Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-28-2018, 10:37 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(04-27-2018, 10:50 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I have claimed that if one is afraid of a terrorist or nut shooter, one should seek training, the right equipment, and be mentally prepared.  That seems a common red perspective.

There are many among the blue who seem obsessed with the worst case, that the training, equipment and readiness will be perpetually inadequate.  In some ways one is right.  You have to be a veteran, to have regularly encountered lethal incidents, to be truly ready.  You can only do so much in the classroom.

Me, I have studied western armed conflict and eastern unarmed.  I do not see the preparation as useless.  It seems obvious I can't convince those that avoid the training.  By inclination and inexperience, they remain perpetual victims and ready to perpetuate this helplessness.  They will say absurd things like it is not risky or less risky to let a lethal shooter continue to shoot and kill.  They seem ready so say anything to retain helplessness, the lack of responsibility for self defense and that of the community.

And the result is the sort of stalemate that comes from world view clash, with greatly varied understanding of how the word works.  To me, it is the blue who seem irrational.

These are good points, so let me ask a question: if we are planning to rely on well trained and mentally prepared members of the general public to be our safety shield in times of danger, what is the downside to this?  It sounds remarkably like a Samurai culture, which worked in a very disciplined Japan in the past, probably would not work in the Japan of today and seems totally out of step with America in the past, present and future.  In short, I don't see this as a viable model, and some very limited variant would be not just less valuable but actually antithetical to law and order -- the assumed target.

It's the old cats and dogs discussion; cats just don't play well as a team.  Dogs do.  All of which raises the question, are we socially more like the latter than the former?  Personally, I think not.

Your choice of description is curious.  In the Agricultural Age, many privileged military classes extended their dominance over politics and economics.  The samurai make a good example.  In these cultures, weapons prohibitions were common, if futile.  Yes. the common men were forbidden and could not afford swords, but their instruments for threshing grain?  Their nunchaku?

It might have begun with the Vikings.  The English were forced to be strong everywhere.  The People had to be strong at the weakest point.  It might have been the longbow and musket era, where the English were more ready to trust the common man to dominate traditional Agricultural Age cultures that did not.  It led to the English Civil War, where the side with the support of the local militia often had an advantage.  It followed into the era of colonial and revolutionary culture, when you had to have a strong populace to survive.

In some ways, the Right to own and carry weapons is the antithesis of the privileged samurai culture.  It led in period to human rights and democracy.  Did you dare deny those things to an armed populace?  Did you expect the elite to confront them successfully?  In many ways the Right to Bear Arms is key.  The same arguments that led Jim Crow  to adapt a legal stance against the underprivileged were used against the labor unions, who were denied the Rights to Assemble and Bear Arms at the same time.  Somehow, the Pinkerton men weren't.  The suffering and elitist Gilded Age resulted.

The reds remember.  The reds, given that Washington is as usual awash in elitist privilege, will yield their weapons from cold dead fingers.  It is possible to see the Right to Bear Arms as very very American, as the key to all else, the very antithesis of samurai privilege.

I think the blue ought to remember that, with their strange ideas that associate helplessness with strength.  Militia culture has not entirely died.  It is alive and well in so called fly over country.  Alive and well and for good reason.