FairAndUNbalanced.com

 
Anytime I want to read something insightful, I can check Stinque.com to see if nojo has anything to contribute to the cause.

Someone recently posted on Facebook a goofy sort of defense of the NRA.

Millions of NRA members and not one has shot up a school.

That’s a fact!

This was a bit much for nojo, who shot back:

Their money, along with that of weapons manufacturers, is funneled into politicians who work tirelessly to do nothing — or worse — to solve a problem that has killed 1.5 million Americans since 1968.

They are all accessories to murder.

We know of no other way to explain it.

Comrade Misfit was having none of it. I’ve been reading our favorite earthbound misfit for years. She’s a fun read, generally creative, and knows everything, everything, about planes, trains, warfare, and firearms. She’s a gun enthusiast, an expert on the subject.

Comrade Misfit:

I’m an NRA member. If you want to brand me as “an accessory to murder” or “a member of a terrorist organization”, then there is nothing to discuss. There are millions, if not over ten million, rifles out there that are patterned on Eugene Stoner’s design. Are you going to pay for every one of them?

Beyond that, be careful of using the “my right to life trumps your right to own a gun” argument. That’s exactly the argument used to ban abortion.

I dunno. It’s not a bad analogy. Not perfect, but no analogy is, really. I think a somewhat closer analogy might be a debate over whether we should allow a privately owned missile launcher, ready to fire, to be parked on the roadside next to an airport.

Ryan appreciates Comrade Misfit’s point but regards her argument as weak.

Ryan:

While I don’t agree that members of the NRA are terrorists or accessories to murder, the organization absolutely deserves condemnation for its particular brand of propaganda (especially constant fearmongering), tactics (including blocking gun research), ridiculous arguments, opposition to reasonable and popular gun control measures, and association with and influence over the GOP and conspiracy theorists. One shouldn’t have to be pro-gun control to recognize this.

“That’s exactly the argument used to ban abortion.”

The arguments are different in at least one meaningful way: we have not established that the fetus does have a right to life. Even if we did, which right trumps the other is a values question that by no means dictates our position on the right to life vs. the right to own a gun.

Nevertheless, it is indeed a poor argument. Having a right to life does not mean that the government is obligated to protect it absolutely in every way, including from gun-owning fellow citizens with no intention of harming anyone. That would have all sorts of undesirable implications and consequences. For the same reason, of course, gun owners should neither regard their second amendment freedom as limitless nor fight for it to be. There is indeed a point at which reason and safety should trump freedom. We are simply fighting over what that point is.

Dave Dubya of Freedom Rants is not known for mincing words.

Dave Dubya:

“my right to life trumps your right to own a gun”

There’s no need to conflate abortion into this issue. And it’s more like, “My right to own a gun trumps your right to life and liberty” that has become the NRA creed. Freedom, life, and liberty end at the point of a rifle.

I’m from the Great North Woods and hunted from a young age. I get it.

I never needed an AR15 to hunt, nor for self defense. Sport or no sport, they were designed to kill human beings. Now I’m attacked for agreeing with Reagan that we don’t need 30 round mags in public. I still have a few guns, but I’ll be damned if I give a dime to the NRA. In the past they were very much about education and safety, but now they are primarily a political organization.

The indisputable bottom lines are these:

The more weapons in circulation, the more humans will die from them. As with the cholera epidemic, shut down the pump and more will live.

Despite the hollow platitudes about “freedom”, the NRA now exists solely to funnel wealth to weapons merchants and to empower the Republican Party. The NRA is virtually an arm of the Republican Party.

That means NRA money goes straight to the Party of Trump. There’s blood money flowing. It’s as if human sacrifice is accepted in the name of the Militia Amendment. For this we have thousands killed and millions living in fear, not freedom.

Stephanie Ruhle breaks down how much money the NRA has given to Republicans who talk about their “thoughts and prayers” — The thoughts and prayers are with the victims. The dollars and cents are another story.”

https://www.facebook.com/Mediamatters/videos/10155322144601167/

The NRA spent $21 Million on supporting Trump and attacking Hillary.

Thanks for the “freedom”, boys. Putin thanks you too, as he laughs his ass off.

My own view is that what started as a firearms safety organization has devolved. It is now mostly funded and run by gun manufacturers, who strike me as a cold-blooded group.

I suspect most NRA members would support common sense limits, if they were not drowned out by industry mouthpieces. I have known a few members, one at worship, a couple at work, one from long ago at another job. We haven’t had much cause to talk about the issue, but they all wear shoes and talk without drooling.

Aside from those who have surrendered to movement extremists, we all are for reasoned debate. I don’t hear or read much argument for confiscation of all guns or regulation for its own sake.

But it’s hard to argue for murder or for death by careless accident. And nobody likes to be bullied.

Have a safe weekend. Let’s be real careful out there.

 
From The Onion:

THE HEAVENS—As he entered the Pearly Gates and walked the gold-paved streets of God’s Eternal Kingdom, the late Rev. Billy Graham was reportedly so overwhelmed Wednesday by the great majesty before him that he did not at first notice he had taken a turn leading him down the main thoroughfare of heaven’s largest gay enclave. “Oh no, oh—Where am I, exactly?”

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From tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors:

We note with chagrin that Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers fundraising event that would feature auctioning off an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—just like the type used to hunt free-range high school students in Florida—is now changing course:

“After POLITICO contacted the committee on Tuesday afternoon, the Stevens County Republican Party removed mentions of the AR-15 and a plan to offer a Ruger 10-22 .22-caliber rifle as a door prize from the event’s website. The organization was still considering how to proceed with the auction, its chair said.

“Then, after the POLITICO report was published on Tuesday evening, the committee made a final decision to nix the AR-15.”

Tuesday? They didn’t think this was bad optics until YESTERDAY?

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:

February is Black History Month. It’s an interesting time, because two diametrically opposed views come to the fore. One view sees the history of Blacks in America as a failure of the American experiment. The opposite view sees the history of Blacks as an American success story—black liberation.

In “honor” of Black History Month, The Washington Post ran an op-ed by a historian and college professor titled Black history is U.S. history — but some of my students don’t want to hear it. It is written by Donald Earl Collins, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland University College. The article’s subtitle is “History class should be the last place where we stop talking about race.”

I agree: We should be talking about race—how America makes race irrelevant in life. That, however, is not Collins’s message, which is why I put the word honor in scare quotes.

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From Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post:

The Second Amendment to our Constitution guarantees the right of all citizens to bear firearms. However, it does NOT guarantee anyone’s right to own military-style weaponry, nor does it guarantee the right to indiscriminately murder innocent civilians! Those who claim that any attempt to regulate or restrict gun ownership of any kind are rabble-rousing LIARS who are needlessly paranoid and who are aiding and abetting future mass killings – PERIOD!

These people need to realize that the mere prohibition of owning such weapons does NOT mean the government is trying to “take away our guns!”

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Wondering why a few conservative friends fail to be impressed.

 
From Max’s Dad:

Yeah its all you kids fault for not being meddling enough. Trump the moral leper took time off from watching Fox News and its moral creeps to tweet out a blame game tweet blaming the kids for not ratting out a troubled teen. For chrissakes, if every troubled teen was turned in to the cops, well there’d still be full high schools cuz the cops wouldnt do a damn thing once they found out the troubled teen was white.

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From Green Eagle:

A couple of brief excerpts from the Washington Post today. First, this remark from Paul Waldman:

“Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, and the Russia scandal in general, are driving this president around the bend, to the point where he is setting himself against not just the government he leads but also the interests of the United States of America. And everything we’ve seen up to now suggests that it will only get worse.”

You see, the President “setting himself against …the interests of the United States of America” is about nothing but him being “around the bend,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Waldman doesn’t dare mention the real reason for this behavior: The Russians put him in office, and destroying the security of the United States is the price he agreed to pay for that favor. I do not believe for a second that Waldman doesn’t know this perfectly well, but he gets paid to slide our attention away from this fact by any means possible.

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From The Journal of Improbable Research:

“An earprint is an impression of the external ear. House breakers may leave their earprints inadvertently when they listen at doors and windows to check if there is anyone inside before breaking and entering a premises. Owing to uniqueness and individualistic characteristics of the human ear, earprints can be used as evidence to link a criminal with the crime. In the recent past, many suspected thieves have been convicted and several burglaries linked due to the presence of similar earprints.”

So writes Professor Kewal Krishan of Panjab University, India, in ‘Identification: Prints – Ear (Earprints)’, in the Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine (Second Edition) 2016.

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