Because you’re an idiot?
Look, Forrest, if you don’t want a gun, cool. Don’t get one. No problem. However, when you put pen to paper (or fingers to internet stupid machine or whatever) and explain why, do so in a logical manner. This is just stupid:
I decided there was one principal reason I wouldnt buy a handgun: I dont want to live in fear. I know that sounds strange a gun is supposed to bring peace of mind. But to keep a piece at your side is to look at the world through gunsights. Its a profoundly anti-social posture. To me, carrying a handgun is an acknowledgement of weakness, not strength. Its an admission that youre out of ideas for how to deal with people, even those especially those who mean you harm. Its a failure of imagination, a failure of wits and, in the case of open carry, a threat of violence to every passing person.
No, it’s not a sign of weakness. Much like not driving a car means you’re slow. It’s acknowledging that you are a tool using primate. And you can be more effective.
May 16th, 2016 at 6:24 pm
He got every point almost perfectly backwards, which is quite an accomplishment. It means he’s one of the few who’ve actually thought these things through, and he really owns it, embracing the evil with gusto.
That’s the mark of the authoritarian; good is bad and bad is good, strength is weakness and weakness strength, courage is cowardice and cowardice is courage, liberty is slavery and slavery liberty and so on, right down the line. It’s not often you find someone so specific and articulate in his wrongness.
I approve. Would that they were all so forthright about it.
May 16th, 2016 at 6:33 pm
Yeah, Lyle, I would agree – that person (sorry, I can’t call it a “man”) really shouldn’t own or carry a firearm. Probably shouldn’t drive a car or a motorcycle, either.
May 16th, 2016 at 6:42 pm
“Which is why, to be consistent, I think cops are slow-witted idiots who are simple dangers to everyone around them, who quite reasonably feel threatened by seeing their firearms.”
…
Said no such person, ever.
May 16th, 2016 at 7:08 pm
“Its an admission that youre out of ideas for how to deal with people, even those especially those who mean you harm.”
Why yes Francis, carrying a gun *is* to teal with those that mean you harm. And *is* to be used when there are no other feasible options.
Look if realizing that such situations can exist is too scary for you… then that’s not my problem.
“Its a failure of imagination, a failure of wits and,”
Oh man, one wonders how this rocket surgeon would deal with a home invasion. No doubt it would be /imaginative/.
And he wouldn’t call the cops. Because you know they’re weak minded gun-toters too.
May 16th, 2016 at 8:45 pm
So if this rationale is to be imposed on others, what shall we say of those who use guns to take from others what they keep for themselves?
May 16th, 2016 at 9:22 pm
“To me, carrying a handgun is an acknowledgement of weakness, not strength.”
Yeah, I’m too weak to throw projectiles at thousands of feet per second, so I carry a gun.
Criminals meaning to do me harm carry guns — which can throw projectiles at various speeds well in excess of my maximum ability. I am weak versus firearms when I have only my hands and feet. Criminals, by the way, are total assholes that may or may not kill me even if I hand over all my worldly possessions. And they have guns, often illegally.
May 16th, 2016 at 10:01 pm
Why does this person hate policemen and Secret Servicemen so much? Does he want President Obama to be protected by people armed with tactical sporks?
May 16th, 2016 at 10:21 pm
If this individual can read the little essay by the Kraut Col. Caudill (USMC ret.) without altering his position, then *his* little essay is exposed for what he and it are, just tools who want to take away the tools of others, in the service of *other* others.
May 16th, 2016 at 10:47 pm
The guy is an idiot. Might as well say seat belts are a sign of weakness and a admission that youre out of ideas for how to deal with other drivers, especially drunk drivers who may do you harm.
It’s really being stuck on stupid.
May 16th, 2016 at 10:57 pm
@JTC: I suspect you are referring to an essay written by Marko Kloos. why the gun is civilization. Somewhere along the way it got attributed to the fictional “Major Caudill”.
Where you come up with “Kraut Col. Caudill” is more of a mystery. I suspect it is an example of the “telephone game” we were taught in kindergarten; I believe the point of the game was to demonstrate how easy (and common) it is for stories to get twisted and eventually just plain wrong.
May 17th, 2016 at 1:35 am
I think it’s his choice. I may not agree with him, because his reasons for saying “no” may be similar to mine for saying “yes”, but I don’t think it makes him less of a man for holding a private opinion. (Well, ‘public’ in this case.)
Some people like spinach. I hate the thought of it. I guess I’ll never measure up to the standards of, say, Popeye The Sailor Man.
Ultimately, you might consider that he’s saying he would rather risk death than to shoot someone. If so, that’s called “Ethics”. Either that, or he thinks the risk to himself is not worth the inconvenience. Or he’s just uncomfortable with the idea that he ‘needs’ to carry a gun to survive.
To call him weak, or to denigrate his manhood, is to suggest that everyone who doesn’t agree with YOU can’t be a man because he doesn’t think as you do.
Look up “Evelyn Beatrice Hall”.
May 17th, 2016 at 9:13 am
@ Jerry the Geek:
I would agree with you if all he was saying was, “I don’t want to own or carry a gun.” But that’s not what he’s saying. He’s saying, “Because I don’t want to own or carry a gun, you shouldn’t either.”
It’s not ethics. It’s the same old BS the antis are always spewing, disguised as something else, like ethics.
May 17th, 2016 at 10:30 am
@bob r: I suspect that you are clueless to even the most common of gun blog memes and naïve to obscure humor and references; you should probably stick to kindergarten games.
May 17th, 2016 at 1:01 pm
To carry a firearm is to accept the reality that regardless of the perfection of your wit and wisdom it may not always stop those bent on doing you harm.
May 17th, 2016 at 1:12 pm
I acknowledge my weakness. As a 65 year old man in pretty good shape, the number of people whose asses I can kick gets smaller every year. Some of the larger wild animals I might encounter when I take long walks in the countryside, where I live, I can’t handle with my bare hands.
I’ve run out of ideas of witty, imaginative ways to convince thugs not to rob me. While I don’t open carry, the threat of violence to every passing mugger beats being the recipient of violence.
May 17th, 2016 at 1:59 pm
“Despite historically low crime rates and an improving national economy, more and more Texans are arming themselves.”
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web online blog named such thinking “The Butterfield Effect” after reporter Fox Butterfield, who reversed cause and effect in writing that “despite” prisons overflowing with newly imprisoned convicts, crime rates were dropping. It is a common trope among liberals to reverse cause and effect.
May 17th, 2016 at 8:10 pm
“carrying a handgun is an acknowledgement of weakness, not strength”
Conversely, NOT carrying a handgun is not an acknowledgment of strength either. Nor an assertion of it. except maybe in Forrest’s bearded-Spock alternative logic.
I suggest that only people who are vaguely aware of their weakness would obsess about strength or try to redefine or invert it to their tastes.
I carry a handgun not because of my weakness or strength, but out of awareness that bad things happen because of bad people. It’s a very outward thing. No navel-gazing or Freudian gonad-measuring.
May 17th, 2016 at 10:18 pm
@JTC: While it is entirely possible that I am “clueless to even the most common of gun blog memes and naïve to obscure humor and references”, I think it more likely that the humor you intended to convey just didn’t make it all the way to my monitor. Maybe _everybody_ (minus me, of course) that reads SaysUncle knew exactly what you meant and the link I provided was of no value, at all, to _anybody_. More likely, there are a few people who had no idea what you were writing about and have not had the please of reading Marko’s excellent essay.
I can assure you that I did not intend even the least hint of an insult to you in what I wrote. However, it appears to me that you very much did intend an insult. While advice from a complete stranger on the internet is probably worth about zero, here’s some anyway: lighten up; attempting a positive interpretation of something directed your way will not always be “right” but it will generally be less aggravating.
May 18th, 2016 at 12:21 am
Christian/Newsome
Get back to me on “ideas” that one has run out of, cupcake.
May 18th, 2016 at 12:59 am
@bob r: attempting positive interpretation of the veiled condescension and insult of your respective “I suspect” comments is antithetical for me, and countering it, far from aggravating, is recreational.
Sorry if I was wrong about your intent, but dude, if I had a nickel for every reader here who does not know that “why the gun” was so ironically and so apparently unacceptably penned by a german immigrant that a real or imagined super-patriot had to be created to hijack and disseminate it so widely and stubbornly that the actual author facetiously self-identifies as Maj. Caudill? I’d have like, no nickels.
May 18th, 2016 at 7:44 pm
To paraphrase, “A non-gun owner is a gun owner who hasn’t had a loaded gun pointed at him”.
May 20th, 2016 at 1:48 pm
“Its an admission that youre out of ideas for how to deal with people, even those especially those who mean you harm.”
That’s correct because the dead people ran out of words that didn’t work.