>
>I don't doubt there are lots of really sweet gun-owners, Kel - but do you
>really think that Paul-Revere-cum-NRA stuff about citizens defending
>themselves carries the argument? Either with respect to a 1936 Germany or
>a 2001 America? I don't think you think that ...
>
>Just wondering,
>Rob.
uhhhhh, yeah, i take two people's word for it what happened in nazi germany. one is the men in the family i spoke of, the other is gunter remmling who i went to grad school to study under, along with manfred stanley who didn't take a position, but then he wasn't in the resistence, either.
here's one of the reasons why i love manny:
"It takes time to listen; more to sort out what one hears according to the always ambiguous applications of the rules of interpretation. It is often painful to listen; to enter the worlds of others, leaving the haven of the intellect and risking the moisture of emotion so difficult to domesticate through measurement."
the stuff matt spoke of, no. but the analysis here of a war between the detroit militia and the michigan militia. yeah. i see that as an inevitable part of our future and it will be fought with guns and bombs and technological weapons we've not much considered. when you read the stuff on information warfare and urban warfare spewed by the Defense Department, you can be certain that these people are ready and preparing to fight a war at some point, one in which they don't plan to use bombs and apache helcipters. rather, they plan on "urban warfare" because they don't imagine that they can whack a bunch of citizens ... or whatever... and get away with it.
the biggest "customer" of information warfare strategies are the police departments in this country.
will weapons help? i don't know.
i don't see why we have to find out by making illegal something a lot of people use for sportsmanship and as a plain old hobby, collecting. i don't know about you, rob, but most men i know collect the most useless kinds of junk. they enjoy marksmanship, they enjoy getting together with the boys to shoot trap, they enjoy hunting and bringing home venison. most of the hunters i know supplement their food budget this way. a good number of them supplement their income this way.
i know men who like the loud sound it makes. i know men who like big fat loud vehicles and especially going off road so they can see the dirt fly. heck, there's one guy on another list that likes to blast off concrete blocks and listen to them thud. chris susi knows more b/c he mocked the guy!
MEN ARE WEIRD!
seriously, tho....
*sigh* i was involved in a direct action against new york state's attempt to site a raidoactive waste dump. and i saw first hand just how much power folks felt knowing they had shot guns, etc against state troopers if need be. have you have laid down with a bunch of other people, no weapons, and formed a human barricade while state troopers pointed guns at you, happy to pick you off b/c you are a bunch of dumbass rednecks? no prob not. but i'll tell you, it was the symbolic aspect of the access to weapons that made all the difference in the world to many of these dumbass farmers. i like that power we felt. we ought to feel it more often. i liked the poster chuck cc'd here of ghandi being run over. politics and protest is pragmatic and sometimes violence is necessary.
mujeres libres! sexy chicks with boots, guns and red scarves damn it.
i have intellectual and political reasons, principals as to why i think the left does itself a great disservice to get up in arms about this issue. i have clearly spelled it all out. i'm pragmatic about this stuff. i don't think we have an inalieable right to anything but must struggle endlessly for those rights. so i'm not one of THOSE idiots. i don't think we are going to topple capitalism or defend ourselves b/c we have guns. i DO think the scenario outlined here recently is part of our future. i want guns against the wankers if need be.
but more importantly my arguments are pragmatic in the sense that i don't want cops to use gun reg as a way to harass the less powerful people in this country. they will, no doubt.
i don't want to make this such an all-fired issue only to alienate folks that just might be on our side, particularly when we fling about idiotic stereotypes revealing just how much we loathe anyone who doesn't share our effete cosmopolitan values. particulaly because, in assuming violence is largely associated with rightwingers and gun owners, we ignore the way machismo and all that bad het masculinity gets played out right under our noses, BY US!