It Boggles The Mind
Fallenmonk notes that Jon Kyl has returned to the roots of the American Republican Party, invoking the Dobbslins to defeat the evil Democrats. Barney Frank has been required to battle LaRouchskis. The Nine-Twelvers are everywhere, as long as it doesn’t interfere with watching their Dear Leader on Faux. The Limbaughians are ready to fill in the gap, and the militia weirdos are showing up where permitted by state laws, and pretending they are “bad and tough and ready for everything”.
[A personal note for the fool with the AR-15 slung on his shoulder in Arizona: if you don’t control the safety and the trigger, you stand a good chance of getting shot in the butt with your own gun. Real “bad” people are laughing at you. (see picture)]
So, what is the leader of the party doing to advance his agenda: calling religious leaders, to ask them to combat lies about his program.
Excuse me, that might be a logical move for a community organizer in Chicago, but it doesn’t cut it, when you are the President of the United States. You don’t get your message out by using “informed White House sources”, you either speak yourself or you appoint someone to speak for you on this issue, and you back what they are saying. Of course, it is hard to stay on message if you don’t have one, so why don’t you work on that and get back to us.
Update: News flash from Badtux 54% of Americans don’t know that Medicare is a government program!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9 comments
Real “bad” people are laughing at you.
Yes… yes, we certainly are! LMAO 😀
Update: News flash from Badtux 54% of Americans don’t know that Medicare is a government program!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is just a supposition… but you seem… surprised Bryan? 🙄 😉
WTF indeed, but unsurprising nevertheless. 🙂
Walking through a crowd with a weapon slung like that, I would be hard pressed not to scare the crap out of him. He’s obviously never had any real training, and based on the holster, he’s carrying it on his off side. There’s a Darwin Award with his name on it waiting to be awarded.
I expected maybe 40%, but a majority is beyond the pale. You have to ignore your pay stub, your tax forms, all of the stuff you sign when you get hired. The level of willful ignorance required to beyond reckoning. If you know anyone on Social Security, you would have to avoiding seeing the mountain of paperwork if they ever go to a doctor. Good Lord, when you hit 50, the AARP starts flooding your mailbox with flyers about the joys of joining and their great Medicare supplement policies. Medicare sends everyone in the system an instruction booklet every year explaining benefits.
Even the minimum of television I watch is filled with ads about Medicare this, and Medicare that.
This is really a stunning indictment of the total lack of awareness in this country.
This reminds me of the odd and unpleasant fact that in the Star Wars universe, light sabers do not have safeties, just a big switch that’s easy to flick on. *AND*, they’re carried by Jedi loosely at the belt, where they can be easily jostled. This seems like a situation ripe for an accident: “Reason there is Jedi cannot love. Find out you will.”
But George Lucas has an excuse. He writes bad movies. Slinging his characters’ weapons off the belt in an unsafe way is no big deal because, well, the weapon isn’t *real*. It’s fiction. Fake. Imaginary.
So what’s these guys’ excuse? Gah! The stupid! It burns, it burns!
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
.-= last blog ..Upcoming attractions =-.
With any luck only other gun nuts will be around when something “untoward” happens.
My problem is that one of the happiest days in my life was when I was no longer required to carried a gun. They are a real PITA, especially in a crowd or using a public restroom. I have a hard time imagining people who want to put up with one.
If you are going to do it, you really should take a few training courses, or better yet, do a tour as an 11B or Marine and really learn to love your weapon.
My problem is that one of the happiest days in my life was when I was no longer required to carried a gun.
Yup! Same here. When I got my security license a couple years ago, they of course had checked my record and found that I’d had assorted weapons training, so they wanted me to do a 1-day *refresher* (required) so they could add on my license that I was qualified to carry a weapon. I said no way! They seemed confused by my refusal. People don’t seem to understand that for someone like me to carry a firearm and a situation arises wherein my first instinct (and by training) would be to use the firearm, and someone *will* end up dead. Without it, I tend to be much more aware of my surroundings and know where I can get out of someone’s line of fire. A few people have asked me when we are walking somewhere why I am always looking around and my eyes are always moving, even in places I know, I usually reply: “Habit”. 🙂
I’m one of the last people who should be given a firearm, because some idiot will force me to use it. Firearms have a nasty habit of attracting idiots, like moth’s to a flame.
I’m still pissed that the sneaky b*st*rds put “Griffin Coordinator” on my license (Project Griffin is a UK/Aus Anti-terrorism program that binds security personnel, police and anti-terrorist specialists together in the case of a terrorist event.) I even got a high-visibility pretty orange vest with a red griffin logo on the front, and bright white “Coordinator” on the back. I told them just to put a bulls-eye on them and be honest about it. Morons. If I were in a mall or someplace crowded and some terrorist event was taking place, I’d pick a likely looking idiot, tell them to wear the pretty vest and walk around. I’d soon find out where the nasties are. 😈
I keep telling the powers-that-be that I’m not interested in their stupid games and I don’t want to play anymore. Maybe, if I take out a few of them, they’ll believe me.
There are too many people in this world who fail to understand that guns are tools, not toys. They are not large jewelry or membership pins. They have specific, but limited uses.
If you can’t honestly says that you are comfortable killing, don’t own one, because you are setting yourself up to be a “non-profit arms dealer”, i.e. someone who is willing to kill will take it away. They are as dangerous as a circular saw. You wouldn’t let a 4-year-old use a circular saw, so why have a weapon where a child can get it [which is generally anywhere but in a locked cabinet]?
Americans have this cowboy myth built-in, that is hard to deal with for normal people. We never had as many guns in this country as people think. The people who settled out West had rifles from service in the Civil War that were used for hunting more than protection. Only officers had revolvers, so they weren’t very common, and were expensive. The truth doesn’t matter; the facts don’t matter; all that matters is the myth.
These are the same fools who believe the myth that militia armed with Pennsylvania rifles played a major role in the U.S. victory in the American Revolution. Uhm, no. After the initial battles around Boston, the militia were worthless except as skirmishers who fired one shot and then ran for home, contributing to victory in only one battle (Cowpens) where General Morgan put them with their backs to a river so they *couldn’t* run and had to fight. George Washington, after the disasters of Long Island and Manhattan, remarked in his letters to Congress that militia was useless and they needed to give him more professional soldiers or the war was going to be lost. In the end the American War of Secession (it wasn’t really a revolution because it was waged by the duly elected governments of the colonies against their central government) was won by professionally trained soldiers with professional military weapons (smoothbore muskets with bayonets mounted, and the bayonets *were* used as a primary weapon), not by rag-tag militia. And even there, the main reason it was won was because the British Crown went bankrupt and lost the ability to hire new soldiers to replace those lost to desertion, defeat, or disease, not because of anything that happened on the battlefield — Cornwallis’s army was less than 1/10th of the soldiers Britain had on the North American continent at the time. But once the money lenders cut off the Crown because the Crown was no longer capable of paying even the interest on the outrageous government debt, it was all over. But people still continue to believe the myths…
People have no idea how expensive a rifle was at the time, and how few firearms of any type there were in the colonies. Most of the battles in the Mohawk Valley were waged with spears, clubs, and farm tools, because that is what was available to both sides. The long range weapons were the bows carried by the Iroquois, with the tribes split in their loyalties. There were a few “fowling pieces”, and some pistols and swords among the elite, but you had to buy gunpowder, flint, and lead, and farmers had better uses for what small profits they made.
I am aware of only one of my relatives who fought in the Revolution actually owning a firearm. He lost it when he was captured by Tories, but escaped because the Tories gave it to the man who was guarding him. What the Tories didn’t know was that the musket didn’t work, so the relative escaped, being much more “fleet of foot” than his guard, who wasted time trying to get the musket to fire. The relative was taking it to the only semi-sort-of gunsmith in the area when he was captured. [that’s in a family history, but I think he went into the woods to tie one on and lost the musket. He was Dutch, and everyone knows what drinkers they are according to the English Methodists in the family.]
Real history isn’t half as exciting as what’s written.
Virtually all of the weapons the colonists had were leftover militia weapons from the French and Indian Wars of twenty years previous i.e. British military issue weapons, or captured from overrun arsenals, or French or Spanish muskets that the governors of Louisiana and Haiti were quick to ship over. That’s what the vast majority of everybody, milita and regulars both, ended up armed with, i.e. military smoothbore muskets mounting bayonets — NOT rifles.
Rifles simply were not militarily useful other than as sniper weapons due to the slow rate of fire (roughly two minutes to pound a new bullet into the lands) and fouling caused by the lousy black powder of the day which limited you to only five or six shots before having to stop and clean the thing because the lands were so fouled you couldn’t even get a bullet to pound into them anymore. And of course no bayonet, which was a problem since most battles were won by the bayonet in those days due to the short range of muskets and the slow reloading time of rifles. The tactics at Lexington and Concord where a British column was mauled by sniping from behind trees wasn’t repeatable, because the colonials were sniping at a column which was not prepared for war, did not have its skirmishers with it, and wasn’t ready to do battle. Every subsequent attempt to do the same thing resulted in the slaughter or desertion of the colonial militia, because the British simply charged the wall, took it, then rolled up the line on its flank, skewering hapless colonials on their bayonets as they went. See: Long Island, Battle of. Slaughter.
But try to point out to people that with the technology of the day, conventional military tactics were the only way to win a war — guerrilla tactics as such merely served to harass provisioning parties and make it difficult for the British to provision themselves, useful but no war-winner given near-total British control of the seas — and you’re accused of some base heresy. Because everybody “knows” that it was ordinary citizens with civilian rifles sniping from behind trees that won the War of American Secession. Sigh! So many things we “know” to be true, that aren’t!
– Badtux the Gun Penguin
.-= last blog ..Morons with Guns =-.