Of course that would be the gun-industry-argument style of insanity that we’ve seen in the past. But e-bikes are rare in the nation as a whole, so I doubt that the gun industry would get very far with a ‘ban e-bikes!’ campaign.
As I said, if this is the only incident of vulnerability of the top 1%, it will likely blow over with no calls for changes in the availability of firearms. Unless Trump gets it into his head to have a nation such as his mentors Vlad and Xi have, in which ordinary citizens have little or no access to weapons. In that case, he might use this incident as a pretext for cracking down.
If Trump and his backers decided to move against gun ownership because it was threatening the elite, would the Democrats finally see some liberationist merit to gun ownership (like this left commentator did)? Or would they say “well okay, so Trump did one good thing.” ?
This goes for any Dictatorship. Does the economy work? Are the oppressed small minorities?
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
You get revolts when things get bad.
And yeah, trump will see high inflation, I predict. But not so much there will be riots and revolts. Just that MAGAism will be voted out. Until the people forgot, and then…
I suppose it would depend on whether or not it worked. If the people most loud-mouthed about “From my cold dead hands!” don’t start a civil was over this, then the (alleged) whole point of gun ownership has been proven to be false.
Plus, it isn’t about “Having no guns at all”, it’s more about “Not letting every idiot with a pulse have a gun”.
Most people who describe themselves as “libertarian or even anarchist” voted in a guy who swore to be an authoritarian dictator.
Thank you, I take great comfort in the fact that the people who will be trying to kill me are fundamentally decent folks who are just misinformed. That makes everything so much better.
Just as Sandy Hook … changed nothing … so, too, did the only gun violence that Trump would ever possibly care about: him getting shot and a foiled attempt at a second round.
If that didn’t move the firing pin … I really don’t know what would.
How does this person feel about illegal immigrants, and Leftist radicals. If the duly elected government told him that the American system was under attack from within and he was being deputized to help them hunt down and bring to justice those who were trying to destroy his freedom, would he heed the call?
Okay, how about declaring that anyone who believes the “lamestream media” is self-evidently an idiot, and only those who have thrown off leftist brainwashing should have a gun.
You disagree? You feel that you’re qualified to declare who is an idiot with a pulse and who isn’t? Because you’re so much smarter than they are? Well, a hell of a lot of those stooopid people– deplorables really– don’t think so; right or wrong, they see your stance as insufferably arrogant, elitist, and tyrannical. And they have guns.
Y’know, we used to have these things called “courts”, and “laws”, and people used to be able to more or less agree that it was good to put things in the hands of the courts and laws.
Fortunately we do still have them. And so far anyway the courts and laws have declared that owning firearms is officially enshrined as a right, not a privilege. If virtually everyone disputed this, there’s even this meta-law called the amendment process.
And the courts and laws also hold that some people forfeit that right. Except that it’s impossible to enforce those laws, for various reasons (for instance, the fact that gun sellers aren’t required to check to see if their customers aren’t allowed to own firearms). And whenever anyone suggests that we should try to change things so we could enforce the law, Republicans go crazy.
Gun sellers in fact are on the hook if they sell a gun to someone who is ineligible to own one legally. Even if there was a law requiring any transfer of a gun to go through a background check, how many illegal gun sales would that catch or prevent? Neither a burglar who stole a gun out of a house nor a career criminal who bought it hot on the street would give a shit.
Where do you think the guns in “illegal gun sales” come from in the first place? At some stage in the process, a “legitimate” owner is selling to an “illegitimate” owner. Crack down on that stage, and you eventually push it back to an actual legitimate owner, who won’t sell to criminals.
Surely this isn’t possible? Gun-grabbers (by which I mean people who grab guns, not people who don’t want to grab guns) keep telling us that having a gun protects you against burglary.
There is absolutely no way of detecting an unlawful transfer of a firearm, background check laws or no, until a gun is recovered by law enforcement and its chain of custody traced. I don’t see how enacting a floutable law changes that.
In real life “extremely reactionary” people are consistently “motivated by hate and cruelty”, because that’s what reactionary, traditional values are. Hate. Cruelty. Malice. There’s also greed and power lust, but those are hardly virtues either.
Most of the time, it’s not, and is under the control of their respective State governments. A State governor doesn’t have to get Federal permission to deploy their National Guard units within their own state, or to other states if they consent.
NG units can be “Federalized”, which means that they get brought into the Army/Air Force
And I suspect in some sort of state-level rebellion, that would be the decision that the National Guard commanders would have to make. I suspect it would come down to whether the Federal orders/actions are considered lawful. And I also suspect that if things came to such a pass where a State was rebelling and calling up its National Guard, that would probably be considered the case.
Care to offer proof? Your contention is hyperbolic and absurd. Most really reactionary people I’ve known were driven more by a fear and distrust of change than anything else. They like things the way they are, or the way they were, and don’t want to change It doesn’t have anything to do with hate or cruelty whatsoever.
It would be more accurate to describe the National Guard as a branch of the US Army Reserve, which the state governors are allowed to use when the Federal government isn’t using them. The federal legislation establishing the National Guard makes it clear that these are not traditional state militia. The N.G. is funded at the federal level for example.
Of course, you are conveniently avoiding mentioning exactly what the changes they fear are, and what the supposed past they want to return to was like. Reducing women to second class citizens, marital rape being legal, racial segregation or slavery, massive persecution of LGBT people, fun stuff like that. The change they want to revert is the reduction of their hatred and cruelty.
Leopards have been eating their faces going on half a century. They are still voting for the leopard. They will take up arms and defend the leopard. They will happily die for the leopard as long as they know its hurting the people they hate as well.
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