Ann Althouse admires Hillary Clinton’s approach to balancing competing values and making hard choices with regard to public policies impacting Americans’ constitutionsl rights. Evidently, you balance those competing values by defining people interested in the ones you don’t like as “a minority” which you will not allow to terrorize the majority.
Hillary’s “guns” riff… contains [an] amazing assertion. … She begins:
First of all, I think as a teacher or really any parent, what’s been happening with these school shootings should cause everybody to just think hard.
“Hard” is Hillary’s key word. It’s her book title — “Hard Choices” — and it’s an all-purpose boast and excuse. She’s capable of doing what’s hard and, when things are hard, one can’t be expected to get everything exactly right. And yes, “hard” invites her critics to mock her in a sexual way, as Rush Limbaugh did on his show yesterday: Hard Choices? Hard?!! That’s going to make everyone think of Bill Clinton’s erections. I’m paraphrasing. What Rush said was: “Now, if Bill had a book and the title of that was Hard Choices with the foreword by Monica Lewinsky, then maybe you might have a book that would walk itself off the shelves.”
Back to the town hall transcript. We’ve seen that Hillary has led off with her core theme: It’s hard.
Which seems to say: We all should just first pause and think about how hard it all is. She expands on hardness:
We make hard choices and we balance competing values all the time.
This might make you think she’s about to give a balanced presentation with careful attention to the opinions and preferences of those who see deep meaning in the right to bear arms. But the values on one side of this values competition dominate:
And I was disappointed that the Congress did not pass universal background checks after the horrors of the shootings at Sandy Hook and now we’ve had more… in the time since.
And I don’t think any parent, any person should have to fear about their child going to school or going to college because someone, for whatever reasons — psychological, emotional, political, ideological, whatever it means — could possibly enter that school property with an automatic weapon and murder innocent children, students, teachers.
I’m well aware that this is a hot political subject.
Hot political subject, yes, but I thought you said there were values here and that it was hard to balance them. Are the gun-rights people just political heat you have to face or do you genuinely contemplate their values? …
But I believe that we need a more thoughtful conversation.
Yes? Do tell. We’re going to balance those competing values? We’re going to cool down and actually think about everything? NO! The next thing she says is:
We cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.
Whoa! That’s the line I was looking for. Read it again and see how shocking it is. Not only did Hillary completely turn her back on “balanc[ing] competing values” and “more thoughtful conversation,” she doesn’t want to allow the people on one side of the conversation even to believe what they believe. Those who care about gun rights and reject new gun regulations should be stopped from holding their viewpoint. Now, it isn’t possible to forcibly prevent people from holding a viewpoint. Our beliefs reside inside our head. And in our system of free speech rights, the government cannot censor the expression of a viewpoint. But the question is Hillary Clinton’s fitness for the highest office, and her statement reveals a grandiose and profoundly repressive mindset. …
Hillary Clinton poses as the coolly thoughtful presider over a national conversation, but if you listen to what she’s saying, she already has her answers and she’s not going to let hold you hold any other viewpoint. The woman who once famously said…
I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration, somehow you’re not patriotic…
… is now ready to deploy the verb “to terrorize” against those who debate and disagree with her.
Glenn Reynolds was amused the other day when he found the gun-running scandal involving Democrat State Senator Leeland Yee (who represents San Francisco & San Mateo County and who was, when the scandal broke, running for Secretary of State) was getting coverage from Popular Mechanics, while being studiously ignored by CNN.
Esquire magazine picked up the Popular Mechanics “Leeland Yee-supplied guns” feature, but the MSM is generally ignoring all this, classifying the matter as merely “local news.”
Leeland Yee was honored in 2006 by the Brady Campaign for “gun violence prevention” for his co-athoring a bill requiring semiautomatic handguns (not sold covertly by State Senator Yee) to include ballistics identification microstamping.
Andrew Sullivan quotes readers of his Dish to produce a somewhat disingenuous on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand summary of the gun control debate.
Reader 2 (the token pro-gun guy) is “a responsible gun owner [who] want[s] to reduce the number of gun deaths, and [who accepts the liberal perspective that] there are many ways of doing this, from requiring guns to be locked up when not in use so that minors cannot accidentally shoot somebody, to universal background checks to at least make it difficult for criminals to get their hands on guns.” But, even he recognizes that most of the left is simply playing a salami game, one slice today, another slice tomorrow, aiming at complete elimination of civilian firearms ownership.
Quote Reader 2:
On one hand, there are over 300 million of us, so only one in 500,000 Americans is killed every year because his knumbskull cousin said “Hey Bert, is this thing loaded?†before pulling the trigger. You can see that as a small number. The other way to look at is that each and every day, an American or two loses his or her life this way. In countries with sane gun laws, that 606 number is somewhere closer to zero.
That sentence encapsulates what I hate about the anti-gun crowd.
While Waldman is ahead of the game in that he at least admits that at .5% of all accidental deaths make accidental gun deaths a pretty low priority, he goes on to say that we should eliminate all personal gun ownership to take care of it anyway. Why does this bother me? Well, because it says that he doesn’t value my desire to own a gun to the point where he would take my gun to solve a problem he just admitted was insignificant. So by extension, what I want is even less significant than this insignificant issue. …
[I]t is difficult to work with somebody who puts such a low value on something that you value that they see no reason why anybody would even want what you want.
If you want to know why it is so easy for the NRA to sell the idea that some people want to take your guns away look no farther than Paul Waldman (and Obama, Bloomberg, Feinstein and others) who on one hand say they don’t want to take your guns while making statements that make it clear they don’t value you having one.
It’s easy for the NRA to find people who agree with the idea that some people want to take your guns away (no “selling” required), because it’s true.
David Frum (the poor man’s Andrew Sullivan), got a good deal of attention for his tweet last weekend: “Hypothesis: the people who most want to carry are the very last people on earth who should be allowed to carry.â€
One of the best rejoinders came from David French.
In my experience, those individuals who carry do so because they very consciously do not want to belong to the class of citizens that is inherently helpless — totally reliant upon the state to protect not just themselves but their family, friends, and neighbors. If the choice is between protectors and protected, they choose to be protectors.
This identity is often inseparable from the notion that there is no set of government policies — no utopia — that can eliminate from human society the need for immediate protection. People can and will try to hurt others — using whatever means immediately available — and it strikes us as utterly reckless to be unprepared for this reality.
The protected class has a different view. The protected class is a dependent class — not economically dependent of course, but dependent on the state in perhaps a more fundamental way (for their very lives) – and like members of other dependent classes, they are terrified of flaws in the state’s protective apparatus. Walled off from gun culture, they read the occasional, aberrant story of (legal) gun-owner stupidity or recklessness and cower in fear of a nonexistent threat. (While of course blithely sending their kids off to far more dangerous activities, like swimming in neighbors’ pools or riding in neighbors’ cars).
To the protected class, private ownership of firearms is the flaw in the system that makes them feel vulnerable. It’s the barrier to the safety they crave but can’t provide.
Thus the irreconcilable cultural divide: The very thing that provides security and safety for the gun-owner and his or her family frightens their non-gun-owning friends and neighbors, but the root of the problem is not the gun but the protected person’s very sense of themselves.
Ol’ Remus predicts what life will soon be like here on the farm.
There’s a rabid raccoon circling your livestock.
You go to your gun safe and enter your sixty-digit code, press the fingerprint-verification pad, put your eye to the retina reader, wait for the Instant Background Check, open the safe and get out the .22 single shot rifle, unlock the child safety lock and remove it, install the bolt in the rifle, take two rounds of ammo from your legal nine round supply, chamber the legal maximum of one round, enter the serial numbers of both rounds and their removal time on your web-based log. You close the gun safe, reactivate all the security and run out the door.
You dispatch said rabid raccoon. He was moving slow.
Back to the gun safe, enter your code, fingerprint pad, retina reader, open the safe, remove the bolt and store it, reinstall the child safety lock and replace the rifle, log the replacement time, verify the serial numbers of the expended rounds and close the gun safe. Then down to the State Police to turn in the fired cases, get fingerprinted, get a blood test and have an ankle bracelet installed.
Next day an official container arrives. You take the required raccoon parts from your freezer and the twelve-page notarized incident report, attach photos, an annotated map, your blood test results, the standard request for two rounds to be credited to your ammo allotment, and send it all in. Your ankle bracelet won’t be removed and your gun safe won’t be reopened until the incident report is approved. It’s just common sense.
Your case involves the taking of a cute animal for non-game purposes and so it wends its way through local, county, state and federal law enforcement agencies. A hearing is scheduled requiring your presence at a city three hundred and eighty miles away. Your name is now on the no-fly list so you drive. You make your case to the review board.
Hundreds of Connecticut residents lined up Monday to make sure their weapons will be legal in the new year.
The state’s new gun laws are supposed to protect the families of Connecticut, but some said the laws are only causing problems for law abiding citizens.
People started lining up at the State Department of Public Safety in Middletown early Monday morning. The line wrapped around the building and people were registering up until the building closed at 4:30 p.m.
The controversial, wide-ranging gun control law was passed in Connecticut in April after the mass shooting inside Sandy Hook Elementary where 20 children and six adults lost their lives.
Now anything the state considers to be an assault weapon or magazine holding more than 10 rounds needs to be registered by Wednesday or it will be illegal in the new year.
If an assault weapon bought before April is not registered by Tuesday, owners will have to sell it to a gun dealer, render it permanently inoperable, or turn it in to law enforcement.
“If you get caught with a banned assault weapon after tomorrow night then you’re going to be prosecuted as a felon,” said Mike Lawlor, who is the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice.
I am so happy not to be living in that state anymore.
Senator Hudak contemptuously rejects a rape victim’s observation that she might have been able to defend herself if she had been carrying her weapon.
Rather than face a recall election, Colorado Senator Evie Hudak has decided to resign. (Town Hall)
After seeing two of her Colorado colleagues recalled over anti-gun votes, Democratic State Senator Evie Hudak, will submit her resignation.
Hudak will hold a news conference Wednesday morning at the Arvada Library.
“By resigning I am protecting these important new laws for the good of Colorado and ensuring that we can continue looking forward,” Hudak wrote in her resignation letter in regard to her gun votes, which led to the recall effort.
Proponents of the recall have until early next week to submit about 18,900 valid signatures to the secretary of state’s office. If enough signatures are valid, Hudak would be the third Colorado lawmaker to face a recall election this year because of her support for tougher gun laws.
Earlier this year, Colorado State Senator Angela Giron and Senate President John Morse, both from blue districts, were recalled and replaced with Republicans.
