Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms – Page 9

Planning to Carry?

Leftists want to strip you of your Constitutional rights. The arguments they employ are worthless when these emotion-driven dopes argue at all. You may think to resist them by exercising your rights. But grave responsibilities attend their exercise.

Know the law. Leftist shysters will surely try to use it against you should you have to shoot in self defense. Get training. Practice regularly. Proficiency with a handgun is the most difficult type of fire arms proficiency to attain.

Much more on this topic in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Why Would Anyone Ever Need an AR-15?

Stephen Willeford has an answer for you.

Wonder Lost

I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli uomini il nulla nel tutto.

The child finds everything in nothing; the man nothing in everything.

And knocking back a couple or three Fanciulli cocktails won't help matters.

Reading Now: Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Undoubtedly the most Joycean of the booze novels. This is not what one could call a 'page turner.' Not suitable for beach or bed reading. But it looks to be a deep work that will repay the close attention it demands. Under the Volcano was originally published in 1947. Two other booze novels from the '40s are rather more suited for entertainment: Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, 1944, and Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, 1941.

And then there is the grandpappy of them all, Jack London's John Barleycorn. My analysis: Jack London, John Barleycorn, and the Noseless One. (Perhaps an astute literary type will point me to a booze novel in English temporally antecedent to London's.)

It is interesting to note in these waning days of dear October, Kerouac month, that Lowry and Jack both died of drink and at the same age: 47. The difference seems to have have been that Lowry was deliberately out to off himself on the day of his death, his last binge fueled as it was with barbiturates, while Kerouac had not fixed upon 21 October 1969 as Todestag.

The mystery of self-destruction! Is there a natural explanation? Or is the booze monkey a real demon?

There follows an example of of a Lowry sentence that will slow down the serious reader, indeed bring him to a dead stop, as he tries to untangle the syntax. Lowry being a Cambridge man, we assume he knows how to write English. But then we come across this:

His love had brought a peace, for all too short a while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself, long ago, whose every sidestreet he had come to love and café where he could gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. (13)

As I said, this novel is not a 'page turner.'

Addendum (10/28)

London Ed writes,

If you mean a novel that is almost entirely about drunkenness, i.e. whose subject is just drunkenness, such as Lowry, then you won’t find much in 19^thcentury literature. I recommend Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard, if you haven’t come across it already, but that is an essay, not a novel. (It has been questioned whether Lamb actually was a drunkard, but the evidence suggests he was).

In A Tale of Two Cities – as you surely know – a drunkard is the central character, and drunkenness is one of the themes, but the central theme is an unusual kind of redemption, not drink itself.

See also The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where again drunkenness is a theme, but not central. Bronte may have modelled the drunken character on her alcoholic brother Bramwell, although she may have been influenced by The Anatomy of Drinking (Robert Macnish, 1835), which is worth a visit (‘Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking’).

For an interesting conspectus of modern ‘feminist’ writers who were no enemies to the bottle, see this Guardian article. ‘Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output’. Is there a relation between the bottle and the writing? Macnish argues that genius is accompanied by ‘melancholy’, i.e. depression. ‘High talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom’. So they drink to relieve the gloom. So the bottle, on his account, is more a property in the Aristotelian sense: it accompanies the phenomenon of genius, but is not essential to it. Or by contrast is it essential? It is hard to imagine Burroughs without junk. (Or Kerouac without the drink?).

Enjoy the volcano book. I have it in the attic somewhere, but didn’t get beyond the first chapter or two.

And let's not forget the role that benzedrine played in the composition of On the Road.

Addendum 2 (10/28, 5:08 AM MST)

Ed adds,

Sorry, some more. Macnish rightly says the the most ‘delightful’ state is when sobriety and inebriation briefly become neighbours. That’s right. There is a short episode, usually after the first glass, when the gods come down to the planet, and the world is blessed. Unfortunately the blessedness is so good you want to continue it, and have another, but this never works. For this reason, wise men (and women) never go beyond the third glass. Another alcoholic writer, (Chandler) cleverly said “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.” Perhaps you meant the same when you spoke (somewhere) about having a couple of Buds but being none the weiser).

I agree entirely. The wise man stops at the third when returns diminish bigly. But you and I are not alkies. They achieve some crazy bliss from continuing.

Raymond Chandler? Funny you should mention him. In the midst of his high-falutin' Joycean prose, Lowry uncorked a Chandleresque line: "Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher." (22-23) Here is my attempt at Chandler-style prose:

The stranger sat down and played his King's pawn to e4. I countered with the French Defense and in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.

I wasn't thinking about taking any girl's clothes off when I repeated the old redneck line, in a blog post circa 2004, "Ah had me a coupla Buds, but I got none the wiser." 'Wiser' pronounced something like waah-zr.

Addendum 3 (10/28, 11:04)

Ed continues,

“Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher.”

“in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.”

Love them both. I think the second is more Chandleresque. Hard to say why. The first contains a literary illusion. The second is just cheap suits. You have to remember that Chandler was brought up in London, quite near where I live, and he went to an English public school (Dulwich). So he carried an English snobbery with him to the US. When he says ‘Los Angeles has the personality of a paper cup’ you can hear that public school sneer under his voice. His work is almost entirely about the vulgar, but that is the point of it.

I mentioned the London thing to a hard core noir fan, who was astonished. He thought, not without reason, that Chandler was a quintessentially American writer. No more than Joseph Conrad (who did not speak fluent English until his twenties) was quintessentially English.

Why Do Leftists Blame the Weapon Over the Wielder?

I spoke of

. . . the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

What explains this displacement? A reader proffers an explanation:

Maybe they displace responsibility here because, if we blame the person shooting the gun, next we have to notice just how often that person is black, and how rarely he is white. And noticing that, for liberals, would be racist. Nothing that makes blacks look bad, or worse than others in any way, can be noticed. It must be a gun problem because otherwise it would be a black problem. (Largely, on the whole — given what a small proportion of the population is black and what a huge proportion of the 'gun problem' consists of black people shooting people for no good reason.)

Right. It is politically incorrect to take note of differences between blacks and other groups when these differences show blacks to be worse in some respects than these other groups.

On the other hand, when once in a while the person shooting the gun is a white person–and, best of all, a white person who just might conceivably be associated with conservatism or even some kind of white consciousness –liberals will find that the problem is, for once, not just a gun problem but also the problem of 'angry white men', 'racists', 'white supremacists' or even just 'white people'… And then we learn that it's those people — those bad white people–who are responsible for this awful gun culture and gun problem. So once again, the liberals are really engaged in race hatred and race baiting and maybe, some day, open race war. So as with so many other things, it seems they don't really believe their own supposed principles, e.g., that the problem is guns not people shooting guns . . . .

My reader's point seems to be that leftists try to have it both ways at once. By blaming the weapons rather than the wielders, leftists can uphold their cherished but plainly false conviction that blacks are no more criminally prone than whites: there is nothing about blacks that makes them more criminally prone; it is the availability of guns! But their real agenda as destructive leftists is to foment racial division. So when a white man goes on a rampage, then they drop the notion that the availability of guns is the problem and play the race card.

What Do Gun Violence and Systemic Racism Have in Common?

Neither exist.

(William Tingley calls me "the pithy Maverick." How are you doing these days, Bill?)

The Gun Issue in a Few Sentences

Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire the means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the citizen has a right to keep and bear arms? Yes.

Very good. All the rest is commentary.

I go into detail here.

Come and Take Them, Bret Stephens

David Harsanyi's refutation of Bret Stephens' call to repeal the Second Amendment begins like this:

The idea that gun-control advocates don’t want to confiscate your weapons is, of course, laughable. They can’t confiscate your weapons, so they support whatever feasible incremental steps inch further towards that goal. Some folks are more considerate and get right to the point.

Exactly right. Never underestimate the mendacity of a leftist.

You will have noticed that the Left is now opposing free speech. Time then to repeat: It is the Second Amendment that provides the concrete back-up to the First.

A few days before the Las Vegas massacre I penned an entry that refutes Stephens' optimism about disagreement. He naively thinks that mutually respectful conversations on hot-button issues will converge on agreement. Well, events have borne me out.

Can anyone in his right mind think that 'conversations' about the Second Amendment will converge on agreement?

You see, when a leftist speaks of 'conversations,' what he means is that the right-minded need to shut up and acquiesce in what the loons say.

To which the only rational and appropriate response is of the middle-fingered sort.

The Unserious ‘Serious’ Discussion About Guns

George Neumayr is one of the few who is talking sense on the issue. What follows is a fine complement to what I say in The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

I have bolded some passages.

………………….

The philosophy underlying liberalism is at once totalitarian and relativistic. It proposes more government and less morality. It laughs at the mustiness of the Ten Commandments, then demands respect for a flurry of new laws. It scoffs at old codes of self-control, then presses for “gun control” and greater state controls on this or that freedom.

From this ethos, regnant for decades in elite circles, has come an out-of-control society in which pols reflexively respond to unspeakable tragedy by advocating more and more laws for a people whose gradual loss of virtue guarantees that they will violate them. The terminus of this toxic admixture of totalitarianism and relativism is the transformation of society into a kind of prison: an endless number of laws and deprivation of freedoms imposed on an increasingly soulless citizenry. Of course, the people running such a system, the totalitarian elite, make sure to exempt themselves from the confines of the prison even as they boast of its glorious benefits. Recall the Soviet thugs who would impress Western visitors with stats proving the Soviet Union’s “low crime rate,” or Fidel Castro showing visiting dignitaries “how safe Havana is.”

That is the utopia to which gun-control liberals hope to lead America. They clamor for a tragedy-proof America in which “nothing bad ever happens to anyone,” except the massive loss of their freedom. The gun control lobby’s “solution” to crime isn’t the recovery of a civil society that teaches virtue but the granting of more and more power to a state that treats everyone like a criminal.

Conspicuously absent from all the sanctimonious lectures on gun control this week was any grappling with America’s cultural meltdown, which is the most comprehensible explanation for a spike in mass shootings even as laws and restrictions multiply. Indeed, the loudest voices for gun control come from the degenerate cultural forces most responsible for that meltdown. They demand that America “get serious about gun control,” even as they get less and less serious about the values and institutions most essential to the preservation of civilization. Educrats who have decimated America’s public schools profess shock at an increase in “school shootings”; late-night hosts who roll out the red carpet for blood-and-gore stars wonder at the “glamour of violence”; an elite that prides itself on destroying the traditional family is aghast at the rise of so many mass-shooting misfits who come from broken families.”

All of the hasty calls for more gun control from these preening frauds conveniently ignored that the Las Vegas shooter used illegal guns. If anything, the tragedy is an indictment of their exclusive focus upon legislation as a solution to criminal pathology. That they would politicize it so quickly, without bothering to engage any of the facts of the tragedy, underscores the opportunistic totalitarianism always lurking beneath their demagoguery. They never let a crisis or a mass shooting go to waste.

According to the media, late-night comedy talk show hosts now serve as the “conscience of the nation” at these fraught moments, which sounds about right for a democracy as fatuous as ours. In between showing clips from the latest demented, violence-drenched Hollywood movie, they are going to lead the nation towards “sensible gun control,” apparently. “Sensible gun control” is the elite’s euphemism for making sure that everyone except their bodyguards is deprived of guns.

Beware of the word “sensible” in the mouth of statists. It is what they say right before they violate a right. Obama’s call for “sensible conscience protections” foreshadowed his fiat violating the consciences of all employers by forcing them to cover the abortifacients and contraceptives of their employees. “Sensible gun control” foreshadows the destruction of the Second Amendment.

The left is neither sensible nor serious about controlling wicked behavior. If it were, it would seek to shore up the foundations of civilization, without which the multiplication of laws is useless, to which the tragedy in Las Vegas attests. It is insensible to think that good laws can protect the innocent without a functioning civil society that reinforces them. It is precisely the fruit of that civil society, a culture of self-control, that the liberal elite has done the most to poison. Liberals favor “gun control” without self-control. In the end, this just means more and more government control — an endless cycle of relativism leading to totalitarianism.

Larry Correia on Suppressors

On guns, Correia knows whereof he speaks.

First read this 'viral' post written in response to the Sandy Hook shooting. He lists his credentials.

Then this on suppressors.

If there is any need for suppressors, they need to take the form of muzzles for Hillary, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and the rest of that pack of know-nothings who ought to be made to keep their traps shut about matters about which they know nothing.

The Problem: Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?

This is a repost, slightly redacted, from 2012 to help stem the tsunami of folderol washing over us from the orifices of the mindless gun-grabbing Left in the wake of the Las Vegas rampage. 'Liberal' is elliptical for 'contemporary liberal.' I am not speaking of classical, 19th century liberals or JFK-liberals. It is not 1960 anymore.

…………….

Without wanting to deny that there is a 'gun culture' in the USA, especially in the so-called red states, I would insist that the real problem is our liberal culture. Here are four characteristics of liberal culture that contribute to violence of all kinds, including gun violence. So if you want to do something, work against each of the following. But first look in the mirror to see if you are part of the problem.

1. Liberals tend to have a casual attitude toward crime.

This is well-documented by Theodore Dalrymple. No Contrition, No Penalty is a short piece by him. See also my Crime and Punishment category.

It is interesting to note that Connecticut, the state in which the Newtown massacre occurred, has recently repealed the death penalty, and this after the unspeakably brutal Hayes-Komisarjevsky home invasion in the same state.

One of the strongest voices against repealing the death penalty has been Dr. William Petit Jr., the lone survivor of a 2007 Cheshire home invasion that resulted in the murders of his wife and two daughters.

The wife was raped and strangled, one of the daughters was molested and both girls were left tied to their beds as the house was set on fire.

The two men convicted of the crime, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes, are currently on death row.

Anyone who cannot appreciate that a crime like this deserves the death penalty is morally obtuse. But not only are liberals morally obtuse, they are intellectually obtuse in failing to understand that one of the main reasons people buy guns is to protect themselves from the criminal element, the criminal element that liberals coddle. If liberals were serious about wanting to reduce the numbers of guns in civilian hands, they would insist on swift and sure punishment in accordance with the self-evident moral principle, "The punishment must fit the crime," which is of course not to be confused with lex talionis, "an eye for an eye." Many guns are purchased not for hunting or sport shooting but for protection against criminals. Keeping and bearing arms carries with it a grave responsibility and many if not most gun owners would rather not be so burdened. Gun ownership among women is on the upswing, and it is a safe bet that they don't want guns to shoot Bambi.

2. Liberals tend to undermine morality with their opposition to religion.

Many of us internalized the ethical norms that guide our lives via our childhood religious training. We were taught the Ten Commandments, for example. We were not just taught about them, we were taught them. We learned them by heart, and we took them to heart. This early training, far from being the child abuse that A. C. Grayling and other militant atheists think it is, had a very positive effect on us in forming our consciences and making us the basically decent human beings we are. I am not saying that moral formation is possible only within a religion; I am saying that some religions do an excellent job of transmitting and inculcating life-guiding and life-enhancing ethical standards, that moral formation outside of a religion is unlikely for the average person, and that it is nearly impossible if children are simply handed over to the pernicious influences of secular society as these influences are transmitted through television, Internet, video games, and other media. Anyone with moral sense can see that the mass media have become an open sewer in which every manner of cultural polluter is not only tolerated but promoted. Those of use who were properly educated way back when can dip into this cesspool without too much moral damage. But to deliver our children over to it is the real child abuse, pace the benighted Professor Grayling.

The shysters of the American Civil Liberties Union, to take one particularly egregious bunch of destructive leftists, seek to remove every vestige of our Judeo-Christian ethical tradition from the public square. I can't begin to catalog all of their antics. But recently there was the Mojave Memorial Cross incident. It is absurd that there has been any fight at all over it. The ACLU, whose radical lawyers brought the original law suit, deserve contempt and resolute opposition. Of course, I wholeheartedly endorse the initial clause of the First Amendment, to wit, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ." But it is hate-America leftist extremism on stilts to think that the presence of that very old memorial cross on a hill in the middle of nowhere does anything to establish Christianity as the state religion. I consider anyone who believes that to be intellectually obtuse and morally repellent. One has to be highly unbalanced in his thinking to torture such extremist nonsense out of the First Amendment, while missing the plain sense of the Second Amendment, one that even SCOTUS eventually got right, namely, the the right to keep and bear arms is an individual, not a collective, right.

And then there was the business of the tiny cross on the city seal of Los Angeles, a symbol that the ACLU agitated to have removed. I could continue with the examples, and you hope I won't.

3. Liberals tend to have low standards, glorify the worthless, and fail to present exemplary human types.

Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. It seems obvious that the liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.

What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their way of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.

The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.

4. Liberals tend to deny or downplay free will, individual responsibility, and the reality of evil.

This is connected with point (2) above, leftist hostility to religion. Key to our Judeo-Christian tradition is the belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Central to this image is that mysterious power in us called free will. The secular extremist assault on religion is at the same time an assault on this mysterious power, through which evil comes into the world.

This is a large topic. Suffice it to say for now that one clear indication of this denial is the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

Hillary’s Gun Tweets in the Aftermath of the Las Vegas Shooting

1) "Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again."

Note first Hillary's hypocrisy. She preaches that we must put politics aside, and then goes on to politicize the shooting. Or perhaps she has a curious notion of politics as that which 'deplorables' engage in while she is above that sort of thing. Besides, to stand up to the NRA is a political act inasmuch as the NRA is in part a political outfit that lobbies Congress in support of Second Amendment rights.

One understands Hillary's animus against the NRA since this organization played an important role in getting Trump elected.

Note second Hillary's thoughtless repetition of the vacuous boilerplate of career politicians: "to stop this from ever happening again." This is the emptiest of empty rhetoric. Everyone knows that these sorts of awful events will continue to occur and that they cannot be stopped. The most that can be done is to take certain steps to reduce their likelihood. For example, baggage checks at the Mandalay would probably have prevented this particular event. It took numerous trips for the shooter to stock his hotel room with guns and ammo.

2) "Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get."

Another reason why Hillary, Dianne Feinstein, and the rest of the liberal gun-grabbers enjoy no credibility with the sane is that they are know-nothings. A so-called 'silencer' does not make gun shots inaudible. It merely suppresses the report somewhat. This is why the correct term is 'suppressor.' But Hillary and her ilk cannot be bothered to learn basic gun terminology such as the distinction between semi-auto and full-auto long guns. On top of that, they always reach for emotive terminology. They don't use descriptive terms like 'semi-automatic long gun' but emotive terms like 'assault weapon.'

There is a technical, non-emotive use for 'assault rifle.' See here. Selective fire is part of the definition. "Selective fire means the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, multi-shot burst, and/or fully automatic firing mode.^[1]" By this technical definition, however, semi-automatic long guns available for civilian purchase without special permits such as as the AR-15, which Hillary and Feinstein would count as 'assault rifles,' are not, technically, assault rifles.

So we have to distinguish between the emotive and the technical use of 'assault rifle.' It is plain that leftists such as Hillary and her ilk use the term emotively.

You would think that philosophers would avoid emotive language. You would be wrong. A reader sends me to Brian Leiter's academic gossip site where he opines that ". . . adult, civilized societies do not allow private citizens to own assault rifles." Leiter is clearly using the term in the emotive sense.

Question for 'liberals': If an AR-15 is used by a citizen to defend his home, his family, and/or his livelihood, is he assaulting or defending?

Are semi-automatic long guns intrinsically assaultive? Is any gun intrinsically assaultive? Or does it depend on how the weapon is used? Obviously, the latter. Are the police armed so that they can assault the citizenry? Think about it, 'liberals.'

Hillary's tweets here.

Equanimity, Arizona Style

The Brits may want to rethink their gun laws in the light of recent events.

Katie Hopkins lays into Sadiq Khan, mayor of London.

Keep calm and carry on? Keep calm, and carry one!

By the way, are there any cities or towns in Muslim countries that have Christian or non-Muslim mayors or other government officials? Just asking!

Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,

. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)

Read that final sentence again, and again. And apply it to current events.

Kolakowski concludes that "movements which aim to destroy freedom should not be tolerated or granted the protection of law . . . " (Ibid.) and surely he is right about this. Toleration has limits. It does not enjoin suicide.

Power Tools

Serendipitous! I spent the morning out in the desert practicing with my handguns. When I logged on afterward I found that Bill Keezer had referred me to an entry entitled Power Tools by Malcolm Pollack in which the latter quotes Col. Jeff Cooper. I want the quotation for my files:

Weapons are the tools of power. In the hands of the state, they can be the tools of decency or the tools of oppression, depending on the righteousness that state. In the hands of criminals, they are the tools of evil. In the hands of the free and decent citizen, they should be the tools of liberty. Weapons compound man’s power to achieve whatever purpose he may have. They amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus, we must regard them as servants, not masters–and good servants of good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.

I haven't been able to find a source. As you know, I do not like unsourced quotations. It's the scholar in me. Paging Dave Lull! If cyberspace has a Head Librarian, Dave is the man.

"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."

You are free to live unarmed, and for some this will be a wise course. A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training, and you will need to throw thousands of (aimed!) rounds down range before you can consider yourself competent.

These are trying times. The thuggish elements among us are on the rise, and they are enabled by those in positions of authority. The wise hope for the best, and work for the best, but prepare for the worst. You might want to think about that as well as ask yourself: Which side am I on, and who is on my side?

Related: Colonel Jeff Cooper's Situational Awareness Color Codes. Very useful information along with commentary by me that is sure to cause snowflake melt-down.

Should Liberals Buy Guns?

UPDATE (5/20): Dave Lull sends us here, where you can find more Jeff Cooper quotations (unsourced) as well as a daughter's tribute to her father.

UPDATE 2 (5/20): Malcolm Pollack's follow-up post.

Should Liberals Buy Guns?

It might not be in their best interest. Buy guns and ammo and the accessories and you support those industries and the lobbying efforts of the National Rifle Association. The NRA, however, played a key role in getting Trump elected. The NRA takes decidedly anti-leftist stands on crime and the nanny-statism liberals hold dear.

This puts liberals in a delightful bind. Delightful to us, that is. Fearing 'fascism,' they are now buying guns as numerous news stories have reported, but in so doing they shoot themselves in the foot, figuratively speaking.

Do you liberals really want concealed-carry reciprocity? Trump is for it and so is the NRA.

There is a parallel here with liberals' new-found love of federalism. As William McGurn has recently noted,

For both historical and philosophical reasons, federalism runs counter to the progressive instinct. Those on the left like government, and their preferred legislature is the Supreme Court. (Brilliant! Emphasis added.)

Fearing Trumpian 'fascism,' our liberal pals are now getting excited about states rights despite their long-standing mendacious insinuation that all talk of states rights can only mean a return to Jim Crow and the lynching of blacks.

UPDATE 3/24. A Friendly Warning to Liberals

A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training. In the course of this training and numerous trips to the shooting range and gun stores for ammo, etc. you will find yourself associating whether you like it or not with rednecks, country folk, blue collar types, cops, ex-cops, military, ex-military, church-goers and other subspecies of the people Obama derisively referred to as "clingers" and Hillary as "deplorables."

The danger here is that you will learn that, in the main, these are decent people. Your liberal bigotry fueled by hate and ignorance will stand refuted by experience. This may cause such painful cognitive dissonance that you may no longer be able to remain a bien-pensant librul.

You have been forewarned.