Count Me Among Those Who are Fed Up

Mike McDaniel had a post yesterday at the American Thinker entitled When it comes to leftists and law-abiding gun owners, they really hate us. McDaniel starts out with a typical leftist approach:

After any notorious shooting, anti-liberty/gun cracktivists inevitably—after demanding: “what will it take before we do something about gun violence?”—call for a “national conversation about gun violence.” When Normal Americans reply, “OK, let’s talk,” they scream, “shut up, you racist, red neck, domestic terrorists!” Every. Single. Time.

I have encountered these "let's have a national conversation" types. My response, because I have around so long has been: "We have already had that conversation. You lost." They are not going to change my mind now, after all I have seen and heard, and I am certainly not going to change theirs. Second of all, as McDaniel points out, there is no such thing as "gun violence." Guns are tools, relatively simple inanimate objects. People are the once who commit violence, and that violence depends on whether they are assaulting innocent people, or they are defending themselves from such an assault. Guns may be used in both cases, but one of them is justified, the other is not.

It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from poor Charlie Brown. Normal, honest Americans are willing to talk with just about anybody about just about anything, even though they know there’s no such thing as “gun violence.” People commit violence, not inanimate objects. Guns are nothing more than tools that propel projectiles. They have no consciousness, no emotions, no malice. They are neither good nor evil, and they’re only one of many tools capable of being used by human beings to harm other human beings, tools like motor vehicles, which in the warped sense that guns are responsible for violence, are responsible for far more deaths and injuries than guns.

Normal Americans are the people who built, build, and maintain America. They’re not the people who are protesting law enforcement in particular and our representative, constitutional republic in general. Recognizing “our democracy” is a tyranny of the majority, they support the rule of law by voting and politely telling their representatives when they’re displeased.

Yes, I think our Constitutional, representative republic was inspired. But knowing that men are not angels I keep an eye on it. The right to keep and bear arms keeps the government from taking all of my other rights. I certainly believe that those who have rigged our elections need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. And we need to go back to watermarked paper ballots and holding elections on one day. But I depend on the corrective power of the Constitutional representative republic to fix it.

True, many Normal Americans, knowing all that, are fed up. Many won’t bother to have a “conversation” that will produce little more than angry, spittle-slinging rage, obscenities and insults. Still, some will try in the hope that logic, reason, objective facts and the lessons of history might somehow prevail, that those foundations of western civilization might somehow reach those likely too far gone on the path to a communist utopia might pause, think and embrace sanity.

So sure, they’ll have that conversation, because they’re decent people and they’re willing to be pleasantly surprised. But they’re not willing to bargain away the Constitution or the rule of law to people who want them dead.

Count me among those who are fed up. I have had the conversation with many people, and at my age don't need to have another "angry, spittle-slinging" conversation filled with "rage, obscentities and insults." But if McDaniel is willing to put up with it, more power to him.