One, a prominent advocate of gun control buys an AR-15 for himself, with high capacity magazines he publicly opposes, and only reverses himself when news gets to the media: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/09/Gabby-Giffords-Husband-Buys-AR-15-Announces-He-s-Not-Keeping-It-After-News-Leaks-Out
[Note: if anyone has any doubt CNN is a propaganda front for the Left, read their treatment of the same story here: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/11/gabby-giffords-husband-buys-assault-weapon/ ]
What clearly happened here is that Mr. Kelly got to thinking: Hmmm. The AR-15 really IS a good personal defense weapon, and if I’m successful, I won’t be able to get one later, so best get one now. Now, I KNOW I”M a good person, so this isn’t an issue. It’s those OTHER people we need to worry about.
Fuck Mark Kelly. He clearly, literally, beyond any reasonable doubt thinks he is BETTER than most Americans, and thus deserves a different standard of treatment and privilege.
As Christopher Lasch put it, modern “liberals” (his word, which I would not grant) have all the vices of aristocrats and none of the virtues. Remember, in feudal England, aristocrats had a monopoly on effective weapons as private citizens. This meant that the ruling elite, and the army they controlled, was always better armed than any private group which might seek to oppose them. There were no “well regulated” militias that were not the house army of some aristocrat, and when conflict happened, it was invariably between groups of aristocrats, and not between anything like “the people” and their government.
Data Point: Cass Sunstein, who carried the ballot in my head as to who in this world I would most enjoy kicking in the groin.
Here is his review of a book advocating what I am going to call “Soft Nazism” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/07/its-your-own-good/?pagination=false
I’m not going to take the time to address all his errors and conceits, but will address his three principle arguments:
1) people are sometimes stupid. Measurably, they make cognitive errors. This is true. But why does he assume that the same does not apply to him? Why does he assume that the patina of science conveys, necessarily, a greater understanding? Marxism purports to be “scientific”. Freud considered his work “scientific.” And in the modern world it is easy to trace very large errors, such as the generalized recommendation of a low fat diet, which has made America fat, because it is bad science and has always been bad science; and the conjecture of global warming. All of the models have plainly been falsified multiple times by actual events.
2) People are short-sighted. Again, this amounts to the claim that people who think they are superior actually ARE. He worries about the environment–which is doing quite well–but says NOTHING about the trillion dollar annual budget deficits we are running, how they will bankrupt our nation, and put not just grandma on dog food, but the grand kids too. HE IS SHORT SIGHTED. Again, patent stupidity is not a good argument in favor of greater control in the hands of he and his.
3) Finally, when you get to things like smoking, you get to the highest level of idiocy. People like him want to put everyone on the public dole. Smoking is bad because the government has to pay for the health costs related to smokers illnesses. They insist on taking care of people who are not asking them to, then insist on regulating their behavior because now that they control them, their behavior is expensive. Just a couple weeks ago some Japanese PM was telling old people to “just die”. Their crime? Existing at public expense.
If assholes like Cass Sunstein were not trying to “save” smokers, then it would not matter how long they lived. How is it any of his fucking business, if these people are paying for their own insurance? It only becomes his business when he takes over the insurance business.
And do we really want to equate the value of lives with economic productivity? There is, again, no reason to to that if all expenses are being carried in the private sector. People make their own determinations as to what their lives are worth, and those of those they love.
But assholes like Sunstein quite literally PUT VALUES ON LIFE. They’ve done it all across Europe. If the cost of keeping someone alive is more than their economic value, they are denied life saving, or at least prolonging, treatments.
This is treating people like cattle. If economic utility is the principle value, then we ought to cut the poor off from food, because they cost more than they earn for the State.
But of course, if they did not pretend to be “compassionate”, people like Sunstein would never get to the power positions they yearn so desperately to abuse.