This world is a dangerous place:
“The government shouldn’t be able to deny a licensed conceal-carry holder their right to provide for their own protection if the government is not willing to,” said State Senator Forrest Knox, a Republican who helped develop Kansas’ concealed-carry bill, echoing an argument that has gained currency among conservatives amid a national gun control debate.
The bill states that if a city or university can’t afford metal detectors and armed guards at the door of a public building (say, a library or children’s museum), then concealed carry must be allowed in that building. Because who knows when a toddler might whip out a drop nine at storytime if you complain about him shitting in his diaper.
JPL
There is nothing in the second amendment about concealed weapons. Real men dress like Rambo.
MattF
Just combine that with the winger ideology of cutting funding to public services.
PeakVT
America, where real men are afraid of everyone, everywhere, all the time.
geg6
I cannot even articulate how much I hate these cowardly mother fuckers.
COB
The Kansas state motto is Ad astra per aspera – To the stars through difficulties.
Senator Knox is one of our many difficulties…
chrome agnomen
@COB:
if only we could overcome those difficulties and send him to the stars.
Bill E Pilgrim
Yes clearly if they can’t detect whether people are bringing concealed weapons into the building, then they should allow people to bring concealed weapons into the building.
It’s only logical, in the modern Tea Ess of A.
c u n d gulag
Conservative “MORANS” POV:
The very thought of thinking that someone like me’s packin’ a semi, makes service quicker at fast-food joints!
And if I want a f*ckin’ salad-bar at Applebee’s, they’ll f*ckin’ make me a f*ckin’ salad-bar, triple-quick, if I reach for my holster!!!
And, you, Judge, don’t you dare pass sentence on me with a line that doesn’t start with the word, “Not!”
I a mayahn, and I spell that “M-M… M-A-Y…”
F*CK YOU!
YOU KNOW I’M A MAYAHN, YOU F*CKIN’ SPELL IT!!!!!!!!!
WereBear
Did they grow up with Gunsmoke and think it was real? It always astonishes me that wingnuts manage such a rich fantasy life with the handicap of having no imagination.
Bill E Pilgrim
@COB: There was a movie about Wernher von Braun called “I Aim at the Stars” in which a reporter character cynically adds the subtitle “but sometimes I hit London”.
The line is often mistakenly attributed to Mort Sahl, in one of those weird things where everyone repeats something to the point where it’s accepted as fact.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Sooner or later there will be a loud sharp noise in one of these buildings. Maybe a child’s balloon pops or someone drops something. One of these cowards will fire wildly at the noise, another will fire at that noise, and another will fire…
WereBear
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: Sadly, the ones they wind up killing turn out to be, most often, their own children.
RepubAnon
@chrome agnomen: The stars? You mean send him to Hollywood? The wingnuts claim not to like Hollywood, despite all the action flicks.
Seriously, though – I’m still waiting for an explanation as to why allowing poorly trained (or untrained) people carting firearms around makes our society safer. Iowa even thinks legally blind people can safely carry and use firearms. (Link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/10/221131211/in-iowa-blind-people-can-carry-guns-in-public-not-everyones-a-fan).
It all goes to fear and delusional thinking: too many Hollywood movies where Joe Everyguy picks up a gun and immediately becomes a skilled combat marksman and trained commando-style fighter. The inconvenient truth is that merely possessing a firearm isn’t enough: you’ve got to be trained in its safe and proper use, and practice constantly. Otherwise, possessing a firearm merely makes you a serious threat to your own safety and that of the people within range. (Look at how many wrongful shootings result from police officers using their firearms, despite all their mandatory training. Why does anyone think untrained citizens have better combat shooting skills than trained police officers?)
Plus, MattF’s point: the logic of cutting funding for metal detectors for courts and then claiming government is “unwilling” to install metal detectors is somewhere between lunacy and total cynicism.
Thoughtful David
@WereBear: Yes, they do.
I’m pretty sure every single gun nut imagines himself as James Bond/Roger Moore in the gunfight sliding down the bannister and picking off the bad guys with his AK, then shooting the knob off the bannister end-post so he won’t rack himself. They’re quite sure that’s real, and imagine that it’s just what they would do. After all, they are “más macho”.
Aji
@WereBear: Yes. Every fantastical stereotype of their white-bread, privileged childhoods is The Way That Things Should Be, and anyone who wants to get in the way of that fantasy is unpatriotic, unAmerican, ungodly, and every other “un-” they can think of, and they and all their works must be eradicated.
Matt
@Aji: You forgot “probably gay”. :)
Aji
@Matt: Oops. My bad.
Yeah, that, too.
mai naem
I saw some blurb somewhere talking about some string of Fla shooting ranges not letting any lone white males to rent guns because they them to kill themselves at the facility and it costs the owners $5,000 for clean up after the suicide. I guess the free market took care of that little problem.
HelpThe99ers
@mai naem:
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2022650736_gunrangerentalxml.html
Google shows similar incidents in Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan…
Glocksman
Ironically enough, even in gun friendly Indiana we allow counties to prohibit firearms from courthouses and other public buildings without mandating metal detectors, etc.
Though here in Vanderburgh, the only public building where guns are prohibited is the Civic Center (city/county government building and courthouse), and there are guards and metal detectors to enforce it.
Hospitals prohibit them, but don’t have the controlled access for obvious reasons.
Businesses can post all the signs they want, but all they can do is ask you to leave.
If you’re stupid enough to refuse, then you can be arrested for trespassing.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Bill E Pilgrim:
It’s such mindbendlingly circular logic, isn’t it?
And yet these fucking cowards essentially fucking run the country and determine our gun policy in America. We live in these pants-shitting wimps’ country.
Mike in NC
We’ll be in central Florida next weekend, so I plan to leave room in the suitcase for a Kevlar vest for when we go out to dinner.
Debg
I teach at a Kansas university (not one people have heard of unless they’re from the region) and even our fairly conservative students are unhappy with this concealed carry law. The student government association has been working against it with grim determination.
Villago Delenda Est
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
I want the land of the free and the home of the brave back.
Because we are living in the land of natural serfs and bet wetting cowards, who revere a deserter from the Texas/Alabama and Massachusetts National Guards as their leader.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Debg:
But don’t you see? University! They’ve been indoctrinated into treason by that goddamned pernicious liberal academia! Don’t they know that Guns aren’t just an important freedom, they’re the ONLY Freedom in the US?!
Cassidy
I think we need to readjust tactics. Instead of spending the money on metal detectors, etc., we should come up with a plan to arm all of America. We can give subsidies to poor people in urban areas (Obamagats), hand out CCL’s and gun to anyone who makes less than the poverty line, and see how long it takes the GOP to get behind strict gun control.
patrick II
@WereBear:
I enjoyed the first few years of “24” — right until I heard that CIA torturers were emulaing Jack Bauer and a supreme court justice adked “what would Jack Bauer do?”. The life they lead in their imaginary world is so brave and wnoderful that it is a shame wingnuts have to screw up our real world to live it.
aimai
I don’t know why people are having such a hard time grasping the logic of this. From the moment of the first big school shootings right through Newtown one of the chief arguments of the gun nuts is that creating gun free zones is itself the problem. There are even (false) stories on the rightwing sites arguing that the Aurora killer went to two or three other cinemas, first, which had “concealed carry” and then chose a cinema which forbade guns for his massacre.
So they are starting from a completely different place than a sane person would. To them the creation of gun free zones produces gun massacres since it attracts killers. They think Its like putting up signs saying “no armed guards/no dogs/no alarms!” Its the “fly paper strategy” but an accidental one. They associate it with limp wristed liberal policies which backfire.
This is part of their talismanic beliefs about guns and guns ‘n good guys. They believe there are numerous crazed, gun owning, killers out there stalking children in schools and rather than removing guns from their hands they prefer to imagine that hidden guns on ordinary citizens will be some kind of deterrrent to the killers, rather than a problem in and of themselves.
Anoniminous
In the US the Right for paranoid psychotics to own weapons capable of killing large numbers of people, in a short amount of time, shalt not be infringed!
Anton Sirius
Dear moran: who do you think issued that license? God? Patrick Henry? Jesus fucking Christ I am tired of the constant stream of idiotic fuckery that spews out from people like this.
SatanicPanic
@Cassidy: Unfortunately that would just give SYG types an excuse to shoot more brown people. Half of them would welcome this.
gene108
You know sometimes the harder you push back, when the entity being pushed gets the ability to get back at you they will hit as hard as they can.
As much as gun-nuts keep trying to expand access to firearms, there will come a tipping point when most Americans – since most Americans are not gun owners – will have had enough and the “gun-grabbing” laws that come will be worse (from the gun-nut point of view) than allowing some basic regulations now.
If they thought the Assault Weapon’s Ban of 1994 (heh…one liberal law Clinton got passed) was destroying their freedom wait till more Sandyhook’s, guy’s gun going off by accident at Home Depot, etc. start increasing and the backlash that’ll follow.
Cassidy
@SatanicPanic: I don’ t think so. They only act that way because they know they’re the only ones armed. When all those brown people suddenly have guns themselves…
MomSense
@geg6:
Right there with you.
Jebediah, RBG
@Cassidy:
Best part of your plan is that we already know it will probably work, since, in California under Saint Raygun, a few openly armed Black Panthers made gun control happen in about three and a half seconds.
burnspbesq
@patrick II:
I also enjoyed “24.” But I don’t think I ever lost sight of the fact that it was fiction. Your average wingnut never quite got that.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108:
I really wonder if a tipping point exists. I thought Sandy Hook would be the tipping point. It wasn’t, because we’re at a point where the backlash to the backlash comes before the backlash, and is stronger. These mass shootings just make guns more popular and gun laws weaker.
Paul in KY
@gene108: I hope you are right, but then again I hope we don’t have more Sandy Hooks. That Australian massacre several years ago that brought strict gun control to Australia was 40 people being shot. Over here, due to our much larger population size, probably 150 or more people would have to be murdered.
I don’t wish for that (and I know you don’t either).