Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day
In 1920, England was the safest industrialized society on Earth. In fact, it was by far the safest society of any sort on Earth. Through a series of gun control laws, England has become by far the most violent society on Earth.

Australia's politicians were so eager to follow England's lead that they let a certifiably insane man loose - and gave him his guns back. When the shots stopped, 35 people were dead and 21 were wounded. Today, Oz is clearly the second most violent industrialized society on Earth.

Now, New Zealand wants to get in on the fun. Their politicians are changing the rules for firearms possession, making it harder to keep and bear arms. That will make criminals feel safer, with the inevitable increase in violent crime. Which will result in a demand for more "gun controls." And finally New Zealand will most likely be in the same situation England and Australia were in before it.

-- Extranos Alley - Defining Insanity
It's not just the gun control laws. In the case of the Anglosphere, gun control is just one of the symptoms of a flawed philosophy that forces its people to spiral down an ever-more-dangerous path of compelled helplessness.

This philosophy was perhaps best expressed recently by James Bowman (author, I believe, of Honor: A History) in a Weekly Standard piece from April, Harm's Way: The roads in Britain are paved with good intention, itself a review of Theodore Dalrymple's (pen name of Anthony Daniels) latest book Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. In it, Bowman excerpts a bit from the book, and then expands:
The many hypocrisies and deceptions on which the New Labour coalition was built are typified by the system of criminal justice with which, in his prison job, Daniels had an intimate acquaintance. Citing the work of a whistle-blowing policeman named David Fraser, he compares the British police to
a nearly defeated occupying colonial force that, while mayhem reigns everywhere else, has retreated to safe enclaves, there to shuffle paper and produce bogus information to propitiate its political masters. Their first line of defense is to refuse to record half the crime that comes to their attention, which itself is less than half the crime committed. Then they refuse to investigate recorded crime, or to arrest the culprits even when it is easy to do so and the evidence against them is overwhelming, because the prosecuting authorities will either decline to prosecute, or else the resultant sentence will be so trivial as to make the whole procedure (at least nineteen forms to fill in after a single arrest) pointless.
The real question is, why isn't this clearly appalling state of affairs a scandal in Britain? I think the answer is that the media consensus there--and to a large extent here--includes certain core principles, such as that crime is caused by something other than criminals and that imprisonment is society's shame, rather than that of the incarcerated, which can only be protected by maintaining these hypocrisies and deceptions, and with them, the illusion that nothing can be done about most crime. Therefore, the media are complicit in pretending that these problems don't exist--because they shouldn't exist.
(My emphasis.) And along with that comes the inability to differentiate between "violent and predatory" and "violent but protective."

And that's insanity.

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