’s dropping. Since he manipulated the Fed with artificially low interest rates and pumping a billion plus worthless dollars into the stream, he actually does deserve the blame. Trump has also been criticizing the Fed for raising interest rates too fast. Guess you missed that one, huh?
Mitch, as you know I’m a staunch defender of uninhibited free speech. But I’m also a staunch opponent of insipid stupidity.
Dunning_Kruger hasn’t made a coherent ignorant statement here for the last year. He’s not a good spokes slob for the left. He’s not even a good troll; Angry clown was a good troll.
This isn’t a Democracy so there’s no vote, but if I’m not mistaken, and I’m not, you warned asshat he’d be bounced if he didn’t up his game.
The game hasn’t been upped. Your move.
It suddenly occurs to me that D_K’s coherence took a dive at exactly the same time he (mostly) stopped plagiarizing comments from his intellectual betters.
Fell right into place.
I don’t think the stock market is a great measure of policy performance, but some people do:
“I have long believed that stock markets are the best barometer of the health, wealth and security of a nation. And today’s stock market message is an unmistakable vote of confidence for the president.” ~ Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow
“Absolutely, this is a mark-to-market business, and you see what the market thinks.” ~ Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin
“I think there is a lot more momentum in the stock market. … “The stock market is reflecting the reality of what’s going in the business environment today. There is going to be a continuation [of the] rally in the equity markets based on real underlying fundamentals of the U.S. economy … as well as companies having more earnings power because of lower tax rates.” ~ Former chief economic advisor to Trump Gary Cohn
Funny thing about that Kudlow quote. It was stated about the Bush administration in a column of the NY Sun from July 20, 2007. I personally think it’s overwrought to the point of being wrong; especially because it gives lefty jackasses license to create misleading contexts.
Explain mark-to-market investing and it’s significance to a Treasury Secretary, Emery. Show your work.
As to Cohn’s comments, they were in December of 2017 when the market was on a tear and he was predicting its performance would continue. It did.
And…
… the least you could do, Emery, is reference the site from which you *stole* your entire comment. This one, right here. Same three quotes, but which included dates and context, you weasel.
I watched all of The Lives of Others tonight. I’ve seen bits of it before on Youtube.
When you watch the whole the thing you can see the theme you miss in the short clips. The Stasi wants to spy on people when they are acting as they truly are. But because people think the Stasi is always spying on them, they never act as though they aren’t being spied upon.The spies can never do their job. Kind of a clever turnabout on Bertolt Brecht, though most people don’t catch this.
There are scenes where real people interact that are modeled on other scenes where people interact during a stage play. Everyone is forced to be dishonest.
JDM: The best economy in the history of the world inexplicably requires a $1.5 Trillion fiscal stimulus and can’t handle a fraction of a percent change in interest rates.
Trade wars, on the other hand, don’t bother this powerful economy at all…..