GUN RESTRICTION
In response to: Will America Embrace Newsom’s Proposed Constitutional Amendment Restricting Guns?
Our governor has been in high-intensity ADHD mode since the pre-election season, before President Biden decided to go for it. Now it’s time to settle down, try to relax and deal with some local issues. … There will still be dragons to slay in ’28.
John Kracht, via SanJoseInside.com
REAL WOODSTOCK
In response to: Woodstock West: The Celebrated ‘Woodstock Nation’ Had Roots in San Jose
Interesting article and a snapshot of a place in time that I was too young to care about (9 years old in 1969). Attitudes have changed in 50+ years and most importantly they’ve changed regarding society’s attitude toward rape. The fact that 15 rapes occurred during the festival is a damning indictment about the idiocy of a world with no guardrails (or police). The new society that the “hippie-think” thought they could build was/is totally unrealistic and any of the 15 victims still living (they all must be around 70 or older) would have definite opinions about the terror they experienced at the hands of their aggressors. The festivals did bring people together to experience music in a new way and it did build community, but the treatment of women at these early festivals by some men is a real negative and it takes the shine off of what the festival organizers were trying to accomplish.
Mark Carbonaro, via MetroSiliconValley.com
The original Constitution and Bill of Rights is still the best template for governing a country, but zeroing in on one particular aspect while ignoring other attacks on it has a deleterious effect.
What the Media Borg broadcasts isn’t what the average person thinks. The public knows that the nearly half of American households have firearms. Those guns are owned by honest, law abiding folks who don’t misuse them. If they did the number of Americans killed or seriously injured would skyrocket.
The same folks wringing their hands over the 2nd Amendment are ignoring the rising attacks on the 1st Amendment. Goaded by the country’s media, they presume that disarming the population would end gun violence.
Since there are hundreds of millions of firearms in this country no matter how many new laws are passed, many if not most of them would be kept by the the folks who own them.
Whenever there has been a buyback of firearms by local authorities, few guns were turned in for the simple reason that the government is stingy, offering people between 15% and 25% of the resale value. If the gov’t really wanted to take guns away from law abiding folks, it would have to offer more than resale value.
The bureaucrats and electeds who come up with these buyback schemes aren’t stupid, they know that if they offered, say, double what a gun is worth, a lot of people would take them upon on the offer. So why don’t they make a serious offer?
Because they’re not serious. It’s a dog and pony show where they can put their presumed virtue on public display. Then when the show is over they put the dozen or two guns they bought from NRA widows on a table for the media to photograph, and MovOn to star in their next virtue extravaganza.
What good does it do?
The media constantly refers to the high rate of gun violence in America. But as the saying goes, figures don’t lie; liars figure. Yes, gun violence is rising, but where? The media doesn’t really say, objectively.
The overwhelming number of crimes committed by firearms take place in big city downtown areas. But if we remove just five cities: Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, St. Louis, and New Orleans from the statistics—cities with the strictest gun laws—the murder rate in America drops the U.S. to the 189th out of 193 countries in the world.
Despite the constant emo-scares that bombard television viewers, the truth is that America is an exceptionally safe country to live in—for folks who don’t live in the downtown areas of big cities.
If local and state governments made a concerted effort to fix the problems in those and similar big cities and left the rest of us alone, gun violence would plummet.
So why don’t the powers that be do that?
The only reasonable conclusion: they want the violence to continue.
Gun violence is part of the Left’s agenda. They want to disarm all Americans. But why?
The answer to that is also obvious: in every country that becomes a dictatorship, the government first disarms the people because a disarmed population has no choice; everyone must bow down to the government.
It’s that, or the gulag. Your choice.