These are very good people
Trump weighs in on the gun-toting “protest” yesterday.
What would Trump be saying if 200 lefty protesters carrying assault rifles had gathered on Pennsylvania Avenue, just yards from the White House, with signs saying “TYRANTS GET THE ROPE” and similar exhilarating calls to action?
Not, I’m guessing, “These are very good people, but they are angry.” I don’t think he would be saying he should give a little. I don’t think he’d be saying he should see them, talk to them, make a deal.
Who knows? He might invite them in to discuss their differences over a nice glass of Clorox.
So what is the deal? Are we supposed to calculate how many additional lives are lost? The Art of Manslaughter?
Could be the case. Appeasement has been tried before; sometimes it achieves what the appeaser intended, and sometimes it only raises the stakes. But it could also be the case that the armed ones are both expressing their anger and making a threat of death and/or serious injury if they do not get their way. They are also in a crowd, and crowds have been known to obey their own logic. And once the shooting starts, a different logic again is the one that comes into the contest.
Trump might be aware of all that. But then again….
And of course there is the added thing that the things they are angry about are unreasonable. Yes, it’s inconvenient not to be able to get a haircut, or go to the gym. But these are not the people who have lost their jobs and their means of support; these are people who want their lives to be as easy as it always has been, without having to consider other people at all. And they want to be noticed. They want news reporters to put them on television. They want to show they are MEN. They want to show they won’t be told what to do by a woman.
None of this is reasonable. Arguments about the economic difficulties of the service workers who have no job to go to? Those are reasonable. Those are probably also able to be dealt with, at least in the short term, by government aid, but that is something the Donald does not want. And the service people who continue to work, long hours, often with little PPE, who don’t want to die? Those are reasonable causes to get angry, too.
By declaring that these men are angry, Trump is simply lumping their anger in with righteous anger of people who have genuine reasons to be angry. If a woman gets angry, she’s dismissed as “just an angry woman”. If a black man gets angry, he is dismissed as “an angry black man”, which for some reason seems illegitimate and unreasonable. But let a white man, especially one in the middle of the country, get angry, and we are all jumping up and down to appease, to deal, to help, to soothe, to listen. And in most cases, what they are angry about is contrived or trivial, like all the Trump voters who were angry that a black man had been president and a woman dared to try.
Tyranny is law coming from the barrel of the gun… and this is/was a hostage situation no matter how you spin it.
It is apparent to me as an outsider that your Police are captives of a certain narrative. They see their job as aiding and abetting angry white men, not protecting the democratic institutions. How can these terrorists be allowed anywhere near a government building, a place of deliberation?
America, where is your freedom whern you bow down to armed thugs?
I’m not sure it’s the police in this case; I read in the reporting on this that Michigan law allows guns at the capitol as long as they’re not concealed. It’s mad as a box of frogs but the fault is with the legislators rather than the police.
But anyway yeah. Freedom shmeedom. I find this HORRIFYING and disgusting.
Ophelia: wanted to send you a message but the contact page expects a captcha – I don’t see a captcha and the “what is this” link goes to a 404.
Canada prohibited a LONG list of automatic rifles Friday morning. I checked the list and was astounded at how many clones of the AR-15 are made… they (and many other types as well as other classes of weapons – all .50BMG rifles and pretty much any mortar or rocket launcher (what?) – are all prohibited: no import, no sales, no use anywhere. Effective immediately. Owners will be reimbursed somehow, to be decided later. Some limited grandfathering will be allowed, apparently.
But finally some actual progress on getting rid of these death machines! In Canada, at least.
Surely the constitutional right to bear arms would include anything bearable, meaning capable of being carried by the owner or user.
I would guess that it would cover the bearing of personal bazookas, rocket launchers, and anti-tank and anti-helicopter weapons. At the time the second amendment was adopted, I think the ‘arms’ included firearms, but only of the single-shot, flintlock variety, and muzzle-loaded, such as used by Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.