Make No Mistake-This Is War

There have been several articles about the recent assault on the Second Amendment as a result of the mass shooting in Las Vegas. While the dead are buried, the wounded are tended, and the police search for a motive, the Left is busy calling for a bunch of stupidity that will not affect the next mass shooting, but will burden all the law abiding people that did NOT have anything to do with the mass killing. I intend to highlight a few of those today, gentle reader, if I may.

The first is Alicia Colon's article that appeared in the American Thinker October 8, 2017 entitled The Unbelievable Stupidity of Those Who Believe that Laws Stop the Lawless. As a readers digest version, the title says it all. Of course the Left doesn't really believe that there is some magic incantation or formula that will suddenly cause evil people to be good. Indeed, if there were, the whole of the Christian Church could declare victory and the reign of Jesus on earth. But there is no such magic incantation, and so one must view the manufactured anguish of the Left as nothing more than an attempt to convince the American public to give up their Second Amendment rights. In any case, go and read the whole thing, as she makes some other good points as well.

Next up is William Sullivan's piece on October 9, 2017 at the American Thinker entitled The Logical End of the Left's Antigun Crusade.   Sullivan takes as his starting point an interview with Representative Don Calloway on the Tucker Carlson show:

Recently on Tucker Carlson’s show, Don Calloway (Rep D-MO) opened with this pearl of insight into the leftist mind, suggesting that “mass shootings are the result of the types of weapons that are available to our society, and the lethality of weapons that are available to our society.”

...snip...

But are mass shootings truly “the result of the types of weapons available to our society?” Follow that logic to its reasonable end.

Following which, Sullivan destroys the logic of the Left by pointing out that the total number of people killed by mass shooters in the last 51 years is 948 people. This is tragic. More tragic still is that 3,827 people were killed in 2014 alone by either being beaten of stabbed. Morally, there is no difference between being stabbed, or beaten, or being shot by a mass shooter. Yet one is held out as being more reprehensible. Moreover, it is not the existence of the weapons themselves that are the cause of these mass shootings, but the murderous intent of evil people.  Guns, as always, are inanimate tools.  They do not influence people who do not have the desire to kill, to become killers.  The problem, as always, is the people themselves.

Today there are a number of proposals out there to ban the so called "bump stock" to prevent someone from doing the same thing the Las Vegas shooter did. Years ago one of the flashy moves in cowboy movies was to "fan" the hammer of a Colt 45 Peacemaker or similar single action revolver while the shooter held down the trigger. The result was a very rapid rate of fire. But no one actually did this in real life. It was only the trick shot artists who might fan his revolver in a demonstration. One could not actually aim while fanning. Similarly, bump fire has been around, but it is not very accurate, and people don't (usually) use bump fire in real life. So, conservatives are not all fired up to defend the bump fire stock since, as Spike Hanson points out in his piece at the American Thinker entitled To Win the Second Amendment War:

Whether or not bump stocks end up banned is a trivial matter. The war over the Second Amendment will not hinge on the outcome of this particular battle. Both sides know this; the importance of the issue is entirely psychological.

For progressives, a win would be a move in the right direction, evidence that conservatives are vulnerable. It would be comparable to the Doolittle Raid against the Japanese homeland in 1942 – a strike of no great strategic import but invaluable as a way to shift national confidence from the Japanese to the American side.

For conservatives, there is little to be gained by thwarting this progressive gambit (which is the reason some are prepared to make a tactical retreat). Why expend resources on such an insignificant matter when winning it will not much advance the Second Amendment cause? Why, indeed! The answer is that a defensive mindset leads to defeat. Fainthearted people rarely win at war. This is no less true for a political war than it is for a military one.

And there it is. I myself have no real interest in fighting this fight. But we must, because we can not give on inch. Not one more inch. This is a war, and we can not lose it. The NRA has signaled that they are agreeable to banning bump fire stocks. But then the NRA have been the Neville Chamberlains of the gun rights movement since I can remember. Their appeasements have given us the gun control laws we have today. And those laws have nothing in common with the American system of Constitutional government, but more with Fascistic and totalitarian governments. Therefore I urge readers to consider joining the GOA effort to stop Congress from passing a bump stock ban, and get back to work giving us National Reciprocity.

This is war. We can not lose it.