Grey Matters

If someone beats a victim to death, we don’t blame the cudgel or the perpetrator’s boot. If he knifes someone, we do not blame the knife. But shoot someone with a gun and the call goes out for more gun control.

The anti-rights folks have a very special antipathy for firearms. So much so that they form groups to lobby against them. (Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Women Against Gun Violence, Parents Against Gun Violence, Bishops Against Gun Violence, etc.) It is telling that they do not aim to address the causes of the violence, they only seek to restrict access to the means. They ignore the causes and go straight to the snake-oil cure — more gun control. They apparently do not understand the causes of violence generally and maybe they just don’t care about violence, only “gunviolence.”

They are typically ill-informed. I just read an article claiming it has been “illegal” for civilians in the USA to own a fully-automatic weapon since 1986. It isn’t. They typically exhibit ignorance (or deceptiveness) by conflating semi-auto and full-auto weapons. That’s been on-going for decades. Their most common deception, from back in the heyday of the 1994 “assault weapons” ban, is to call semiautomatic rifles “assault weapons”.

The more honest anti-gunners invented a new term: “semi-automatic assault weapon” because, well, a semi-automatic weapon cannot honestly be called an assault weapon. True assault weapons have a full-auto mode or a three-round burst mode. Semi-automatic weapons do not (though true assault weapons do have a semi-automatic mode).

If you wish to call semi-automatic rifles “assault weapons,” you may as well go all in and just claim they are “machine guns”. After all, they are like machine guns — except for the lack of a full auto mode.

The NRA and others refer to AR-15 pattern weapons as “modern sporting rifles” and that makes perfect sense (certainly more sense than “assault weapons”) because the AR-15 is the most widely used weapon in recreational shooting sports and competitions. It is rarely used in crime.

The Boston Globe reported that 411 people had been killed by “assault rifles” since the “assault weapons” ban was lifted in 2004. NOAA says that over the last 20 years, an average of 51 people were killed each year by lightning strikes.

Is it a problem that the occasional nut-job or jihadist decides to kill as many people as he can? Yes, obviously. But it does not justify the huge amount of effort put into fretting over “gun control.” You’re 1.5 times more likely to be killed by lightning than an “assault weapon.”

And it certainly is not justification for infringing even further the Right to Keep and Bear Arms “protected” by the Constitution.

Ask yourself this: Why did no one at the Pulse in Orlando shoot back? Why was the perpetrator able to shoot over 100 people with impunity?

Answer that honestly and you will have both pinpointed the problem and the cure.

This fellow had to surrender his tie tack to security.

Such cannot possibly be any less than an *actual* phobia.

Hey, what ever happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi? I kinda miss them. The Middle East wasn’t exactly peaceful, but it was more peaceful than today more stable.

I’m crossing my fingers that Assad holds onto Syria.

I recently opined that race, religion and even nationality are insignificant compared to culture. I was asked, “What do you think culture is?”

In a broad sense, to me, culture is how we live. It’s an amalgam of religion, customs, beliefs, practices and whatnot. Culture is way more important that race, religion or nationality in shaping a person’s attitudes.

We mix cultures at our peril. Take immigrants from Russia when the USSR held sway, for example. They were brought up believing (they were propagandized) that America is a terrible place, that capitalism is exploitive, that the police cannot be trusted and that the only way to get rich is to be corrupt, therefore rich people are all corrupt, among other things.

Then they come to America and damn near everyone seems to be richer than they were back in the USSR. They are likely to consider their “rich” neighbors corrupt and decadent. They are unlikely to cooperate with police investigations, etc.

Culture is what we are taught. Take a young child and raise him as a Viking or an Apache warrior and he will be a Viking or Apache warrior, no matter his origin.

There are places where kids are taught in school that America is the Great Satan and it is as much a part of them as what and how to worship a $Deity. Bring them to America and their culture will still inform their actions.

What the evening news loves to call “home grown terrorists” are, to an alarming degree, Muslims who are first generation Americans, born in the USA to Muslim immigrants. Or recent converts to Islam. Their Muslim culture and beliefs affect their actions.

Put a teaspoon of wine into a barrel of sewage and you still have a barrel of sewage. But put a teaspoon of sewage into a barrel of wine and you have a barrel of sewage.

America was once the strongest country in the world both militarily and economically because people who came here from other countries assimilated. With minor variations, we are pretty much an American culture. But if people come here with no intention of assimilating, if they come here for the express purpose of imposing their culture on us, we’re in trouble. It is cultural suicide.

American or “western” culture exists in far-flung places all over the world, having been adopted by people who saw it and liked it, accepting it as part of their own. They are able to pick and choose which parts of American culture to adopt as their own, be it movies, rap music, or wearing their ball caps backwards. The French may balk at words like “email,” “fast food,” “blog,” and “hashtag,” (best to check with their General Commission for Terminology) but American culture exists in France without having been imposed on them.

Contrast that with Islam being forced on Europeans by immigrant Muslims. In England, Belgium and France, there are no-go zones where unassimilated Muslims prohibit entry of non-Muslims. They came to conquer and have established a beachhead. If there are not already, there will be Muslim controlled zones to America soon.

I watched a six-part YouTube series on the rise of radicals in Europe. While acknowledging the rise of what we call “radical” Muslims (devout Muslims who follow the teachings of their prophet), the reporter was much more concerned with what she called European extremists and the “extreme right” in Europe. Nationalist movements are arising all over Europe in response to Muslim jihadists and she finds this alarming, blaming the rise of “radical” Muslims on these nationalist movements. She says the radicalization of Muslim youth is the result of Europe’s failure to assimilate them. But they do not want to be assimilated. They want nothing to do with European values. They follow the Koran and want only Islam and Sharia. She is, IMHO, “blaming the victim” and putting the cart before the horse, as we in American culture sometimes say.

Culture is the whole ball of wax. It is the whole enchilada. Sure, there are subcultures within any given culture, like the “car culture” and gang culture that exist in America. Culture is what our children are taught and experience. It is who we are. Sometimes, a different culture is adopted later in life as well.

When a woman’s head was hacked off in an act of “workplace violence” by one Alton Nolen (who had converted to Islam, adopted the name Jah’Keem Yisrael and posted photos of Osama Bin Laden and other Jihadists to his FaceBook page), one must ask from where he got the idea of beheading the victim. It is not something we teach in American culture. He’d been trying to convert coworkers to Islam in recent weeks and had posted warnings to infidels on his FaceBook page.

He beheaded one woman, killed a second and was then shot by a company official who happened to be carrying his personal firearm.

Because no official connection could be found to ISIS or other extremist groups, it was chalked up to “workplace violence” instead of Islamic terrorism. Whatever it was that he was yelling in Arabic, I’m sure it was something about working conditions or some such.

You probably didn’t see news coverage because it was just workplace violence and there were only two people killed, it having been stopped at two by an armed citizen. (If he’d shot the two victims instead of using a kitchen knife, it may have been more widely reported. Then again, maybe not, given that an armed citizen stopped it. We wouldn’t want to give citizens the idea that they should be defending themselves all willy-nilly.)

Nolen didn’t just stab the first woman to death, he hacked at her neck until she was beheaded. Isn’t there a verse in the Koran (47:4) about “smiting the necks” of infidels? From which culture did Nolen get his ideology?

Culture is all-important. We should choose with care which cultures we allow to dilute our own.

Hillary Clinton and others are constantly railing against the Gun Culture. She has no idea what that is.

The mere possession or use of firearms does not make one a member of the gun culture any more than owning an automobile makes you a member of the Car Culture or a Car Nut.

If you were a member of the gun culture, you’d know it. The gun culture is busy working up special loads for each of our rifles and loading the ammo ourselves, trying out different powders and primers. We’re debating barrel twist rates for a given weight projectile and trying different recoil buffer weights. And asking questions like: “Hey, anyone tried one of those buffers containing containing powdered tungsten?” They’re sharing information like I did yesterday, introducing a fellow to my Uzi, explaining how an “open bolt” firearm works and then letting him try it out.

Education and trigger time. Yesterday, I’d been testing some newly acquired surplus magazines for proper function with three different bullet weights. I found out that Uzi does not feed flat-nosed 147 grain cartridges. Now I know better then to load flat-nosed rounds in Uzi mags. Here’s hoping that my other 9mm weapons like the flat noses better.

We conduct classes on how to sight in a rifle’s optical ‘scope and adjusting iron sights on a pistol. We have competitions. And we practice. A lot. We have gun safes. And holsters. We don’t shove our pistols into our waistbands. We are careful and safety conscious. Here’s my version of The Four Rules of basic firearm safety.

And we mourn more than most people when a Bad Guy guns down an innocent because we know that people like Hillary will blame us and use it to further erode this constitutionally protected right.

Hillary hasn’t clue one about the gun culture she excoriates. She ignores the culture of violence created by the social-welfare state and instead blames inanimate objects for “gun violence” even saying that “gun violence” is caused by guns being “too easy” to get, despite it being much easier to buy a gun 50 years ago than it is now.

So she’s either stupid or she’s lying. I lean toward the latter.