Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control -- Canada Free Press

[bsteadman]

Gun Control, Thought Control and People Control

Canada Free Press
Daniel Greenfield
12/18/2012

Excerpt:

The gun control debate, like all debates with the left, is reducible to the question of whether we are individuals who make our own decisions or a great squishy social mass that helplessly responds to stimuli. Do people kill with guns or does the availability of guns kill people? Do bad eating habits kill people or does the availability of junk food kill people?

To the left these are distinctions without a difference. If a thing is available then it is the cause of the problem. The individual cannot be held accountable for shooting someone if there are guns for sale. Individuals have no role to play because they are not moral actors, only members of a mob responding to stimuli.

You wouldn’t blame a dog for overeating; you blame the owners for overfeeding him. Nor do you blame a dog for biting a neighbor. You might punish him, but the punishment is training, not a recognition of authentic responsibility on the part of the canine. And the way that you think of a dog, is the way that the left thinks of you. When you misbehave, the left looks around for your owner.

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.
The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual

Individual behavior is a symptom of a social problem. Identify the social problem and you fix the behavior. The individual is nothing, the crowd is everything. Control the mass and you control the individual.

That is how the left approached this election. Instead of appealing to individual interests, they went after identity groups. They targeted low information voters and used behavioral science to find ways to manipulate people. The right treated voters like human beings. The left treated them like lab monkeys. And the lab monkey approach is triumphantly toted by progressives as proof that the left is more intelligent than the right. And what better proof of intelligence can there be than treating half the country like buttons of unthinking responses that you can push to get them to do what you want.

Would you let a lab monkey own a gun? Hell no. Would you let it choose what to eat? Only as an experiment. Would you let it vote for laws in a referendum? Not unless it’s trained to push the right button. Would you let it drive a car? Nope. Maybe a bicycle. And if it has to travel a long way, you’ll encourage it to use mass transit. Does a monkey have freedom of speech? Only until it annoys you.

You’ll take away most of the monkey’s bananas, which you’re too lazy to go and find for yourself because you have more important things to do than fetch bananas. You train monkeys to fetch bananas for you. That is how the enlightened elites of the left see the workers whose taxes they harvest; as monkeys that they taught in their schools and created jobs for with their stimulus plans for. And the least that the monkeys could do is pay their taxes, because the monkeys didn’t build that. You did.

You do plan to take care of monkey’s medical expenses, at least until they get too high, and spay and neuter it with free birth control. You will train it to be the smartest and most well-behaved monkey it can be. And when it gets too sick, you plan to have it mercifully put down so it doesn’t hang around spreading diseases and depressing you with its misery.

And what’s wrong with any of that? Human beings are just evolved monkeys. It’s not as if you’re being cruel to the monkey. You’re engaged in what you might charitably think of as a symbiotic relationship with the monkey. If the monkey were smart, it might think of you as a parasite. But you have a whole lot of rounds of ammunition stockpiled in case of a Planet of the Apes scenario.

If you assume that there is as much of a substantive difference the elite and the common man as there is between a man and a monkey, there is nothing particularly inappropriate about such behavior. We herd animals. Liberals herd people. The human being is the livestock of the liberal animal farm.
Liberals believe that they are the master race on account of their superior empathy and intelligence

The Nazis believed that they were the master race because they were genetically superior. Liberals believe that they are the master race on account of their superior empathy and intelligence. There’s an obvious paradox in believing that you have the right to enslave and kill people because you care more, but that didn’t stop millions of people from joining in with revolutions that led to a century of bloodshed in the name of movements that cared more.

The defining American code is freedom. The defining liberal code is compassion. Conservatives have attempted to counter that by defining freedom as compassionate, as George W. Bush did. Liberals counter by attempting to define compassion as liberating, the way that FDR did by classing freedoms with entitlements in his Four Freedoms.

On one side stands the individual with his rights and responsibilities. On the other side is the remorseless state machinery of supreme compassion. And there is no bridging this gap.

Liberal compassion is not the compassion of equals. It is a revolutionary pity that uses empathy only as fuel for outrage. It is the sort of compassion practiced by people who like to be angry and who like to pretend that their anger makes them better people. It is the sort of compassion that eats like poison into the bones of a man or a society, even while swelling their egos with their own wonderfulness.
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View the complete article at:

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/51838

[bsteadman]

Newtown, Beslan, Ma’alot: Defending the Targeted School

Soft targets will always be attractive to the murderous.

PJ Media
Abraham H. Miller
12/18/2012

Excerpt:

As we mourn the victims of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, we might want to take a break from the seemingly endless and mindless discussion of the role of guns in this tragedy and consider a larger issue. One that has not made it to the pages and airwaves of the mainstream media and probably won’t until it is too late.

Beslan, a city in the Russian Federation, is five thousand miles from Newtown, Connecticut. But it is now connected to Newton by a similar tragedy: the invasion of a school and the wanton murder of children and adults.

On the first day of school in 2004, Islamist terrorists seized 1100 children and adults at the Beslan School Number One and herded them into a small gymnasium. The terrorists rigged the gym with mines and bombs. Two conspicuously large bombs were placed in the gym’s basketball hoops.

Children were made to stand in front of the gym’s windows as human shields. Periodically, the terrorists would fire their guns to further terrify the hostages.

Hours passed, the temperature climbed, and hostages began to faint. On the second day of the hostage-taking episode, children began dying of dehydration. Children and adults began stripping to stay cool and some people drank their own urine.

The gruesome scene was videotaped and a compliant and insensitive world media began broadcasting the footage. On the third day of the siege, Russian spetsnaz units stormed the school. Half-naked and bloodied hostages ran from the building.

The terrorists retreated to the school’s basement, where they were wiped out by the Russian troops in a horrendous gunfight. The gymnasium burned to the ground and the charred bodies of adults and children had to await DNA tests for identification. One terrorist had not retreated to the basement, and was later found by the Russian troops hiding under a truck. He told his captors that he would tell them whatever they wanted to know if they would not turn him over to the children’s parents.

The siege at the Beslan School left 311 people dead, of which 186 were children; some 700 people were injured. Neither time nor distance is a great healer in heart-wrenching events such as these. The survivors of Beslan, like survivors of all such episodes, continue to bear their psychological scars.

For years, I interviewed survivors of hostage and barricade situations. Precious few ever truly escape the lingering impact of the experience.

Beslan, as a case study, was part of a presentation I attended some years ago by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. A warrior, historian, psychologist, and expert on the science of killing — which he calls Killology — Grossman is a captivating speaker. On the day I heard him he brought law enforcement officers across local, state, and federal jurisdictions to their feet in enthusiastic applause.

Grossman’s message, overly distilled, is this: terrorists choose soft targets that generate a lot of emotional imagery for the camera’s lens. The next 9/11 is probably not going to be the taking of airplanes — a hardened target — but the taking of schools: a soft, unprotected target that has an even greater psychological impact and generates even greater visuals for a Western media hungry to fill airtime with sensational events. Nowhere is the symbiosis of terrorists and their media enablers greater than in events like Beslan.
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View the complete article at:

http://pjmedia.com/blog/defending-the-targeted-school/

[bsteadman]

Obama at prayer vigil: ‘I will use whatever power this office holds’

Washington Examiner
Charlie Spiering, Commentary Staff Writer
12/17/2012

Excerpt:

During a prayer vigil for the shooting victims in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama vowed that he would ‘use whatever power this office holds’ to try to prevent another tragic shooting.

“Since I’ve been President, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by a mass shooting,” he said, adding that the victims,’ “only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“We can’t tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change,” he asserted.

Obama admitted that laws were unable to “eliminate evil from the world,” but that it was no excuse for refusing to address a growing problem.

“In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens — from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” he said. “Because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.”

He added, “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
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View the complete article at:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-...4#.UNDCp3cnn9o

[bsteadman]

Sarah Palin Offers Perhaps The Single Best Commentary On Newtown Shooting Tragedy

The Ulsterman Report
Ulsterman
12/17/2012

Excerpt:

Readers have sent hundreds of suggestions, comments, and linked articles my way related specifically to the terrible school shooting in Newtown, Conneticut this past week. One such link stood out – words written yesterday by Sarah Palin who, in her own to the point manner, expressed much of what I myself had been feeling upon learning of the tragedy:

Sarah Palin

EXCERPT:

Unspeakable evil slammed America in the beautiful little town of Newtown, Connecticut, just days ago. No words can express the collective shock and sorrow shared by Americans who know the murder of innocent children is the most horrendous crime imaginable. The Connecticut state motto, “Qui transtulit sustinet,” promises that only God can sustain us. Though still insufficient and unfulfilling for the grieving families of these beautiful babies in the Lord’s arms now, perhaps those words are all the inconsolable loved ones can hold on to at this time. May God show His sustaining love to them right now. Please Lord.

It may seem, especially after Friday, the world is spinning fast and furious and out of control. Many political, economic, and societal problems attempt to weigh down our spirit so heavily that some despondently give up after being deceptively led to believe there is no real hope for anything getting better. And despite 24-hour news cycles with constant information flooding our eyes and ears with much white noise, TV’s talking heads really have nothing meaningful to offer.

Those who let themselves be terribly disappointed in political leaders as they ignore real problems, aided along with a complicit media bombarding us with irrelevant distractions in order to avoid facing the reality of a fallen culture, should know those distractions are to hide from a finger pointing to the main contributors to much of our problem. To stop distracting would result in acknowledging the political and media machine’s starring roles in our failing society. So, as they too often tear down those who try to do good, while elevating and celebrating corrupt selfishness, they dumbly assume we don’t know it is they who significantly contribute to our upside down world today. We’ve learned our lesson. Don’t put your hope in Hollywood or Washington. Instead, build resolve and seek truth more aggressively than ever at such a time as this.
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View the original, full comment by Sarah Palin at:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/sarah...51191714058435

View the complete Ulsterman Report post at:

http://theulstermanreport.com/2012/1...oting-tragedy/

[bsteadman]

VIDEO: Pamela Geller on Dr. Drew discussing Newtown

Atlas Shrugs
Pamela Geller
12/18/2012

Excerpt:

In case you missed my appearance last night on Dr. Drew .... here's my take:

This is the poison fruit of the left's decades long war on American values and morality. The problem is not guns. The problem is our societal glorification of violence and death. We need to recover love of life and respect for human beings in the society, and teach such things in schools.

Our societal nihilism is what leads to these attacks.

American children are fed a daily diet of violence from early childhood on. A non-stop feed of gratuitous, mindless violence on television, in movies, on the internet, and particularly video games, dehumanizes and desensitizes. How many open chest cavities do we need to see on CSI or Law and Order? When I was a kid, Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchock could scare the living daylights out of you without so much as a knife or gun drawn. Add to that the porn culture .......

Hollywood, the music industry, the lack of morality and virture, the breakdown of the family and a reckless abandonment of the mentally ill. In the late 20th century psychiatric hospitals got a very bad name; the left decided the mental institutions were wrong, cruel. Institutionalizing someone became ‘the boogie man’. These hospitals were closed, and we basically tossed our mentally ill onto the street. We medicated them and then threw them to the wolves. Now we’re raising a generation of mentally ill children, with limited mental health resources and a system whose hands are tied until AFTER the tragedy happens.
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View the complete article, including video, at:

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/a...-shooting.html

[bsteadman]

Video: Gun Control in Australia - Watch and Weep

Video: Gun Control in Australia - Watch and Weep

http://www.wasobamaborninkenya.com/I...Watch-and-Weep

[bsteadman]

Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown

Wall Street Journal, Online
David Kopel
12/17/2012

Excerpt:

Has the rate of random mass shootings in the United States increased? Over the past 30 years, the answer is definitely yes. It is also true that the total U.S. homicide rate has fallen by over half since 1980, and the gun homicide rate has fallen along with it. Today, Americans are safer from violent crime, including gun homicide, than they have been at any time since the mid-1960s.

Mass shootings, defined as four or more fatalities, fluctuate from year to year, but over the past 30 years there has been no long-term increase or decrease. But "random" mass shootings, such as the horrific crimes last Friday in Newtown, Conn., have increased.

Alan Lankford of the University of Alabama analyzed data from a recent New York Police Department study of "active shooters"—criminals who attempted to murder people in a confined area, where there are lots of people, and who chose at least some victims randomly. Counting only the incidents with at least two casualties, there were 179 such crimes between 1966 and 2010. In the 1980s, there were 18. In the 1990s, there were 54. In the 2000s, there were 87.

If you count only such crimes in which five or more victims were killed, there were six in the 1980s and 19 in the 2000s.

Why the increase? It cannot be because gun-control laws have become more lax. Before the 1968 Gun Control Act, there were almost no federal gun-control laws. The exception was the National Firearms Act of 1934, which set up an extremely severe registration and tax system for automatic weapons and has remained in force for 78 years.

Nor are magazines holding more than 10 rounds something new. They were invented decades ago and have long been standard for many handguns. Police officers carry them for the same reason that civilians do: Especially if a person is attacked by multiple assailants, there is no guarantee that a 10-round magazine will end the assault.

The 1980s were much worse than today in terms of overall violent crime, including gun homicide, but they were much better than today in terms of mass random shootings. The difference wasn't that the 1980s had tougher controls on so-called "assault weapons." No assault weapons law existed in the U.S. until California passed a ban in 1989.

Connecticut followed in 1993. None of the guns that the Newtown murderer used was an assault weapon under Connecticut law. This illustrates the uselessness of bans on so-called assault weapons, since those bans concentrate on guns' cosmetics, such as whether the gun has a bayonet lug, rather than their function.

What some people call "assault weapons" function like every other normal firearm—they fire only one bullet each time the trigger is pressed. Unlike automatics (machine guns), they do not fire continuously as long as the trigger is held. They are "semi-automatic" because they eject the empty shell case and load the next round into the firing chamber.

Today in America, most handguns are semi-automatics, as are many long guns, including the best-selling rifle today, the AR-15, the model used in the Newtown shooting. Some of these guns look like machine guns, but they do not function like machine guns.

Back in the mid-1960s, in most states, an adult could walk into a store and buy an AR-15 rifle, no questions asked. Today, firearms are the most heavily regulated consumer product in the United States. If someone wants to purchase an AR-15 or any other firearm, the store must first get permission for the sale from the FBI or its state counterpart. Permission is denied if the buyer is in one of nine categories of "prohibited persons," including felons, domestic-violence misdemeanants, and persons who have been adjudicated mentally ill or alcoholic.

Since gun controls today are far stricter than at the time when "active shooters" were rare, what can account for the increase in these shootings? One plausible answer is the media. Cable TV in the 1990s, and the Internet today, greatly magnify the instant celebrity that a mass killer can achieve. We know that many would-be mass killers obsessively study their predecessors.

Loren Coleman's 2004 book "The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines" shows that the copycat effect is as old as the media itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 classic "The Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe. But today the velocity and pervasiveness of the media make the problem much worse.

A second explanation is the deinstitutionalization of the violently mentally ill. A 2000 New York Times study of 100 rampage murderers found that 47 were mentally ill. In the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2008), Jason C. Matejkowski and his co-authors reported that 16% of state prisoners who had perpetrated murders were mentally ill.

In the mid-1960s, many of the killings would have been prevented because the severely mentally ill would have been confined and cared for in a state institution. But today, while government at most every level has bloated over the past half-century, mental-health treatment has been decimated. According to a study released in July by the Treatment Advocacy Center, the number of state hospital beds in America per capita has plummeted to 1850 levels, or 14.1 beds per 100,000 people.
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View the complete article at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...857424036.html