Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Dago on April 22, 2007, 11:41:28 AM
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From the Chicago Sun Times, those who find what they want in a gun free zone.
Let's be realistic about reality
April 22, 2007
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem: ''What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.''
According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to ''fear guns.''
Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab.
And at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to "permit the use of obviously fake weapons" such as plastic swords.
But it's not just the danger of overly realistic plastic swords in college plays that we face today. In yet another of his not-ready-for-prime-time speeches, Barack Obama started out deploring the violence of Virginia Tech as yet another example of the pervasive violence of our society: the violence of Iraq, the violence of Darfur, the violence of . . . er, hang on, give him a minute. Ah, yes, outsourcing: ''the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country." And let's not forget the violence of radio hosts: ''There's also another kind of violence, though, that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters.''
I've had some mail in recent days from people who claimed I'd insulted the dead of Virginia Tech. Obviously, I regret I didn't show the exquisite taste and sensitivity of Sen. Obama and compare getting shot in the head to an Imus one-liner. Does he mean it? I doubt whether even he knows. When something savage and unexpected happens, it's easiest to retreat to our tropes and bugbears or, in the senator's case, a speech on the previous week's "big news." Perhaps I'm guilty of the same. But then Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutes of learning on the planet, announces that it's no longer safe to expose twentysomething men and women to ''Henry V'' unless you cry God for Harry, England and St. George while brandishing a bright pink and purple plastic sword from the local kindergarten. Except, of course, that the local kindergarten long since banned plastic swords under its own "zero tolerance" policy.
I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.
But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they've created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.
I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told 'em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased 'em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where's the nearest place around here where you're most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you're not in the real world.
The "gun-free zone" fraud isn't just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia's distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with "the erosion of intellectual self-defense," and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and "safe spaces" that's the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we "fear guns," and "verbal violence," and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ''The Three Musketeers.'' What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?
İMark Steyn, 2007
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I remember that story. They stabbed their victims to death with knives. Or as they would say in britain, non-domestic knives.
I bag on texas a lot. But you've got to give them credit, when a nutbag leisurly executed people in a gun-free zone here, they didn't increase gun controll, they expanded gun rights.
We really are society ridden with the fear of the inanimate and painted devils, I think it started when our culture began to revolve around the television.
There is a poem with the line "blessed cathode ray", can someone help me remember it?
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http://video.google.com/url?docid=-4007739578898779292&esrc=sr3&ev=v&q=penn+%26+teller+gun+control&vidurl=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DyGGmFj9282Q&usg=AL29H21Jng7qGQR8xBkf4c5aY-vdiOqufw
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Hmph...Look at how much press the Appalachian Law School gunman got.
It just goes to show...
If it doesn't gotta body count, It doesn't make the Front Page(Or Prime Time special reports.)
Our media's been trying to be a political influence and power broker for far too long. They need to go back to simply reporting the facts.
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Originally posted by FrodeMk3
Hmph...Look at how much press the Appalachian Law School gunman got.
Our media's been trying to be a political influence and power broker for far too long. They need to go back to simply reporting the facts.
Reporting the Appalachian Law School incident would not support their(the media) liberal agenda
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That's exactly the point.
The media should, at best, be only apolitical, with no"spin", either way. Just the facts.
No opinions from the editor, no input from their sponsors.
Of course, It's so bad now, that there's no News agency you can really trust anymore, They lean too far to either the left or the right.
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Having grown up in Northern Vermont, I remember never fearing guns. I had respect for them. I attended hunter's safety classes at 8 yrs of age. I hunted with my father until age 10 with a BB gun, so I felt like I was contributing. As an 11 yr old, I used to be allowed to hunt on my own for rabbits and squirrels with a .22. I also had a 410 for hunting partridge and the occasional seagull that wondered into our corn fields. As I grew, I received new guns. My grandfather gave me a lever action 30-30 for my 12th birthday. I bought my first .30-06 at age 16 from an uncle. Never did I fear firearms. I was raised around them. Hunting was and still is a huge part of my family. My uncle Delwyn is an author who has written his own book about hunting stories and is regularly published in field and stream. As I think back, I remember one thing that was taught to me from the get go. Always be aware where your weapon is pointed. Never ever shoot unless you know where the rounds will end up. Never ever shoot something unless you are sure the round will kill cleanly. Never, ever point a weapon at another person unless you intend to use it. Today it is a litlle different. I do not hunt as much as I like to. I work too much, and I do not own a camp in Colorado. I still own guns, many in fact. All with the exception of two pistols and a .30 carbine are kept in four different safes. One pistol (.45 ACP) goes with me in my vehicle. The other is in my bed stand, a Berretta 92F. The carbine is also beside my bed in a corner with 40 rounds closely avalable.
With all these weapons so closely available, you'd think I'd have accidents, or had a problem that caused me to live in fear. I do not. I simply am very comfortable around fire arms and subscribe to the belief of always be ready.
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But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they've created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.
Nice read Dago--pretty much the whole liberal view in a nutshell
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Originally posted by FrodeMk3
That's exactly the point.
The media should, at best, be only apolitical, with no"spin", either way. Just the facts.
No opinions from the editor, no input from their sponsors.
Of course, It's so bad now, that there's no News agency you can really trust anymore, They lean too far to either the left or the right.
Yup, I was merely agreeing with you. :)
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great post dago...but it will be full of lib nonsence soon...lol...i love how they allways avoid the questions and call us apes with no wee wee's..lol
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your a bunch of apes with no wee wee's!
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Easy for Nilsen to say, he's hung like a gorilla I hear. :cry
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Originally posted by MrRiplEy[H]
Easy for Nilsen to say, he's hung like a gorilla I hear. :cry
Has mipoikel been yappin again? :mad:
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libs with wee wee's? umm no..if they had one..they cutt it off long ago:P
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Nugent: Gun-free zones are recipe for disaster
POSTED: 9:51 p.m. EDT, April 20, 2007
By Ted Nugent
Special to CNN
Editor's note: Rock guitarist Ted Nugent has sold more than 30 million albums. He's also a gun rights activist and serves on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. His program, "Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild," can be seen on the Outdoor Channel.
WACO, Texas (CNN) --
Zero tolerance, huh? Gun-free zones, huh? Try this on for size: Columbine gun-free zone, New York City pizza shop gun-free zone, Luby's Cafeteria gun-free zone, Amish school in Pennsylvania gun-free zone and now Virginia Tech gun-free zone.
Anybody see what the evil Brady Campaign and other anti-gun cults have created? I personally have zero tolerance for evil and denial. And America had best wake up real fast that the brain-dead celebration of unarmed helplessness will get you killed every time, and I've about had enough of it.
Nearly a decade ago, a Springfield, Oregon, high schooler, a hunter familiar with firearms, was able to bring an unfolding rampage to an abrupt end when he identified a gunman attempting to reload his .22-caliber rifle, made the tactical decision to make a move and tackled the shooter.
A few years back, an assistant principal at Pearl High School in Mississippi, which was a gun-free zone, retrieved his legally owned Colt .45 from his car and stopped a Columbine wannabe from continuing his massacre at another school after he had killed two and wounded more at Pearl.
At an eighth-grade school dance in Pennsylvania, a boy fatally shot a teacher and wounded two students before the owner of the dance hall brought the killing to a halt with his own gun.
More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.
My hero, Dr. Suzanne Gratia Hupp, was not allowed by Texas law to carry her handgun into Luby's Cafeteria that fateful day in 1991, when due to bureaucrat-forced unarmed helplessness she could do nothing to stop satanic George Hennard from killing 23 people and wounding more than 20 others before he shot himself. Hupp was unarmed for no other reason than denial-ridden "feel good" politics.
She has since led the charge for concealed weapon upgrade in Texas, where we can now stop evil. Yet, there are still the mindless puppets of the Brady Campaign and other anti-gun organizations insisting on continuing the gun-free zone insanity by which innocents are forced into unarmed helplessness. Shame on them. Shame on America. Shame on the anti-gunners all.
No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate restrictions or a "cult of agriculture fertilizer" following the unabashed evil of Timothy McVeigh's heinous crime against America on that fateful day in Oklahoma City. No one faulted kitchen utensils or other hardware of choice after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught drugging, mutilating, raping, murdering and cannibalizing his victims. Nobody wanted "steak knife control" as they autopsied the dead nurses in Chicago, Illinois, as Richard Speck went on trial for mass murder.
Evil is as evil does, and laws disarming guaranteed victims make evil people very, very happy. Shame on us.
Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.
Thirty-two people dead on a U.S. college campus pursuing their American Dream, mowed-down over an extended period of time by a lone, non-American gunman in possession of a firearm on campus in defiance of a zero-tolerance gun ban. Feel better yet? Didn't think so.
Who doesn't get this? Who has the audacity to demand unarmed helplessness? Who likes dead good guys?
I'll tell you who. People who tramp on the Second Amendment, that's who. People who refuse to accept the self-evident truth that free people have the God-given right to keep and bear arms, to defend themselves and their loved ones. People who are so desperate in their drive to control others, so mindless in their denial that they pretend access to gas causes arson, Ryder trucks and fertilizer cause terrorism, water causes drowning, forks and spoons cause obesity, dialing 911 will somehow save your life, and that their greedy clamoring to "feel good" is more important than admitting that armed citizens are much better equipped to stop evil than unarmed, helpless ones.
Pray for the families of victims everywhere, America. Study the methodology of evil. It has a profile, a system, a preferred environment where victims cannot fight back. Embrace the facts, demand upgrade and be certain that your children's school has a better plan than Virginia Tech or Columbine. Eliminate the insanity of gun-free zones, which will never, ever be gun-free zones. They will only be good guy gun-free zones, and that is a recipe for disaster written in blood on the altar of denial. I, for one, refuse to genuflect there.
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ted allways has a nice way of putting things:) great post
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Just in case no one saw this in SteveBailey's thread "My new carry gun"
bj229r posted this link in there. It's a good read even though it's a bit long.
Sheep, Wolfes, and Sheepdogs (http://roanoke.craigslist.org/rnr/314572392.html)
I think we all know who the Sheep are in this country. Sheep were in charge of the administration at VT and WAY too many of them hold important positions of power in this country.
I on the other hand am a Sheepdog and damn proud of it. Unlike the Sheep out there and those on some of these forum threads, I choose to live in the REAL world. To Laz, SteveBailey and all the other Sheepdogs out there, you know who you are, !!!!!! Keep doing what your doing. One day the Sheep will need a sheepdog around and who are they going to see?? They're going to see us doing what we do and just maybe for a little while they will appreciate us. It won't last long, but hey, their Sheep. What do you expect?
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Originally posted by Nilsen
your a bunch of apes with no wee wee's!
And your a Sheep. "Baaaaaaaa" and in this forum we all know what happens to the sheep don't we? Good luck with that.
Signed, The Sheepdog:aok
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Originally posted by Hornet33
Just in case no one saw this in SteveBailey's thread "My new carry gun"
bj229r posted this link in there. It's a good read even though it's a bit long.
Sheep, Wolfes, and Sheepdogs (http://roanoke.craigslist.org/rnr/314572392.html)
I think we all know who the Sheep are in this country. Sheep were in charge of the administration at VT and WAY too many of them hold important positions of power in this country.
I on the other hand am a Sheepdog and damn proud of it. Unlike the Sheep out there and those on some of these forum threads, I choose to live in the REAL world. To Laz, SteveBailey and all the other Sheepdogs out there, you know who you are, !!!!!! Keep doing what your doing. One day the Sheep will need a sheepdog around and who are they going to see?? They're going to see us doing what we do and just maybe for a little while they will appreciate us. It won't last long, but hey, their Sheep. What do you expect?
dude...you are definately out of your freaking mind. Goodluck fighting WWIII.
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Originally posted by cav58d
dude...you are definately out of your freaking mind. Goodluck fighting WWIII.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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BAAAAAA
I can just imagine your house. Trip lines throughout the entire perimeter. A glass of water and a gernade on your night stand, just incase society comes after you.
(http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/3229/untitledjb3.png)
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Originally posted by cav58d
BAAAAAA
I can just imagine your house. Trip lines throughout the entire perimeter. A glass of water and a gernade on your night stand, just incase society comes after you.
(http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/3229/untitledjb3.png)
Lol funny...but you only get ONE chance to be ready for such a thing--that lady in Killeen TX has been thinking that for 15 years, and several people at VT will be doin same I'm sure
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Originally posted by cav58d
BAAAAAA
I can just imagine your house. Trip lines throughout the entire perimeter. A glass of water and a gernade on your night stand, just incase society comes after you.
(http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/3229/untitledjb3.png)
Not quite. Good locks on all the doors and windows, security system that I use, 2 dogs that stay inside at night, motion sensitive security lights on the front porch, on the back deck, and on the shed. 12 gage Remington 870 pump action shotgun with a 20 inch smooth bore slug barrel in a hand made gun rack behind the headboard of my bed loaded with #4 high power pheasant loads. Good penetration at close range but wont over penetrate a wall. I also keep my 9mm and .45 loaded but locked in my gun safe in my closet. If I have time I'll grab one of those as a backup piece to the shotgun.
Maybe you think all that stuff means I'm paranoid. Well I've had my home broken into before on 2 seperate occasions before I got the alarm system installed. Both times me and my shotgun stopped the crime in progress without having to fire a shot even though one of those times the guy was armed himself. I got the drop on that guy in my garage and had the barrel of my gun to his head before he could even reached for his gun. Both times it took over 30 minutes before the cops showed up even when my wife at the time told the police I had the suspects held at gunpoint.
The point of all this?? I am prepared to defend myself, my family, and my property. I have thought about what I will do if something happens and I have a plan to deal with a situation if it occurs. Just like every person should have a plan in the event of a fire, you need to have a plan in the event someone breaks into your home. Kinda makes sense huh?