Meanwhile the hysteria goes on
The front page of today’s
New York Daily News has a
photo of the funeral of one of the victims of the Newtown massacre with the headline:
If these 20 children cannot
change this world, no one will
Comments
December 24
James N. writes:
Do you think it is possible for all of the organs of public opinion to operate in this coordinated a fashion without at least informal collaboration on strategy and tactics?
In particular, the demonization of the NRA for making the only sensible proposal to come out of this horror is astonishing—both for its wrongheadedness and for its uniformity. Everybody hates the NRA all of a sudden, like a hive.
The people who are reacting violently to the notion of putting good guys with guns in schools seem to me deranged. The New York Times even put scare quotes around “good guys” in a headline as if to mean, “there’s no such thing as ‘good guys’ “.
We live in interesting times.
LA replies:
The nation-state has become the nation-mob.
I saw a story this morning about a town that has decided to put a full-time police officer in each of the town’s nine (as I rememberr) schools. While this is at least a rational response to the security issue, it seems to me a spectacular waste of manpower and money. If a few administrators, staff, and teachers would carry in each school, that would take care of the problem, at no cost except for their training. But how can today’s educators, who are mostly hyper-liberal and see guns as evil, remotely contemplate using guns to protect their pupils and themselves from gunmen?
Alan M. writes:
It is becoming easier every day to see how the events of the 1930s in Germany happened.
All pretense has been dropped. The battleground has been softened. The fangs will soon appear.
Yet, we have hope in the Lord and rejoice.
Paul K. writes:
We will never win an intellectual argument with leftists about the proper role of firearms in society because they are not interested in having one. Our side is concerned with addressing the problem of mass-shootings and is open to a range of approaches; leftists, on the other hand, are not. In keeping with Alinsky’s tactics they focus their effort on one goal—disarming the American public—and use the problem as a lever to achieve it.
Here is how the discussion goes:
Gun owners: Rifles are used in less than three percent of all crimes in the US.
Leftists: Ban guns.
Gun owners: We need to look at the effect our sick culture has on our children.
Leftists: Ban guns.
Gun owners: We need to identify dangerously mentally ill people before they commit murder.
Leftists: Ban guns.
Gun owners: We need to end the counter-productive Gun Free Zones.
Leftists: Ban guns.
Gun owners: We need armed guards or licensed teachers in schools.
Leftists: Ban guns.
Ad infinitum.
Along these lines, I recently heard Krauthammer make an interesting point about Obama’s tactics in negotiations about the budget deficit. Boehner proposed closing various deductions that would have met the revenue goals, but Obama insists on raising the tax rates. Why? Because his real goal is not to address the deficit, but to break the Republican Party, and he knows that by forcing Boehner to break the promise not to raise taxes he will cause a civil war in its ranks. He is concerned with the ultimate goal, not the goal about which he pretends to be negotiating.
Kathlene M. writes:
Let me offer an explanation, if I may, about the anger directed toward the NRA. After reading various comments at different sites, I can conclude that people are unhappy that the NRA’s suggestion is to turn America into a militarized society—the very police state that the NRA is always warning against. So, as people see it, eventually we’ll all be expected to don our helmets and bulletproof vests before we venture out. Police and armed vigilantes will be stationed everywhere, or we’ll all be expected to carry the latest high tech weapons at the grocery stores, churches, and schools while surveillance drones hover overhead. This will be in addition to the humiliating searches we endure at the airports and now the trains. This seems to be the opposite of a free society. This is what people are reacting to. They’re asking, “Is this how we want to live?”
While the NRA represents millions of law-abiding gun owners, we forget that it also represents the gun industry (the manufacturers and marketers) whose interests are less about protection of hearth and home and more about making money. Their job is to get many people (especially women) interested in their latest weapons. So the NRA lecturing the nation rubbed many the wrong way. They should have made a simple statement of condolence and said they’d be happy to be part of Obama’s commission. Instead, Wayne LaPierre said he wasn’t even interested in sitting on the president’s commission to look at solutions. That also rubbed people the wrong way.
Paul Nachman writes:
You wrote:
“a spectacular waste of manpower and money.”
Absolutely.
Can you imagine a more alertness-deadening job than sitting in a grade school all day, waiting for the infinitesimal possibility to happen? Of course, the officer wouldn’t actually sit, but within a couple of hours on the first day, he or she would have explored everything there was to explore about the place, so crippling boredom, perhaps even dozing, would set in on that very day.
Of course, it could be made into a rotating responsibility, with any one officer being tabbed only every 100 working days or so. But still, I think the boredom would be crippling and the officer would be unprepared if the infinitesimally probable actually happened.
James N. writes:
Volunteers could guard the schools for free.
I went to a K-3 school “holiday” concert three days after Newtown. I stood between two dads, one carrying a .45, the other a compact .357. I estimate that in an audience of at least 750, with 150 precious little children on the stage, that at least sixty dads were violating the gun free schools law—all to the good.
Read the responses to Charlotte Allen’s NR piece.
For simply stating the obvious,—men are better defenders than women, and armed men are even better than unarmed men—she is vilified BY NR READERS. Now, NR is hardly a real conservative publication, but not too many leftists are regular readers.
I have little children who go to school every day. People who believe, passionately, that they should be undefended are, to me, literally insane. The President, the Congress, important businessmen, media “stars” are all guarded by armed men.
Why not children?
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 23, 2012 07:25 PM | Send