Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Juxtaposition on Guns

I find a very cruel irony about two recent headlines in my local paper. One was a whole thing about the rise in guns sales because idiots think that Obama is going to take away their guns. Yeah if we're lucky he is going to get rid of assault rifles and put safeguards on handgun purchases, background checks and shit. I call them idiots because I live in NY which already has some gun control laws and I'm willing to bet that if Obama could get the whole country to the same level as NY he'd be a happy man. Thats it, prove who you are and where you live to buy a shot gun or a rifle, and a through background check for handguns.

The horrible irony is that the day before this article about people buying thousands of rounds of ammo was the story of a 12 year old boy and his 10 year old friend who were playing with dads gun, got it out of the safe and accidentally killed himself.

Fuck the NRA

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"One was a whole thing about the rise in guns sales because idiots think that Obama is going to take away their guns."

This makes no sense. If people believe Obama is going to confiscate guns from them (and I don't think any reasonable owner claims so), then why buy more? So that the ATF would get more guns from you? You have got to be smoking something funky if you think that's anywhere close to what gun owners are thinking.

The more likely reason is Obama, through his voting history and quotes, wants more restrictions on gun sales. If I were an American, I'd buy a couple of guns too, before he could make it harder for me to purchase one.

And BTW, assault rifles are already banned from civilian ownership, even before the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban. Unless you're thinking of including semi-automatic rifles that superficially resemble military assault weapons. Is that it?

As a liberal atheist gun owner, I'd come to expect thought and logic from my fellow rationalists. Not some near-incoherent babble with no relation to reality.

Fuck the NRA. And fuck ignorant gun haters too. :)

Kilgore Trout said...

Sorry, by "take away their guns" I simply meant take away their ease of getting them, not confiscating the guns they already have. Which is why people are buying more, and tons of ammo.

I would have like to have put a lot of thought into this post, I think its an important topic, but I'm really busy and just wanted to get my basic point across, which you entirely missed and thats the kid that died.

As for assault rifle I did mean things like an AR-15 which is the semi-auto civilian version of a military M-16, or an SKS which is the legal version of an AK. The similarities between those and the illegal versions are far more than skin deep, they are the same thing, just without the full auto capability (M-16's might be 3-shot burst I can't recall for sure) but often it's fairly simple machining or changing of parts to turn them into full auto assault rifles. I know people who have full auto SKS's, they aren't hard to come by. But even in semi-auto form what is the point of a an SKS? I'm not a hunter but I'm quite certain that normal hunters usually go for like a Remington 700, not a freaking SKS cause one accurate shot is worth more than a dozen misses. Although at my old house we did occasionally hear the group of wanna-be hunters blast off a dozen shells at a time, and that was with shot-guns, (rifles were only recently allowed for hunting here) but those were more likely yuppie fucks who wanted to feel macho more than real hunters.

I'm fine with responsible people owning guns for hunting. I think the idea of guns for protection is a joke because the stats don't lie, you're far more likely to kill the wrong person then stop an attacker. But if people want to cling to that idea I guess I don't have a problem with it, but like everything the only real safety is education.

Maybe I'll do another post about this.

Thanks for the critique even if it was a bit rudely put.