School Teachers, Nurses, Government Workers, CELEBRATING Charlie Kirk's murder
- By JSRG
- News & Current Events (Articles Required)
- 147 Replies
A context which is frankly absurd. He's proposing an armed rebellion by people armed with a Saturday night special or a couple of hunting rifles and a few boxes of ammo against the best equipped army on the planet.
Who is going to organise this? Where are the HQs going to be? How are you going to communicate? How does someone who spends a few hours at the range every now and then going to go up against a bunch of highly trained killers with unlimited weaponry, armed cars, tanks, helicopters, drones, night sights, rocket launchers, smart bombs and heaven know what else? This is not a few guys with flintlocks and a horn full of powder casting their own lead bullets, which the founding fathers had in mind.
It's an absurd, bat crazy American macho fantasy. And a few dozen children being gunned down on a regular basis is the price some people want to pay to live out this fantasy.
Kirk had 2 kids. Would he have agreed to pay the price of their lives to prevent some basic rules and regulations on owning a weapon being agreed to? Give me a break. He accepted someone else's children being sacrificed for his adolescent posturing. He accepted other parents' children having their bodies being blow apart to keep the fantasy alive.
I'm not a gun rights guy (I'd be totally fine if they were to remove the Second Amendment, it's a mess judicially anyway), so I'm not even all that much in agreement with his argument. Nevertheless, I feel much of what you wrote could be used to argue that cars all need to be banned (they kill about as many people per year in the US as guns) and that people who don't think cars should be banned are just accepting other people's kids getting run over, and not their own. Plus, no cars means a lot less pollution! The counterargument, of course, is that cars have a lot more positives than guns (I am inclined to agree with this counterargument). Still, he did offer what he viewed as ways to lower the gun deaths at schools. As the article I linked to notes, he might be wrong in his arguments, but the amount of callousness people make him out to have in this area is unwarranted, unless one wishes to claim that people think cars should be legal are similarly callous.
In regards to the possibility of resisting "the best equipped army on the planet", a lot depends on exactly how this hypothetical tyrannical attempt by the government plays out. Remember that the best equipped army on the planet, with all of its technological superiority, still ultimately lost to far weaker forces in Vietnam and Afghanistan; to win, you don't necessarily have to actually defeat the US military, just resist long and hard enough that they decide it's not worth it and quit (someone might say it was because the US was democratic that it gave up, as voters got tired and a tyranny could keep going on, but decidedly non-democratic countries have had to give up when facing much weaker enemies like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan). If the federal government and all the state governments decide to impose absolute tyranny and the military has no objections, then probably an armed citizenry wouldn't be able to do all that much if the government is absolutely determined to go through it all no matter what. However, more plausibly we'd see at least some of the military defect and some states resist, and in that case having resistance people with guns who know how to use them could be a major problem for a tyrannical government. I do think he overestimates how much power an armed citizenry could have in this, but I think you underestimate it.
Well, as noted at the link, it appears the gun that was used to kill him would have still been obtainable even if the gun control laws he disliked had been passed, so to say him dying was a total being paid seems erroneous. Emphasis mine, footnote included:Now his wife can add his tragic death to the total being paid.
God help you all..
Even if Kirk never specifically blew off gun deaths, though, he did fight against many proposed gun regulations, from the attempt to revive the federal Assault Weapons Ban to federal registration. Then he was killed by a gun! Regardless of his rhetoric, his actions in the legislative arena created the conditions for his own death!
…Right?
No. Charlie Kirk was killed by a single shot from a old-style Mauser .30-06 caliber hunting rifle.
This was not an assault rifle. It was not a sniper rifle. It wasn't even a semi-automatic. It wasn't a handgun. It wasn't a ghost gun. It had a bolt action. It was not a "weapon of war," unless you mean World War I. Here’s an ode to the “indestructible” .30-06 from 1962, singing its praises as a big-game rifle.
This is a hunting rifle. Charlie Kirk believed that the Second Amendment guaranteed Americans access to weapons of war to resist tyrannical government. His critics insisted that he was wrong, and that the only people who need guns are hunters and sportsmen. But this was a hunting gun.
If you repealed the Second Amendment and immediately imposed Canada's gun laws in the United States, Charlie Kirk still could have been shot and killed by this rifle.4 The only way to prevent this would have been to ban every gun in existence, then somehow enforce that ban. Not one of our peer nations has even attempted this, much less succeeded at it.
Once we know more about the shooter, we may find that there were interventions we could have done on the shooter himself (rather than the gun). That's a healthy conversation to have, once we have all the facts. (I don’t know about Charlie Kirk, but I’m pro-red flag laws, and I’ll be interested to know whether a red flag law might have been useful here.) As of today, though, there’s no justification for saying (or thinking) that Kirk’s successful advocacy for gun rights contributed in any way to his own murder. Even if Kirk had been firmly anti-Second Amendment and successfully gotten it repealed and most guns banned, this gun still would have been available to most anyone who wanted him dead. There’s no poetic justice here. Just blood and a child’s tears.
4 Hunting rifles like this must be licensed and registered in Canada, through a PAL or POL license. However, anyone can obtain the license, except people with records of crime or involuntary commitment to a mental hospital. (The U.S. has similar restrictions on criminals and the mentally ill owning guns.) Canadian sportsmen have to jump through more hoops than Americans do to get a gun, like a gun safety course and a 28-day waiting period for a first-time licensee, but none impose substantive obstacles for someone who has already decided to use a gun to commit murder.
Now maybe its description of Canada's gun laws is incorrect, but some quick research seems to back it up.
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