Second Amendment March

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

Greetings, all -- I was at the March, yesterday. That is, I was at the real one on the Mall, not the spinoff across the river.  A week or two ago, in a discussion of Tea Partiers, I had a brief dialogue with squidb0i  about the 2A March. He said that in the absence of credible threats to gun rights, the 2A March was simply a front for "teabaggers".

With that in mind, I kept a conscious eye out for TEA Party type signs, pamphlets, handouts, etc.  Attendance was in the high hundreds, maybe over a thousand. I wandered around and saw most of the crowd at one time or another. There were 2-3, maybe 4 signs that could be interpreted as TEA Party related.  There was one sign for the John Birch Society, back in the back. There was one religious nutjob, and a couple of Third Way whackos. That's it, out of a LOT of people. Everybody else there was attending to promote gun rights.  

There was a certain amount of mockery directed at outfits like the SPLC, mostly by people like Nicky Stallard of the Pink Pistols, and Kenn Blanchard aka Black Man With A Gun(tm).  The SPLC had apparently labeled a number of the organizations there as "hate groups", including Oathkeepers.  Nicky pointed out that it was pretty stupid to call 2A advocates racists or homophobes, considering that she and Kenn were speaking.  All in all, a good time was had by those attending, and I got to see and meet some of the icons of the gun rights movement.  I even got to give Dick Heller one of my empty-holster flags: an L-shaped piece of red posterboard, with a sticker showing the DC flag and "Disarmament Without Protection". He was amused.

Comments

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

Equate NOT torturing someone with coddling them and you get called on it.
Then please, enlighten me. Instead of this endless circle of insults, why don't you tell me what your alternative would be. I'm all ears, because I've gained little insight as to your opinion of it after reading your blog. I found one entry on Dawali and another on figures in the Spanish Inquisition. Also, nothing on supporting our troops. I guess that means I can use the same strawman argument against you, right? Because you don't talk about supporting our troops, you "cheer on" the people in the anti-war crowd who call them "terrorists", huh? Typical...

[usekh.livejournal.com]

They are, by several orders of magnitude, used more for self-defense than for crime.
Interesting, are you talking about guns -actively- being used for self defense here?

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

Yes. Criminal misuse of guns runs around 100,000-200,000 per year, roughly. Estimated defensive uses are around 2,000,000. In 99.9% of those cases, the gun isn't fired and nobody gets hurt. That's why studies that only compare dead bad guys to dead crime victims, are bogus.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Estimated by whom?

[3fgburner.livejournal.com]

http://www.guncite.com/gcdgklec.html for the source.

Going by the description, that's Gary Kleck's work. That's the best-done national survey of defensive gun use.

[paft.livejournal.com]

PFT: Equate NOT torturing someone with coddling them and you get called on it.
MVL: Then please, enlighten me. Instead of this endless circle of insults, why don't you tell me what your alternative would be.

My god. You honestly think NOT torturing someone is the same as "coddling" them. Sick. Especially from someone who calls herself a Christian. Who would Jesus torture, do you think?

You write as though NOT torturing someone has never been tried, as though I'm proposing something completely new. I'm not. In reality, our methods of interrogation in the past did not include a policy of torture, and yet somehow, we managed to prosecute wars successfully.

What it generally involved was establishing some level of rapport and trust with the prisoner. (Yes, I know that kind of spoils it for people who like torture but hey -- are you interested in successfully interrogating someone, or in getting your jollies by hurting them?) This does not mean putting the prisoner up in a hotel and giving him or her massages. It does mean an interrogator negotiating with them often across a table, convincing them that it's in their best interest to tell what they know.

Sorry to spoil things for you, I mean, you being a moral Christian and all who just loves her some torture.