Last week’s New Yorker cover caused a big row; people missed the obviously satirical nature of the cover depicting Obama as a Muslim fist bumping his Angela Davis-esque wife, with a big Afro and an AK slung over her shoulder.
It was obvious satirizing some of the sillier Internet-driven attacks on the man, and frankly I don’t see what the fuss was about. The real nonsense was contained inside, in Hendrik Hertzberg’s editorial.
While it only tangentially address the RKBA issue, what mention it does give reflects the more pernicious elitism the “guns are evil” crowd is so prone to now that they’ve lost a big battle.
For twenty years, nominal support for the death penalty and its partner in crime, “gun rights,” has apparently been mandatory for any Democrat wishing to have a serious chance to be elected President
Partner in crime? What the heck is that supposed to mean? As though one is dependent on or reflective of the other. And why the quotation marks if not to belittle the right that millions of Americans hold dear? Clearly Hertzberg is an elitist who thinks your right to defend yourself is somehow not really a “right” at all.
As for the Court’s radical decision conferring upon an individual the right to possess guns separate from service in a “well regulated militia,” he did not, as reported, “embrace” it.
What was radical about it? The court simply ruled that “people” means the same thing in the 2A as it means everywhere else in the COTUS. I’ve never understood the attachment many so-called “liberals” have to the idea that the 2A somehow made militia service a prerequisite to firearms ownership. How does saying “because we sometimes need a militia, the common folk can own guns” get morphed into “you can have a gun if you’re in a militia?”
In any event, Hertzberg confesses something that won’t help Obama–SCOTUS appointees he makes aren’t going to be friendly to the RKBA.
“Radical” because they say so.
It is part of the big lie technique — say something often enough and say it with enough people until it becomes accepted truth.
There has been a propaganda program underway in some corners of the U.S. and it has worked to an extent more than I would have believed.
Some of the big lies now currently believed by millions of Americans include:
1) The 2nd Amendment is a collective, not individual, right
2) Having a gun in home is more of a risk to you and your family than a benefit to protect your family,
3) Gun control reduces murders and suicides (in a particular form, the D.C. handgun ban saved lives in DC) even though both the CDC and the National Research Council have published independent studies that there have been no studies proving gun control helped reduce violence.
With regard to #3, check my assertion about the DC handgun ban claims with a google search on “”Effects of Restrictive Licensing of Handguns” and see how many links you get to articles citing a study claiming reduced violence from that ban. You’ll even find statements by police authorities from countries around the world that parrot that line.
The widespread nature of these beliefs 1), 2) or 3) in various forms and the many articles proclaiming some form of these beliefs in supposedly objective scientific journals suggests a concerted effort. The question is qui bono?
Comment by Phil Lee — July 23, 2008 @ 7:55 am
It’s odd sometimes how something can be “hidden” in open sight. The other day a commentator noted that the first three words of the Constitution - We the People - are written in larger letters as if to shout out loud just how important the people are.
Comment by Donald Pollock — July 24, 2008 @ 7:05 am