Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘gun control’

The U.S. Supreme Court has been hard at work, ensuring that all Americans have the right the own handguns.

Of course, with fifty million potential gunshot wound victims without health insurance, one would think that the Founding Fathers might have anticipated the need for a universal right to healthcare in the Constitution too, no?

The world may be two steps away from nuclear destruction, but the good news is that Canadians won’t be able to shoot each other with handguns. Except the ones purchased illegally, of course.

Michael Moore must be disappointed that Charlton Heston won’t be around to make fun of anymore. He’s retiring as the president of the National Rifle Association, thanks to the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Moore may be an idiot, but that doesn’t make the NRA heroes. Far from it. This powerful lobby group has far too much influence in the U.S. government, pressing its “lofty” agenda:

Heston became NRA president in 1998 as the gun-rights group was overcoming a period of internal strife and facing run-ins with the administration of President Clinton. During his tenure, the NRA raised its membership to 4 million members. The group helped send a supportive President Bush to the White House and Republicans take control of Congress.

The NRA also pushed the U.S. House to pass legislation limiting lawsuits seeking damages against gun manufacturers and distributors this year and is gearing up to try and make sure a ban on assault weapons lapses next year in Congress.

Why anyone would need an assault rifle for any remotely legal purpose is beyond me.

The NRA spends billions of dollars a year to ensure that the right to bear arms is expanded at all costs. Sadly, these costs are much higher than monetary. The cost is in the scores of human lives lost each year thanks to the NRA’s radical agenda. I mean, when will people get it?

According to Elana S., I was the Site of the Day on RightWingNews.com.

I guess now would be a good time to re-state my positions on certain issues: Pro-choice, against religion in public schools, pro-gun control, and pro-social programs.

I will resist being labelled until the end!

In the time since I started this blog, I haven’t exactly shied away from controversy in my postings. But with all the issues being debated – Mideast politics, Concordia politics, the US and potential war on Iraq, terrorism – I seem to be getting the most critical e-mails about my post below on Jim Turnbull and the Canadian gun lobby.

Now, the gun registry’s got problems and it might not be the most popular viewpoint out there to oppose those opposing it, but come on, this is far from the most controversial topic that’s come up here! So I wondered why it’s getting so much attention. Then it came to me: because I’m pro-Israel, people assume I must be right-wing in my politics and that I’m therefore a supporter of what our neighbours to the south call the “right to bear arms”.

Simply put, I attracted a right-wing readership with my main topic of discussion, and then alienated them by doing a 180 on an issue that I happen to disagree with them about. Don’t get me wrong, I agree to disagree – some of the smartest bloggers I know want to toss the gun registry out the window (check out the links on the lefthand side of this page) and it’s not like I don’t understand where they’re coming from. But I have to ask sometimes: what does wanting more restrictions on gun ownership and licensing have to do with supporting Israel?

Anyone notice anything strange about those combinations? They don’t logically follow. And I categorically reject the idea that we need to pick a side and go along with all the pet issues that have come to represent one side or another.

In my FAQ, I specifically state that I don’t identify with either the Left or the Right. My views are simply my views, and I think that the real hypocritical thing is to change them simply because the political stage has shifted in one direction or another. If I said I was a Liberal, and tomorrow all Liberals decided that their new pet issue was opposing all people with orange socks, and I disagreed with that, then it would be silly to go along with it simply because of a label, wouldn’t it?

I take issue with the Left for its overspending of our tax dollars, its hatred of anything with a profit motive, and its absolutely disastrous foreign policy – especially when it comes to the Mideast, but in general as well.

I take issue with the Right for butting into our private lives in issues of abortion, gay rights, and religion, and its insistence that the right to own a gun is more important than the right for the next guy not to get shot, and its refusal to associate rights and freedoms with responsibilities.

Most of all, I take issue with people who assume that it’s a spectrum of “either-or” and that everyone has to pick one side or the other.

So I’m just going to keep on saying what I think, without worrying about whether it’s fashionable on the Left or on the Right, and trust that people out there reading can recognize the difference between labels and views. I also happen to hold an inkling – maybe naively idealistic – that if we can just get past these labels, and pick and choose the good from both sides, maybe we can get somewhere closer to where we want to be as a society.

Idiocy on the Left. NDP leadership candidate Bill Blaikie said Tuesday night in a debate that he thinks that US President Bush “is planning every minute of his life to kill as many Iraqi children as he can in the name of oil or whatever it is that’s really on the agenda.”

You gotta wonder how much of the marijuana he’s so eager to legalize he’s been smoking. At least with someone like Blaikie at the helm, the NDP isn’t likely to win too much new support.

Just in case you think I’m leaving anyone out . . .

Idiocy on the Right. This guy:

That’s pro-gun activist Jim Turnbull, the guy who’s cowboy hat is only slightly more ludicrous than his habit of borrowing slogans from the American NRA. The guy who urged Canadians to bring guns to a public meeting. Responsible gun ownership indeed! The guy who said: “And to all of you men who registered your firearms, when you go to bed tonight, put your hand in your pyjamas… and see if you can find some balls!” The above photo shows him being arrested for taking out an unlicensed gun in front of scores of police and waving it around. Has he been smoking some of Bill Blaikie’s supply?

The thing is, I sympathize when people complain about federal government overspending on the gun registry. It was supposed to cost $2 million, it’s costing over $1 billion. I get it, ok?

But what I don’t get are people who use that as an argument to scrap gun laws altogether. You don’t have the right to bear arms, okay? Individual rights end where the next guy’s rights begin, and he’s got a right to live without being shot.

Guns kill people. Period. And no legal-technical bullcrap is going to convince me that the gun nuts have got it right. Sorry, but I don’t get why we should protect someone like Jim Turnbull’s right to own a gun over the right of people everywhere to safety. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people?” Maybe, but guns are an incredibly efficient way to kill people.

Any otherwise law-abiding citizen who wants to own a hunting rifle to kill deer, well, fine, but quit whining about filling out a few forms. Maybe not all criminals will comply, but with a federal database containing most guns in the country, it will be a helluvalot easier for police to do their jobs. And if the issue is government overspending, fine, address it, but scrapping the entire idea of registring guns is just a lot of claptrap.

In the “stupidest reasoning to oppose the gun registry” category, this letter by Gerry Gamble in yesterday’s Gazette tops the list:

In addition, the vast majority of car accidents and deaths are caused by registered vehicles driven by licensed drivers. Obviously, licensing and registration has been unable to stop motor-vehicle mishaps. So will how registration have an impact on the use of dangerous firearms? The fact is, it won’t.

What Mr. Gamble obviously ignores is the reason behind registering motor vehicles. We don’t register them to prevent accidents; we register them to better be able to deal with accidents when they happen. Like guns, cars can be lethal weapons in the wrong hands. The idea is to keep track of whose hands they are, so that a vehicle involved in a crash – like a gun involved in a shooting – can be traced to its owner, and the owner punished.

I’m in favour of gun control laws, but I understand many of the arguments opposing the registry. Unfortunately, this one is just absurd.

A surge in violent crime in England has been raising eyebrows. Mark Steyn, in an attempt to dismiss gun control as ineffective that, incidentally, I disagree with, claims that within 2 years, the murder rate in London will exceed that in New York (via Damian Penny). And Tom’s comment was “Britain is falling apart. You might like to mention it in your blog.”

Well, Tom’s right, it does bear mentioning. In this past week alone there’s been a siege where police squared off with a hostage taker for over 11 days, negotiating and feeding the gunman Kentucky Fried Chicken. The hostage has been freed but the gunman is still refusing to surrender. Two women have been murdered, and their body parts found in plastic bags. Two men were stabbed to death in Bristol. A cab driver was murdered in Manchester. And the shooting deaths of two girls and injury of two others on New Year’s Eve who walked out of a club and into bullets apparently intended for gang rivals is leading to renewed calls for gun law reform.

Is there a full moon over there or something?

Charlton Heston, former Moses and poster boy for the NRA, got his own statue.

The statue, unveiled Tuesday night, shows the actor holding a lariat in one hand and a rifle in the other. It was donated by members of the National Rifle Association, an organization headed by Heston.

“I’m enormously impressed,” he told a crowd at the museum gala. “Indeed, I’m overwhelmed.

Granted, I’m no fan of Michael Moore and his ultra-left wing idiot politics, but you kinda got to at least admire the way he exposes the gun nuts and the NRA for the idiots they really are. Mr. Heston, I sure hope you’re proud of this honour, now be a patriotic American and go out and shoot someone!