Too long gone

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“If we’re going to be the Christian nation many gun worshipers claim us to be, then we have to get rid of our guns.”



“I love guns. Grew up with ‘em. … I plan to buy more – a bunch more. In fact, who’s to say I don’t already have a veritable arsenal?”


“I guess we need armed guards for the police. And when they start getting shot we will need armed guards for the armed guards for the police. And when they start getting shot …”

“There is no statistical correlation between the exercise of prayer, or respect for the Ten Commandments, and some immunity to mass shootings.”

“Police said the two were sitting across from each other in a booth … when the man reached into his front pants pocket and accidentally discharged a small pistol, striking his wife in the leg just above the knee.”

5 People Shot at 3 Different Gun Shows on Gun Appreciation Day

“There ought to be some big national organization out there that provides firearm safety courses.”

“A quick search on Google news for ‘shooting’ on late Saturday night, Gun Appreciation Day, offered these headlines. …”

“The true source of the NRA’s political power  – lobbying and fundraising — is the perfect demonstration of how irrelevant their cause really is.”

“So I guess it’s true that blacks wouldn’t have been slaves if they had guns, much like it’s true that blacks wouldn’t have been slaves if there was no such thing as American slavery.”

“Eventually, any conversation about gun control in America ends with someone, somewhere opposed to new gun regulations comparing the proponents to Adolf Hitler.”

“I couldn’t blow this guy away for something he could change later in life. I’m not going to decide this man’s fate.”

“According to a survey from the National Association of Evangelicals, nearly three-quarters of evangelical leaders support increasing restrictions on guns as a way to curb America’s gun violence epidemic.”

“The point is: Things change. Goliaths fall. It happens.”

“Ultimately I choose to live without guns because, a) I don’t hunt, b) I’m not a police officer, c) I choose to live gently in a violent world.”

“When Isaiah and Micah spoke of swords into plowshares they were most likely quoting an ancient song. … The song haunted these holy men.”

  • Amaryllis


    A voice from the dark called out,
    “The poets must give us
    imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
    imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
    the absence of war.”

    But peace, like a poem,
    is not there ahead of itself,
    can’t be imagined before it is made,
    can’t be known except
    in the words of its making,
    grammar of justice,
    syntax of mutual aid.

    A feeling towards it,
    dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
    until we begin to utter its metaphors,
    learning them as we speak.

    A line of peace might appear
    if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
    revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
    questioned our needs, allowed
    long pauses. . . .

    A cadence of peace might balance its weight
    on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
    an energy field more intense than war,
    might pulse then,
    stanza by stanza into the world,
    each act of living
    one of its words, each word
    a vibration of light—facets
    of the forming crystal.

    - Denise Levertov

  • http://www.aeryllou.tumblr.com/ Aeryl

    That Matt Barber article is the best example I could ever find of how our gun culture is extensively tied to this culture of anxious masculinity. 

    His continuous assertions that liberals have no experience with firearms (soft hands never knowing the touch of a Sig Sauer 45 and being candyasses*) as a way to set himself in opposition of those he sees as weak.  

    And I’m filing that story under shitthatneverhappened.txt.  But lets give him the beenfit of the doubt.  And I’m sure that the mother in that story, already terrified by the men in the van intimidating her, was made to feel so much better by the high powered weapon being brandished under her nose.  My question is what would the response had been had those men pulled their own weapons in response, as that’s the world Barber wants to live in.  Was he to discharge that weapon in front of her face, damaging her hearing?  What if the muzzleflash had been close to her face and she was burned?  Would he still be touting that story as “the way the world should be?

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino


    And then someone always hauls out the “omg US gun laws are EXACTLY LIKE THE NAZI GUN LAW OMFG”.

    Deconstructed here. The relevant extract follows:

    Perhaps one of the pro-gun lobby’s favorite arguments is that
    if German citizens had had the right to keep and bear arms, Hitler
    would have never been able to tyrannize the country. And to this
    effect, pro-gun advocates often quote the following:

    police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into
    the future.” – Adolf Hitler

    However, this quote is almost certainly a fraud. There is no reputable
    record of him ever making it: neither at the Nuremberg rallies,
    nor in any of his weekly radio addresses. Furthermore, there was
    no reason for him to even make such a statement; for Germany
    already had strict gun control as a term of surrender
    as impotent as possible, and one of the ways they did that was
    to disarm its citizenry. Only a handful of local authorities were
    allowed arms at all, and the few German citizens who did possess
    weapons were already subject to full gun registration. Seen in
    this light, the above quote makes no sense whatsoever.

  • Münchner Kindl

    As much as I wish it for you, I doubt the US can ever return to a normal state about guns.

    It’s not enough to pass laws or effectivly use existing laws (like background checks: actually doing them and using one database), the situation is one of a self-fulfilled prophecy:

    to actually reduce the amount of guns and thus the violence they might cause, it’s not enough to limit the sales of guns, but you would also need to take away the guns from the nuts. Which is precisly what the nuts have been warning about and are ready to shoot to prevent. So Waco times thousand.

    In addition, laws will never help unless the whole culture and myth changes. Every time there’s a discussion about guns on the internet (different sites), pro-gun-advocates will bring up the following scenarios:
    1. Imagine you’re at home when in the middle of the night armed villains break in to rape your children and wife. You take the gun underneath your pillow and protect your family.

    2. You’re walking the street in the evening when a bad man tries to rob you. You take out your concealed gun and shoot him. (The disproportion between life and property is another problem)

    3. You’re in a campus/ cinema/ school when a mentally disturbed (crazy) person runs amok and starts shooting. You pull out your gun and shook the crazy to protect the innocents around you.

    Now, to any rational person, these scenarios are all pure fantasy of a 10-year old. Anybody in law enforcment or similar can tell how these things play out in real life.

    But in Hollywood and among pro-gun people, imaginery scenarios are used as valid arguments, because guns are magic and mythical.

    You’d need a broad-based approach on all levels – cinema and media, schools, newspapers with facts – to get rid of these myths and the belief in the magic of guns first, otherwise new laws will be toothless.

  • Foreigner

    omfg if germans had been armed hitler would never have happened!!!!

  • http://loosviews.livejournal.com BringTheNoise

    Further to that, Hitler did pass a law banning ownership of guns… but only affecting Jewish people and other persecuted groups. It actually made it easier for non-Jewish citizens to obtain guns, including lowering the minimum age to purchase a gun from 20 to 18: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop_talking_about_hitler/

  • Foreigner

    Pursuing the gun-nut mindset further down the rabbit-hole, that means:

    omfg hitler took the guns away from persecuted people just like obama’s gonna do to us!!!

  • mud man

    essential to living the way God intended for us to live

    There are those who would build the Temple,
    And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.
    In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet
    There was no exception to the general rule.
    There were enemies without to destroy him.
    And spies and self-seekers within,
    So they built as men must build
    O weariness of men who turn from God
    To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action, …
    Binding the earth and the water to your service, …
    Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles, …
    Remembering the words of Nehemiah the Prophet: “The trowel
    in hand, and the gun rather loose in the holster.”
    Those who sit in a house of which the use is forgotten: are like
    snakes that lie on mouldering stairs, content in the sunlight.
    And the others run about like dogs, full of enterprise, sniffing 
    and barking: they say, “This house is a nest of serpents, let us 
    destroy it …”

  • mud man


    There you are.

  • Water_Bear

    There’s also the fact that taking people’s guns away en masse is legally impossible; if anything violates the right to keep and bear arms it’s nicking people’s guns. Technically you can amend the Constitution, but seeing as the 2nd amendment is part of the Bill of Rights there’s no way in hell anyone is ever actually going to do it.


    First of all, can you PLEASE give some kind of hint about a link you’ve posted before you send us to a cesspit like Town-freaking-hall?!?

    Second, the Barber piece simply reminds me of the dirty truth that dare not be spoken aloud: if fascism ever comes to America, people like Barber and the rest of the NRA nuts won’t be the heroic insurgency fighting against it like the Wolverines of legend. They’ll be the guys goose-stepping down the street with bright red arm bands and automatic weapons ready to start something with anyone insufficiently loyal to the new regime.

  • Water_Bear

    -Ignore this if two of these appear, otherwise shake fist at Disqus for eating the first one-

    The main problem isn’t public perception though; it’s entirely possible that a generation or two down the line Americans will be anti-gun enough to pass that kind of broad retroactive gun-ban, even enough to comply with it. But the problem is that it’s legally impossible.

    The 2nd amendment could, like any part of the Constitution, be amended out of existence. But the thing is, overturning an amendment has only ever happened once (the 18th which prohibited alcohol, removed with the 21st) and the 2nd amendment is part of the Bill of Rights which makes it virtually inviolate. And as long as the 2nd amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, nicking people’s guns en masse is not going to be possible.

    Plus you can’t right an Ex Post Facto law; any existing guns would be grandfathered even under the broadest possible ban. That comes in at both state and federal levels.

  • Jenora Feuer

    His continuous assertions that liberals have no experience with firearms …

    You know, I consider myself reasonably liberal/progressive.  (I’m Canadian, for a start.)  Grew up all over the place in B.C., including small towns like 100 Mile House.  Heck, I was a ‘preppie’, going to a private high school.  I also do not own a gun.

    That ‘prep school’ had a gun range (the school dated back to WWI, when it was expected that young men would learn how to shoot guns).  I made use of this range.  While I’ve never fired anything higher power than a .22 rifle, and I’m no crack shot, I do know how to use a gun and have had proper training.  So do both my parents.  My mother once said that a gun instructor kept looking at her oddly because of how she held a gun.  (She kept holding it right-handed but sighting with her better left eye.)

    I don’t own a gun in part because I’ve used them before, and I have a great deal of respect for them and how much damage they can do.  The only gun my father owns is a .177 pellet pistol.

    The whole ‘weak people don’t know anything about firearms’ is of a piece with comments on other threads I’ve seen where someone was noting that the biggest loudmouths about loving guns also were often the sloppiest people in terms of gun safety.  These are the people who see the gun as a personal power enhancer rather than a (potentially very dangerous) tool.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jon.maki Jon Maki

    On the Brian Zahnd post, it’s interesting how emblematic the comments are of how out of sync with reality people get as soon as you say something that could be construed as even remotely negative about guns.

    Post:  I’ve chosen not to own any guns and here’s why.  I respect the fact that you’ve made different choices, and all I’m asking is for you to respect my choices.

    Comments:  ZOMG!  Why are you trying to take away our guns???  Jesus loves guns!  Second Amendment!  Tyranny!  Hitler!!!!!one!!!

    Regarding the assorted comments that have been made about if slaves/Jews/whoever had been armed bad things wouldn’t have happened, has anyone pointed out that if Jesus had been packing the Romans wouldn’t have been able to crucify him?

    As for the Barber piece…fuck it.  Just get off your asses and start your glorious goddamn revolution already; I’d almost rather you just get it over with and shoot me than have to put up with any more of this deluded nonsense.

  • Kiba

    I guess I could be called a progressive/liberal and I grew up around guns (my brother almost had is head blown off when a cousin of ours was trying to show off for his girlfriend). I don’t much care for them; they were always so loud and hurt my ears. Anyway, we lived out in the boonies in Southern Arizona and had them in case of things like coyotes, javelinas, and rattlesnakes.

    When I was a teenager I fired a .45 (first gun I ever shot) and then a .22 and failed to understand what the fuss was about. Now, if I were ever to move out to the country then I might think about getting a shot gun but that would only be for things like coyotes, etc. 

  • Mark Z.

    Plus you can’t write an Ex Post Facto law; any existing guns would be grandfathered even under the broadest possible ban.

    That’s not how the ex post facto clause works. You can write a law that requires everyone currently possessing certain guns to dispose of them (as long as you compensate those people for their loss of property). What you can’t do is punish those people for having owned the guns before the ban went into effect.

  • Ian

    Joe Biden has reached an interesting level of fame such that any article purportedly written by him is both an obvious forgery and a credit to his name.

  • LL

    Maybe a law that prohibits anyone whose mishandling of a weapon has resulted in injury or death to others from owning any guns at all would placate both sides. Well, OK, placate the anti-gun people more, but still. 

    If you shoot your own wife in the leg in a restaurant while digging around in your pants pocket, you shouldn’t be allowed to own any guns. Ever. 

  • Cathy W

    I believe when Australia implemented a very broad gun restriction some years ago, they included a voluntary buyback program. Something like that might be successful.

  • Madhabmatics

    I love how, as the gun control debate goes on, the difference between people who just hunt and sports shooters gets increasingly obvious. I know people around here get a little annoyed when dudes claim to speak for all hunters by saying “I totally need to be able to shoot off 30 bullets without reloading… in order to hunt a deer.”

  • Albanaeon

    Well, here’s another liberal that’s okay with guns.  Aside from being ex-military, I do wonder though if it is more a “Western US” thing, because you can’t swing a cat and not find a half dozen hunters. 

    But Madhamatics is definitely on to something with what feels like a growing discontent between the sportspeople and the gun-nut.  There’s still an overlap in the group, but a fair amount of the people I know who hunt are getting fed up with being included with the hysteria driven folks.  For one, most of them are extremely careful with their guns, probably as nothing drives home what a gun can really do like killing an animal (often larger than you) with a twitch of a finger.  Second, the “take my gun from my cold, dead hands” rhetoric can quickly bury a host of other issues that sportspeople are concerned with, like hunting rights, environmental concerns, etc. that the NRA frequently makes allies with people AGAINST those things.

    I hope its not just wishful thinking, but I hope that a more reasonable NRA starts working with environmentalists in the not too far future.

  • Jonathan

    Couldn’t the amendment simply be reinterpreted though, without actually overturning it? Rights, even those in the Bill of Rights, are often far from absolute.

  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

     Well, obviously we should do the opposite of what Hitler would do, right? So… Make it harder for white christian men to get guns, and easier for African Americans, Muslims, and QUILTBAG folks to get them.

    Surely the NRA could not object to that!

  • Water_Bear

    The Supreme Court really really hates to overturn precedent and there have been a lot of cases sussing out the boundaries of the 2nd amendment.

    And, well, people don’t like to talk about this but the second amendment was at least in part meant specifically to put military weapons in civilian hands so that they could fight the government. Back when a small town could make their own cannons and shot, the idea that small arms would turn the tables in a revolution wasn’t a crazy suggestion. An interpretation which ignored the obvious intent of the amendment would be hard to justify.

  • Isabel C.

    And that’s where I really roll my eyes at these guys.

    Okay, I kind of roll them at the crowd that thinks they really really need semiautomatic weapons to pursue their hobbies, because people have been hunting deer with bows and arrows for millennia, so suck it up and put down the artificial penis. (Also, if it was provable that making a facet of my hobby slightly less convenient made it less likely that many people would get killed, I like to think I’d accept that with a modicum of grace and adult behavior.)

    But really, the people who piss me off in this are the ZOMG SECOND AMENDMENT TYRANNY BLACK HELICOPTERS FEDGOV CONSPIRACY hand-flappy crowd.  Point the first:  everything everyone else has said about the Second Amendment and muskets. Point the second: holy shit, guys, if you think the government has a supa-sekrit conspiracy to TAKE AWAY YOUR LIBERTEH with black helicopters and everything, what in the name of God makes you think you and the sporting goods section of Wal-Mart stand a chance?

  • http://jesustheram.blogspot.com/ Mr. Heartland

     “Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority.”

    Perhaps more than anything, these are people who want to see themselves and be acknowledged by others as the eternal normative standard for the USA. From this basis there is no such thing as polite disagreement, only competing claims to the One True Path.   

    Proclaiming themselves as part of a righteous militia, constantly ready to make physical war on whatever evil, is a means of asserting a paternal relationship to society. 

  • hidden_urchin

    Actually, the ” well regulated militia” wasn’t conceived to fight the government; its purpose was to fight for the government. (They didn’t want a standing army and there were occasionally local rebellions against the government that needed to be put down.) It was more or less the predecessor to the National Guard.

    In short, the original purpose of the Second Amendment was the exact opposite of what the NRA claims it was.

  • http://lliira.dreamwidth.org/ Lliira



    For someone who has defended trigger warnings so vigorously, Fred sure seems allergic to using them ever for anything. 

  • http://lliira.dreamwidth.org/ Lliira

    This, and also, it was there so settlers would be allowed to shoot Indians. One of the many dirty big secrets about the Revolutionary War: One reason colonists (especially those out west, in Ohio and such) were ticked off at Britain was that Britain would not let them murder nearly as many Indians, or steal nearly as much Indian land, as they wanted to. One of the main goals of the war on the part of colonists was to remove this restriction. 

  • AnonymousSam

    This has been making the rounds on Facebook: https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/734627_10151358640831178_1168253991_n.jpg

    The logic of this picture infuriates me.

    First of all, if you see someone breaking into the home of your neighbors, whether or not you have a gun is irrelevant. What you should be doing is calling the police and reporting a robbery in progress. The last thing you should ever do is confront a criminal, because that’s when people die — and it isn’t always the criminal, or, for that matter, the vigilante. Being a gun-toting hero is just one more ridiculous fantasy that these people want everyone to indulge as often as possible.

    Secondly, even assuming nothing ever happens because of this sign, intentionally trying to get people robbed/hurt/whatever? Not cool. I don’t care whether your neighbor is a heroin addict on disability who uses his checks to fraudulently buy oxycontin and abuses his kids when he’s high — his death might be the best thing to ever happen to his family, but it isn’t your responsibility to make sure it happens.

    Thirdly, what kind of horrible world do we live in where if you saw someone robbing your neighbor’s house, you’d shrug and say “That’s what he deserves for not wanting innocent people to die” and go about your business?

  • AnonymousSam

    The whole “liberals hate guns so of course they are ignorant about them, frightened of them and refuse to do anything to better themselves” shtick sounds a lot like Haidt’s “liberals can’t understand conservatives, but conservatives understand liberals and argue from far better defined positions” bullshit too.

  • gocart mozart

    “If Jesus had been packing, the Romans wouldn’t have been able to crucify him?”

    This cannot be repeated often enough.

  • redsixwing

    Tell me the Barber link is a poe? No?

    ‘scuse me, I have to go despair of humanity for a while.

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/ZNNUWEXUPQUQAYGBFDHTEIJBUI Joshua

    Seriously. I can’t imagine this guy standing up for the rights of anyone who is not exactly like him. I don’t think he’s a Black Shirt or anything, but from historical evidence guys like that are usually enthusiastic about violating the civil liberties of others; as long  as they, personally, are left alone.

  • Kiba


    When I was living at my old apartment I came home after work and my door wouldn’t open. The cheap plastic innards of the lock had shattered when I went to unlock the front door. I pounded on the door and neither my brother or our roommate woke up. It was after office hours so the leasing office was closed and I didn’t have a cell phone (the one payphone near by was broken) and couldn’t call. I lived on the second floor and ended up having to climb up from my downstairs neighbor’s patio to my balcony and luckily one of the living room windows wasn’t latched so I was able to crawl into my apartment.

    I’m really thankful, and I live in Texas, that none of my neighbors saw me and, if they happened to own a fire arm, decide to take potshots at me. Seriously, if you see someone breaking into a house/apartment just call the cops. It might not even be a burglar you end up shooting if you decide to play hero.  

  • AnonymousSam

    *Nods* This exact scenario and others were going through my head as I wrote that. I’ve had to break into my own home too. The other big one is taking a shot at a robber and having the bullet hit a bystander. In the dark, all silhouettes are evil thugs, right?

  • Erl


    Actually, in the past century, there have only been three 2nd Amendment cases. It’s one of the most rarely litigated of the Amendments. And Supreme Court jurisprudence in general is pretty okay with restricting a specified right in the interests of safety, that Ben Franklin quote aside. 

  • Anton_Mates

     If I was the neighbor, and also eight years old, I’d be strongly be tempted to put up my own sign reading “My next door neighbor has lots of guns and ammo!  All I’VE got to steal is a bike, a laptop and a blender! Out of respect for their opinion, if I see you making off with their arsenal, I promise not to do anything sissy like call the police!”

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    I know. When I’ve been in arguments with people like that and I point out that the US government has tanks, planes, frakking nukes, I ask them what makes them think unrestricted gun ownership will help, and they always nebulously fell back on, “Well, we don’t think the US military will fire on US citizens.”

    In the pinch, all it takes is one soldier who’ll follow those orders rather than risk court-martial and a stretch in Leavenworth for failure to obey orders, and Whitey McPatriot is still gonna be deader than dead.

  • http://apocalypsereview.wordpress.com/ Invisible Neutrino

    The sheer unselfconscious hiding-in-bubblish “fuck you Jack, I got mine” mentality infesting some Americans is in full flower on that sign, and for a member of a right-wing political movement that often praises the American value of “freely given charity”, folks like that show their true colors PDQ under the proper stimulus.

  • Sgt. Pepper’s Bleeding Heart


    Not voluntary. There was an amnesty period (12-18 months, can’t remember exactly) and if you handed over your weapons of mass destruction during that period you got financial compensation and no hassle. Since the amnesty expired, if you are found to hold illegal weapons of mass destruction, or unregistered items in a restricted class, you are in trouble.

  • arcseconds

     Are you quite sure you’re sociopathic? Because you sound far more empathic (and good-natured) than anyone who’d create this image (I’m hoping it’s an image, and not an actual sign…).

  • P J Evans

     I’d remind the of Ft Sumter  and the four-plus years after that. Where the US military fired on a lotof US citizens. Plus assorted other occasions, including firing on striking workers.

  • P J Evans

     I suspect that’ it’s a nice piece of photo-shopping; the neighbors would most likely have made the resident take that sign down fast.

  • AnonymousSam

    There was a time when I was almost as bad. I’ve just come to certain realizations about the meaning of life (or at least, my life). If I permitted myself to behave according to my base instincts, I’d be too busy snarling about how I wanted to kill this disgusting prick.

    Whether or not it’s an image or a real sign is almost irrelevant. Someone made it, and people are fist-pumping at it.

  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

     Not shown: Sign on the next lawn over reading “I ain’t got shit. The guy next door has like $3k worth of guns and isn’t nearly as good a shot as he thinks he is.”

  • http://blog.trenchcoatsoft.com Ross

     Whenever Sam mentions his sociopathy, I think of this:


    — L  Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  • Lori


    dozen hunters.   

    I don’t think it’s a Western thing. We’ve up to our gun racks in hunters here in the Midwest too and have been for as long as I can remember. IME the divide isn’t by region it’s semi-rural and rural vs suburban & urban.


    If you don’t think that the military will attack civilians, then why bother with the guns in the first place? It’s like saying, “I firmly believe that no one will ever rob my house, but I need an entire arsenal in my basement to ward off robbers.” You can believe one or the other, but not both. 

  • Lori

    They think of the government and the military as separate things. The government is against them, the military is for them. They see themselves needing to take up arms against something “the government” does* and succeeding because the military refuses to follow orders.

    This is totally delusional, but AFAICT it’s basically what they think.

    *The exact thing that would require this fantasy armed insurection varies from nutbar to nutbar. The most common one is of course trying to Take All The Guns, but I’ve heard election of the wrong president and attempts to collect taxes plenty of times too.