On Monday I did something I shouldn’t have. It’s been gnawing at me all week.
Monday morning, first thing after booting up my computer and before I even had a sip of tea, I clicked on a link. Yes, the same thing most of us do hundreds, if not thousands, of times per week. You’d think by now the brain would be numbed to any creepiness that might be hiding behind any link. But no.
This particular link was to an anti-gun thread on a forum I used to (until that moment) visit daily. The forum generally has nothing to do with politics, but when political discussions do arise, they can get … heated. I know that. Most of the politically engaged people on the site are also liberal or progressive or whatever they’re calling themselves these days. I know that, too. I also know that there are a handful of people on that site who, when the subject is guns, are foaming-at-the-mouth rabid. Normally I stay away, but I noticed that the most recent post in that thread was by somebody I respect. He’s not pro-gun, but he’s sensible, moderate, and often witty. So I clicked.
My eye strayed to the post right above that one. It was that post that blighted my day and much of my week.
I won’t quote it here lest it mess up your Friday, but basically, in two short paragraphs, it contained so much prejudice, ignorance, and downright irrational loathing that I was stunned. The majority of gun owners are murderers. They’re killing all the rest of us. The usual. But this person — who in other contexts has seemed friendly, smart, and reasonable — added that since gun owners are a minority nobody should have to respect their rights, anyway, so whatever the government does to us is okay.
—–
What got to me, what still gets to me, what has gotten to me before, isn’t the sheer hatred. It isn’t the bigotry. It isn’t the fact that people like this won’t even look at facts, won’t even consider considering an opponent’s point of view. (Although that, too.)
It’s that there are so many people who froth with loathing in the name of “tolerance” or “civility” or “decency.” It’s that there are so many people who view themselves as noble defenders of minorities while wanting to wipe other minorities of the face of the earth. It’s that there are people out there who are ripe to be whipped into a deadly frenzy against some politically chosen “other” — and who don’t know it.
They’re totally unaware. They’re so mindlessly righteous of their cause that they have no grasp of the fact that all of history’s witch-burnings and pogroms and genocides have been enabled by minds functioning exactly like theirs.
It’s not the ignorance and bigotry that are the worst of it (though that, too). It’s their total absence of self-awareness.
Liberals aren’t the only ones prone to this, of course. Millions of “patriots” have marched off to slaughter, totally unaware of how they’ve been manipulated into feeling what someone else wants them to feel. During the Cold War, there were plenty of “conservatives” who were so rabidly anti-Communist that they’d have turned the U.S. into a Soviet-style police state to “protect” us from those monstrous, villainous Commies (that they themselves so came to resemble). Religious fanatics everywhere and at all times have been stirred into handy political manias, having no idea that their quest to make the world a better place by eliminating “heretics” or “infidels” would only bring catastrophe. (Oh yes, and bring profit and power to the already powerful.)
And none of them see how much alike they are. That spittle-flecked hoplophobe who scared me so much on Monday has no idea how much he’s like the “good German” who believed that political paradise could be obtained, if only the world could be rid of a few million inconvenient Jews and “defectives.” He has no idea how much he’s like the jihad supporters whose eyes gleam as they envision “improving” their world by eliminating Westerners and Western ways.
No, because totally, totally unlike them — and totally, totally unlike us drooling, unreasoning, inferior, downright murdering gun owners — he’s on the side of the angels. So what could possibly go wrong? Just annihilate a few million and …
And so the cycle of hysteria-driven disasters goes on and on and on through all of history.
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I have a JPFO article due today and I plan to write about this. But frankly, beyond talking about being gobsmacked by the depth of self-unawareness I witness in the most rabid hoplophobes, I don’t know what to say.
Claire one of the things that I have learned over the years is the simple fact that stupid/evil people cannot help themselves since they are unable to see themselves or their arguments as stupid/evil. The greater danger is that this author may be an agent provocateur just there to sow dissension. The secret here is to not bite the hook. One would hope that the administrator would filter persons like this out for their disruptive posts.
MJR — As to biting the hook, I left the forum immediately after reading that post.
Unfortunately, I’m sure as I can be that this person isn’t an agent provocateur; when not ranting against all gun owners, he’s a nice, decent, helpful participant in the discussions. And not a disruptor who needs to be curbed by the mods, either. What’s scary is that he represents either a majority opinion or at least a commonly accepted opinion among the politically engaged posters to that site.
Confirmation bias taken to a homicidal extreme. I’ve mostly quit arguing RKBA. I just state my position and leave it at that. Or try to to.
When I suggest that one should be careful of kicking in several million doors (estimates of American gun owners range from 60 million to more than 100 million) because the occupants are well armed (estimates of guns possessed by those Americans go as high as 750 million), I’m accused of starting a civil war.
I point out that threatening to kill the children of well armed, well trained gun owners is a bad idea verging on suicide, and I’m accused of threatening to kill people.
Facts? Bloomberg’s Everytown Moms Demanding Genocide posted a graphic “proving” that guns in the home kill friends and family more than attackers. Yeah, the Kellerman study. Again (they get to continue using false studies, and the media never calls them on it). I pointed out that study has been thoroughly debunked, that even Kellerman himself admitted it was wrong. the Killer Moms insisted that it wasn’t the Kellerman study. I noted that the graphic included Kellerman’s study title, and reference number. They banned me and deleted my posts.
University of North Massachusetts (local joke: UNH) did a “survey” that supposedly mirrored the national surveys showing that 90% of NH residents want universal preemptively-prove-your-innocence checks. To date, I haven’t found a single person (online and in physical space) who admits to participating in that “survey”. I have never in my entire life been included in one of those surveys purporting to support victim disarmament.
“News”? One of my hobbies in the past couple of years has been debunking news reports of seized “machine guns”; most recently a federal prosecutor who held a press conference announcing a .45 cal “submachinegun” with a “silencer” was seized in a drug bust. The weapon on display was a semiauto Vector CRB with a barrel shroud. Not a single paper or TV station would follow up or correct the stories. WMUR black holed my comment which showed they were wrong, and has not responded to emails. In a previous incident (“TEC-9 machine gun”), a Nashua Telegraph reporter said it was just his job to report what the cops tell him, and that it isn’t his job to fact check or ask questions like, “If that’s an illegal machine gun, why wasn’t the guy charged for that, too?”
A Newtown parent was allowed to lie to a NH state legislature committee in support of a another PPYI bill, because it’s become political suicide to note that a “grieving parent” is lying.
We’re marginalized. Screwed. Depending on how impatient the gun grabbers are, things will get very bad. In NH alone, state and local police departments are stocking up on BearCats and MRAPs (one department specified the need to deal with Free State Project members,when they requested their BearCat funding… which they got; they took possession of the vehicle this week). My own town (population less than 1,800) police department has automatic weapons from the DOD 1033 program. Now add in the police mindset that lets a cop shoot an unarmed boy in the back because he just wants to go home safely at the end of his shift, and the prosecutorial discretion that says that’s cool.
We have successfully been demonized.
I’ve never been a ray of sunshine, but I’m becoming more pessimistic daily, and pretty much don’t argue. I speak my piece, and hope that maybe someone is paying attention. But I expect I’m only preaching to the choir.
This does not really surprise me. I know…I am speaking to the choir here but for years now and I do mean years we as a people have been literally brainwashed by our school system as well as the news media. Our government has found out that it is much easier to get whatever results it wants is to get the masses to depend on the government for thier succor. In short, this whole “thing” is nothing more than what happened in the ’30s in Germany. It is what gave the commies power in Russia. All these so called school shootings and such does the terrorists work for them. With lies, social disturbances, economic instability the average person on the streets is totally unaware of what is happening. Not to mention all the diversionary tactics that comes out of the oval office.
It’s melodrama.*
Anti-gun folks see gunz as evil, therefore everyone (Survey sez 93%!) must want common-sense gun control. Everytowners are the noble heroes fighting to save the long-suffering heroines. (A small and shrinking minority of deluded gun owners!) However, their gun-control efforts continue to be frustrated. The only possible explanation is a hard-hearted villain (NRA!) thwarting their efforts and tying the heroines to the railroad tracks. But sooner or later virtue will triumph.
The idea that there are lots of gun owners, that we don’t want saving, that in most states we are a voting majority electing pro-gun senators, and that those senators are voting for gun rights not out of fear, but because they and their constituents agree with the NRA, simply cannot penetrate the anti-gun theatrical mindset.
* Melodrama: Sentimental drama marked by extravagant theatricality, subordination of character development to plot, and focus on sensational incidents. It usually has an improbable plot that features such stock characters as the noble hero, the long-suffering heroine, and the hard-hearted villain, and it ends with virtue triumphing over vice.
“It’s not the ignorance and bigotry that are the worst of it (though that, too). It’s their total absence of self-awareness.”
Regarding progressives in general, with perhaps the exception of those who advocate pogroms:
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
— C.S. Lewis
I have come to see the root cause here as a complete lack of empathy, in an otherwise normally functioning human being. One could argue whether or not people are gradually becoming incapable of empathy, because of how they are “educated”, or simply because of living in a world in which people grow ever less directly accountable to one another–but in the end what I see over and over is pogrom-quality dehumanization, which can only take root when empathy is kicked out completely.
I see this too, Claire. Otherwise perfectly normal and even likeable people who simply switch off the empathy engine when it comes to certain keywords that trigger the conditioned fear of “the Other”. It’s not just guns, but boy, when I find someone who falls victim to the phenomenon at all, guns are almost invariably on the list of activating topics.
It’s horrifying; it actually makes me physically sick sometimes trying to come to grips with where this all goes. (It’s not like history is not clear on this.) But what should we expect, when someone is willing to outsource one’s sense of ethics to an external party that can at best be called amoral? The State is above all an absolution fantasy, and the protection racket is its central organizing mechanism. And so I guess it doesn’t surprise me, but I’m with you, Claire: it still shocks me, to witness such genocidal sociopathy (because JFC, that is what it is) with my own eyes.
One can completely understand the desire to outsource some things to a (at least implicitly trusted) third party. We all do that, of necessity, in a world of information overload. I doubt I could function otherwise, myself. But some things absolutely must be kept “local”–lest one wind up outsourcing one’s very humanity, itself. And I simply cannot imagine anything more essential to basic humanity, than empathy.
I even struggle with some in the “gun-rights” community, who indulge in some of the same dehumanization language, because that just seems like a place that we should never, ever go. Sure, I understand the resentment and the anger and the bitterness; I’ve been called less than human my whole life and it effin’ pisses me off. But I cannot–maybe it’s that I will not–call others “hive insects”, “rabbits”, “sheep”, “parasites”, “diseases”, or other less-than-human labels, without a tickling sense that I tread dangerously close to the line between response and aggression.
I know from history that atrocity doesn’t happen all at once. It starts somewhere. I think that “somewhere” is exactly the instant that we look at other human beings as less than human beings.
And that is absolutely what I see coming from the hoplophobes.
Its’ seems to me that people who makes statements like, “The majority of gun owners are murderers. They’re killing all the rest of us”, is often working on projection… and a coward. And they do have a reason to be afraid. I’m not going to be murdered or otherwise incarcerated on liberal whim. Liberals fully intend to kill or incarcerate us if we don’t comply to their idiocy and having the ability to fight back scares the hell out of them. A quick look at lefties should tell us all that they are fully invested in slaughtering unarmed people. That’s what they do as soon as they take over. And don’t kid yourself. They are full blown inhuman tyrants… but they are also cowards. Cowards always detest those who aren’t cowards. It’s a tough road gun owners are on, but that’s just the way it is. It’s kind of amazing I got this far in life but I have learned a thing or two. I’ve always mocked Republicans and still do pretty much. But I hate progressives/Liberals, whatever the term is. More human suffering has happened at the hands of the atheist left than religion could ever achieve. But maybe these are the best of times and seeing our enemies clearly, and resisting them, is the essence of morality and humanity.
They justify demonizing gun owners because we must want to hurt people because we own guns. They are willing to have us killed, by other people with guns, because of that fear. The killing is okay as long as they don’t have to see it or do it themselves. This desire to have undesirables killed is not new. For centuries it was over religion, often to justify taking resources. Past Americans killed native americans, because they were to different and in the way etc. Millions h ave been killed because they were the wrong political party. Many of the “peace” lovers only really want peace for themselves and those like them. It isn’t common to just western society either, going through history you see it over and over.
The lack of empathy towards gun owners is being carefully orchestrated. The message is that it is okay to be violent towards persons with guns as long as they do not belong to law enforcement. The Chicago death rate is allowed to rise because the numbers will be used to support the gun owners are bad line of programming. I
It’s easy for me to wright that the best course is not to bite the hook, to simply to stay away from those sites but that is a recipe for disaster. Why? If there are no dissenting voices then the anti juggernaut will pick up steam that much faster.
I guess that every bad or corrupt government, your choice depending how you look upon what is going on in Washington, needs a home grown enemy to keep the public mind off the failures of those in power. Lucky for your president they have a pair of enemies, gun owners and Muslim extremist bogymen. This is the major failure with any democracy, the fact that it is easy for a small group with the resources to corrupt the system for their selfish ends. It all comes down to the fact that there are those who like being ruled, those who like to rule and those who simply want to be left alone.
I tend to side with Bear in that I see no good coming from all this.
Our government seems concerned about somebody.
http://www.dailyprogress.com/starexponent/opinion/columnists/fresh-local-why-is-the-usda-buying-submachine-guns/article_3db0e13c-0833-11e4-a6a9-001a4bcf6878.html
Oh, Claire, I wouldn’t get down about that. People are what they are; “we” (collectively speaking) are no different from the Germans who supported Hitler, at least genetically (German ancestry is by far the largest in this country). But it’s nothing to worry about. If a civil war is precipitated, those disarmed folks and the government minions will come out a lot worse off than us gun nuts. A lot of gun prohibitionists will be hanging from lamp posts. It’s not a pretty picture, but hey, what can you do? Just respond calmly and logically; make yourself difficult to dehumanize. A few observers might start thinking even if your antagonist does not. Other than that, get ready for the war.
If anything, particularly with the Internet, people are generally getting better than they used to be. How many have a high opinion of Congress these days? It used to look more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp_l5ntikaU
I wrote a little article about dehumanizing others:
http://strike-the-root.com/dehumanizing-people-is-fun
going through history you see it over and over
And over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And the ones that start the killing are the ones that wail the loudest when it’s their turn against the wall.
Coincidentally (except there are no coincidences) right after I read yesterday’s post I ran across an article on Robespierre. I wonder what he was thinking, when it was his turn at the guillotine.
When I get into discussions with anti-gun, pro-war, anti-freedom individuals, I am reminded of a passage in Atlas Shrugged in which one of the characters says she feels like she is trapped in a room with a man whose mind has been eaten out by some terrible disease. She tries to speak to the man, to reason with him, but he keeps advancing with murderous intent, and nothing she can say makes any impression on him.
While the idea is no more irrational than the belief that the Democrats stand up for the little guy, or that the Republicans stand for small government, the notion that it’s a good idea for people who are by principle unarmed to attempt to wage a war of extermination against tens of millions of their fellow citizens for being armed, does surely seem harder to understand. Since it’s at least more overtly suicidal.
(And that’s leaving aside the fact that the only way such a campaign could seriously be attempted is for the gun-hating population to bestow limitless power, money, and firepower on the well-armed mercenaries who would actually carry it out. What could possibly go wrong?)
I’m teaching myself to stay out of such arguments, since they (like arguments in general) can only waste my time, make me feel bad, and alienate people who are my friends. If anyone earnestly tries to tell me I “should” accept disarmament, I’ll simply exert the wonderful power of saying, “no.” And then decline to discuss the matter further.
[I ran across an article on Robespierre. I wonder what he was thinking, when it was his turn at the guillotine.]
“Oops?” 🙂
[I’m teaching myself to stay out of such arguments, since they (like arguments in general) can only waste my time…]
I tend to as well, particularly as I get older. But it’s not quite as hopeless as it seems, if you remember that you are arguing for the benefit of the observers – not to convert your antagonist. The more doctrinaire and unreasonable he is, the better off you are, because he will lose supporters and you will gain them.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s_ss_i_2_9?k=eric+hoffer+true+believer&sprefix=eric+hoff
His teachings have been used and abused. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer
Don’t think of all those up-arming agencies as the enemy; rather think of their building(s) as logistic/support depots…