Originally Posted by Odin

Yes, and we'll just keep arresting pot smokers! That will stop people using drugs!

What did Einstein say about insanity? Keeping doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The Nanny Statists tried it with alcohol, didn't work. They tried it with mind-altering drugs, has not worked. When are the Nanny Statists gonna figure out that trying to ban everything they disprove of doesn't work?

When you can grow guns in the woods, your analogy will be true ... but not before.

Originally Posted by Galen

Eric, you might try reading this article I found on Yahoo: http://www.associatedcontent.com/art...an.html?cat=17

In particular read the articles at the end. When Australia and Great Britain banned guns violent crime of all types increased. There is no correlation with gun control and lower crime rates and there never has been. Odin is right about this but your phobia will not let you see it.

The Boomers strike again with yet another solution that will fail like all of the others.

Just so you know, the violent crime rate was on the rise here at the same time, due in part to the emerging generation - Gen X. Investigate further, though. The US is alone in the advanced world in murders and manslaughter, due to the ability to do the deed safely from a distance. Try killing someone with a knife, if you think that's the same as standing back 10 paces and banging away.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/16/a...ins.print.html

It was an outdoor political event, held in grim economic times, and the gunman had the perfect angle. He got off five shots at close range. Had a woman not jostled his arm and an alert bystander not tackled him before he could reload, Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant and unemployed bricklayer, almost certainly would have assassinated President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose paralyzed legs left him unable to run for cover.


The shooting in Miami in 1933, which left the mayor of Chicago dead, took place two weeks before FDR was sworn in as president at the depth of the Depression. Roosevelt, who was not especially popular before the attack, suddenly was seen across the country as having been spared by God for a purpose. His New Deal program sailed through Congress in his storied first 100 days, a sign that even failed assassination attempts can shape our politics. Like so many American assassins, Zangara was delusional; he said he shot Roosevelt because “my stomach hurts.”


President Obama was right last week to focus his thoughts—and ours—on the victims of the Tucson rampage and the lives they led. Those who gathered that day were doing something fundamentally American: they were meeting with their elected representative at a “Congress on Your Corner” event, participating in the give-and-take of the democratic process. For nearly 200 years, Americans have also been rightly haunted by that strange subspecies of citizen that is their opposite: those who see killing political leaders as a better form of self-expression. They are a sorry lot, mostly a collection of sexually frustrated loners and misfits united only by their common background in social isolation. But they, too, are a longstanding part of the American fabric.


They may have something to teach the rest of us, however unintentionally, about the consequences of our atomized country. Where political violence in other countries is nearly always associated with extremist movements, religious fundamentalism, or criminal organizations, American assassins are usually peculiar stalkers defined less by ideology than vague political and personal grievances.


Jared Lee Loughner would seem to be just the latest to fit this American profile. The 22-year-old gunman killed six people, including federal Judge John Roll and 9-year-old Christina Green, and wounded 14, among them Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Wielding a Glock semiautomatic, the assassin fired 30 rounds in a few seconds outside a Tucson supermarket. His mugshot, with that twisted smile and weirdly sparkling eyes, told you almost everything you needed to know about the coherence of his motives.


The brilliance of our Constitution and the political system it shaped has always rested uneasily beside a troubling tradition of lethal violence. This nation was born in armed revolution, an idea not lost on Loughner or most of the other assassins of the past. We carved a frontier and pushed Native Americans off their lands with the gun, which assumed a mythic place in America’s definition of itself. The dismissive “cowboy” critique so popular abroad is a cartoon; winning the West has a more winning quality than the revisionists allow. But even Americans who cherish their Second Amendment protections must know that these rights have at times eased the path to mayhem. So does our refusal to confront the stigma of mental illness with the funding and laws necessary to keep paranoid schizophrenics in treatment.


The Tucson shootings wounded all members of the collective American family, so ably represented by the president last week. But for those over 50, assassination carries a special dread. The nearly two decades between President Kennedy’s murder in Dallas in 1963 and the attempt on President Reagan’s life in Washington in 1981 were something approaching an Age of Assassination. Among prominent figures killed, wounded, or shot at in those years were Malcolm X (1965), James Meredith (1966), Martin Luther King (1968), Robert F. Kennedy (1968), George Wallace (1972), President Gerald Ford (twice in 1975), George Moscone and Harvey Milk (1978), Vernon Jordan (1980), and John Lennon (1980).


Since the attempt on Reagan, presidents have been relatively safe, even as mentally disturbed gunmen sprayed their bullets more randomly at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and elsewhere. It’s more difficult than ever for potential assassins to penetrate the Secret Service, which has developed sophisticated ways of protecting the president and his family. As recently as the 1970s, it was possible for invited guests to enter presidential events without going through metal detectors. Now even his closest aides had best not forget their IDs. (Party crashers who managed to attend a state dinner in 2009 led to an even greater tightening of security.) But members of Congress, governors, and celebrities are still accessible to the public. The fear today is that copycat assassins or mentally unstable individuals, feasting on a steady diet of vitriol, may initiate a new round of prolonged political violence.


It’s often impossible to cite specific, direct causes for individual episodes of mayhem. Most people can hear repeated references to comments like “If not ballots, bullets” (Florida radio talk-show host Joyce Kaufman) or “Tiller is a baby killer” (a reference to Dr. George Tiller, murdered by an anti-abortion activist) or “Second Amendment remedies” (Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle) and do nothing violent. Still, Arizona alone is home to roughly 21,000 schizophrenics, according to the calculations of Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and about 10 percent of them are potentially dangerous. When they explode, they could be responding to the voices in their heads, or the voices on the radio (or in books and online), or, most likely, some cacophony of voices within and without.


An “Insurrectionism Timeline” posted by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence cites more than 100 examples of incitement (gun sights on congressional maps weren’t threatening enough to make the list) and direct threats of bodily harm in the last two and a half years. Just two days before the Tucson attack, police arrested a man for threatening to shoot members of the staff of Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado. Three days after Giffords and the others were attacked, police took a man into custody after he allegedly made threatening phone calls to the office of Rep. Jim McDermott, suggesting he deserved to die for voting against the extension of the Bush tax cuts.


Loughner’s motives were less coherent, but that doesn’t mean his heinous act was nonpolitical. This was not a case of a lunatic going berserk and shooting up a random shopping center. Loughner felt aggrieved by what he considered to be Giffords’s failure to answer a question he asked her at a previous community meeting in 2007. He obsessed over his desire for vengeance (“Die bitch!” read one of the missives recovered from his personal possessions) and apparently plotted the attack in advance. By aiming for a political leader, he moved from the ranks of mass murderer to assassin.


The Tucson gunman’s web rants (“It’s possible to overthrow a government and change the currency,” he wrote on Earth Empires, an online forum) are typical of the mixture of paranoid delusion and crackpot politics that has long characterized American assassins. Like so many of his infamous predecessors, Loughner didn’t finish school, couldn’t hold a job (he lost his position as a volunteer dog walker because he insisted on walking the dogs near a toxic-waste dump), engaged in petty lawbreaking (defacing traffic signs), and underwent a rapid personality transformation not long before his monstrous act.


Abroad, the maladjusted are more likely to be watched over by families that have lived in the same towns for generations. But the United States has always been a rootless place. In the 20th century, of those trying so desperately to change history by shooting the president, only Lee Harvey Oswald had a wife, children, and a steady job at the time he pulled the trigger. Looking back further, only John Wilkes Booth, a major stage actor, had a successful career before his crime. And despite the conspiracy theories that pop up after every presidential assassination attempt, only Booth was part of a proven plot. He was more like an assassin from another country, as in some ways he was—the Confederacy.


A few other assassinations were also largely political. George Clark, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, shot James Hinds, a Reconstruction-era congressman from Arkansas—the only member of the House of Representatives ever to be assassinated. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz killed President William McKinley in 1901, and in 1954, Puerto Rican separatists were arrested after they opened fire on the floor of Congress, wounding five members of the House in what today would be called an act of terrorism. The 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, who pulled the trigger in a Los Angeles hotel on the first anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, might be seen in the same political category.


Almost every other American assassination has been at least partly the product of mental illness, which often surfaces or worsens between ages 18 and 30, when young people leave home for the first time and confront the stress of adulthood. Cultural influences have played an unpredictable role. Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon after being heavily influenced by J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and John Hinckley Jr. wounded President Reagan and his press secretary, Jim Brady, in an effort to impress the actress Jodie Foster when she was attending Yale. Foster had played a child prostitute involved with Travis Bickle, the unhinged assassin played by Robert De Niro in the 1976 film Taxi Driver.


“These types of assassins, these American boys, are really reflective of the youthfulness of our culture,” says Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, which was influenced by the story of Arthur Bremer, who paralyzed Governor Wallace for life. “America is a relatively young country, and particularly young men still think that, as Americans, the world should be theirs. And if it isn’t, there’s somebody else to blame.”


A disproportionate number of assassins were bullied or excluded as children or young adults. “In junior high I was an object of pure ridicule,” Bremer recounted in the years before his 2007 parole. Charles Guiteau, who assassinated President James A. Garfield in 1881 after he refused to offer him an ambassadorship for which he had no qualifications, had earlier joined a utopian religious sect called the Oneida Community. But the perfect world its adherents envisioned didn’t include presumptuous oddballs like Guiteau, who was nicknamed “Charles Gitout.”


The rage this kindles sometimes can’t be contained. At 12, Oswald threatened his half-brother’s wife with a knife and struck his mother. A psychiatric assessment when he was young described his “vivid fantasy life, turning on the topics of omnipotence and power, through which he tries to compensate for his present shortcomings and frustrations.” At her sentencing, Sara Jane Moore, who fired at Gerald Ford, described her attempt as “a correct expression of my anger.” Schrader sees a pattern: “If you’re filled with feelings of anger and self-loathing, you want to blame someone else. And people in the public eye are the ones that touch you because they’re bigger than life. They’re your surrogate parents.”


The bounty of America, more than its hardships, can worsen the pain.



“Democracy can be cruel to misfits,” says Charles Peters, the 84-year-old founder of The Washington Monthly. “The reason it’s cruel is you’re told you can be anything, and there’s enough evidence around you of people getting ahead that you believe it’s true. So when you don’t, it’s crushing. The more democratic a society, the more humiliating the failure.”




In his Tucson speech, the president reminded the nation that “in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame, but rather how well we have loved.” That warm generosity of spirit—in addition to freedom and ambition, mobility and innovation, and yes, individual isolation—is a vital part of what defines America. No assassin can ever take that away, if we don’t let him.

Originally Posted by Odin

Thanks for that article.

IMO violence has nothing to do with guns, it has to do with poverty and culture. We Upper-Midwesterners like our guns, but we are not a violent culture.

I'd say some of the problems small towns have are drugs, teenage pregnancy, and domestic violence. In the city some of their main problems include, crime, gangs, and substandard education in the public schools. But the root of these problems can probably all be traced back to the same thing, poverty. The symptoms of poverty may not play out exactly the same in the small towns as they do in the city, but the source is the same. And maybe it is cultural. But with the exception of some mental illnesses, I think we can chalk up a lot the problems we have with violence in our society to poverty.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

The implication of a philosophy that shuns violence at all costs is "might makes right". It's a bit of the dichotomy we're seeing between the strident right and conciliatory left. Yes, threats of violence can lead to real violence, but failing to stand firm against those threats merely guarantees that, having proven their worth, threats will be used all the time. Eventually, they have to be addressed or the situation deteriorates into an end state no one wants.

My words on non-violent civil war are drawing some odd reactions.

Eric thought I meant I wanted peaceful secession. I do not.

What I am saying is that although the right pushes gun ownership and uses violent rhetoric--and I agree with the Newsweek article above that their rhetoric contributes to the decision of a young lone nut to target a Democratic political event and Congresswoman, instead of, say, his school--the right is winning this new civil war largely by political means, using a degraded form of American democracy and appeals to various strong emotions. And if they bring it off, as they seem to be doing, I am willing to accept their triumph during this crisis rather than advocate opposing it violently. I am not suggesting actual violence should not be dealt with, but I think it will remain very small-scale. And I do think that maintaining our democratic structure is a value in itself, even if I do not like the existing result. Just the idealist in me, I suppose.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Most if not all ideologues have their hearts in the right place. They really do believe that they know what is best for everyone else.

As there is more than a little truth in the above, one might want to consider if someone who thinks he knows best for everyone and is ready to act on that assumption has his heart in the right place.

While I haven't been following the gun statistics lately, I did during the height of the Culture Wars. At that time the US murder and other violent crime statistics involving whites, asians, and most other races was right in line with Europe. It was the black on black crime rates that were so absurdly high that the over all crime rate for Americans was well above the norm for developed countries.

At that time, it was not true that Americans have a gun culture and a violent culture. It was the black inner city population that had a gun culture and violent culture. Drugs and gang related violence was a large part of this.

For whatever reason, neither side of the gun debate addressed this statistic. It hasn't come up in this reprise of the discussion either. The gun problem in the United States is not a problem of our gun control laws. Poverty, race and drugs are far more important. At a guess, the conservatives do not want the government spending money on poverty and race issues, while the 'progressives' would rather pass gun control laws than try to resurrect anything at all reminiscent of LBJ's Great Society. If so, this is prudent of the Democrats, as the Great Society was a mess and the 'austerity' mood of the country is no where near in tune for anything at all like the Great Society.

Anyway, gun control is going nowhere in the immediate future. I anticipate that the most extreme local gun control efforts disarming the law abiding in urban areas will be rolled back considerably by the individual rights interpretation of the 2nd. Concealed Carry laws will slowly be implemented in rural conservative areas. The world will not end as these laws are put in place.

And as long as the issues of race, drugs and poverty are isolated from the gun debate, nothing really meaningful in a pragmatic real world sense is being said. The gun control advocates will continue to misinterpret the statistics. The gun rights advocates will talk about how the Founding Fathers had perfect values, set firmly and unchangeably in the Constitution. The results will be values lock and nothing really changing.

CNet reports that just In time for Valentine's Day: Bullet-shaped flash drives. For discussion purposes, and to induce decent people to retch.

Is there a design school somewhere that instructs students on creating goofy USB flash drives?

Bullet-shaped flash drives retail for between $14 and $21. (Credit: Active Media)

We've seen drives shaped in the form of engagement rings, bones, lighters, car keys, and skulls. We now get a drive in the shape of a silver .22 caliber bullet.

The tech trinket comes from Active Media Products and is presumably marketed for the NRA crowd or those people who, maybe as a result of the glut of bad teen-horror TV programming, fear werewolf attacks.

"The Bullet-2 drive is the ultimate USB drive because it is rugged, reliable, waterproof, dust-proof," Active Media wrote in a press release. This new drive retails for about $14 at Amazon for a 4GB model and $21 for the 8GB.

At a time when the country has been rocked recently by high-profile gun violence, one might think Active Media's marketing department would have put the kibosh on a release now. But apparently bullet-shaped USB drives are a hot commodity.

Before the .22-caliber model, the company offered a drive shaped like a .50 caliber bullet.

Gotta post this latest news from today.

LOS ANGELES —

Two people were shot accidentally at a Los Angeles high school on Tuesday morning when a student dropped a backpack containing a gun, MSNBC cable television reported.

One victim was reported in serious condition and one in critical condition in the incident at Gardena High School, MSNBC reported.

A Los Angeles Unified School District spokesman gave the same account to KCBS-TV and said the gunman was in custody.

The account differs from information from Gardena police, who said earlier that three people were wounded and the shooter was at large.

Video from a helicopter showed students coming out of buildings with their hands up as police with guns drawn covered them. One person was placed on the ground and handcuffed by police, but it wasn't not clear if the person was a suspect in the case.

The shooting occurred about 10:30 a.m. at Gardena High School. MSNBC said the police reported that a gun had been recovered, but it was unclear if the gun had been involved in the shooting.

MSNBC analyst Cliff Van Zandt said police believed the gunman was still on campus. But he said the incident did not appear to be a Columbine-type "active shooter" situation, referring to the 1999 massacre at a Colorado high school.

Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast told The Associated Press that three victims were treated by paramedics and taken to a hospital.

The school, which has more than 3,000 students in grades nine through 12, is in the 1300 block of West 182nd Street. That's the Harbor Gateway neighborhood of Los Angeles, next to the city of Gardena. Prendergast said that Los Angeles police would take over the investigation.

This breaking news story will be updated.

This is from MSNBC.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

My words on non-violent civil war are drawing some odd reactions.

Eric thought I meant I wanted peaceful secession. I do not.

What I am saying is that although the right pushes gun ownership and uses violent rhetoric--and I agree with the Newsweek article above that their rhetoric contributes to the decision of a young lone nut to target a Democratic political event and Congresswoman, instead of, say, his school--the right is winning this new civil war largely by political means, using a degraded form of American democracy and appeals to various strong emotions. And if they bring it off, as they seem to be doing, I am willing to accept their triumph during this crisis rather than advocate opposing it violently. I am not suggesting actual violence should not be dealt with, but I think it will remain very small-scale. And I do think that maintaining our democratic structure is a value in itself, even if I do not like the existing result. Just the idealist in me, I suppose.

My point is the corollary. Is a structure that is malleable by the threat of violence still democratic? To me, it smacks of rule by bullies. We have no shortage of autocratic regimes as examples of how it works. I don't ever want to see it here.

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

Not all Boomers. I think Eric's heart is in the right place...he simply cannot see beyond his obsession...which seems ideological, not phobic. Problem is if guns are all banned only crooks and cops will have 'em...and the cops can't be everywhere, everywhen.

You repeat yourself here since I have lived in places where the cops were the criminals.

Originally Posted by The Rani

Most if not all ideologues have their hearts in the right place. They really do believe that they know what is best for everyone else.

Not quite. Most ideologues not only believe they know best, but are willing to use any means necessary to force everyone else to conform, including violence. I disagree with Eric, but don't believe he falls into that category.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Come on Odin, think about this. Why do you think there is a Black Market in guns? 99% of all weapons trafficked on the Black Market originated with a legal sale. If we registered and titled guns, then selling them comes with legal requirements, like transfer of title. Now, no one knows beyond the initial sale who owns a specific gun or where they keep it. In some states, and Virginia is one, you can go to a Gun Show, buy whatever you like and leave with gun in hand. There are no background checks or traceable records.

NYC has followed this for years. The WaPo did a series on it. Mexico is up in arms about it (literally). We have a wide-open gun market and folks in the rural areas insist on keeping it that way. Of course, the violence can be home grown too, but the big cities suffer the most ... and have no recourse.

Why does this make sense?

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

When you can grow guns in the woods, your analogy will be true ... but not before.

Doh, brain fart on my part.

Originally Posted by Galen

You repeat yourself here since I have lived in places where the cops were the criminals.

Here in Fargo the traffic cops basically extort drivers, using "quotas" as an excuse.

Originally Posted by The Wonkette

Gotta post this latest news from today.

[/I]
This is from MSNBC.

See? Another three lives saved because someone was armed!

(Engrish Transration: Another idiot was carrying a loaded weapon with a round in the chamber- and in a backpack, on school property)

Originally Posted by Odin

Here in Fargo the traffic cops basically extort drivers, using "quotas" as an excuse.

Manchester Road, through a dozen municipalities. 30 mph on the former US 50/66. Death Star Trench for speed traps.

FBI: Pipe Bomb Found On MLK Parade Route

Originally Posted by Odin

FBI: Pipe Bomb Found On MLK Parade Route

I call bullshit, with a side of cointelpro (and possibly a dash of entrapment).

This makes what, three (?) 'incidents' in the Pac NW that have been 'narrowly averted' thanks to, and according exclusively to, those Heroic State Enforcers. We must be insufficiently reverent out here for them to give us so much of their attention.

Since it was an MLK-day thing, I doubt they'll 'find' a swarthy-skinned youth to have talked into and equipped to carry out the 'nefarious deed' -- as previously. Never fear, though... certainly there's something lined up.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

I call bullshit, with a side of cointelpro (and possibly a dash of entrapment).

This makes what, three (?) 'incidents' in the Pac NW that have been 'narrowly averted' thanks to, and according exclusively to, those Heroic State Enforcers. We must be insufficiently reverent out here for them to give us so much of their attention.

Since it was an MLK-day thing, I doubt they'll 'find' a swarthy-skinned youth to have talked into and equipped to carry out the 'nefarious deed' -- as previously. Never fear, though... certainly there's something lined up.

Hmmm... I didn't think about that.

Originally Posted by Odin

Hmmm... I didn't think about that.

Don't feel bad, bud. Just always keep in mind the wisdom of the poet, when it comes to pronouncements from the ruling class or its organs.

Originally Posted by Bobby Browning

My first thought was, he lied in every word...

This quote from Glenn Beck seems relevant to this thread.

“Tea parties believe in small government. We believe in returning to the principles of our Founding Fathers. We respect them. We revere them. Shoot me in the head before I stop talking about the Founders. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.

I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don’t. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep’s clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.

You’ve been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind.” ~ Fox News, June 10, 2010

Other examples can be found here.

And here is a Limbaugh rant (I heard part of it in my car)--which he is so proud of that he posted the transcript on his own website.

RUSH: Now, let me suggest something here. We could all say just as easily that the Democrats, the left is responsible for Tucson. We could say it. We didn't. But we could.

How? Very simple.

The left -- which continues to agitate, abuse, punish, name-call, whatever -- create an environment in which the individual is smothered. They treat people, individuals, as worthless. They come up with these conspiracy theories that Bush knew about 9/11. Imagine yourself wandering aimlessly through the murk as a disturbed young man, you see one of your cities practically blown off the map and then you go out and watch a movie by Michael Moore and you listen to Democrats and you read websites -- and you watch movies, documentaries --about how Bush was behind it. What do you think it's gonna do to an already disturbed mind?

And who did all that? Who plants ideas like these in people's heads? Bush knew of 9/11? What kind of a mass murderer does that make Bush? And don't forget, 35% of the Democrats in this country in a poll say they thought so, that Bush knew about it. That means that by extension, Bush knew about it and didn't do anything to stop it. Therefore he is complicit. The left is constantly telling anybody who will listen how rotten this country is, how rotten we are, how rotten the nation is, how unfair and unjust our economic system is. They create this environment of pessimism, self-hate, and desperation. They tell victims -- and they try to make as many people victims as possible by putting them in groups of victims.

They tell these people that they've got no chance in this unjust and unfair country. "If you're Hispanic, you got no chance. If you're African-American, you got no chance. If you're a woman and African-American, you are doomed! You have no chance. The only out for you is the military, and if you do that, you're stupid, but you really can't be blamed because this economy was so destroyed by George W. Bush, you have no future." What is this going to do to people? And this went on for eight years. And before Clinton got to ten it went on for 16 or 12 years, during Reagan and the first term of Bush. This has been a constant refrain: Uunjust, unfair America is.

And now, as though to put an exclamation point on it, we got a president who runs around the world basically affirming this all by apologizing for it to anybody who will listen. So you take some uneducated, ill-informed, mal-informed, disturbed young people, and you subject them to this stuff: Lying propaganda, movies, documentaries, who knows what the hell else, political speeches. Sure, we could sit here and blame the left for this. We could say they've got blood on their hands, that they create this kinda climate. Because the Democrats, the left in this country, they turn citizen against citizen.

They want people to hate each other over wealth or race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever. They love talking about hate speech! They love talking about hate. They want people to hate each other. It's a distraction to boot. You get men and women at war against each other, they're distracted. You get blacks and whites at war with each other, they're distracted. No matter what war you set up, it equals a distraction while the left marches on down the highway of socialism. How can you be a liberal and be proud of yourself when you're told you don't sacrifice enough for the state? We've heard that refrain, too.

"The American people have not been asked to sacrifice during the Iraq war! We have not been asked to sacrifice," meaning we're not paying enough taxes. Or your ancestors committed some horrible offense. Or conversely, if you're not able to succeed it's because of the Founders who were inherently racism, racist; or it's the unfair unjustness of capitalism. Or basically a system built to deny you your just rewards -- and other than that, you've gotta find a way to get your "benefits," because country is stacked against you. This is the message of the Democrat Party every day, and it is ratcheted up during every election.

This is the message. So who is it that is creating the message of desperation and despair and pessimism playing on fears and weaknesses? It is them. It isn't us. We're the ones who are optimistic! We continue to tell people this country provides excellent opportunity for anybody who wants to seek it, whatever ambition level you have. We are warning people that that magic, that this wealth of opportunity, is threatened by the current regime and its socialist policies --and we threaten that because we want people to oppose it because our warnings are rooted in love. Love of country, love of this nation's history, love of its potential, and love of its existence. Love of its future.

And there isn't any of that on the left. This stuff needs to be turned around on these people. If you are a victim, and you have been victimized by other citizens or society generally, as the left preaches, are you not more likely to become violent? They tell you that the deck is stacked against you, that the rich are taking everything from you, or that the Republicans want to kick you outta your house and take away your Social Security, or the Republicans want you to die, or their oil companies want you to go broke, or what have you? What are you gonna be prone to do here after a lifetime of hearing this stuff?

Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big This, Big That, Big Insurance. Every American institution that exists, according to the Democrats, is out to veritably kill you at one point or another. If you were told that you are put upon by the system, that you have no hope unless society is transformed and made more just, unless there is fairness -- are you not more likely to become violent? If you're told every day that your future doesn't exist, that it's been robbed and stolen from you already, what are you gonna do -- particularly if you have (sigh), you know, mental disturbance going into this all this?

You're told the rich are ripping you off. If not for them, you would be living well. If not for them, you'd have the boat and you'd have a house on the beach and you'd have three cars. Are you not at least gonna be resentful? And don't forget this is not something they say now and then. It's every day. It is their platform. If you're told that America is a racist nation and there's nothing you can do about it, are you gonna get kicked off and form the New Black Panthers, maybe, and try to get in the way of people electing people that you oppose?

Who knows? Anything's possible when that's the message. When you got community organizers like Obama running around agitating on all this stuff, on street corners every day in urban areas of this country, what the hell do you expect to happen? And they blame us. Turn it around on them, folks, damn it. They're the ones this create climates of hate, negativism, pessimism, desperation. "All is lost," despair, they create it. That's how they benefit. They profit from all that.


Nowhere in all this, of course, is the slightest indication of why Jared Lee Loughner would have chosen to shoot a Democratic Congresswoman if he was acting out of leftist resentment.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

This quote from Glenn Beck seems relevant to this thread.

“Tea parties believe in small government. We believe in returning to the principles of our Founding Fathers. We respect them. We revere them. Shoot me in the head before I stop talking about the Founders. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.

I will stand against you and so will millions of others. We believe in something. You in the media and most in Washington don’t. The radicals that you and Washington have co-opted and brought in wearing sheep’s clothing — change the pose. You will get the ends.

You’ve been using them? They believe in communism. They believe and have called for a revolution. You’re going to have to shoot them in the head. But warning, they may shoot you.

They are dangerous because they believe. Karl Marx is their George Washington. You will never change their mind.” ~ Fox News, June 10, 2010

Other examples can be found here.

It's interesting that he defuses the phrase 'shoot me in the head' by applying it to himself before he starts talking about a red-blue shooting war that might be pending. He seems to know he is using inflammatory rhetoric, and is building in an excuse for why it shouldn't be considered inflammatory.

But he is talking about values lock. He's asserting that the Blue population cannot move off of Marxist values, that one has to shoot people as it is impossible to use reason to get any sort of values change. From my perspective, it is entirely false. In my experience, liberals believe Marx saw real problems in the culture of his time, but the solutions he proposed didn't work and are never apt to work. From my perspective, this is a strawman argument with deadly overtones.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

It's interesting that he defuses the phrase 'shoot me in the head' by applying it to himself before he starts talking about a red-blue shooting war that might be pending. He seems to know he is using inflammatory rhetoric, and is building in an excuse for why it shouldn't be considered inflammatory.

But he is talking about values lock. He's asserting that the Blue population cannot move off of Marxist values, that one has to shoot people as it is impossible to use reason to get any sort of values change. From my perspective, it is entirely false. In my experience, liberals believe Marx saw real problems in the culture of his time, but the solutions he proposed didn't work and are never apt to work. From my perspective, this is a strawman argument with deadly overtones.

Remember what Strauss & Howe said about the emergence of demagogues during the Crisis...

I dunno. I keep thinking that after all is said and done Loughner was a kook-koo. Right, Left, twinkies, invisible purple gorilla that lives inside his ball point pen; something was going to set this guy off. It just feels to me of total non-agenda.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

My point is the corollary. Is a structure that is malleable by the threat of violence still democratic? To me, it smacks of rule by bullies. We have no shortage of autocratic regimes as examples of how it works. I don't ever want to see it here.

If the 'bullies' use outright force or threats to personal safety, resort to manipulation of the machinery of voting, or deny choice, then there is no democracy. If the 'bullies' lie or threaten indirect menaces (like job loss or foreclosure) then such is sleazy.After all, some policies can lead to economic disaster.

There is no fine line between democracy and tyranny. The more corrupt or fraudulent the process, the less democratic the social order is.