.
.
Via Ted Rall’s blog, where he explains his participation in the way guaranteed to annoy as many people as possible:
… This is definitely the first-ever joint Spiegelman-Rall appearance.
My participation may come as a surprise to readers who know I am a strong advocate of the Second Amendment. History teaches us that revolutionaries and those to seek to resist foreign invasion rely on guns that were in circulation before the conflicts they fought against oppression and tyranny. This is why I believe that it’s important for Americans to have the right to own weapons.
Guns, it hardly need be said, are dangerous. So I believe that they need to be controlled and regulated the same way cars are. Motorists are required to receive training before they are allowed to drive. They must carry insurance to cover people they injure or kill with their car. They must take new tests, such as vision, to ensure they are qualified to drive. And of course cars are regulated. No one would suggest that cars be unregulated.
Like a car, guns can kill and maim. So people who buy guns should be required to pass a safety test, receive proper training, register their firearms and carry insurance in case they shoot someone or something they shouldn’t.
There is an argument that regulation is a first step toward government seizure. If they know who has guns, they can take them away. Which is true.
I don’t trust the government. No one should. But I’m counting on the fact that, if and when the time comes for armed resistance, it will be possible for patriotic Americans to keep their weapons out of the hands of government agents who seek to take them away. The situation will likely be chaotic and anarchic.
Moreover, we have to live in the present. Right now, as things stand, we have hundreds of millions of firearms in the hands of anyone with a couple of hundred dollars. That’s madness…
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
Art Spiegelman, it should be noted, is a great speaker. Probably one of the best public speakers that I have ever seen.
piratedan
shared…. this fight is not over yet. It may not be a burning white hot issue as far as R’s are concerned, but these fires still burn and they’re not likely to be banked anytime soon.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Amazing, the Family Circus, of all things, is in there.
David Koch
Speaking of buying them.
digya see Hillary gave a $200,000 speech today at a Dallas resort to a bunch of real-estate lobbyists.
She doesn’t need the money, so why did she do it. Well, the answer is to cozy up to them so they can finance her 2016 run.
To John Edwards and Obummer’s credit, they didn’t take money from lobbyist. They didn’t accept $400,000 from Rupert Murdoch. Hillary had no such problems, if you remember she defended her practice at 2007 Dkos debate saying, “a lot of these lobbyists, whether you like it or not, represent real Americans,” a statement brought the audience to riotous laughter.
The problem is you would have hoped that Hillary had learned something from the last two elections. You can raise a lot of money online and not have to sell us out to lobbyists who will later demand and receive deregulation such as repealing Glass-Steagal.
But I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Redshirt
I love the Family Circus! Ironically, of course.
We need to keep all our fires burning. Let’s use gun control as an organizing issue on the left. FSM knows the Right’s been using it for decades.
srv
Heh, remember how Rall used to drive Cole beserk back in the day. Good times.
But not as good as a two hour concert with Prince tonight. Or the two encores.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Redshirt: I didn’t recognize all of the comics in there. Apart from the Family circus, I did notice Fox Trot, Baby Blues, Mother Goose and Grimm, Pearls Before Swine…
ETA: Of course, Doonesbury.
Spaghetti Lee
I gotta say, I’ve always felt about Ted Rall the way some people feel about Bill Maher. Smug, douchey, not quite as liberal (or as talented) as he thinks. Not sure I want to claim him as an ally.
Aside from the stupid Red Dawn fantasy bit at the end, I don’t disagree. I think people should be able to own one or two handguns for self-defense. The statistics don’t say it’s likely you’ll end up using it the way you think you will, but whatever, that’s true of your elliptical machine too. But they should have to take safety classes. Have to register it. Have to keep it in a safe place. If someone messes up with it, the owner is liable. This is all stuff that we already do with cars: the reason people keep making the car comparison is because it makes sense. Hell, people with certain breeds of dogs have to document it with the government. Even killed 32 people with a pit bull? If you actually are a hunter, or a gun collector, you can get special dispensation to that effect.
In the current dialogue on guns, this makes me some kind of crazy communist. It’s crazy. I’ve got an uncle who thinks private gun ownership should be banned; he’s not even on the chart when it comes to what’s ‘acceptable dialogue.’
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Spaghetti Lee: I can’t stand Ted Rall either. For me, it’s primarily his amazingly ugly cartooning style.
Redshirt
Picture this: Hiking out in the middle of the woods, off trails, a good way from any form of civilization, and a flash of red catches the corner of your eye. You beat through the bush to find it, and lo! Jack Chick tracts, in near pristine condition, in the middle of nowhere. Weird! But fun to read nonetheless!
John Weiss
@Spaghetti Lee: One or two handguns? Give me a double-barreled shotgun loaded with single buckshot; a handgun takes quite a bit of practice, a shotgun hardly any.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@John Weiss: Did you get a boner when you posted that?
Yutsano
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Took me awhile to recognise Zitz, but I knew who the teenager was. Oh and Bizarro too, but only from the signature at the end.
Spaghetti Lee
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
I’ve wondered if there’s some sort of negative correlation between decent art and decent politics when it comes to political cartooning. I don’t like Bagley or Toles’ art, either. Tom Tomorrow, I guess part of his shtick is that all his people look the same and the backgrounds are pretty non-descript, but man, his drawing style hasn’t even evolved by accident over the years, and it wasn’t that interesting a style to begin with. And looking at Rall’s blog, I laughed when I saw Stephanie McMillan as an example of an artist who needs more attention. Judging by what I’ve seen from her work, there’s a very good reason she doesn’t get attention.
By contrast, I think Michael Ramirez is the most talented artist in the current crowd, but politically he’s awful. Same with Jeff Macnelly when he was still around. Glenn McCoy isn’t quite as talented, but his stuff is usually fun to look at (again, if you can ignore the dialogue). There’s nothing wrong with focusing on your craft a little more. I think it’s got something to do with the old-fashioned idea that ‘edgy’ ideas need to have an ‘edgy’ style, i.e. ugly and hard to look at. Because otherwise you’re a sellout or something.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Spaghetti Lee: With Tom Tomorrow, his stuff looks the way it does because when he first got started, he mostly used old clip art for his panels, and he has stuck with it, I guess. He describes his (at least early) method in his first book collection of his strips.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Yutsano: After watching it again, I saw Zits and Bizarro, and Pearls Before Swine.
I don't think this is as funny as Prick did
Rick Santorum tells story of dog urinating on him, talks welfare reform in Grosse Pointe
GROSSE POINTE, MI – When Rick Santorum was going door-to-door in Pennsylvania in his 1990 congressional campaign, an old lady’s dog urinated on his lap.
Santorum used the anecdote of the embarrassing animal encounter to grab the attention of a crowd of students at Grosse Pointe South High School on Wednesday in a speech about leadership and perseverance.
Ok…He really has a way with kids apparently…
He continued knocking on doors that day despite the wet lap, and came to the home of famous Pittsburgh Pirates baseball player Kent Tekulve. When the pitcher opened the door and looked down at his stained pants, Santorum said “Mr. Tekulve, I’m so excited to meet you.”
“I got his vote and I won that election,”
Ok. Good thing there were lots of YAF in attendance. Otherwise FLEE!!!
bargal
Ted Rall might be on the right side of the gun control debate, but his claim that private gun ownership would have any effect on an invasion force powerful enough to overwhelm the US military is Milius-strength stupidity.
MikeJ
@bargal: It worked pretty well in Iraq.
TheMightyTrowel
Watching Die Hard while writing lectures. It’s a public holiday (happy Anzac day, y’all) and I’m the only one at work.
Two reflections: A) God, Alan Rickman. I always root for his bad guys to win. B) That opening scene when bruce willis is on a plane, has a gun in his shoulder holster that a fellow passenger sees and shrugs it off with ‘I’m a cop.’ Wow. How things have changed.
Calouste
@bargal:
As is the claim that revolutionaries relied on guns already in circulation. Well, they did, but those guns were in the hands of the military, not of civilians. The number of successful non-peaceful revolutions without a mutiny is pretty much zero.
MikeJ
@TheMightyTrowel:
I was just talking to a kiwi a little while ago and alomost said, “Happy Anzac day” but it’s not really the proper sentiment, is it?
raven
@MikeJ: This is a picture of Kiwi troops going over the side of my dad’s destroyer during the invasion of Green Island in the Pacific on Feb 15, 1944.
TheMightyTrowel
@MikeJ: not really, but it’s not an entirely sober holiday either. At least in my experience, it’s not like 11 Nov in Britain – there certainly are parades and ceremonies, but it doesn’t pervade everyone and everything.
Schlemizel
@TheMightyTrowel:
Interesting choice of words – a kiwi poster on another site said “Don’t expect to hear from us tomorrow, its a national holiday & we’ll all be quite drunk!”
Not as sober indeed.
Linda
@Spaghetti Lee:
Yes, sir, the Red Dawn part at the end is problematic. As one of the crew at Lawyers, Guns, and Money pointed out about a week ago, most of the violent uprising movements of the 60s and 70s (Weather Underground, Baader Meinhof) here and in Europe were in fact worse than a bust–they were retrograde campaigns that hardened resistance to the causes they tried to champion. And the right-wing movements to overthrow the government led to such bright lights of revolution as Timothy McVeigh.
It’s interesting to note that as a group, the more desperate people are, the more they cling to fantasy scenarios to guide their decision making. People who make less than $30,000 a year vote for people who want to make taxes more regressive, because they MIGHT hit the lottery. People who are afraid of terrorism think that a bunch of unorganized people with guns could have run down the Boston bombing suspects without a hitch, as if life were a Claude Van Damm Damme movie. It’s like poor people thinking their kid’s athletic skills will support them in style someday, even if he’s flunking high school.
Face
OT, but just read that the police captured White Hat Guy and he was unarmed. WTF? Wasnt there about 30 rounds fired off? If true, who fired at whom? Seems like this media mistake should be a bigger deal.
MikeJ
@Face: There were certainly shots fired in both directions earlier in the morning, and explosives thrown at the cops. Can’t blame the cops for acting as if he was armed since to the best of their knowledge, he was.
It will be interesting to hear if he ever had a gun, or if it was only his brother. He could have left it in the SUV that he used to flee the shootout or he could have dropped it somewhere else along the way.
bjacques
@TheMightyTrowel: Like “Trading Places,” a great Christmas movie.
“Now I haf machine gun! Ho ho ho!”
Randy P
@MikeJ: Apparently they shot the campus cop to get his gun as they only had one. But his holster was locked and they couldn’t get it open.
The cops were worried that he, like his brother, was wearing an explosive vest.
Side note: it was news to me that a campus cop would carry a gun, locked or not.
raven
@Randy P: Really, after VA Tech and NIU? They have AR-15’s at Georgia. (Not on them but close by).
Frankensteinbeck
I read this as ‘I am completely insane and should probably be institutionalized for my paranoid fantasies, and even I think that we need gun safety regulation and lots of it.’
@Redshirt:
Speaking of ‘completely insane’. Can you imagine what it must be like to be someone who thinks those books are realistic?
Humanities Grad
@Randy P:
That’s been pretty much the norm on many (I’d say most) college campuses in the U.S. for a very long time now.
Most campus police forces aren’t “rent-a-cops.” In most communities, they’re professionally trained, professionally licensed police officers. I’ve been a student and faculty member at several different public universities since the early 1990s, and every one of those schools had its own police force. The officers are often certified as deputies for whatever county the campus happens to be located in.
raven
@Humanities Grad: At Illinois they were part of the State Police. At Georgia they all go through the regular police academy.
Wag
Great video Annie. Also, the first video you’ve posted since the upgrade that didn’t eat the entire screen of my iPhone. I don’t know what you did but keep it up. Thanks.
Fort Geek
Man…that little shoe at the end hit me kind of hard.
liberal
I doubt it. I’d wager that having guns prior to the conflict is neither necessary nor sufficient. Political strength is. With that, the guns will follow.
NotMax
Duh. Relying on guns that were in circulation after the conflicts wouldn’t be terribly efficacious.
YellowJournalism
@Fort Geek: Agreed.
moderateindy
I really hate the “we regulate cars” argument. I think it doesn’t really apply, because it is not a constitutional right to own a car. The right to bear arms is codified in our constitution, so I think it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison. Like trying to compare a household budget with a governmental budget.
That being said, nothing in the constitution prohibits the regulation of arms. Hell, we already do that. Obviously an individual can’t own a SAM or bazooka (are bazookas even a thing anymore? who cares, it’s just fun to say the word bazooka)but we don’t let them own full automatic weapons either. The Supreme court seems OK with that, so obviously, constitutionally we can put restrictions on gun ownership.
As far as the Red Dawn scenario, it isn’t completely ludicrous. Of course no one would be able to repel a military force, but with the amount of weapons around we could just bleed them dry over a number of years, till they just grew tired and left, the way the Afghans did with Russia. Plus, actually having weapons would encourage an organized resistance, which would in turn encourage other countries to help fund and supply an organized resistance.
Of course the truly ludicrous part of the scenario is any country or countries actually trying to invade the US. Besides our overwhelming military superiority, nobody is going to kill the cash cow and the world’s economic engine that is the USA. Also, too..NUKES.
The final scenario, that people need things like 100 round clips and such in case we need to overthrow our own gov’t. Let’s face it, if it ever gets that bad, we are well past any scenario that ends with a resolution coming from a few well armed rebels.
MattW
Omnes Omnibus
@MattW:
I could explain snow globes, but fucking globes…?
ericblair
@moderateindy:
And what country could possibly do this? A significant invasion from any country would mean that their home would be bombed into glass in less than ten minutes. Besides that, if they seized the Pentagon, or destroyed most of Washington, what then? We have significant military forces dispersed across the country and the world which are quite capable of independent action. You’re describing a scenario where some country manages to instantly neutralize the entirety of our armed forces globally, instantly, and simultaneously, which is pretty much bullshit.
The more likely situation would be an internal coup. The coup plotters would need brownshirts to project domestic power. Historically, who would you think would be the likeliest to join up with the coup’s militias, people with lots of guns or people with one or no guns?
MosesZD
Armed resistance… What a fucking tool. Government takes over, it simply takes over the MEANS OF PRODUCTION and ‘resistors’ run out of guns and ammo pretty damn fast. Never mind TANKS, ARTILLERY, AIR FORCE, NAVY… Chirst…
Which means you need third-party support to survive. Or did Teddy-boy not notice that all these ‘resistors’ in other countries rely on countries like the US to support them? And that without means of production and rearment, they fail?
LOGISTICS. It matters. It’s not ‘glorious.’ But it wins (or loses) wars. Especially in these modern times with weapons that require a manufacturing base to support in the field.
But, no, we get people using bad movies and black-powder wars to make a point.
Fuck. People are stupid.
Omnes Omnibus
@MosesZD:
“An army marches on its stomach.” This was a part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s genius back during the black-powder era.
The Moar You Know
@Randy P: To pile on: even at my hippie alma mater, one of those schools in NorCal more famous for being stuck in the sixties than for any recent research they’ve done, we had cops with guns. Back in the 1980s. Great guys, retired Oakland cops, mostly.
Forked Tongue
Rall doesn’t need guns, he has a weaponized drawing style that makes his opponent poke his own eyes out.
moderateindy
@ericblair: did ya not read the rest of my post which said how ludicrous the idea of a foreign invasion was? It was literally two sentences away from the stuff you highlited.
ericblair
@moderateindy:
Yeah, sorry, it just set me off. I’ve heard this sort of argument in all seriousness multiple times: besides the likelihood of an invasion itself, if the invaders managed to wipe out every camp/post/station, National Guard and Reserve facility, and police station in the country, we haven’t got an invasion as much as we’ve got magic.
bargal
@MikeJ: Um, any enemy daring, brilliant and ruthless enough to defeat the US military and invade the continental United States won’t give a shit about your unregulated, badly trained bubba militia. Unlike Americans in Iraq, your new overlords weren’t expecting a cakewalk, let alone flower-strewn parades and greetings as liberators.
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
Second amendment fetishists should probably give John Adams a second viewing (or a first one!). There’s no way that the United States gains its independence without the French Army at their back.
Unless said fetishists have something more French in mind, which wouldn’t surprise me. I would get the fuck out of here if we ever came to that, or even 10% of the way.
DavidTC
I have two fun questions I like to ask people when they start talking about ‘needing’ guns.
First, if they go all Red-Dawnish, I ask them ‘How much money do you want to spend on national fortification?’ I mean, if we’re under the threat of invasion, surely we should have torpedoes and whatnot installed at harbors, and bunkers and things. Their idea of how to fight off an invading force via _small arms_ is pretty damn stupid, and appears to rely on the idea we’d _let them invade_ and then start shooting them!
Then, if they go ‘my guns are to overthrow the government if it becomes unjust’, I ask them ‘So, you’re against scaling down our military, then? Cause we all know you can’t fight our existing military?’
The ‘pro-gun’ right does not actually believe any of the nonsensical reasons they state that requires them to own guns. The reasons literally do not logically add up, and they do not behave in such a way that people who did believe in such things would behave, and those two reasons are _literally_ opposites. (You cannot both hope that _you_ can overthrow the government and that a _foreign military_ cannot.)
The only two reasons that people can _honestly_ believe they should have guns for is hunting, and self-defense, and that last one is mostly factually wrong(1) but does make _logical_ sense.
1) Self-defense really only ‘works’, even in theory, in the home-invasion sense. It is possible, in theory, to hold off an attacker like that. To get out of bed and pull out a gun, and shoot them if they come in. This, of course, ignores the actual facts that home invasions are actually pretty rare to start with (Criminals much prefer breaking into unoccupied houses.), and the odds are actually on the side of some innocent person getting shot…but ignoring the facts, the _theory_ is reasonable.
What isn’t a sound ‘self-defense’ idea is walking around armed with a handgun. Barring things like stumbling across a mass shooting (Which is pretty damn rare.), if someone points a gun at you, you’re fucked _even if you have a gun_. Because their gun is in their hand, and yours is in your holster. Duh. Now, it does work against anything less than a gun…but the problem is, no one is mugged with anything less than a gun anymore.
Joey Giraud
But the Red Dawn scenario is what justifies giving all our money to Lockheed, Raytheon, GE, General Dynamics and on and on.
How can that scenario be wrong? Have we been fooled?
Jay
Interesting video.
Minus the occasional dips to “Doonesbury” and “Get Fuzzy,” I don’t read the comics anymore. I’m in my 30s now, and once I got out of teenagehood, it somehow struck me as childish to be reading them.
Plus, the guy who drew Bill The Cat & Opus The Penguin retired long ago, didn’t he?
So fuck it.
However, when I saw the lead characters for the strip “Zits” folded into the video, I started wondering if Jim Borgman did a gun violence storyline in that strip.
Does anyone know? When I was a teen, I used to read that strip and think that that’s what a somewhat “normal” teenagehood would be like. Made me smile.
I’ve been Googling around for a “Zits” gun storyline. If anyone can point me to a strip or strips where, say, the issue of a high school classroom shooter is taken on, holler back.
Tonal Crow
And in today’s installment of “If we ban guns, murderers’ll just use hubcaps”:
http://news.yahoo.com/police-identify-victims-illinois-killings-150032733.html
MANCHESTER, Ill. (AP) — The five people found hubcapped to death in a small south-central Illinois town this week were two young brothers, their pregnant mother, their father and their great grandmother, authorities said Thursday.
Investigators were still trying to piece together the events that led to Scott County’s first homicide in two decades, and why the suspect, Rick O. Smith allegedly walked into a home Wednesday and hubcapped an entire family — including a 6-year-old girl who survived — before he was killed by police.
The Illinois State Police said the victims were: 1-year-old Brantley Ralston, 5-year-old Nolan Ralston, 29-year-old James Ralston, 23-year-old Brittney Luark, and 67-year-old Jo Ann Sinclair. Sinclair was Luark’s grandmother.
…
The state police said they believe Smith, 43, entered the home through the back door Wednesday and beat the victims at close range with a 1931 Packard hubcap and possibly a 1995 Honda hubcap. Two people were found in a bedroom, two in a second bedroom and the man in the hallway. A sixth victim, a 6-year-old girl, was injured and taken to a hospital in Springfield.
…
A bystander called police and told them that Smith fled in a white sedan. Smith led authorities on a chase to the nearby town of Winchester, where he threw his hubcap repeatedly at police, who responded with gunfire. Officers shot Smith, and he later died at a hospital.
Police said they found the 1931 Packard hubcap, the 1995 Honda hubcap, and a large sharpened Toyota Tundra hubcap of unknown age in Smith’s car.
Scott County State’s Attorney Michael Hill said Smith, of rural Morgan County, had previous convictions for reckless homicide, drugs and bad checks.
…
Jebediah
@Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage):
Agreed. We saw him at Royce Hall and he was great.
slightly_peeved
@DavidTC:
A gun isn’t so much for defence as it is for preemptive offence.
it’s hilarious when Americans accuse Australians and the British of giving up their right to self defence. I can defend myself against fists or a knife – i can run if nothing else. there is no defence against a pointed gun.
Cygil
@bargal: ..His claim that private gun ownership would have any effect on an invasion force powerful enough to overwhelm the US military is Milius-strength stupidity.
Silly. Ted Rall doesn’t want his guns in order to stand up to a foreign invasion. He wants a his guns to stage a Syria/Lebanon-style revolution/insurgency against his own government. From the left.
Perhaps this is a whole different kind of stupidity, but he’s quite serious about it. He’s been talking up the idea of a left wing popular revolt for years.