Still With The Deafness of Tone

It's been almost two week since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut and the Right is continuing merrily along with their complete deafness of tone. They just don't get it. This one is different and, like the last election, they're are going to learn yet another hard lesson. Even Frank Luntz thinks so.

“The public wants guns out of the schools, not in the schools,” Luntz said on CBS’s “This Morning.” “And they are not asking for a security official or someone else. I don’t think the NRA is listening. I don’t think they understand most Americans would protect the Second Amendment rights and yet agree with the idea that not every human being should own a gun, not every gun should be available at anytime, anywhere, for anyone. At gun shows, you should not be able to buy something there without any kind of check whatsoever.” 

That's right. There are plenty of people that should not own guns. I think this incident (as well as the rest of them this year) illustrate that if you increase the number of people carrying weapons, you are going to increase the chances of irresponsible gun ownership. It shouldn't simply be that people who have criminal records should not own guns. Many people with mental illness or people who live folks who have mental disabilities should not own guns either.

I don't think the gun rights folks (and many others on the Right) realize how Orwellian they sound. The irony is hilarious when you consider how much they rip the left for doublespeak. The answer to gun violence is...MORE GUNS, damnit!!

War is Peace...

What the Right really wants is to (ahem) do it again only harder. They are using this as an opportunity to see if they can gain any ground on what they view as "Slaughter Zones" (AKA Gun Free Zones). They want to be able to carry their guns wherever they want, including schools. It's a chest thumping, juvenile maneuver which serves to further their "fuck you, dad/stomp down the hallway/bedroom door slam" agenda of being pissed off at rules they don't like. Never mind the rest of us.

The only guns I want in schools are the ones carried by police officers (yet another group the Right sneer at as not "having any real training" which is basically code for insecurity and envy). Schools are public property which means that the public gets to decide what goes on in our schools. With private property, gun owners can kindly go fuck themselves if they want to beef about gun free zones. The health club I go to, for example, has a few malcontents who bitch about not being able to bring their guns in when they lift weights (how would that work, exactly?). Perhaps they should choose another place to go rather than gripe.

Doubling down is what they do lately, though, and it continues to cost them elections. This won't be any different. They underestimate the president and worse, the public, who has a growing distaste for some guns, as Mr. Luntz notices above. He's a right wing pollster so if he's saying it, they are in big fucking trouble. And it won't be because (cue high pitched shrieking) Barack Obama is going to be a "gun grabber." Actually, they're not really in "trouble" either...only the way they see it...the world (gasp!) changing and that simply won't do.

In fact, I pretty much guarantee that three things are going to come out of all of this. First, people will get to keep the guns they own (if they choose not to sell them back to the federal government, that is, for a very good price:)). Second, plenty of guns will be available for people to use to defend themselves.

And third, the Right is going to be a mouth foaming pile of apoplexis.