Reader Dan sends a new National Review meditation on what would have happened in Stephen King’s novels if the characters had been properly armed:
And consider the novel Cujo. Had the mother been carrying even a hunting rifle she could have shot the rabid dog within seconds of encountering the animal, and thus spared her son a slow death.
Why stop at Stephen King’s characters? If Blanche DuBois had a Baretta 84FS Cheetah tucked into her garter belt, would she have had to rely on the kindness of strangers? Wouldn’t Anna Karenina have had a much cleaner end if, instead of throwing herself under a train, she had blown her head off with a Remington 870 Express Tactical Shotgun? How would a couple of Glock 37’s, some extended magazines, and Kevlar body armor have altered Holden Caufield’s experiences in New York City?
I’m sure many of you would like to probe the intersection between literature and the second amendment–I’ll leave you to it in the comments.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What if Jesus had had superpowers?
I’m sorry, is that blasphemous?
Alex S.
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Well, my first thought was: What if the Romans had shot Jesus?
geg6
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
@Alex S.:
Damn, I love you guys! I LOLed so loud I got the dogs barking.
Mr. Prosser
What if Ahab had outfitted his whale boats with 50 cal. semi-auto sniper rifles?
qwerty42
And if Custer had B-52’s at the Little Big Horn?
SiubhanDuinne
What if Dick and Jane’s parents had given them Crickett 22 Youth Rifles?
Oh, look.
Look at Dick.
See Dick shoot.
Funny, funny Dick.
Bloody, bloody Puff.
Jane has a gun.
What color is Jane’s gun?
Jane’s gun is pink.
Jane has a brother.
His name is Dick.
Jane
hasused to have a sister.Her name
iswas Sally.Foggy F Follansbye
If the mom had a cell phone she could have called 911. If she was driving a Prius she would not have run out of gas. If the state had adequately funded public health, it could have gotten rid of those pesky rabid bats.
Baud
Fun game. Let’s see … What if John Hinckly had a semiautomatic?
Am I doing this right?
Suffern ACE
So I lived my life alone, without anyone that I could really talk to, until I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara, six years ago. Something was broken in my engine. And as I had with me neither a mechanic nor any passengers, I set myself to attempt the difficult repairs all alone. It was a question of life or death for me: I had scarcely enough drinking water to last a week.
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation. I was more isolated than a shipwrecked sailor on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Thus you can imagine my amazement, at sunrise, when I was awakened by an odd little voice. It said:
“If you please–draw me a sheep!”
“What!”
“Draw me a sheep!”
I jumped to my feet, completely thunderstruck. I blinked my eyes hard. I looked carefully all around me. And I saw a most extraordinary small person, who stood there examining me with great seriousness. But since I had little time to respond to this invasion, I was glad that my pistol didn’t have a safety lock on it when I reached for it.
You have to understand. I only had enough water for a week, and a child, who was not my own mind you, had nothing to offer.
El Cid
I’m sure the typical National Review reader would have preferred that Abe Lincoln had been packin’ into Ford’s theater and gotten the shot off first, right?
BruceFromOhio
Several of Kings characters had guns. It didn’t turn out so well.
What if the nitwits at the Corner had been followers of Jim Jones, or David Koresh, or Randy Weaver? Suddenly, “what if they had guns” takes a different tone, don’t it just.
Cassidy
Oh Yeah! Give Scout an M14 SOCOM II and Jem gets a Mossberg 12ga in Realtree camo because he’s an outdoorsy kid.
And Boo Radley? He strikes me as an AK, kind of guy.
chopper
@Suffern ACE:
you win.
Warren Terra
It’s like these people saw Weird Al’s trailer for Gandhi II and found themselves nodding solemnly in agreement.
jon
Having had enough of the attacks upon orthodoxy and theology and geometry, Ignatius placed his sausage-like fingers into the compartment of his Lucky Dogs hot dog cart. Not the mustard, nor the relish, but the Important One where he kept the revolver. Miss Myrna Minkoff was going to see that his thesis was valid. But first, another hot dog….
Schlemizel
Somewhere out there I came across some sick little piece of fiction – IN HARD COVER! – that detailed how the War Of Southern Treason would have ended differently if time travelers had gotten machine-guns to the secessionist bastards.
That is some fine 12 year old boy thinking right there
Warren Terra
@Suffern ACE:
Masterful.
@Schlemizel:
That’s Harry Turtledove. I never read the series, but my local NPR station serialized it via the Radio Reader every night at bedtime when I was a kid. As I recall, at the end Robert E Lee basically arbitrarily frees the slaves of an independent CSA.
Todd
What if Ellen Burstyn had a Glock to shoot her possessed kid with in the Exorcist?
Imagine if William Wallace’s armies had been outfitted with M1 Garands?
Certified Mutant Enemy
What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?
Todd
@Schlemizel:
Harry Turtledove’s “Guns of the South”. In that one, he pretends that Lee was an honorable man, and after becoming Confederate president, he ends slavery.
I laughed my ass off.
ETA – I see Warren Terra beat me to it.
Napoleon
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
Yeah, what if!
Zirgar
It’s not a literary reference, but I wonder how would the fireplace poker incident have played out any differently if either Wittgenstein or Popper had a gun instead?
DanF
Would Golum love his ring more than his Bushmaster? “My precious! No my precious!”
Schlemizel
@Warren Terra:
ah – about what I would expect from one of the finest minds in Mr. Andersons 7th grade English class.
I am so glad I didn’t ever try to read it. I almost did because it is such a stupid premise but I knew I would be breaking windows with a flying book if I started. Couldn’t the dipshit at least understand American history before writing that story?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
If Ronald Reagan had had a gun, that fuckin’ monkey would have gone to bed!
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Schlemizel:
The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove:
Not a bad book. South African white supremacists get a hold of time travel technology and use it to aid the CSA by supplying them with AK-47s.
At one point, Robert E. Lee gets a hold of history books from the future and rethinks his positions after seeing how history views slavery and the Civil War…
Mezz (fpa Michael2)
Well clearly, if Delores Haze had been armed with even like a little teeny tiny Gun for Girlies, she could have had her way with Hum and then killed him in “self-defense” when she was finished with him.
Bonus: she could have killed her mother too (jealousy) rather than having to wait for her to get run over by a car!
There simply MUST be a point, right, where the general public just totally turns against these fktards??
jibeaux
What if these guys’ dicks were the size they want them to be, and we could finally live in a sensible country?
artem1s
REGUR REGUR REGUR!
Schlemizel
@Todd:
Yeah, Lee as an honorable man – so it really was fiction.
You know he once had a female slave escape his lovely little rest farm on the Potomac. When bounty hunters returned her he quiet naturally had her whipped – I’m sure it was all for her own good. But he didn’t feel the overseer he gave the actual work to was doing a good enough job so he paid one of the bounty hunters to whip her harder.
Such a fine, upstanding man! I am sure after the deaths of hundreds of thousands he would have not only freed al lthe salves he would have seen to it that the KKK and Jim Crow never happened
Schlemizel
@jibeaux:
If their dicks were the size they want them to be we would have a very robust industry making stilts!
jibeaux
To respond in a more serious way, Josh Marshall likes to respond to those kind of “arguments” that they have nothing to do with the policies being debated. No one’s saying the mom in Cujo can’t have a hunting rifle, for Pete’s sakes.
jibeaux
@Schlemizel: Sounds good to me. I’m not too athletic, but I can outrun a guy on stilts, and there will be a handly visual marker for the crazies.
Baud
@jibeaux:
Stop making sense. We’re talking about guns here.
gogol's wife
@jibeaux:
That’s the one I want to read.
Todd
Here’s a good one – Uncle Tom stumbles across a grenade launcher, an M4, a cache of ammo and a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
Much hilarity abounds. Particularly since underneath the stack of ammo is a solar charger and an ipad with Django Unchained preloaded, ready for viewing over and over and over.
Warren Terra
This whole exercise puts me in mind of a Winger Haggadah:
beltane
And take a look at this product sold at the NRA convention http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/05/09/1207888/-Ex-Girlfriend-Target-Bleeds-When-You-Shoot-Her-Sold-At-NRA-Conference What novel did she walk out of?
Southern Beale
Yeah, if Scarlett O’Hara had a gun she could have single-handedly won the Civil Wa-wa!
Fucking idiots.
debbie
@Suffern ACE:
But, but! What is to become of the beautiful little flower?
Certified Mutant Enemy
What if Hitler had nuclear weapons?
heckblazer
@Schlemizel: Harry Turtledove has a doctorate in history. Admittedly, his specialty is ancient Byzantium.
RSA
Number of dogs contracting rabies (annually): ~350. Number of children killed by guns (annually): ~3,500.
Yeah, that’s a great cost/benefit tradeoff.
Also, @Suffern ACE, that was lovely.
heckblazer
@beltane: American Psycho.
greennotGreen
@Schlemizel:
Apparently not.
Having grown up in the South in the 50s and 60s, I too thought the Confederacy was made up of honorable men just trying to protect the South from economic blackmail by the North, the preservation of slavery being an unfortunate by-product. When I got to college and read original source material, I realized that the leaders of the Confederacy were FKING NUTS!
(I have also just recently read a long piece in the Smithsonian about Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward his slaves, the ones who were not Sally Hemmings. He’s the perfect argument against Jason Richwine’s proposed IQ Uber Alles immigration policy. Jefferson was a brilliant man – and a narcissistic pedophile who bred human beings for profit.)
jamick6000
the most obvious one is Russell Crowe in Gladiator, if he had a gun at the end he could have shot the emperor (irl the emperor stabs to death Russell Crowe but Russell Crowe still kills him)
if he had a gun at the beginning, he could have sold it for a shitload of money (because it would have been an amazing technology in those days) and bought back his farm.
beltane
@Certified Mutant Enemy: Then he would have won the war, enslaved or exterminated all of the earth’s non-Aryans, and the folks over at the National Review would have lived happily ever after.
artem1s
sweet FSM, the woman was driving a Ford Pinto. All she had to do was blow the thing up./snark.
Obviously their real aim here is to get Mr. King to write shorter books, cause reading is HARD!
kd bart
This reminds me of a recurring Saturday Night Live skit from the late 70s. Two of theat I remember were:
What if Spartacus had had a Piper Cub airplane?(Kirk Douglas was the host)
What if Superman had landed in Germany?
Certified Mutant Enemy
@kd bart:
What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo? was one of those skits…
Bostondreams
@Schlemizel:
He also wrote what is known as his ‘Southern Victory‘ series. In it, obviously, he looks at the consequences of a Southern victory in the war (Socialists replace the disgraced Republicans in the Union, for example).
It ends in 1944, with the Confederacy crushed, its fascist president shot by a black guerrilla, and war crimes tribunals planned throughout the South.
It’s actually pretty interesting, especially when looking at historical figures. For example, Woodrow Wilson is still president during WW1, but of the Confederacy, while Teddy Roosevelt is president of the United States at the same time. The Confederacy allies with France and Britain, the US with the Germans (Prussia had helped the US remodel its military after defeat in the Civil War).
ericblair
What if Romeo and Juliet had unlimited texting plans?
J: gonna drop some shit to look dead, don’t freak, brb
R: k
Most plots tend to fall apart with ubiquitous mobile communications, so now we spend twenty minutes in each thriller setting up Why The Cellphones Don’t Work.
kd bart
What if Moses had had GPS?
Certified Mutant Enemy
Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee was probably the first what if the Confederates won the Civil War alternate histories. The ending offers up an interesting twist…
artem1s
@greennotGreen:
yes, this. I’ve also wondered about all those innovations at Monticello. I sincerely doubt he actually had a hand it constructing any of them. Yes, there were drawings but how closely do they correspond to the actual working items? Certainly he had some brilliant carpenters who executed the mechanical items in the house. Who were they? Did they not get any credit for their work because they were slaves?
Robert Green
the lorax should have double-tapped the onceler and his whole family. would have preserved the environment and all those truffala trees.
Certified Mutant Enemy
If Frodo had an AK-47, Boromir would never have tried to take the Ring from him.
Bruuuuce
Jeezly gods. What if Aunt May was the herald of Galactus? It amounts to the same thing.
@Alex S.: They’d have been on an episode of Star Trek:TOS
CorbinDallasMultipass
@kd bart: what if solomon had cloning technology?
Comrade Dread
@Schlemizel: It was a decent book.
Lee’s sudden reversal has less to do with nobility or honor than finding a history book his racist gun suppliers keep with them and reading up on how posterity views the South’s obsession with racial supremacy and slavery. I’m not sure that Lee the historical figure would have cared.
Also, if Edmond Dantes had only carried an AR-15 with him everywhere, he wouldn’t have had to spend a couple of decades in a 19th century French prison.
The Nameless One
@Warren Terra: Djesus Uncrossed is their favourite story from Sunday School.
droog
Tom suggested some nice petunias but Sonny insisted that Clemenza plant a gun instead.
SO not a wartime consigliere.
YellowJournalism
@SiubhanDuinne:
I think Aerosmith covered that one already.
Speaking of Janes, if Jane Eyre had a gun, she could have shot Mrs. Rochester and avoided the whole bigamist marriage embarrassment and all that wandering the countryside in sorrow.
kd bart
What if the Lincolns had decided to stay home and look at slides instead?
maryQ
And here’s one that won’t make the National Review’s literature revision:
What if Bigger Thomas had had a gun. He could have just popped a few caps in Mary and Jan as they were getting in on in the back seat, and dumped the bodies in some river somewhere, instead of having to mess with that whole accidental suffocation followed by decapitation and incineration mess.
But then again, Jan was a communist, and Mary, well, even though her dad is a rich slumlord, and therefore cool by NR standards, well, she was a slut for giving up the goods to a commie.
But still, even in those circumstances, it’s hard to imagine that the NR would have wished that a black man had a gun.
The Nameless One
@Bruuuuce:
She was.
Joel (Macho Man Randy Savage)
If Sophie had been armed with a MacMillan TAC-50, she could have just mowed down all the maneating giants and been the hero of her village.
Warren Terra
@The Nameless One: That was pretty great. Who knew SNL had a sense of humor?
Howard Beale IV
Why stop at literature?
What if Ash from Pokemon traded in Pikachu for a Stringer?
NCSteve
What if the narrator of a “The Night Before Christmas” had had a Glock 9 mm with which to fend off the home invasion of the bizarrely dressed old man who presented a clear and present danger to his family?
Schlemizel
@NCSteve:
Gawd I love that book too much!
joes527
What if Django had a … … … ummm … Never mind.
Todd
@Schlemizel:
About the only thing the dumbass did was act as the mayor/pirate captain of a small city’s worth of roving marauders. His only tactical “victories” were in basically pillaging areas in order to keep his pirate crew fed and clothed. he had no real strategic purpose, wasn’t seizing areas to be governed, wasn’t driving forces out of critical areas. All he was doing was recklessly spending his men at a frighteningly staggering rate, all in support of a reprehensible cause – stealing labor.
The best that could be said for him as a tactician was that by having to chase his treasonous ass all over the boondocks, Union forces were delayed in smashing Richmond. The dude never thought strategically.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
Been done by James P Hogan in “The Proteus Operation”:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=23
Really good book
Ajaye
@SiubhanDuinne: thank you for this. First laugh of the day and it was a good one!
Throckmorton
I envision a depressed and suicidal Eeyore, despondent over the loss of his prosthetic tail and the soul-destroying monotony of life in the Hundred Acre Wood, completely losing his s%&t and opening fire, splattering kangaroo and piglet brains all over the forest floor.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Give the main characters firearms and every movie and book becomes “Blood Meridian”.
One of the best books ever written, I gotta say, but it would get really depressing if that’s all there was.
Larkspur
Mary Bennet keeps playing the piano at all the social events, and quite competently, in her opinion, and yet she never gets the accolades she deserves. In fact, everyone is dreadful to her, with their mocking slurs and sidelong glances, as if she is too stupid to notice. Well, she decides, attention must be paid. So she brings her violin case to the next fancy ball. But it doesn’t contain a violin (although if it had, she would have been a true proficient). It is a universal truth that a single, homely, oppressed young woman with no fortune is in need of weaponry, and that everyone else is in need of Kevlar.
Bruuuuce
@The Nameless One: Huh. And here I always thought it was only a What If.
I suppose we can fall back on if the Native Americans had automatic firearms, then the idiot writing in the OP’s referenced article would probably still be a serf in some baron’s wheat field.
TriassicSands
Good questions all. Enquiring [sic] minds want to know.
Bobby Thomson
What if the father in Julie of the Wolves had a gun?
Oh, wait. He did.
OK, how about if the protagonist in A Taste of Blackberries had a gun? Then he could have just committed suicide instead of getting all moody and shit.
Larkspur
Or maybe this will work: what if fish found guns at the bottom of the barrel?
maya
The Drones of Navarone?
Avery Greynold
Dorothy drops the flying monkeys with a minigun. Formerly cowardly lion frags the witch’s guards. Confronted by the witch, bullets prove ineffective. Luckily the scarecrow, always afraid of a match, had a permitted concealed-carry Super Soaker. He invokes “stand your ground” law and gets immunity.
Crusty Dem
It ain’t “Chekov’s knife”, bitches!!
thruppence
What if Dominique Francon shot Howard Roark when he tried to rape her?
celticdragonchick
@BruceFromOhio:
Arguably, some folks in the US Marshals service and the FBI HRT probably should not have had rifles either…
Weaver was charged with multiple crimes relating to the Ruby Ridge incident, a total of ten counts including the original firearms charges and murder. Attorney Gerry Spence handled Weaver’s defense, and argued successfully that Weaver’s actions were justifiable as self-defense. The judge dismissed two counts after hearing prosecution witness testimony. The jury acquitted Weaver of all remaining charges except two, one of which the judge set aside. Weaver was found guilty of one count, failure to appear, for which Weaver was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was credited with time served plus an additional three months, and was then released. Kevin Harris was acquitted of all criminal charges.[17]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Weaver
hitchhiker
Gosh, guns make every story short, boring, and worthless. Imagine that.
scav
The Last Woman Standing Bikini Firefight Round is the most exciting part of the Miss America Pageant anymore.
“I’d like to teach little children to Eat My Lead Losers!”
walden
What if Francis MacComber’s wife had had a high-powered sporting rifle?
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: Really?
Rey
I take in Ron Crapshaw never read the Gunslinger novels.
kooks
I haven’t read Anna Karenina yet. Thanks for blowing the ending you ass. Sheesh – spoiler tags!
Mino
If Lee had freed the slaves of a victorious CSA, Booth would have assassinated him.
celticdragonchick
@Cassidy:
Uh, yeah. Really. Militarized law enforcement is a real threat to the very public they are supposed to protect.
As it turns out, Kevin Harris was acquitted of the killing of that federal marshal by reason of self defense. Think about that for awhile. Idaho tried for years to get FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi rendered over for trial. (Horiuchi is said to have complained that he was being shunned in the FBI after he shot Vicki Weaver)
So yeah…maybe some of those folks should not have had rifles at the time either. Innocent people would still be alive today.
Bonus photo from Boston, where a
soldierofficer in an up-armored Humvee is pointing a rifle directly at a civilian looking through his window.Below the photo is the Youtube viral video (over 1,000,000 hits) of Boston PD with submachineguns raiding houses without writ or warrant and yanking out terrified citizens with their hands up. There is nothing consensual about it, despite later claims by Boston PD spokesmen.
Much, much more on police militarization and the abrogation of civil rights, including the notorious CAMP raids in Los Angeles here at Radly Balkos blog at HuffPo.
Phil
It’s worth noting that, near the end of Cujo – which I recently re-read – the county sheriff shows up, draws his service revolver, aims it, and is quickly and efficiently overpowered and dismembowelled by a 200 lb., rabid, heat-tired dog,
Tonal Crow
If MLK had had a Bushmaster, he wouldn’t have been assassinated!
If Rosa Parks had had a Bushmaster, she’d never have had to have ridden in the back of the bus!
If Alexander Hamilton had had a Bushmaster, America would now be a monarchy!
If Jesus had had a Bushmaster, we’d all be in Hell…oh…wait….
kd bart
What if Bambi’s mother had been wearing Kevlar?
Todd
@celticdragonchick:
The thing I would tell Weaver is that you don’t have a right to an armed standoff, and anything that happens to you and your slackjawed family after the standoff begins is your problem.
The other thing I would tell Weaver is that when you’re charged with Federal crimes, dust off your wallet and get a lawyer. Don’t rely on the brilliance of your arguments about gold fringed flags or the unconstimatooshinality of the Federal Reserve to keep you out of trouble, and your lawyer will do a much better job of keeping track of your court dates than you will.
Fucking racist redneck militiatards really do need to be locked away in FEMA re-education camps. Thankfully, Vicky Weaver was not able to spawn with him again – that gene pool is emptied and filled in with dirt. Its just a shame that Horiuchi didn’t do him in.
Redshirt
@kd bart:
There’s kind of a version of this story! Superman: Red Son
It’s a “what if” where Kal El crash lands in the USSR instead of USA and becomes a Commie Super hero.
Redshirt
Also, what if the Terminator was a gardener?
Also too: What if Darcy Burner was a Transformer?
Bobby Thomson
@walden: Your accomplishment has been observed.
PaulW
What if instead of kicking the football Charlie Brown broke out his grenade launcher screaming “your nickel-a-dy psychiatric help was bullsh-t, Lucy! DIE IN A FIRE!”
What if instead of getting his hair cut off Samson wore a motorcycle helmet?
low-tech cyclist
If all the kids in Gryffindor had had assault rifles, they could have simply gunned down Voldemort. Screw this ‘magic’ stuff – let’s see Voldy magically defeat a rain of bullets headed his way!
gogol's wife
I’m going to have to use this thread in a literature course.
gogol's wife
@kooks:
I hope this is snark.
gogol's wife
@kd bart:
LOL.
celticdragonchick
@Todd:
This is a perfect example of how people on the left can be every bit as hateful, vicious, petty and bitter as the wingnuts at Red State.
You and I may not have liked what they believed in, but their beliefs should have been constitutionally protected and they were targeted specifically because of them. The murder of a woman holding an infant is sickening, no matter how much you dislike her, and the fact you are rejoicing in that is appalling beyond description. It is rank tribalism. Honest to God, what the fuck happened to your soul? What went wrong with you?
Mino
@kd bart: Very good. I was wondering how to get Bambi in this thread.
celticdragonchick
@Phil:
In real life, the dog loses Every. Single. Time.
https://www.google.com/search?q=police+shoot+dog&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
themann1086
@Schlemizel: His other Alternative Civil War History series, How Few Remain (and the 12 or so sequels) is quite good. He pulls no punches on just how evil slavery (and apartheid/segregation) is, nor does northern racism escape a closer look. I never read Guns of the South, as it seemed too… silly. Much sillier than his WW2 series where aliens invade!
Bob In Portland
What if Emerson walked around his pond with a couple of glocks?
gene108
@Mino:
I wonder how many people at strip joints realize Bambi was a buck and grew up to be the biggest strongest buck in the forest?
I’m not sure how it became a girl’s pseudonym.
TOP123
Bazooka virumque cano. Aeneas I – Danaos nihil. Finis.
Cassidy
@celticdragonchick: You’ve said a lot of dumb shit, but that really tops it. They were targeted because of illegal weapons sales and because their beliefs put them in contact with people who needed to be investigated. Jeebus christ, you fucking handwringers are annoying.
Honestly, anyone who beleives that Infowars shit about the Boston PD deserves to be mocked and ignored. Turn your guns in. You’re not mentally fit to have them.
Hob
@Phil: Thank you!! I was pretty sure that was the case, but hadn’t read it lately.
And sure, the main character might’ve had a better chance of shooting the dog from inside a locked car, but then there would’ve been no damn story. Do these people not understand what fiction is? Similarly, the people in Salem’s Lot would’ve had a much easier time if they’d just not had vampires. They should’ve thought of that!
celticdragonchick
No. They were targeted specifically because of their beliefs and potential usefulness in being used as moles in white supremacist organizations. The illegal weapons sale was entrapment, and the jury found it to be as such.
I do not frequent infowars. I did, however, watch the video of officers pulling frightened people out of their homes at gunpoint while yelling at the neighbors to get away from the windows. The photo of an officer pointing his rifle at one of the neighbors is quite easy to find. Can you rebut the video in any meaningful way without resorting to ad hominem?
You really are cute when you get yourself worked up, dear.
Mnemosyne
@Hob:
It’s like the people on the left who complained that it would have been more realistic for Juno to go through with having an abortion in the first half hour of the movie. Yes, and then how do you fill the other 60 minutes of screen time, genius?
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
And then Tim McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City on their behalf. Was that not sufficient revenge for you?
Hungry Joe
What if there were 300 million guns in the United States of America? Man, that would be …
Oh.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
I think that is one of the worst attempts at a strawman comparison I have ever see here, and that takes some real effort. I don’t know if I should applaud or merely be disgusted.
Just where in the hell did you get the notion that I or anybody else that frequents this site would have thought that mass murder was some sort of appropriate catharsis for what happened at Ruby Ridge?
Randy Weaver was exonerated of every charge save failing to appear for the original trial in a court of law, and his family was given a 7 figure settlement for the death of Vicki Weaver. Sadly, Lon Horiuchi was never successfully tried in Idaho. The system mostly worked as it is supposed to in court, not through blowing up a federal building full of children.
I am skeptical of law enforcement in this day and age because they are now working largely outside of the constraints that have been in place over our history, and have access to weapons (including APC’s with M2 .50 cal machine guns) designed for war rather then law enforcement in a peaceful society. Also, protections that we have enjoyed from search and seizure have been greatly eroded, demonstrated by the aforementioned video, the mass traffic stop and mass arrest of motorists in Aurora, Colorado last year (looking for a single bank robber, motorists were detained at gunpoint, handcuffed and some were physically abused) and other examples readily found and examined by Radly Balko at HuffPo.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
And yet you’re still bitter enough about the Weaver case to berate people about poor persecuted gun fondler Randy Weaver.
Sorry, but I have no patience left for gun nuts. None at all. If you guys want to go off to your own little corner and let your children shoot each other, have at it, but don’t expect any fucking sympathy when your gun nuttery gets your friends and family killed.
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
People ended up dead who should not have been, and the event did end up radicalizing a significant portion of the far right. Law enforcement does not seem to have learned from their mistakes, even after Kevin Harris was deemed to have been acting in lawful self defense when he shot a federal marshal.
Let’s take a more recent example of the two Latina women who were shot at over one hundred times by police in Los Angeles during the Dorner manhunt. Does that increase your confidence in the oversight and training of police, to say nothing of individual judgement? Would those women have been justified in (hypothetically) trying to defend themselves from police gone utterly off the rails and who unloading several dozen shots into their truck and the surrounding homes? Have you noticed that police are rarely fired and almost never prosecuted for mistakes of this magnitude? The review of the shot that killed Vicki Weaver found it to be illegal, and the shoot on sight order was also unconstitutional and illegal, yet Horiuchi successfully evaded prosecution with reliance on “I was following orders” and the willingness of superiors to stonewall authorities in Idaho.
Let’s investigate one of the very few cases of unlawful death by officer that was prosecuted: The Oakland subway shooting in California. In that event, the officer was sentenced to less than one year for shooting a handcuffed black man in the back.
An infamous case in Fairfax where police piled into the driveway of a local optometrist who ran a small time sports pool ended up with him being gunned down when one officer had “an accidental discharge” into the man’s chest. The police union protested the two week suspension of an officer who ‘accidentally’ shot a man in the chest and killed him.
This is a handful of the examples where police operate essentially above and beyond any notion of the law that you and I contend with.
Lethal mistakes, dead wives and children, destroyed homes (just read about the CAMP raids and the Los Angeles riots become very, very understandable) and police who act like part of an army of occupation are all the price we pay for our ‘War of Drugs’ and now our never ending ‘War on Terror’. Every terrorist loser with a kitchen implement and some fireworks can now have an entire city confined to their homes while soldiers and police in armored vehicles turn homes inside out and scare the daylights out of the occupants at gunpoint.
At what point to do admit that the terrorists are actually winning…since they are in effect terrorizing us? Do we learn from this and go back to treating them like fucking common criminals (something that was endorsed at this blog two weeks ago by a front pager) and making our police act like police and not a low rent Delta Force?
Sad_Dem
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
But speak English, krautwaffle, is what
My Daddy said when we were children,
staying at Billy Duke’s place,
And that time my cousin took me out on a sled,
I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And so I did
to my M1A, as I ventilated everyone
in the schoolyard at recess.
smintheus
Imagine the fun the aged stranger in Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” could have had if only he’d carried an AK-47 into the church.
celticdragonchick
More fun with the police:
In March 1992, police in Snohomish County, Washington conducted six simultaneous raids on members of the same extended family. An informant had implicated the targets of the raids for the robbery of an armored car and the murder of its driver a year earlier.
One of the raids was on the home of Larry and Robin Pratt. The informant had implicated Larry Platt. Though police knew there were likely to be innocent people and possibly children in the house, they decided on the pre-dawn, no-knock raid instead of confronting Pratt as he was coming or going to work. The police had also obtained a key to the apartment from a landlord, but decided instead to enter the residence by slamming a 50-pound battering ram through a sliding glass door.
As they executed the raid, shards of glass flew out toward the Pratts’ six-year-old daughter and five-year-old niece sleeping nearby. The police confronted 28-year-old Robin Pratt as she came out of her bedroom to see what was wrong. She immediately dropped to her knees. She briefly raised her head, looked at Dep. Anthony Aston, and said, “Please don’t hurt my children.” Aston then fired a single bullet into Pratt’s neck. She bled out and died in front of her daughter.
The police then went to the bedroom, where they confronted Larry Pratt and put a gun to his temple. When he asked if he could move, the officer said if he did, he’d blow Pratt’s head off.
Police later learned that the informant had been lying — he admitted as much. Every one of the raids conducted that morning were waged against innocent families. The police never bothered to check the informant’s statements with the accused before confronting them and their families with violence. If they had, they’d have found that every one of the people he had implicated — including Larry Pratt — had solid alibis disproving the informant’s story.
Det. Aston would later say he couldn’t remember how or why he shot Robin Pratt. There is no dispute that she was on her knees, and posed no threat when Aston shot her…The Washington State Attorney General’s Office declined to press criminal charges against him.
Raid of the day at Huffington Post
kooks
@gogol’s wife: Yes, I lol’d
Bubblegum Tate
What if Piggy found a gun on the island? That “sucks to your ass-mar” business would’ve ended right away!
g
Um, if I recall correctly, the Mom in Cujo was dropping her stopping off to have her car checked out after picking the kid off at school. Are they really advocating that moms pack hunting rifles while driving kids home from school?
g
@jibeaux: True – nothing would have prevented the Mom from having her rifle in the car.
Actually, what a lot of gun nuts are really trying to do is to increase the cultural acceptability of carrying around deadly weapons. They are unwilling to accept the general public’s notion that guns are dangerous.
Think about it the way culture has approached drinking alcohol. No one is proposing new laws against drinking alcohol, which is legal, but culture has changed since the days of the two-martini lunches or the “Mad Men” whiskey bottles in corners offices. The gun nuts’ approach to gun culture is tantamount to someone saying, “Hey, no, really – what’s wrong with having a highball in the office?”
DaddyJ
Clearly, if Charlotte had possessed even rudimentary shooting skills, she could have shot that bastard Mr. Zuckerman when he came to butcher Wilbur, instead of wasting all that time writing messages in her web.
The Stolen Dormouse
@Warren Terra: I think you mean Guns of the South, by Harry Turtledove. That came out years before the alternate history series that goes from the Civil War to WW II.
In Guns of the South, the guns were given to the Confederates by unrepentant Boers who got their hands on a device for time travel, in retribution for future U.S. support of the overthrow of Apartheit. Ultimately, the successful South has to give up slavery anyway, to keep its economic ties to Britain and Germany and thus survive as an independent nation.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
Sure, as long as we can also investigate the two separate cases of a brother killing his younger sister in Kentucky and Alaska.
Oh, wait, I forgot — shootings are only bad if they’re done by the police. If children kill one another, that’s just their blood watering the tree of liberty.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
More fun with domestic violence murders in Seattle and Florida.
I’m sure the last thought of the Seattle victim who was murdered as he tried to call the police was, “Well, at least I was killed by a private citizen and not the cops. That makes all the difference in the world.”
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
I refer you to the following:
Description of Straw Man
The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of “reasoning” has the following pattern:
Person A has position X.
Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
Person B attacks position Y.
Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of “reasoning” is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
El Cid
@g:
Well, if they’re only able to carry a single weapon, I guess that would be okay. Ideally, though, the well-equipped mom would have a much, much broader array of firearms and ammunition at all times.
Auguste
Side note, I was just granted new understanding of a particular part of Bioshock Infinite (well, and also Judaism) thanks to a Balloon Juice thread about guns in literature.
I don’t have anything else to say about that, it just surprised me so I thought I would record it for posterity.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
Yes, I get it — you don’t really care how many kids get killed as long as you can protect yourself against the big bad cops. Letting five-year-olds have children’s rifles is the only thing standing between us and the SWAT teams.
And if it sounds like I don’t care about people being abused by cops … at this point, I really fucking don’t. We are not going to be able to get the cops under control until we get the citizens under control who think it’s their fucking “Constitutional right” to do shit like this.
But, hey, he was just exercising his constitutional right to own guns and use them to defend his car when he was pulled over for a traffic violation by jackbooted thugs, amirite?
AkaDad
In Braveheart, if the Scots were wielding uzis they would have got their freeeeeeedoooooooom!
The Tragically Flip
It’s great to know that gun nuts are done with trying to pretend guns are useful in actual reality and are now reduced to trying to argue how guns might have been useful in fictional worlds against supernational horrors.
I return to one of the most brilliant and now prescient Colbert sequences ever, the Doom Bunker:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/220650/march-04-2009/doom-bunker—jack-jacobs-and-stephen-moore
You will definitely need guns against the werewolf congress.
Tehanu
@kd bart:
You left out my favorite, What if Eleanor Roosevelt had an imaginary magic friend and could fly?
celticdragonchick
@Mnemosyne:
It seems a shame to tell you at this point that you are arguing with an imaginary person in your head who does not exist. I have no idea where you get these incredible allegations of positions that you seem to think that I hold, but it is nothing if not entertaining to see you argue with claims that nobody here has made.
I have rarely seen a person make so damning a statement in such an open fashion. There is a certain contradictory refreshing yet sickening quality observed when a bigot really does go hell for broke and starts using the “N” word, just as there is in seeing certain pitiable, hate filled individuals like yourself who refuse to care when civil rights are violated. Then there is Todd, who takes sadistic glee in the harm that the state can do to others so long as it advances a personal political narrative.
I pity you. You are so filled with hate and vitriol that you cannot be troubled to evince even the least amount of concern for bloodshed done in our name so long as it is done to people you do not like for political reasons. You have taken the proud tradition of liberalism and turned it on its’ ear to become atavistic tribalism.
The Bobs
If only Katniss had a BFG 9000.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
Idaho 3-year-old girl shoots infant sibling in the face
But apparently police violence still exists, so we have to let this kind of thing keep happening to prevent the jackbooted thugs from pushing citizens around.
Mnemosyne
@celticdragonchick:
I particularly love that you’re saying this because you don’t like that I keep pointing out stories where toddlers are shooting each other.
I don’t hate gun nuts like you because of tribalism. I hate you because you refuse to do anything to stop the death and maiming of children because restricting gun rights infringes on your “freedom.” If a few hundred kids have to die or be injured every year, well, that’s just the price their parents have to pay for your freedom. It’s not your kid who’s being killed or injured, so why should you care?
Get back to me when you’re willing to take some responsibility for the gun culture you’ve helped create where it’s considered normal to give a fucking five-year-old his own fucking rifle and leave it laying around the house loaded. Come back when you can find me a gun owner in this country who’s actually fucking responsible and doesn’t leave a loaded gun in the glove compartment where their three-year-old can find it and use it to shoot her brother.
ETA: The government left you guys alone, and now we see the results. Good job, “responsible” gun owners. There should be a special tax on guns just to pay for the funerals they cause.
celticdragonchick
That wasn’t what we were talking about to begin with. I suppose I could talk about gun deaths in Darfur as well, or possibly in Mexico…especially considering that the guns used there often come from here, but again, that wasn’t actually the topic. We were talking about adults who should not have had guns at some point. Focus, please.
Bullshit. Utter, gut wrenching stench of bovine excrement. You never even asked me what my views were on children and access to guns. You don’t even know what my actual opinions on gun control are, since I have not really discussed them at length on this blog. You want to scream at the imaginary “gun nuts” in your head, whatever the fuck a gun nut even is…since I have no idea how you define the pejorative beyond using it to smear anyone who disagrees with anything you say.
Since you seem utterly incapable of understanding what the strawman logical fallacy actually is, there is not much to be gained with trying to reason with you. If you cannot understand the argument, then why bother?
Again, you are arguing with imaginary people in your head. Children die in accidents all the time. It is still entirely possible to mandate gun locks or safes with firearms sales just as it is possible to require child proof pool covers for swimming pools. I support all of the above. Living in a free society also means having to responsible for one’s actions.
I do not answer to you, nor will ever attempt to do so. I am responsible for my own actions. You can scream at people all you like, and they will ignore you as the very nut that you accuse them of being. You certainly look like a raving nut to me, and you are utterly incapable of making a good faith argument or even recognizing that the people you glibly accuse do not believe in the things you scream about.
I keep my kid safe. I make sure that kids around me are safe. The only weapon I have fired in the past 15 years is a black powder Kings 2nd Land Pattern Brown Bess musket, and I demonstrate the weapon at a National Park under supervision of National Park rangers. I own other weapons, but have not shot them in quite some time, not that it is any business of yours.
In all seriousness, I think you need professional help.
Casey McCasland
@ celticdragonchick
Agreed. Well put.
@ Mnemosyne
IRT- ETA: The government left you guys alone, and now we see the results. Good job, “responsible” gun owners. There should be a special tax on guns just to pay for the funerals they cause.
There should be a special TAX on me! I have caused a funeral or two… >8)) ME… not my weapon.
Do baby bunnies have funerals???? hummm
Dummy
Casey McCasland
@Mnemosyne:
Probably talked shit! BAMM!!! IN THE FACE!!! LOL your funny… 8)