Michael Moore needs to grow up
886 words
I grew up outside a small town in the inland Northwest, a town steeped in the gun culture. Both my parents were crack shots. I can’t count the number of guns in our house. Everybody we knew hunted. I grew up on a diet of wild meat.
But my parents, my mother especially, taught us from an early age that guns were not toys. One family friend had a hook instead of a left hand due to a hunting accident. So as a child, I had a strong, almost superstitious fear of guns. I knew they were inanimate objects, but an air of danger and malevolence still clung to them.
Of course the best way to dispel such a fear is to actually learn how a gun works and how to use it. Then one has actual concrete awareness that guns are inanimate objects, and whatever danger they pose lies in us, in how we use them.
But when I became old enough to learn to shoot, I took one lesson from my father and then refused to go further. It was a rite of passage, a stage on the way to adulthood. But I did not want the responsibility of handling weapons. And, frankly, I just didn’t want to grow up. And because my parents were a little too liberal, and I was far too stubborn, they didn’t force the issue. So I went out into the world with a child’s salutary fear of guns intact.
A few years later, I went to a screening of The Terminator on a college campus. Now, if The Terminator teaches us one thing, it is that the police and the authorities can’t really protect us against a determined assailant—any assailant, not just a nigh unstoppable killer android from the future.
Yet, at the end of the movie, after Sarah Connor finally crushed the terminator in a giant industrial press and the red lights in its chrome eye sockets died, we heard the sound of sirens off in the distance . . . and all around me there were audible sighs of relief. Thank goodness the authorities are coming! Just in time to draw chalk lines around the corpses.
Naturally, that audience was smarter, better-educated, more liberal, and probably more anti-gun than average. And yet, after all they had seen, they had a deeply ingrained and essentially childlike response to the sound of sirens: the government is coming to save us. What a relief!
I laughed out loud. But I didn’t laugh long, because a serious resolution dawned: I needed to learn something about self-defense.
People advocate gun control for many different reasons. But, as the debates about gun control in the aftermath of every school massacre show, the most salient trait of gun control advocates is their unreasonableness.
By and large, the moral, political, and historical arguments offered against gun control have been tightly logical and based on copious and well-documented empirical facts.
But none of it matters to the gun grabbers, most of whom are so convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority that they feel entitled to behave like vicious morons, dispensing with facts, arguments, and manners altogether in favor of hysterical demagoguery and rhetorical thuggery.
There is something infantile about it, and I suspect that at the root of much of the hysteria is simply the refusal to grow up and take personal responsibility for their own safety, and the safety of those they love.
I am not anti-cop. But the police generally cannot protect us from crime. They usually show up too late to do anything but file reports and try to catch the perpetrators. Reasonably, that’s all we can expect of them.
Thus it is the responsibility of adult citizens to know how to protect ourselves and our loved ones from violent crimes. We need to know how to reduce the likelihood that we will be targeted, and we need to know how to defend ourselves if something happens. When one takes responsibility for one’s personal safety, learning how to use a gun, and store it safely, is a natural step.
Liberals react to such notions with hostility and panic because most of them simply do not wish to grow up.
Outside of politics, of course, most liberals are lovely people. I like nothing better than sitting in a fair trade coffee bar with my liberal friends, planning concert and museum outings and comparing notes on organic bakeries, thrift stores, and pet friendly hotels.
But when it comes to gun control, immigration, and a host of other issues, liberals don’t think or act like responsible adults. So under no circumstances should they be entrusted with political power.
Mao Tse-Tung famously claimed that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. He was able to murder millions, because he made sure that the state had the guns, and the people did not. The best form of Tyrant Control is to have a well-armed populace. If the people are to have power, the people must have guns.
In our society, one can exercise political power simply by turning eighteen and registering to vote. But if political power flows from the barrel of a gun, then shouldn’t we limit the franchise to those who learn how to use guns responsibly?
17 comments
“I am not anti-cop. But the police generally cannot protect us from crime. They usually show up too late to do anything but file reports and try to catch the perpetrators. Reasonably, that’s all we can expect of them.
Thus it is the responsibility of adult citizens to know how to protect ourselves and our loved ones from violent crimes. We need to know how to reduce the likelihood that we will be targeted, and we need to know how to defend ourselves if something happens. When one takes responsibility for one’s personal safety, learning how to use a gun, and store it safely, is a natural step.”
Fair enough. I am often told by friends who have been in the coutry where I live, Paraguay, for decades, that long ago, under the government of general Stroesner, people were sleeping outside, they didn’t bother locking their front doors, women could walk alone at night without worry, that in fact people just didn’t think about comitting crime. That is long gone, liberalism came, people now live behind barred windows, they worry when they step out of their car, women are agressed in broad daylight… How about a bit of prevention from a strong government ?
I wish it was true that the cops usually show up too late to do anything but file reports and try to catch the perpetrators. Reasonably, that’s all we can expect of them for more and more I read that they show up and shoot the family pet. I wouldn’t call the cops.
Why should one be radically anti, or pro, everything?
The gun problem is complex, and therefore my opinion on the gun problem is neutral and adaptive. Sometimes, I wish the masses are armed, sometimes, it may be preferable that they are not. It all depends on the situation.
It all depends on the government we have. If it is a bad government, populated by a corrupt and hostile elite, then having a population armed is surely better than having a population of defenceless sheep. If the government is good, and is meant to stay that way, then perhaps gun control becomes more understandable and acceptable. The tricky part, of course, is determining if the government will stay good forever.
While I fully concur with the above, I wish to suggest that you have opened several doors to the need for deeper exploration, e.g. (including but not limited to): Self-defense against interpersonal criminal aggression, quality of law-enforcement service in any locale, and the ramifications of the Peter Pan complex.
A further avenue of exploration for your house intellectuals, is the difference between a society whose social character leans toward the Apollinian, versus one whose social character leans toward the Dionysiac.
Traditional White Societies do pretty well with guns – tinkering with this from the State can only hurt the balance of power. Alot of dumb guys who shouldn’t be voting are perfectly good at fixing cars, chopping tree, or handling guns. It’s a different kind of intelligence, if you will, below the level of self consciousness. Likewise, the folk arts of a healthy people are often amazingly good despite the lack of theory involved. Look at the amazing things social insects do: they don’t know how they do it, but they sure know how to do what they do.
I’ve always been amazed at what Society tolerates in regards to driving. Things like drunk driving get my draconian side up. The problem with any kind of universal gun registration is that it is always a prelude to confiscation. Though I still believe America is doomed, I’d like to see some aspects of the Old Republic survive into the New – and this is one of them. In any case, as Adams said, no Consitituon will be workable without a moral people – and we lost that decades ago. All questions about guns, driving, drugs, etc have to be seen in that light first.
We don’t have a “gun problem”. We have a….”vibrancy” problem, which causes almost all violent crime…
Apologies if I’m a little off topic, but here is a pro-white argument against gun control I’ve been using lately. While it pisses off liberals and non-whites quite handily, it’s also based on easily cited facts (or “hate facts”).
Most white people in the US are able to own guns responsibly. It is black male criminals who so radically skew this country’s gun crime stats and make us look like an out-of-control, gun crazy country.
If we were to outlaw guns or somehow significantly reduce the number of guns in this country, then sure, blacks might not kill each other quite as much, but guns would also be driven underground into a black market. Thus, gun control would disarm law abiding whites and create a new market for the mostly non-white underclass. Whites = disarmed, black criminals = as armed as ever.
Given that on the ledger of interracial crime, blacks prey on whites more than vice versa, one of the main effects of gun control would then be to make whites more vulnerable to black criminals, and would increase the rates of black on white crime.
It would also open opportunity for muscle-bullies and knife-people of any derivation.
Exactly. I believe that it has been said that if you were to remove black violent crimes from the total violence rate of America, the US would have a similar violence rate that Belgium has.
Again, we don’t have a gun problem. We have a diversity problem.
A good one. Quoted and linked and riffed on here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2013/01/liberals-as-toddlers-again.html
Ha, ha, I love the picture! Does not really make this Moore traitor look very convincing…
“The tricky part, of course, is determining if the government will stay good forever.”
I doubt anything will stay good forever. Certainly no government has ever stayed good forever!
And since a good government need have no fear of an armed populace, what purpose is served by disarming the people even if they have no need to fear their current government? Governments will change, usually for the worse.
Governments change all the time; but once disarmed the people are very rarely ever allowed to possess arms again. Gun control is the Roach Motel of politics: you check in, you don’t check out.
Whereas good governments very easily deteriorate into bad governments.
So why risk it, for a social good (disarmed populace) that is of very dubious value, especially if your population is a law abiding First World white population that is unlikely to abuse its gun rights?
Michael Moore runs a close second to Tim Wise, when it comes to his toxic effect on European-Americans. I can understand white leftists watching his puke, but when otherwise rational and aware conservative Americans go to pay to see his puke, it makes me want to puke.
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