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Liberals Waste no Time Pushing Gun Control in 2015

Liberals Waste no Time Pushing Gun Control in 2015

Progressivism never sleeps.

The ink on 2015 is barely dry, but that hasn’t stopped liberals from continuing their push for increased gun control.

Seizing on the still-raw emotions of the shooting at Sandy Hook, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker outlined what he calls their “moral work”:

The Newtown Lawsuit and the Moral Work of Gun Control

The news that the parents of the children massacred two years ago in Sandy Hook, near Newtown, Connecticut, by a young man with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, were undertaking a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer was at once encouraging and terribly discouraging. The encouraging part is that those parents, suffering from a grief that those of us who are only witnesses to it can barely begin to comprehend, haven’t, despite the failure to reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre, given way to despair. Like Richard Martinez, after his son was murdered by a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter, they’re allowing themselves to be angry, and then turning their anger into action: they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible.

The filed complaint—the numbered paragraphs give it an oddly religious feeling, like theses nailed to a church door—is worth reading in full, however painful that might be, not only because of the unbelievable suffering and cruelty it details on that terrible morning but also because it offers, in neatly logical fashion, an indisputable argument: the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time.

John Hinderaker of Powerline wrote an excellent response to this which you can read here.

Leftists claim to support the rights of law abiding gun owners when it’s politically convenient, but they will never stop pushing gun control.

Furthermore, the left doesn’t seem to realize that when it comes to this issue and many others, most Americans don’t agree with them.

Walter Russell Mead of The American Interest said it best:

Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans’ ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force.

No “name and shame” report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of the consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape.

The left’s agenda is shriveling on the vine of 2014 and they know it.

Happy New Year!

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.

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Comments

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/395601/happy-new-year-happy-new-gun-control-nonsense-charles-c-w-cooke

That’s another good piece, pulling the sanctimonious little wus’s pants around his ankles.

It’s interesting that the same patterns have been all they have for lo, these many decades. I remember Birch Bayh with the same essential crap.

“the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time.”
Virtually all P/Ds in America have such rifles in their arsenals. By the plaintiffs’ own words, all these P/Ds have such rifles solely to “kill a lot of people in a very short time”. I’d like to hear a big city PC confirm that.

Sandy Hook was such a horrible tragedy, but it is equally tragic that these victimized families had decided to become tools to the liberal political agenda.
By engaging in this frivolously stupid lawsuit they are actually desecrating the memory of their children, and they are missing the opportunity to work productively towards reducing gun violence.
Shame on those who manipulated them into this. And sorry, but shame on them too.

DDsModernLife | January 2, 2015 at 9:20 am

But it’s so simple! Just “reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre,..”

    FrankNatoli in reply to DDsModernLife. | January 2, 2015 at 1:05 pm

    I would like a quarter for every individual unaware that the “VIOLENT CRIME CONTROL AND LAW ENFORCEMENT ACT OF 1994” banned only the sale of newly manufactured “assault weapons”, that the hundreds of thousands of existing firearms and millions of high capacity magazines were grandfathered, legal to possess and transfer. With all those quarters, I could retire and forget about my SEP. Why bother with the facts?

Please, please. These people should never be referred to as liberals or progressives. Call them what they are, FASCISTS!

nordic_prince | January 2, 2015 at 10:12 am

Comparing the complaint to Luther’s 95 Theses? Oh please ~

“…a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter.”

“…a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time.”

Classic moonbat argument. I never understood what makes people such as this Gopnik buffoon think that one gun is any more “dangerous” than another. It’s not the fork’s fault that millions are morbidly obese.

casualobserver | January 2, 2015 at 10:35 am

I cannot give the parents anything more than a lot of leeway to grieve. But once that grief spills over into political action, my sympathies wane a little. And unless they have chosen to AT LEAST campaign for more effective handling of mental illnesses, this feels less about solving problems and preventing another parent from having to experience the same thing. It feels more fundamentally ideological. And a shameful, one-sided leveraging of a tragedy. Whether or not the group of parents have always been so left or have allowed themselves to be influenced by the left, isn’t what matters. Actions speak.

    alaskabob in reply to casualobserver. | January 2, 2015 at 1:44 pm

    As Kubler-Ross noted in the stages of dealing with a major tragedy, the shock and disbelief goes to anger which is where the Left seizes these people. The stage of “bargaining” winds up with “my loved one’s life will only mean something/have value if such and such a gun control law is passed.” With such high stakes and little likihood of getting what they believe they need, “resolution” of the grieving process is less likely to occur. I would never ask them to forget what happened but hope they are not stuck in a hell of oscillating from anger to bargaining to grief at not getting their “if only” legal bans.

15 U.S.C. §§ 7901-7903

Stuff it, progs; it’s the law of the land.

Henry Hawkins | January 2, 2015 at 12:54 pm

SPOONS MADE ME FAT.

    Ragspierre in reply to Henry Hawkins. | January 2, 2015 at 1:30 pm

    C’mon, Henry! They really just kept your hands from being all sticky.

    You would have been scooping that double-nut chocolate ripple with your fingers, and you know it!

“…they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible.”

Like Ford, GM, and Chrysler are responsible for thousands of DUI deaths. Right.

So long as people have access to arms, there will be killers of the innocent. This is nearly unavoidable. One of the problems with government-enforced gun control is that it can (and sometimes even now, does) prevent people from defending their lives against criminal assailants. The former situation is a consequence of human nature that no government can ever hope to change, even with volumes of new law. The latter situation is an institutionalized denial of the right to defend one’s life in extremis in which government becomes an enabler of criminal acts. The former situation is unfortunate, the latter is unacceptable.

    kalashnikat in reply to DaveGinOly. | January 2, 2015 at 8:57 pm

    Trial lawyers…So car makers, booze makers, and glassware makers should be sued for every DUI. Cattle breeders, dairy farmers, bread bakers, and silverware and dish makers for every obesity related death. Pitiful, and should be thrown out of court with orders to pay all the defendant’s legal costs.

    kalashnikat in reply to DaveGinOly. | January 2, 2015 at 8:59 pm

    Access to arms, not to mention legs?…more people are killed by fists and feet every year than by rifles…should read “as long as people are capable of anger, jealousy, insanity, and rage, the innocent may be killed.”

Punishing responsible gun owners for the actions of a few mentally disturbed individuals is asinine. Murders such as the one which took place in Sandy Hook will not be stopped with gun control. There will always exist, in any society, individuals who commit mass murder and they will do it with whatever weapon is available.

Wasn’t the gun sold to his mother? Maybe they should sue her.
And I really liked how the gun control rant by adam gopnik included this:
(Right-wing judges tend, these days, to be more creative than liberal ones in creating legal precedents that no one ever before imagined possible.)

While ignoring this “common sense” court decision.
http://dcgazette.com/federal-court-decide-new-yorkers-gun-rights/

The judge left standing banned features of a semiautomatic rifle, such as a “conspicuously protruding pistol grip,” telescoping or folding stock, and thumbhole stock. He stated that if, as the plaintiffs argue, these increase “comfort, stability, and accuracy,” the state’s interest in reducing a murderous shooter’s killing outweighs the law-abiding citizen’s right to these features.

Some ask “How can we allow this to happen?” as if we have the power to stop it. We are not that powerful, and another law will not change the behavior of the mentally ill.

Perhaps the surviving sibling in Oldsmar, Florida will sue the hardware store for selling his mother the axe his diagnosed mentally ill brother used to behead the mother?

http://www.wfla.com/story/27743083/sheriff-woman-decapitated-in-oldsmar-man-arrested

Quite amazing how ignorant these idiot leftists are of the basic moral principles that govern whatever topic they are cutting loose on. They are perfectly self-satisfied pulling it straight out of their asses.

“the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time.”

The purpose of defensive gun use is not to kill, it is to expeditiously incapacitate an attacker. This is a basic element of the law of self defense. It is fine to kill, when that is what expeditious incapacitation requires, but killing CANNOT be the purpose. The purpose has to be defense.

This isn’t just basic law, it is basic logic. It does not matter one whit if you already inflicted a mortal wound on an attacker if that wound does not immediately incapacitate him. Michael Brown might well have been mortally wounded before the last shot took out his central nervous system, but until his brain was lying on the ground he still presented an immediate murderous threat. He STILL needed shooting.

The purpose wasn’t to kill him, it was to stop him, and anyone who doesn’t know that (Adam Gopnik) doesn’t know ANYTHING, yet he blathers on as if he is full of important insight.

The only purpose of a semi-automatic rifle is to “kill a lot of people in a very short time”? Really? Even if there is only one attacker? You have to immediately kill a bunch of other people too because that is the gun’s “only purpose”?

This guy is just SO fricking stupid, yet somehow, in his state of supreme ignorance and obliviousness to the most basic logic, he is able to convince himself (and his left wing editors, and a lot of brain-dead leftist readers presumably), that he’s really nailed this one boy. Incredible.