Gun lover gives up gun

While I will never understand his need to own firearms, I can absolutely emphasise with the gesture he has made.

Because of the Parkland teens, Chris Shields just decided to give up his AR-15. Now, the 18-year member of the military and owner of 10 guns, is calling on fellow gun owners to give theirs up too. pic.twitter.com/Xow6yy9uQg

— Mic (@mic) 24 February 2018

As an aside, Emma Gonzales seems like an incredible person.

A fortnight ago she was just a normal young adult doing normal young adult stuff. Now she's a school shooting survivor and the figurehead for a major social movement.

I hope she's getting the support needed to deal with both these lifer-shattering events.

Evilracistflaggate

It has been brought to my attention that the all powerful, many tentacled Doom Hydra of the Left has - rather than claiming complete eternal power - decided to make kids toys politically correct

Why the hive-minded hordes of left-wing attack drones (of which hordes I am a proud member in good standing) have decided to do this, rather than seizing the levers of power and sending our enemies to the guillotine is not made clear; but I am sure our leaders know what they are doing.  The battle for the future starts now, and it seems the battlefield will be the appearance of little toy cars.

Obviously, our opponents will not expect this and will swiftly be outflanked by this deft thrust, a daring assault comparable to Lee's march to Gettysburg.  And we all know how that ended.

An appropriate comparison, for I am thinking about what can only be called Evilracistflaggate, the huge fuss that has blown up around the use of the 'Confederate' flag, following the horrid events in South Carolina.  'Confederate' in inverted commas used because flag we commonly think of as the Confederate flag - the Starry Cross - was never the flag of the Confederacy.  It was used by General Lee's Army of North Virginia, but the design most of us recognise as the 'confederate flag' is just a detail from the second and third flags adopted by the Confederacy. The second one had a big white bit as well as the 'starry cross' and the third one had a red stripe.

(One wonders if things might have gone better for the Confederates if they had spent less time worrying about the best bit of cloth to die under, and more about winning wars.  Probably not.)

The Starry Cross, it seems, has suddenly become as socially unacceptable as anti-Semitism and owning people.  Totally reliable and unbiased sites like kotaku.com assure us that America is losing its mind in a rush to remove the flag from absolutely everything, ever, even things it might actually be appropriately displayed on:

Today, Apple decided to start yanking games that use the Confederate flag in any way (via TouchArcade). For example, you can now no longer buy the strategy iOS games Civil War: 1862, Civil War: 1863, Civil War: 1864, and Civil War: Gettysburg, which, as you might guess, use the Confederate flag because they’re video games about the Civil War.

Meanwhile. it seems, the evil liberals and PC leftists (is there any other kind?) are busy trying to take toys from children and re-write pop culture history by deleting the Starry Cross from General Lee - no, not the real general Lee, things haven't got that bad yet - but the car in The Dukes of Hazard:

Warner Bros, which owns the licensing rights to the 80s series, announced Wednesday it will no longer manufacture miniature replicas of the souped-up 1969 Dodge Charger, which featured a giant Confederate battle flag painted on the roof. ‘Warner Bros. 

Consumer Products has one licensee producing die-cast replicas and vehicle model kits featuring the General Lee with the confederate flag on its roof — as it was seen in the TV series,’ the company told Vulture. ‘We have elected to cease the licensing of these product categories.’

The snag here is that neither Apple nor Warner Bros are actually far left revolutionary communist-gay rights-environmentalist-PC-feminNAZI collectives that the howling madpots of the right seem to think.

They ARE capitalist enterprises intent on making a profit. If they decide to drop or change a product, its down to their desire to protect their brand and maximise their profits. The forces driving these decisions are profit related, and nothing to do with 'the left' or some supposed politically correct agenda. If you want to blame anything, blame market forces, which are all about shifting product and profit. I guess there is no profit to be made from sanity and accuracy.

Which tells you everything you need to know about capitalism.

(For what it is worth, I'd agree the Apple decision to remove the Confederate flag from civil war computer games IF it would have been correct to show it there (i.e. for Lee's army) is barmy. But I think it often gets used inaccurately, as a symbol many of us associate with the Confederacy.  I doubt many people would recognise the first flag of the Confederacy, the historical 'Stars and Bars' and the other two would only be recognisable because they contain the 'Starry Cross' as a element.  So changing it might actually just be making things a bit more accurate and correcting the assumption that the 'Starry Cross' was the flag of the Confederacy. Surely we're all in favour of historical accuracy?)

And it seems that the vile liberal-communists aren't just intent on banning cars and pixels, but films a well.  Truly, first they came for the General Lee, then they came for Scarlett and Rhett:

When it comes to the Left, it is always only a matter of time before they show their fascist colors. We’re seeing it all over the place in a media frenzy that began with a cause I agree with (removing Confederate Flags from state capitols) into what is now a full-blown mob waging a bullying witch hunt to completely memory-hole the flag. 

Wednesday, the thing that you believe could never happen, did happen: a New York film critic has called for the banning of The Greatest Movie Ever Made. 

In just three days, the left’s mob mentality took us from removing the Rebel Flag from a state capitol to banning “Gone with the Wind.”

Only, of course, it is not as simple as Breitbart would like to make out.

The critic in question, Lou Lumenick, is not actually calling for Gone With The Wind to be banned. He is simply wondering if audiences should pay more attention to the racism and slavery that underpins the movie, rather than venerating it as a quaint and charming piece of romantic melodrama.

Of course, the howling hate mob of the right - the true enemies of rationality, sanity and reason - deliberately misrepresent this, because truth is poison to them.  The tragedy of South Carolina has prompted some people to wake up to the hatefulness of some of the things too often taken for granted.  That's progress.  The right doesn't like progress and stirs up a vicious cauldron of lies about it, blaming everything on this cabal of leftist witches and demons; witches and demons who seem to be all-powerful, but mysteriously interested only in using this power to achieve petty ends.  No flags on cars - that'll teach the Right!

A part of me wonders if this is a deliberate ploy to move the debate away from where it really should be - the easy availability of guns - onto something (anything) else.  Because flags, sanity and honesty are far less important to the right than every racist lunatic being able to get his hands on a firearm.

Save us from Ebola, Muslims but not guns!

For some reason, Americans are terrified about the threat of Ebola, the dangers of Muslim terrorists, but not gunzzzzzzzzzzz.

Meanwhile:

At least three people have been hospitalised after a student reportedly carried out a shooting at a high school north of Seattle on Friday morning (PDT).

Marysville-Pilchuck High School in Marysville is currently in lockdown as police attend the scene, according to officials.

The suspect is thought to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, two police officers told the Seattle Times.

The Marysville School District said in a statement that "Marysville Pilchuck High School is currently in lock down due to an emergency situation. Police and emergency services have responded."

Live video footage from the scene shows students being evacuated from the school in the state of Washington.

The New York doctor may have behaved irresponsibly; quarantining people who might have dreadful diseases makes sense. There are crackpots out there who want to maim and kill in the name of their diseased perception of religious duty. The population at large needs to be protected from them.

But lots of other people other than doctors and Muslims can be irresponsible or insane.

But yeah, I get it. The fundamental rights must be protected. But only when it comes to gunzzzzzzzzzzz.

Random angry post

Haven't been blogging over the last couple of weeks as I have been Not Well so I have missed two events I never thought would happen (The death of Margaret Thatcher and the NZ Labour party coming up with a good sound policy) and one that was sadly predictable (A terrorist attack in the USA).

But I break radio  silence, briefly, just to comment on the latter, how it is insane - utterly insane - that something like the Boston Bombing leads to junking of basic rights and safeguards but an atrocity like Sand Hook provokes shrill demands to Keep Your Hands Off Our Guns and Our Rights Are Sacrosanct. Tells you everything that is wrong with the USA (well, not everything, there's Bon Jovi as well) in a nutshell. A two faced, hypocritical, self deluding arse-about-tit nutshell.

Aussie Gun Control Bullshit

Someone uploaded this clip on youtube the other day and it has been brought to my attention by American types. It purports to show what happened in Australia after gun ownership was restricted and a buy-back scheme introduced.

Apparently, this lead to soaring crime rates and an increase in homicides:

Only, it is from 1999 (or there about). It identifies Trevor Griffin as the Attorney General, something he stopped being in 2001. The data in the clip is - unsurprisingly - out of date. A quick Google check indicates the rates of gun crime and gun homicide in Australia have fallen to record lows - aside from an anomalous spike immediately after the restrictions and buy-back were introduced, which is the 'rise' the clip refers to. Still, if you're dumb enough to think having 90 guns per 100 people is a good idea, you're dumb enough to accept this sort of stuff at face value. Hey! Gun lovers! The Earth ain't flat! Have you discovered that, yet?

Trayvon Martins

Like all sane people, I'm disgusted about the shooting of Trayvon Martins, and the apparent carte blanche extended to his killer. A young man walking home is shot by a fat necked freak on a power trip, who stalked him and triggered a confrontation.

There was a good piece by Gary Yonge in the Gaurdian on this:

One can only speculate as to Zimmerman's intentions. Efforts to create a crude morality play around this shooting in which Martin is sanctified and Zimmerman is pathologised miss the point. Zimmerman's assumptions on seeing Martin may have been reprehensible but they were not illogical. Black men in America are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, convicted and executed than any other group. With almost one in 10 black men behind bars there are more of them in prison, on probation or on parole today than were enslaved in 1850. To assume that when you see a black man you see a criminal is rooted in the fact that black men have been systematically criminalised. That excuses nothing but explains a great deal.

Add to this lax gun laws, entrenched segregation, deep economic inequalities and a statute that endorses vigilantism, and a murder of this kind is inevitable. Indeed what makes Martin's case noteworthy is not that it happened but that it has sparked such widespread indignation beyond his immediate community. It is not at all uncommon for young black men to leave the world in a shower of bullets followed by deafening silence.

Eight kids under the age of 19 are killed by guns in America every day. While researching the stories of those who fell one November day in 2006 I ran across the story of Brandon Moore. Brandon was 16 when he was shot in the back in the middle of the afternoon by an off-duty cop moonlighting as a security guard in Detroit. The guard had previously shot a man dead during a neighbourhood fracas, shot his wife (though not fatally) in a domestic dispute and had been involved in a fatal hit-and-run car accident while under the influence of alcohol. Brandon's death was dismissed in the city's two main newspapers in less than 200 words. They never even mentioned his name. Brandon's death was ruled to be justifiable homicide. A year later the guard was still in the police force.

the latest developments include the claim that Zimmerman's taped conversation with 911 has been edited to make him seem more gung-ho, and quicker to identify the suspect as black than was actually the case. Putting aside the merits of the case for the moment, am I the only one dazed by the absurdity of this claim, advanced as it is by the very same band of people who happily swallow and then regurgitate every bit of misrepresentative, misquoted puss Anthony Watts vomits up about climate change? Rich indeed. the same bunch of wingnuts who blithely quoted Rush Limbaugh's severely edited version of Danny Glover's comments about the Haiti earthquake? And, more recently, drank down the warm piss of Watts, alleging Jim Hansen claimed AGW would make the oceans boil? the freaks who won't shut up about 'Climategate'?

Have they actually changed anything he said, or presented anything so drastically out of context as to change its meaning? Or just cut lots of snuffling, muttering and heavy breathing?

"He didn't comment on Martins's skin colour until the responder asked him about it," they wail. Indeed. But it's a bit childish to suggest Zimmerman doesn't notice Martins's skin colour until someone asks him about it, don't you think?

Until you can provide evidence that Martins stalked Zimmerman, confronted him and was killed while trying to beat him to death with a packet of skittles, I think the 'Cruelly Misrepresented by the Liberal Media' card should stay safely up the sleeves, boys.

The other contention is that this isn't about race at all. Treyvon Martins was not killed because he was black, but because of the insanity of letting power hungry neanderthals handle guns and think they have the right to use them on their fellows.

There's some truth in that, but as race and class overlap significantly (when you're black) it's fruitless to try to disentangle them. Would Zimmerman have acted the same if it had been a white male hoodie wearing bearer-of-skittles? We don't know. To some extent, it doesn't matter - if this case was all about the hoodie, the other 99 similar cases were more about the skin tone. But I'm willing to bet the amount of melanin in Martins' skin had at least as much influence on Zimmerman's response as the hoodie, the victim' s sex, and the skittles. A white kid clowning around in the rain would have been more liekly to be dismissed as just that - a white kid clowning in the rain, not some drugged up criminal intent on malfeasance.