Okay, so here was my half hour for today… (from a thread from percussionist and community leader Ron Goad where he’d posted a photograph of an absolutely mobbed gun show in Virginia…
Doug Parks If the Governor of Va was not an asshat about guns there would not be overcrowding at gun shows. Many Virginians are buying guns and ammo while it is still legal
…
Rob Hinkal Is that the part where you can only buy one gun a month or the part where if you’ve got to get a background check (don’t worry, there’s lots of exemptions!)? Or the part where you’ve only got two days to report it if your gun is stolen? Or maybe the part where if in a court of law you’re shown to be a danger to yourself or others you’re not supposed to couple that with having a gun? What is it that you want to do that they just restricted?
Doug Parks Rob Hinkal the ultimate goal of registration is to know where to look for guns when the Government decides it’s time to take them
Rob Hinkal With almost more guns in the US than actual people and less than a million cops and only another million or so active military members I GUESS it’d be viable to go and hunt down all the fire arms? Just task every cop and every Marine and everyone in the Army and make them each responsible for dropping by and picking up 150 guns apiece all in one fell swoop? They could probably do it secretly too because you know all cops and all military service members would keep their mouths shut in the course of it all…
So – though I’m trying to reply in a facetious and educated way about the practicality of such an exercise, I’m not really intending my response to just be joking or making fun of the guy. I mean this as a genuine mental exercise: How would you go about taking all American guns?
Even with the knowledge that there’s no way you’d attempt to make this a universal thing because… you know… there’s a lot of middle ground betwixt where we are now and going around trying to confiscate every firearm and there’s a Second Amendment still and that’s genuinely not going anywhere no matter what anybody thinks… there’s this absurd Slippery Slope Argument that bump stocks and fully automatic machine guns are just one step from a reasonable home defense weapon like a shotgun or a hand gun.
People never argue “I’ve been stockpiling AK-47s and grenades and am a member of a militia and sensibly the government might choose to come and take my arsenal away”… no, it’s always “I’ve got a hunting rifle and an AR-15 and a handgun and I don’t want to register the items I use for home protection because the government, in an unreasonable overreach and completely at random, is going to come and take my guns away”. It’s people who claim to be reasonable users that seem to have unreasonable concerns so we come back to Jade Helm and Obama’s Coming for Your Guns (and Bibles) from Beyond His Presidency!
That’s a LOT of firearms. How would you make that happen?
Let me tell you what I’M afraid of that no amount of buying-more-than-one-handgun a month is going to take care of. Let me tell you what I’m trying not to be paranoid about that’s NOT going to be solved by Trump knowing whether or not I have a rifle in my home.
I’m trying NOT to be paranoid about seeing A-10 Warthogs in the sky.
I’ve never noticed them before but they have cropped up a couple of times in the past months. They’re distinctive airplanes and just after Trump starts talking about sending federal and military forces into cities including Baltimore City they start showing up?
A million cops and a million service members wouldn’t be able to keep the secret of Coming For Your Guns, but a couple of hundred specially tasked urban assault teams with air support?
A-10s are not just distinctive in silhouette, they’re distinctive in purpose and capability. An A-10 is designed not to need much space to take off or set down and so doesn’t have to be staged out of known airbases (ideal for hiding in a populated area), it’s designed to be pretty invulnerable to small arms fire (like what the civilian population or even urban police force could reasonably be expected to field) and is designed to make tight circles around small areas (like city blocks) hosing them down with 8” long bullets at a rate of 70 shells per SECOND at a velocity that will cut through every building IN said city block before whipping past at over 400mph.
And so beyond the facetious concept of wondering how the US Government would mobilize enough force to take EVERYONE’S gun, I’m wondering how Doug would personally defend himself if the US Government legitimately decided to come take HIS gun.
Oh – right – that’s why he doesn’t want to register his firearm.
Doug doesn’t need to worry about registering his firearm being the red flag that he’s an anti-government gun owner. He’s stating it on social media where his location is pinpointed by the device in his back pocket. I simply don’t understand how incomplete the train of logic is for people like this. The very information these paranoid netizens are terrified of the government figuring out is something generally what they broadcast every day on Facebook along with convenient triangulation information.
Meanwhile I’m kind of worried about Trump declaring martial law right before the election and authorizing A-10s to open fire on crowds of Dangerous Black Lives Matters Rioters (Fox News at 11). But yeah. I’m trying NOT to be paranoid about seeing A-10s in the sky.
Sigh.
