I don’t know about you, but I read this article with a sense of horror. I know that some of my favorite readers are hunters, but I don’t believe they hunt animals with military assault weapons, armor-piercing bullets, and silencers.
It begins:
“The days are growing colder, and soon millions of American hunters will pursue a time-honored tradition. They will load their automatic weapons with armor-piercing bullets, strap on silencers, head off to the picnic grounds on nearby public lakes — and start shooting.
“If you do not immediately recognize this pastime as part of America’s heritage, then you are sadly out of step with the current Republican majority in Congress. On Tuesday, a House panel takes up the “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act of 2017,” which promises “to protect and enhance opportunities for recreational hunting, fishing and shooting.
” Among these recreational enhancements:
●Allowing people to bring assault guns and other weapons through jurisdictions where they are banned.
●Rolling back decades-old regulations on the use of silencers.
●Protecting the use of armor-piercing bullets.
●Easing importation of foreign-made assault rifles.
●Protecting the practice of baiting birds with grain as they migrate and then mowing them down.
The House Natural Resources Committee was to have had a hearing on the bill in June, before the baseball-practice shooting that seriously wounded House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) led to its cancellation.
“But the National Rifle Association was not to be denied. In a statement last week, the gun lobby’s director applauded the revival of the bill, which, he said, “will protect America’s hunters and recreational shooters and help preserve our outdoor heritage.” Among the GOP witnesses for Tuesday’s “recreational shooter” hearing: Stephen Halbrook, author of a book that draws parallels between the current gun-control debate and Nazis’ disarmament of Jews.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The NRA-GOP and their Trump are not satisfied with dumping toxic waste in lakes, rivers, and the ocean again. Now they want to return to the era when the buffalo were mowed down for fun and left to rot in the prairie as the trains filled with these armed hunters sped off until that species was almost extinct.
Let the slaughter of other species begin again while turning the world into a toxic dump for profit.
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Dana Milbank is one of the best, most hard-hitting columnists (Wash. Post) in the US. Every column is worth reading.
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Please call me for your “special” ocean front property!
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Duane, do you teally not dig satire?
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I may have missed something. I will go back and read it.
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Yes, I see that his writing is meant to be sarcastic of the NRA’s pushing what are rather dubious positions. Thanks for the heads up.
If all Americans jump to conclusions like I did then perhaps we truly are screwed.
At the same time baiting as a hunting technique is banned in some states and allowed in others. With the overabundance of snow and other geese, the need to cut the numbers to help other bird, mainly duck species survive is, at least for me, necessary. Using the term “mowing them down” though is certainly not what occurs in goose hunting. No, we haven’t returned to the days of market hunting of a century ago that so decimated many populations of different species.
The silencers and armor piercing rounds provisions are definitely overboard, but the rest of the policy suggestions are certainly debatable from a hunter’s perspective. And that is what the legislative process is about, eh! And that is what Millbank’s freedom to dissent is also about!
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Well, ya never know when that bunny is going to be wearing body armor….
Or when you may be hunting with Dick Cheney….
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Cheney wasn’t hunting. He had no license or the correct tags. He was at a private killing ranch (which does not preclude the need for the proper permits). Should have been arrested on the spot, hauled to jail, his guns and any game confiscated. And then fined and prevented from illegally killing anymore. But, hey he had a lot more people to kill with his military adventures, and yes they were his more so than Georgie the Least’s.
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“It begins:
“The days are growing colder, and soon millions of American hunters will pursue a time-honored tradition. They will load their automatic weapons with armor-piercing bullets, strap on silencers, head off to the picnic grounds on nearby public lakes — and start shooting. ”
If an article begins with bullshit, I normally don’t read them! Why waste my time? It’s like listening to Betsy, the Ditz, DeVos spout her utter horse manure about public education. Why waste my time?
If anyone does not see the bald faced lies in those two sentences. . . .
. . . . then I’ve got some great white sand ocean beach front properties for sale, cheaply, over at Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri. Please call and we’ll arrange payments and I’ll send you a deed for “your” property.
Continuing. . .
“If you do not immediately recognize this pastime as part of America’s heritage. . . ”
NOPE, I “do not immediately recognize this pastime”. . .
BECAUSE there is no pastime involving automatic weapons with silencers attached shooting armor piercing rounds. NONE, NO PASTIME for “millions of American hunters”.
And people read and believe such lies. No wonder this country is in the shape it is in with that kind of insane nonsense being passed off as journalism. Talk about alt facts. Ay ay ay effin ay.
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I think you missed the dripping sarcasm that Milbank used in that paragraph. If you are correct, then I missed it.
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Perhaps I missed that. Only because you sensed that will I go back and actually read it. Sorry, but I won’t do the same for The Ditz’s pronouncements.
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Boy, I can’t believe I’m about to defend a WaPo writer, but I think that’s kind of the point. The Republican majority is well beyond what even most ardent gun rights supporters favor. They are not, in fact, supporting the rights of America’s hunters, but America’s gun manufacturers and war mongers under the umbrella of the NRA.
I have a dear friend who is an ardent gun rights supporter (who owns multiple weapons of his own which he keeps loaded and unlocked in his apartment) and we’ve had many a tiff over the issue, but even he thinks that the general public has no business getting their hands on military-level equipment like armor-piercing bullets, assault rifles and silencers. As he put it, “Hell, I don’t even trust most Marines with that s—, and I am a Marine”.
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Your friend is wrong to store his guns in the fashion he does. And I’m not a Marine!
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I agree. Try telling him that. His answer is roughly, if there’s someone in the apartment who shouldn’t be, they have a very limited time to get our or get right with their creator. Keeping the weapons locked and/or unloaded defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.
I was at his place over the Thanksgiving holiday last year with a number of other people, including a couple with daughters ages 3 and 4. The four-year-old, upon entering the apartment and seeing unfamiliar people, promptly took us by the hands, opened a drawer, showed us one of the guns and said, with a deadly serious look on her face, “That’s a gun. It can kill you. Do not touch it!” She then proceeded to take us through the apartment and show us all the guns, with the same instructions each time. I could completely picture her mother giving her exactly that lecture (she’s not one to be messed with lightly). Still, I’d be nervous as hell having my kids in that apartment. Those girls have been over there all their lives though and they’re still alive. Each to his/her own, I suppose.
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The NRA has a child safety program to teach children about guns, and how to avoid them see
https://eddieeagle.nra.org/
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How touching that the NRA teaches little children about gun safety!
Nearly 1,300 children are killed every year by guns. Some are homicides, some are suicides, some are accidents.
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Please Diane, Don’t you agree that children should be taught to LEAVE GUNS ALONE, and to run for an adult? The “Eddie Eagle” program is even supported by some of the most anti-gun rights people out there.
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Charles,
I believe that guns should be in the hands of a well-regulated militia. Period.
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Do you really believe that firearms should only be in the hands of a “well-regulated militia”? The militia, is the national guard. What about police, the regular Army, private security guards? And most importantly, what about the people? The Second Amendments protects the rights of BOTH the militia, and the people, to “Keep and bear arms”.
The Supreme Court does not agree with you on this. See Heller v. District of Columbia (2008).
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2007/07-290
To read the Amendment as limiting the right to bear arms only to those in a governed military force would be to create exactly the type of state-sponsored force against which the Amendment was meant to protect people.
Are there any other rights protected by the Constitution and/or the amendments, that you are opposed to? Are you opposed to the right of trial by jury? or the right to post bail, to guarantee a court appearance?
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How about giving every citizen the right to own a bazooka, a tank, a shoulder missile?
You are truly sickening, Charles. You get all your slanted information from the National Review and other rightwing sources.
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I find it incredulous, that a Jewish person, would be against the private ownership of firearms. Disarming the Jews in Germany, was on of the first steps, on the path to the holocaust. see
http://www.independent.org/guncontrol/
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Charles,
You are ridiculous. You really believe that if every Jew in Germany had a pistol, they could have defeated the Nazi Army?
I am a Jew, and I consider your comment both stupid and anti-Semitic.
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If our friend didn’t have simplistic propaganda to guide him, I think he would have no opinions at all: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/ben-carson-wrong-about-hitler-and-guns/
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“If our friend didn’t have simplistic propaganda to guide him, I think he would have no opinions at all”
Good comment.
This is one definition that helps define the numb and brain dead that rely on extremist media outlets to think for them because they can’t think logically on their own.
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Greg,
That didn’t appear in the National Review, so how would he have known those facts?
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And for an example of how Nazis reacted when a Jewish person did use a gun, please Google “Kristallnacht.”
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You should not reduce the point to absurdities. I do not believe that permitting individual citizens the right to own anti-tank weapons, shoulder launched rockets, and bazookas, is in the national interest.
Nevertheless, individual citizens can and should be permitted the right to own weapons for self-protection, sporting purposes, target shooting, hunting, etc. This includes (but is not limited to) rifles, shotguns. pistols, revolvers, antique muzzle-loading rifles, handguns, etc.
There is a legitimate public interest in banning silencers, and any device to reduce firearms noise or flash.
Even Time magazine, a leftist publication, publishes articles in support of personal firearms ownership. see
Even Hitler would not mess with the Swiss. The Nazis could have invaded Switzerland, and every mountain pass was mined with explosives to cause an avalanche and it would have stopped the invasion.
And you did not answer my question. Since you are opposed to the rights to own firearms, are there any other rights you are opposed to?
(I do not restrict my reading to conservative sources. I read all types of media, and watch MSNBC, etc. )
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In Israel, gun ownership is viewed more of a responsibility, than a right. see
http://origin-www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-29/what-americans-could-learn-from-israel-s-gun-culture
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Charles, I know someone who fought in Israel’s army. When he and his wife had children, they didn’t want their children to grow up in a war zone so they immigrated to the U.S. to get as far from those wars as possible. They are all U.S. citizens now. I’ll have to ask him if he still owns firearms since he has lived in the San Francisco area.
Every able bodied Israeli citizen is serving or has served in its military because Israel is surrounded by enemies that want to exterminate their entire country and everyone in it.
Under those circumstances, it stands to reason that most if not all Israeli citizens own firearms and knows how to use them.
The only enemy the U.S. has to really worry about is Trump and his Alt-Right supporters. The countries of Canada and Mexico are not out to destroy the U.S. and exterminate every U.S. citizen.
Most of America’s enemies are thousands of miles away and do not have the ability to destroy the United States and exterminate every citizen.
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Q You really believe that if every Jew in Germany had a pistol, they could have defeated the Nazi Army? END Q
I never said anything remotely like this. Do not reduce the discussion to absurdities.
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Your comment was anti-Semitic. You imply that Hitler could have been stopped if Jews were armed. I know you are an expert on almost everything, but you know nothing about the Holocaust. I suggest you shut up on this one.
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Q Most of America’s enemies are thousands of miles away and do not have the ability to destroy the United States and exterminate every citizen. END Q
What are you smoking? Iran and North Korea are racing to obtain nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them the to US Mainland. North Korea has exploded nuclear devices, and has missiles that can hit Alaska and Korea.
There are terrorists operating in the USA. Have you already forgotten the attacks on Sept 11,2001? It is only a matter of time, before another terrorist attack occurs.
No one thinks that individuals with .38 revolvers will deter the North Koreans.
There are enemies right here! Individual with firearms can defend themselves from murderers and rapists.
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If I had a .38 or a shoulder fired missile, I’m sure I could defend the nation against North Korea.
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Charles,
Again, most of America’s enemies are thousands of miles away from the United States.
Charles, repeat that last sentence a few hundred times.
Charles said, “Iran and North Korea are racing to obtain nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them the to US Mainland. North Korea has exploded nuclear devices, and has missiles that can hit Alaska and Korea.”
But: “Nine countries together possess around 15,000 nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning.”
The world has lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation since the Cold War started soon after the end of World War II.
If Iran or North Korea was insane/stupid enough to attack the United States with nuclear weapons, the result would probably be the total annihilation of those two countries, and Iran and North Korea would have no guarantee that any of their missiles would reach their targets in the United States.
Charles said, “There are terrorists operating in the USA. Have you already forgotten the attacks on Sept 11, 2001? It is only a matter of time, before another terrorist attack occurs.”
And the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor by Japan on December 7, 1941.
2,403 were killed
1,178 were wounded
Who lost World War II?
The United States lost 407,300 troops and 12,100 civilians during World War II.
The rest of the world lost more than 20.5 million troops and more than 30 million civilians.
Japan lost more than 2 million troops and about 600k civilians.
Germany lost more than 5 million troops and almost 3 million civilians.
Italy lost more than 300k troops and 153,200 civilians.
Let’s fast forward to the present and see who has lost the most since 9/11.
Documented Civilian deaths from violence = 178,953 – 200,461.
When we add combatants that number climbs to 268,000.
During the war in Afghanistan (2001–present), over 31,000 civilian deaths due to war-related violence have been documented; 29,900 civilians have been wounded. Over 111,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers, and militants, are estimated to have been killed in the conflict.
********** I repeat, most of America’s enemies are thousands of miles away from the United States where most of the deaths are taking place.
America lost 58,209 troops in Vietnam but Vietnam lost almost 2-million civilians and 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops.
In the Gulf War, the U.S. lost 294 troops
In the Iraq War, the U.S. has lost 2,356 troops
In the Afghan War, the U.S. has lost 2,354 troops.
A few more facts:
Gun violence in the United States results in tens of thousands of deaths and injuries annually. In 2013, there were 73,505 nonfatal firearm injuries (23.2 injuries per 100,000 U.S. citizens), and 33,636 deaths due to “injury by firearms” (10.6 deaths per 100,000 U.S. citizens).
All homicides
Firearm homicides
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
What do you want, a war where the U.S. does all the killing and doesn’t lose anyone? It’s obvious that only psychos and the insane start a war with the United States, and American citizens are more at risk of being shot by another American citizen then killed by a terrorist or an attack from North Korea or Iran.
If we just look at firearm homicides and multiply that annual number by 16, since 9/11, more than 176,000 Americans have been murdered by a firearm and not a terrorist.
One more time, most of America’s enemies are thousands of miles away from the United States where most of the deaths are taking place.
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Poor Duane seems not to understand satire.
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See above. More a case of jumping to conclusions. But I still have that ocean front property for ya 🙂
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The Trump election, has sent gun sales down. See
http://fortune.com/2017/08/04/trump-gun-sales-obama/
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About 37% of all Americans own guns.
But there are more than 300 million guns out there.
http://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-the-numbers
Be careful whom you offend. They might blow your head off.
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Nobody in the public has automatic weapons. You don’t hunt with armor piercing bullets. The silencers are to keep noise down. They don’t silence the shots like in the movies. Hunters hunt to feed their families with clean meat. This is BS article.
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If you don’t hunt with armor piercing bullets, what are they doing in this bill that’s supposedly about “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreation Enhancement? Seriously, that doesn’t concern you at all?
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alphawolf1 (@alphawolf1)
They are there to protect the rights of slave holders to organize vigilante squads, excuse me militias. To put down slave rebellions .
Yes nobody has automatic weapons . 25 rounds in 2.5 seconds would qualify in most Americans minds as an automatic weapon. Even at 5 seconds for reload that would be 200 rounds a minute . Any questions.
Those hunters who hunt to feed their families could not feed their families any other way ? . I am not saying that there is actually something wrong with hunting. But the reason has little to do with the meat.
And if the left started showing up at demonstrations locked and loaded we would see how quickly they banned assault riffles and limited clip sizes.
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Alpha, that is a bill before Congress. Why do you need armor-piercing bullets to kill a deer?
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Have you seen the body armor deer are wearing these days? (Sarcasm alert for Duane!)
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That explains it! Someone’s making money on deer body armor. Probably arming the deer with assault weapons to fight back!
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GregB
Enquirer head line” Deer shoots back “.
Or was Dick Cheney hunting again
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Does Alphawolf work for the NRA?
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I suggest that people read the actual bill and also listen to today’s hearings ( or a sample of comments).
Here is a June, 2017 discussion draft of the “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act” or the “SHARE Act” H.R. 3668 (Rep. Jeff Duncan), To provide for the preservation of sportsmen’s heritage and enhance recreation opportunities on Federal land, and for other purposes. “Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act” or “SHARE Act.” It is filled with acyonyms and not very intelligible.
Here is the actual text of the bill.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3668/text
Here is a youtube of the hearings today. https://naturalresources.house.gov/calendar/archives/list.aspx?Subcommittee=118685
This is the NRA’s dream bill. It is designed to eliminate some parts of the endangered species act in addition opening up federal lands to gun enthusiasts.
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The other dream bill is Reciprocal Concealed Carry, where for example, FL or Utah could issue a non-resident permit to anyone anywhere in the US authorizing them to carry a gun on their person, no matter what the requirements for such a permit may be in the state they live in. That way people in CA and NY would have to buy guns to protect themselves from crazies who could be packing based on that permit they got in FL while they were on vacation. Soon, welcome kits in hospitals will include newborn size Pampers, formula and a Smith & Wesson SD9 with a full magazine. You know, to protect the little one.
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Obviously the piece above is about the congressional bill including things that are not about hunting. What is absent from the gun control debate is that everyone wants gun control at some level.
Everyone agrees that we do not want every citizen to have the capability to shoot bullets laced with nuclear waste.
Everyone agrees we do not want citizens in possession of anti-tank missiles or bazookas.
What we are about is how we want to control the use of firearms for the public safety. We need a good, reasonable debate about what hunting does for us and what guns do to us. We need to know that even hunting does not stop the proliferation of Snow Geese, threatening the tundra. We need to know that owning a gun makes you a member of a sub group that dies earlier than average. We need to know that the decline in hunting around the country threatens the money spent on the maintenance of many duck species.
A similar reasonable argument would help education, foreign policy, economic policy, and almost any other issue.
Reasonable argument takes time and patience. There is a shortage of both in almost all the legislative places in our nation and its states.
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This is not an issue about which I am as passionate as economics related to education, but I will throw in my alt-left (wink) two cents anyway. Any weapon or ammunition used by the police should be owned by law abiding, private citizens as well. And before anyone tries to disarm private citizens, they must disarm the police FIRST. Imagine if the only arms in the country belonged to people who ultimately answer to, say, Scott Walker or Donald Trump, to people who answer to our billionaire overlords. That said, again, this is not my issue of great concern, so if you disagree, I won’t argue. We agree to disagree. We have bigger game to hunt together, namely Bill Gates. And Betsy DeVos… grizzlies.
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I regret calling the police pigs. Scratch that. I was just recalling what I read from the ’60s.
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The NRA has been trying to get suppressors legalized for some time now, their excuse being that all that gun racket during hunting season scares off the game. See if you can make that case to someone in the law enforcement community without them giving you a massive eye roll. They are the ones who will have to respond to shootings, including mass shooting where citizens had little or no warning during the assault. Gun proliferation has resulted in thousands of deaths per year, and making suppressors easier to get can only make that worse. I’m putting my money on the white supremacists and other assorted hate mongers being the first ones in line to buy them. Game populations do need to be managed, and that needs to be done by humans since we are the ones who eliminated the apex predators from the ecosystem equation and threw it all out of balance in other ways as well. Subsistence hunting is a skill, and a part of rural life. The NRA is at fault for promoting hunting beyond what it should be and thereby putting a lot of Elmer Fudds out in the field. As you might suspect when there money to be made, the marketing of gadgets and gimmicks by the hunting industry has proliferated. Perhaps metastasized is a better word. The amount and type of stuff that gets sold to the Fudds is unreal and wasn’t needed in the past, and it still isn’t. True subsistence hunters who have more than a weekend hobbyists connection to the land know this. All they need besides their knowledge and experience to stock the larder is the rifle or shotgun handed down to them from their grand father and a few shells. The NRA is all about marketing, sales targets, fear mongering and lobbying now, their “hunter adocacy” is just the cover story, a faded storefront behind which hides a criminally irresponsible enterprise.
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Diane: as to the last sentence “Be careful of whom you offend. They might blow your head off.”(6:08 PM comment)– that is the absolute truth. I live in a quiet, small suburb which has always been considered extremely safe. About 2 years back, someone shot bullets through a window in a house a block from ours. The police had a community meeting to assure all that the neighborhood was safe & it was an isolated incident (it was assumed by villagers that, perhaps, a teenager living there had gone into the city to purchase drugs, & a payment was missed).
This year, many residents have left their cars unlocked (in neighboring ‘burbs, as well) and, thus, many had been stolen by teenagers. Again, a community meeting was held.
Police were asked if any perps who had been found had guns. The officer answered, “No, but the owner of one of the stolen cars had left his GUN in his car, so now they do.”
Finally, in an instance of road rage several blocks away, one of the drivers shot at the other.
Anywhere. Anytime. Anyplace.
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I’ll also throw this out there, if there is a provision for legalizing armor piercing bullets in the proposed law, then that is aimed directly at the law enforcement community since they are the ones who have to put on ballistic armor to go to work. Just becuase you work in government doesn’t mean you are not anti-government. The law enforcement community needs to wake up to the fact that they are being targeted for privatization just as the teaching profession has been. The fact that civil asset forfeiture is a part of the funding stream for cops in some places is a constitutional outrage. The divisions created by this between cops and the communities they serve and the further divisions resulting within those communities are no accident. Underfunding traditional law enforcement paves the way for private contractors with far less legal accountability to fill the void created, and I for one do not want to see the return of anything like The Pinkerton’s. We also don’t need under trained and under skilled TFA styled rent-a-cops. It’s bad enough that the taxpayers had so much of their money spent on private military contractors in the wars we are still fighting, we sure don’t need that profiteering model brought back home. We don’t need our tax dollars spent on unaccountable thugs who have few disincentives to not violate citizens rights.
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“Just becuase you work in government doesn’t mean you are not anti-government.”
Indeed! This mindset seems to be a requirement to work in any public capacity. From the so-called House Freedom Caucus, to the current cabinet level officers, through members of civil service and the military, and the many cogent examples you cite, it is depressing to think of where this might lead in a decade. It is so very different from the attitudes of a majority of western Europeans and other developed nations in Asia and Oceania, not to mention our neighbors to the north. Rather than declare the government the enemy when something doesn’t work as needed, they generally resolve to fix or make it better. Their responses are not to destroy the foundations of civic and civil life.
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