Not sure which of the three was worst today, Ross Douthat’s lazy “both sides are insane on gun control” column getting the glibs all hot and bothered because of drones, Fluffy’s awful interview with Wayne LaPierre on Press the Meat where LaPierre proves the pro-gun side really is insane, or NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s comments stating “confiscation might be an option” that prove that there’s some on the anti-gun side that aren’t exactly sane either.
What pisses me off the most is that both LaPierre and Cuomo go a long way towards making Douthat partially right for the first time in human memory, and that has me already contemplating the beer in the fridge well before noon on a Sunday.
Derelict
You’re a stronger man than I to absorb that much stupid in such a short span and not want to guzzle gin from a vat.
the Conster
I refuse to subject my beautiful mind to that interview video clip – there’s so many ways it could be awful, can you give us the shorter? kthxbai.
pat
I won’t be watching a minute of Press the Meat. The gag reflex would be too strong.
I plan to write (paper trail!) to my reps and stupid teaturd senator Ron Johnson. It’t time that sane people tried to counteract the lunatic gun crowd. LaPierre started out his diatribe talking about “4 million members.” According to my rough calculation, that is something less than 1.5% of the American population.
We outnumber them.. The Pen is Mightier than the Gun. Ha.
Anya
Cuomo is horrible. He’s just trying to get some leftist cred after all his awfulness, so he’s using the gun issue.
SteveinSC
I normally never watch Meet the Press, but my wife insisted so I watched. It just reinforced my intent never to watch again after the (predictable) performance by LaPierre and the hysterical jabbering that passed for questions from “Stretch” Gregory. Thoroughly pathetic. Chris Hayes, as usual on MSNBC was informative in very many ways except for the foolish discussion of the Nikki Haley-Tim Scott-a-token-Negro-is-better-than-no-Negro-at-all silliness. You know if Hitler had only had a token Jew in the government, Hitler would be showing honest outreach to minorities.
Knockabout
And your transformation into Cole is complete. “Well this both sides do it is stupid but both sides do it. ”
Pathetic.
Knockabout
And your transformation into Cole is complete.
Pathetic.
c u n d gulag
I couldn’t watch that sycophantic whore interview that sociopath on “Press the Meat.”
And as for Andrew Cuomo, he still sucks – except on one occasion, regarding gay issues.
Hey Andrew, this might come as a huge feckin’ suprise to you, but you don’t really need to go so far as to confiscate weapons, since it’s probably illegal, constitutionally – NY City has long had a pretty successful “Guns for Cash” program.
Take that state-wide, fund it, advertise it, and people will come and turn in some portion of their weapons for some cold, hard cash.
Oh, and Andrew, forget about any run for President. You’ve got NO shot.
What an asshole.
Hey, Mario, are you sure Matilda wasn’t just getting some mail delivered in the mailbox by a Conservative mailman?
If you know what I mean? And I think you do.
gnomedad
“The idea is to sell more guns, and like always, it worked.”
dr. bloor
I can’t imagine anything more welcome than Cuomo’s comment. He just rendered himself unelectable in 2016.
dr. bloor
@c u n d gulag:
Oh hell, Andrew is all Mario’s, just the same way Mitt was all George’s. Kids determined to show Dad how to do it right, Mofo.
Schlemizel
@Knockabout:
Your inability to form a coherent argument was firmly cemented (like your head) before you got here. It would be pathetic if it were not for the humor factor
Vince
You know, I usually can’t stand David Gregory but I thought he did a pretty good job in that interview. Not as good as it could have been but still nice.
Dick Woodcock
Beer? Hell, I’m already drinking strawberry moonshine.
And I’m not a drinker!
Cassidy
I don’t think confiscation is an insane option. If these guns are made illegal or highly controlled and these people don’t want to cooperate, tough shit. There is a paper trail of who owns what and if they aren’t fit to own them under any new rules, we need to take them. Period.
BBA
After the shenanigans around the NY State Senate, Cuomo should be ineligible for elective office anywhere. Instead, because there’s nobody else who (a) wants the job and (b) isn’t obviously batshit insane, he’s governor for life.
jdrs0819
Cuomo sucks, but there are a lot on the Dem side — me included — that do want to confiscate guns. Banning them is only part of it; with so many guns floating around, we need less in circulation. How else do you expect to get them out if not for confiscation ala Australia? I mean, they paid people, but they still took them.
Kane
Confiscation of assault weapons has worked in Australia, so considering it as an option in the US is not so insane.
celticdragonchick
Because getting cops killed trying to take previously legal property from people who sincerely believe they have a right to own the property is going to be teh awesome, amirite?
Large scale confiscation will incite more violence and will absolutely feed the right wing meme that the gubmint is their enemy and needs to be resisted by all means, including armed insurrection.
That might not get very far with the 3rd Infantry Division, but right wing violence can still wreck a lot of fucking havoc, and many of these people really mean what they say.
We will have to find gun control solutions that do not go so far as to backfire and make things worse. Let’s start with Cory Booker’s suggestion to shut down secondary gun markets and end non in-family gun transfers without having a dealer involved.
celticdragonchick
@Kane:
Australia doesn’t have a our history that includes armed citizens shooting at British soldiers, one massive civil war and a number of armed rebellions that started with Shay’s Whiskey debacle and proceeded to include Texans fighting the Mexican government and armed union members fighting corrupt corporate gunmen and the Pinkertons in West Virgina, Colorado, Washington State and elsewhere.
There is zero, and I mean zero chance that a meaningful number of gun owners would go along with confiscation. Not in this culture, and not with anger and suspicion of the government at an all time high in the past 100 years. Mere registration of ‘assault’ (because the term can be hard to define, actually) weapons in California was a complete bust, with compliance estimated in the single digits percentage wise.
Heliopause
I don’t necessarily agree with the governor’s statement, but if a legislature deems an item is too dangerous for the general public to possess why would confiscation be “insane”?
WarMunchkin
Wasn’t Australia’s solution to implement a buyback program? New York actually does do this here.
Both Sides Do It
Gun violence is a public health issue
Every gun is a virus with the potential to cause havoc
But lifestyle factors of individual hosts can sufficiently mitigate the chances of violence occurring
Eradicating the virus carries a substantial cost
In such a scenario, eradicating the virus doesn’t make sense. It makes sense to mitigate the damage it can cause and minimize its spread.
Mitigate the damage: limit magazine capacities to single digits; re-instate liability for gun manufacturers so they can be sued, institute liability for gun owners so that if violence is committed with a gun the gun’s owner is liable; voluntary buy-back programs for guns, magazines and the more dangerous ammunition.
Minimize the spread: ban semi-automatic rifles; ban the more dangerous types of ammunition; require handguns to have a manual chambering mechanism so they are no longer semi-automatic; mandatory background checks; mandatory training sessions; no loop-holes for who can sell arms, only in-person from licensed dealers with a permanent location.
Lojasmo
@Knockabout:
Thanks for doubling down. Your first insipid comment wasn’t blindingly stupid enough.
whidby
Given the fact that President Obama has killed far more children in drone strikes than are killed in school shootings, execrable Douthat may be onto something.
I mean if people really give a crap about kids being killed, where are the protest at the White House? Obama could discontinue the drone strikes tomorrow – no act of congress needed, no NRA to battle.
Of course, all of the people working themselves into a lather about gun control the past week don’t really give a crap about children. They just have their little hobby horses – “oooh guns are soooo bad and the people who own them are stoopid” – the this shooting just adds fuel to their already ample supplies of self-regard and indignation.
Ten times as many children are killed accidentally with guns they get access to as are killed in school shootings. So, again, if anybody gave a crap about kids, the fight would be to get trigger locks to every gun owner in America. But for every call for that that I have seen on Balloon Juice and elsewhere I have seen 100 posts fretting about the mythical “assault rifles.”
With idiocy like this, we get the country we deserve.
Gussie
@celticdragonchick:Isn’t that an argument for confiscation. Yes, I want to take guns away from potential cop killers.y
Kane
@celticdragonchick:
I’m not saying that I believe confiscation of assault weapons in this country is possible. It’s probably not. But I don’t think the proposal is insane. Australia is actual proof that the policy has been effective in reducing mass killings, and I think it’s important for the example to be discussed in the debate especially when the other side is arguing that less assault weapons will not have a positive impact on reducing gun violence.
moon
Why should confiscation not be an option? I don’t normally expect to see people on this blog saying “both sides are bad so we should do nothing” but that’s basically the content of this post. I will say other countries with effective gun control (UK, Japan, etc) have very few privately owned firearms and that if we want to achieve their level of violence, then confiscation obviously becomes an important part of that. Drone strikes have absolutely nothing to do with gun control, so invoking them here is just an exercise in derailment.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: So we don’t do it because you’re afraid? That’s a great fucking plan.
rdldot
@BBA: Well, that better be what he wants to do forever, cause he can kiss any higher office (at least Pres) goodbye after his ‘confiscation’ remark. The Dems better not be stupid enough to nominate him cause he’ll lose big time.
aimai
@whidby:
This is demonstrably false. More children have been killed in school shootings on an annual basis than are killed by drone strikes. If you want to add in the children we, as a country, have killed in the last ten years of war be my guest but your point becomes even crazier. President Obama is not responsible for the children killed in Iraq before he became President.
aimai
whidby
@moon: Why is confiscation not an option? Because the vast majority of people are against it, maybe.
My point isn’t that we have to talk about drone strikes and not gun control. My point is that the fact that few people talk about the children kiled in drone strikes but millions of people gnash their teeth when some cute white kids are killed in Connecticut just underlines the fact that we don’t, as a country, really care about saving children. We care about saving a certain kind of child when saving that child aligns with our political goals. Very different things.
celticdragonchick
In a country with over 300 million privately held firearms, a constitution that has been interpreted to mean that owning said firearms is a right that may not be abridged without good reason, and a long history (indeed, a national identity) that conflates freedom, manliness and the protection of civilization and our nation with firearms…
How do you propose to confiscate them?
You would almost certainly have to institute some form of dictatorship and do away with the constitution as we know it in order to actually implement mass confiscation, and then deal with the civil war you manage to precipitate. Americans like their guns, and God knows we like political violence. Good luck with that.
(and NO…if you are looking for mass confiscation, I will not be helping you on that one. I think that effective compromises can be found on gun control. Seizing property from people who had been legislated into criminality through no fault of their own is not reasonable or sane, in my view.)
whidby
@aimai: I am happy to be corrected, but I think your numbers are wrong:
“The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported last August that in Pakistan’s tribal areas alone, there are at least 168 credible reports of children being killed in drone strikes.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/print/2012/12/the-guilty-conscience-of-a-drone-pilot-who-killed-a-child/266453/
And the only reason why “civilian deaths” in drone strikes have declined under Obama is that that any males of military age (12-60) is now classified as a “combatant.”
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
Actions have consequences. Understanding the nature and severity of a consequence should be part of the decision making process, don’t you think? Didn’t we have enough “go with your gut” bullshit in the last administration?
It sure as hell should have been thought about when we started our farcical “war of drugs”.
Hasn’t that gone real well? Just makes you want to start even more domestic wars on whatever, right?
Maude
@Schlemizel:
It’s a troll that goes after Zander. Was gone for a bit and is now back.
gussie
@celticdragonchick: “Because getting cops killed trying to take previously legal property from people who sincerely believe they have a right to own the property is going to be teh awesome, amirite?”
Isn’t this an argument for confiscation? Keeping guns out of the hands of potential cop-killers?
Honus
@Both Sides Do It:
Water balloon
I’m sorry but I don’t see what’s wrong with what Cuomo said. There are so many guns out there already that even if you banned certain kinds going forward, even a voluntary program of gun returns wouldn’t solve the problem. Without confiscation, you’d either produce gun control laws that are so strong that the black market would fill the void, or so weak that it would be pointless to pass anything at all.
celticdragonchick
@gussie:
You may as well argue that the British should have been allowed to confiscate the arms and powder stores at Concord and Lexington, in some sense. We have socialized people for over 200 years to believe that individuals have a natural right and a duty…yes a duty…to resist infrigements on individual liberty even to the point of expending one’s own life. You and I may not agree with where they draw a line for resistance, but most people do actually draw a line at which point resistance becomes a possibility.
We can celebrate non violent protesters who were beaten nigh unto death at the bridge in Alabama. Were the coal miners in West Virginia who were being shot at by Pinkerton agents and company thugs really wrong to use their guns against a corrupt system that also included government collusion with the mines? Were they really wrong to resist when the Army Air Corps bombed them?
Simply put, many gun owners will point to history as they see it and use that as justification for keeping an armed populace that is apart from the government. There are numerous statements from Jefferson et al that can be reasonably seen as supporting that notion. We may think that is quaint or outdated, but we cannot pretend that it is not a view that has been taught fairly consistently in our history, and using that belief as a pretext for taking their weapons would be confirming their views in the worst possible way.
Honus
@celticdragonchick: I think you misunderstand the meaning of confiscate. Gun owners don’t have to “go along with it” The guns will be confiscated because they are illegal. It would a lot easier than you think.
Yes, people will resist, but if it’s a felony to own a Bushmaster or a 30 round magazine, you won’t see 42 year old moms with them in a closet. Things that are legal and common now won’t be seen nearly as much. A guy with a business and a family isn’t going to risk his freedom by wearing an AR-15 to a rally in a park across the street from a presidential speech. I’ve been pretty much steeped in gun culture in rural Virginia for the last 40 years and I have seen exactly two illegal full-auto rifles in that time. In an odd way the “only outlaws will have guns” saying has some truth. Most people don’t really want to be outlaws if they have to pay the real cost. If there is a serious penalty to owning an SKS with 30 round magazine, most people will suddenly realize that they can get along without it.
I don’t see any plausible scenario for successful armed resistance to confiscation, either. Public support will wane quickly if gun owners band together and fire on the police, and I don’t see most of theses tin cans putting up effective resistance to police and professionals. All those SWAT teams we’ve been funding and training for the past twenty years will finally be useful.
Honus
@celticdragonchick: “Were the coal miners in West Virginia who were being shot at by Pinkerton agents and company thugs really wrong to use their guns against a corrupt system that also included government collusion with the mines? Were they really wrong to resist when the Army Air Corps bombed them?”
While Sid Hatfield did shoot down private detectives, (Baldwin-Felts from Cincinnati, not Pinkertons; I think Hatfield actually shot Al Felts brother at Matewan) the miner’s army which formed after the murder of Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse disbanded when the U. S. Army entered Mingo, stating that while they would march to Logan and hang Don Chafin, they would not fight U.S. troops in order to do it.
Billy Mitchell did fly four Martin Bombers to Charleston and kept them at an airfield in Kanawha City. They dropped some grenades in the hills, in order to demonstrate the viability of air power. They didn’t work very well. I think two of them crashed on their way back to Washington.
gussie
@celticdragonchick: Well, we could throw examples back and forth–should nobody fight drug cartels because they are heavily armed? should we have stayed away from the Branch Davidians and polygamous cults where young girls are married to old men?–but none of that seems really on point. Pretty soon we’re in Wolverines and killing-Hitler-with-a-time-machine territory.
The question is simply, should we not pass laws in a democratic system if a certain subset of the population appears likely to react violently to those laws?
I don’t think that’s a sufficient reason to oppose a law; in fact, I think that identifying and perhaps even educating people who are likely to react violently to the law is a positive social effect.
The counter-argument, I guess, is that we don’t want the populace failing to react violently to laws that are, on their face, morally horrible: baby-eating or internment camps. But then one is in the position of having to say that confiscating guns rises to that level of horror. That’s precisely what the ‘cop killer contingent’ believes. But they’re wrong.
Neo
WASHINGTON — Federal funds would be made available to deploy National Guard troops at schools under legislation introduced Wednesday by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in response to last week’s mass slaying at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
The Save Our Schools Act would leave it to governors to decide whether to call out the National Guard and how to use troops around schools.
Mayor Bloomberg didn’t want them in NYC after Sandy, but hey, it’s for the children.
celticdragonchick
@Honus:
It will be massively bloodier then you think, depending on just how far you want to take this.
If you want to just say: “AR-15’s and some other types of semi auto weapons are now illegal to own and you must turn them in”, then you get passive resistance. Nobody turns them in except a few folks who didn’t like them in the first place.
People who smoke pot don’t stop smoking it and turn their stash in. People who snort or smoke coke generally don’t suddenly stop doing that and turn their drugs over to law enforcement. Gun owners, many of who have a near religious attachment to very notion of being a free man/women who owns the means to defend the other liberties will not at all be impressed by your new law, and they will studiously ignore it. That is exactly what happened in California of all places, where compliance with the assault rifle ban in 1989 was estimated to be less than ten percent. Maybe that figure has changed, but there is no way to really know.
Now, if you want to start sending in SWAT teams as you hinted at, or broaden the list to other weapons, then the dynamic really begins to swing to confirming that paranoid anti government gun owners were correct in their assumptions (as they would see it) since you are, in fact, trying to take guns that they had lawfully purchased to begin with.
At that point, I think you see actual armed resistance. We have copious historical precedent in America for exactly that response.
An unexploded aerial bomb was recovered and brought into one of the trials of the miners arrested afterwards. It was used as evidence to demonstrate government cooperation with mine owners and the overwhelmingly disproportionate nature of the reaction to the miners.
whidby
I thought that was because most of the then-existing “assault weapons” already in private hands were “grandfathered in” and were not subject to the ban.
But I didn’t follow that closely at the time and I could be wrong about that.
celticdragonchick
@gussie:
Then you can just work out the cost/benefit ration and hope that the SCOTUS doesn’t kick it to the curb after all is said and done.
I think it is a bad idea to effectively legislate people into criminality when they have done nothing intrinsically wrong to begin with, and especially when the activity/property has been around since WW2 (when M-1 carbines became widely available)
This is one of the most individualistic cultures in history, and Americans as a rule do not like being told what to do by other people. When you propose to have government agents taking private property…especially guns which, for better and worse…are an integral part of our national mythos, you are asking for real trouble.
Limit magazine size? I don’t think that is an onerous burden. Stop the non regulated gun show sales? Absolutely.
Taking guns away from previously law abiding owners goes to the same place that alcohol prohibition went, but even further. It will destroy respect for the law as millions of people refuse to obey it, increase violence as some people actively resist the police and drive up criminal profits as gun running becomes incredibly profitable.
This is not the right culture to try this out.
In any event, the conversation has been interesting, but I must deal with some neglected holiday baking chores.
See you all after Christmas.
celticdragonchick
@whidby:
Even the grandfather weapons were supposed to be registered. Almost nobody complied.
whidby
@celticdragonchick: I was not aware of that.
And funny you should mention it, but today is a baking day for us, too.
Happy solstice!
Triassic Sands
In a sane country, confiscation would work or, to be fair to the owners, let’s make it a buy-back program. In a sane country with sane people, the compliance rate would be very high.
So, is Cuomo insane because he proposes something that would work for sane people, but can’t work in this country because so many people (including everyone opposed to a buy-back program) are insane?
I don’t like Cuomo at all, but since every winger in the country would equate “buy-back” with “confiscation” anyway, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for him to differentiate between them. I don’t know any more about his statement than what Zander wrote, so perhaps I’ve missed something relevant.
The real problem is that any American who defines his 2nd Amendment rights as essentially unlimited and then places those rights ahead of the right of every person in this country to not be shot is both unbelievably selfish and batshit crazy. And everyone who supports those people is batshit crazy.
Gosh, kids, Zippy is so confused.
celiadexter
“Confiscation” is probably the wrong word, but mandatory buy-back or condemnation is essential because there are so many assault weapons out there already that limiting future sales won’t be particularly effective. Whatever one thinks of Cuomo, he can’t be called crazy for that comment.
El Cid
I think that if the policy goal is to limit (reduce to a level, maintain at a level, eliminate) and/or control (over access to) some item such as firearms of some defined capability (i.e., fire rate, whatever) or magazines, etc., the question isn’t first ‘whether or not to confiscate’, but which policy will be most effective and most successfully implementable to reduce the availability of / control the access to said item’.
The numbers of people affected by said policies is small and shrinking over time, but the nature of the items and the preceding history of limited information and ridiculously fetishistic politicization will all condition how you evaluate policy.
It doesn’t so much matter what is bold or strong in this sense if it isn’t at the same time likely to be the policy most successful in the long-run at limiting and controlling certain types of arms or ammunition.
El Cid
Also, the characteristics of different types of violent & armed assault & homicide vary enough that approaches to reduce their frequency and danger and lethality which involve firearms control (or firearms safety regimes) will vary in effectiveness with the crime.
brantl
I wish that the assault weapons were limited to round sizes that could be discontinued. Then, only the guys that made their own would have much ammo, after a while. And, it means you have to stick around to pick up the casings, too.
burnspbesq
Calm down, Zandar.
Beathe deeply and slowly and calmly chant “Jabari Parker, Rodney Hood, Matt Jones, Semi Ojeleye.”
You’ll feel much better.
Bob h
What’s so off the wall about confiscation? In CT they already have the ability to do it in some cases where they have reason to believe someone poses a threat.
Unfortunately they didn’t use it in the case of Nancy Lanza.
Bob h
What’s so off the wall about confiscation? In CT they already have the ability to do it in some cases where they have reason to believe someone poses a threat.
Unfortunately they didn’t use it in the case of Nancy Lanza.
stormhit
@celticdragonchick:
Most people don’t want to throw away their lives over this crap, they just like to fantasize how they would. Because Wolverines.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: That doesn’t make any sense. Here’s the way it should happen. They pass the laws banning this shit or at least instituting much tough regulations. They already know who has bought what and, yes, those people need to be subject to revised background checks. Then, we offer a generous buy back program for a certain window of time. After that, you’re in possession of illegal firearms and you are getting a visit from the police. End of story, comply or become a felon and lose your privilege to own any firearms.
RaflW
NPR did a perfect (horrible) job replaying LaPierre’s talking points on the top of the hour news this afternoon, playing two longish Press the Meat clips of crazy Wayne.
I was yelling at the radio for that one. He’s setting the f’ing frame and 1) NPR is eating it up and 2) who’s setting the anti-gun frame, dammit! Who’s gonna get out in front of this on the left. Cuomo seems like a bad idea…
shedder
Nothing wrong with mandatory buy-back as long as the taking of property is compensated. This is basic common sense.
Shredder
Nothing wrong with mandatory buy-back, as long as the taking of property is compensated for. You require the surrender of the newly illegal weapons and pay the owners fair market value. Noncompliance is a felony offense.
Paula
@whidby:
http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/protect-children-not-guns-2012.pdf
http://www.iansa.org/news/2012/03/us-over-3000-children-killed-by-guns-every-year
Incidentally, I don’t think it’s improper to raise the spectre of hypocrisy between gun violence and our violent overseas policies, but I highly doubt you could make a good case for it.