Here is my proposed gun control compromise following the latest attack on children that millions of us did not commit. Ready? You gun fascists can kiss my Schumer and we keep our guns. In fact, let's also repeal the National Firearms Act and impose national constitutional carry. I think this compromise fairly balances our respective legitimate interests regarding guns. Our legitimate interest is maintaining the capacity to deter and defeat tyrants and criminals. Your legitimate interest in limiting our ability to do so is non-existent.
There are several Republicans who are apparently eager to come to a compromise on guns with the Democrats, whose ultimate goal is to rule unchallenged over a nation of disarmed, supine Canadian serfs. Some are lawyers, which explains why they are in Congress and not raking in bucks lawyering. If I went to one of my clients and suggested, "Okay, I propose we resolve this matter by giving the other side a lot of money and getting nothing in return," I would have to find an alternate income stream too.
The idea of a compromise involves getting something you want but giving away something to get it. So far, so good – that's how negotiating works. But the key point is to get something you want. Here, what we get is that we lose less than they want us to ultimately lose. Instead of banning "assault rifles" completely – every healthy, law-abiding adult citizen should have a real military assault rifle, but that's a tangent – the proposed "compromise" seems to be just to ban them completely for some younger adult citizens. See, I'm missing the part where we get something in return instead of merely losing less. But the durwoods of the softcon wing of the GOP seem pretty eager to fail less spectacularly than they might otherwise and call it a victory.
Of course, this effectively buys into the premise that there is something wrong with guns. There is not. Guns, as I point out in my new book "We'll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America," are an essential element of any free society. Australia gave up its guns and look at them. Canada, too. Nah, I say we unreservedly reserve our ultimate veto over tyranny.
People who wish us ill wish the opposite. Recently, Chris Hayes, the bespectacled nimrod who holds the briefcase of the slightly more masculine Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, recently simpered that a lot of Americans insist on keeping their guns to fight tyrannical government agents. Well, yeah. Exactly. Nothing gets by him. Weird that he would reach back about 250 years to oppose the Revolutionary War, but whatever. Sissies gotta siss.
The unspoken premise of the people outraged that the citizenry wants to retain the ultimate veto on government power is that they are the ones who will be wielding that government power. And you need to wonder why they want us disarmed.
Actually, you don't. You lived through COVID and know.
In support of this noxious notion come some establishment people waving their credentials on Twitter around like you should simply defer to them. One is a major general who used to run my alma mater, the Infantry School at Ft. Benning. According to the general, he gets it. He knows that these are weapons of war and that we civilians don't need them. Well, not so much.
As much as I love generals [INSERT THEATRICAL EYE-ROLL HERE], I must point out some problems with the two-star's premise. A major general typically commands a division of about 15,000. He is a conductor of organized violence, operating in the macro. Of course, he understands what a 5.56mm/.223 round can do. You know who else knows what a 5.56mm/.223 round can do? Me and every other vet who ever shot one, as well as the 20 million or more Americans who own AR-15s and the tens of millions of others who have used them. So, there's no special expertise there.
We know those rounds can hurt people. That's why we want them. To hurt bad people if deterrence fails. That's why in the LA Riots, the Army gave me a 5.56mm rifle to carry. I just think everyone else should get the same protection I had.
The general goes further than mere technical details and opines that such weapons do not belong in the possession of anyone outside the military, where, presumably, people like him can control their use. But that's not a technical issue for which he is offering his expertise. That's a policy issue. Why is a former (but sympathetic) government official under the impression that his past position gives him some sort of special expertise that we should defer to in terms of foundational constitutional policy, i.e., whether or not citizens should have the capacity to resist violent tyranny? The answer is that he doesn't, and the fact that guys like him are presumably the ones who would be called upon to carry out the dirty work of a tyrannical government (in the remote but potential scenario where that might happen in the future) actually makes him the very worst person to opine on the policy.
But you are supposed to be dazzled by the stars and submit. You can be sure there are GOP dummies just aching to, held back only by Mitch McConnell – the frustrating Murder Turtle who nevertheless is no dummy – whispering in their ears that screwing us over on guns is just about the only thing that can turn an electoral environment of $6 a gallon gas and public school groomers into a Republican rout.
No, this is not the time to go soft. This is not the time to indulge the perennial Republican disease of craven spinelessness in the face of Democrats and their regime media minions screaming lies about them. This is the time to say "No."
No compromise on our rights. Not now. Not ever.
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