08-27-2017, 01:27 PM
(08-27-2017, 12:08 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The NRA leaders are insane. I am not especially interested in distinguishing them from Nazis, although they are different. Insane is a diagnosis, correct in my view, of the NRA leaders. They are unworthy of mine or anyone's attention. They are not a rural culture. They are a commercial lobby without principle, promoting violence, and alien to life or its values.
The NRA is in fact a corporate advocacy group with the sponsorship of the businesses that manufacture of weapons and ammunition. Those interests have a desire that they can sell as many of their wares as possible. Supposedly the criminals using guns are not their friends, but people obsessed with having their own arsenals (which is crazy) are a target audience.
The rank-and-file NRA membership is heavily hunters scared into believing that the Big Bad Obama-monster wants to take away their hunting rifles. Truth be told, those are the last people that anyone wants to take guns from. Those are generally well-behaved people as intent on preserving an environment suitable for the survival of game as for protecting their 'gun rights'. If anyone thinks that there is some great Commie plot to take away weapons -- the Soviet Union had permissive gun laws. It had a culture of sport hunting that it considered compatible with 'socialism'.
Quote:We can study and seek to understand why folks join the IS, or Nazis, or the KKK, or the NRA. That's perfectly reasonable, and I have. I have read about Hitler; I know about the NRA. Violent means are not the only means of dealing with these folks, although it appears also to be necessary with regard to Nazis and the IS.
With the NRA, one needs but understand the economic interests of the gun business. If it could get away with mandating that everyone have a firearm and ammo, it would push that.
With ISIS or the Nazis one needs understand evil. The evil people must hide their reality. No swindler begins with the pitch: "I am going to fleece you". To the contrary, the swindler offers "Do I have a deal for you!" Normal business offers "This is what I have and this is what it will cost you. We think this is a great deal for you".
Evil has to offer something -- easy gain, satisfaction of repressed impulses, excitement, quick and easy bliss, pageantry, and of course meaning in life. If the Germans had known that Nazism would bring them great shame and personal loss they would have rejected it. Hitler never promised that youth of the time would become cannon fodder in an insane war, that people who had done nothing wrong would be killed in cold blood, that the US Army Air Corps and Royal Air Force would turn large cities into places of mass death and destruction, that the Soviet army would rape German women in revenge, or that by 1946 the most shameful national label would be "German". Oh, yes -- and that life would often be reduced to primitive existence. by 1946 the Germans would have surely wanted to undo it all. But in 1936 -- how proud Germans were of themselves as the Master Race!
A basic rule applies: you cannot rightly deal in what someone else owns unless one has the consent of that person (as in a brokerage agreement).
Quote:I don't equate the NRA leaders with a rural gun culture, or with the entire NRA membership. Many rational folks are members, even Gabby Giffords and Terry McAuliffe. Bob is perfectly free to expound his views on guns, and we have discussed his views and mine ad infinitum. I don't especially feel the need to beat dead horses and argue indefinitely. It doesn't mean I disparage him or others from expressing their views. They can relate the views of the NRA to their heart's content. No need for me to read or listen to those anymore. It's up to them if they wish to change. Prove to me that they have, and I'll listen. They have not.
Gun ownership satisfies some primal urge and allays some primitive fears. We all dread crime... and I can give anyone an example of a circumstance in which one might want a loaded gun. Too bad about the nice clothing of your eleven-year-old daughter and that she has to watch a would-be rapist die.
I think that it is best that we try to improve ourselves as a people.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.