Bloodless Coup

UPDATE: Balloon Juice

I wonder how long it'll take some nitwit (C. Schumer, call your office) to propose some sort of gun crackdown in response to this, which would of course be THE LEAST HELPFUL THING POSSIBLE.

Jac, I agree with you in principle as a matter of how such a move would be viewed by a populace that, the numbers show, have drunk the Kool Aid and are buying guns up at accelerated rates. It nonetheless is noteworthy that if he hadn't had an AK we'd very likely have fewer dead cops in Our Fair City than we do because he had one.

If he was going to fire on cops, he was going to fire on cops, and odds are someone would have gotten hurt since they were clearly ambushed. But there continues to be not one iota of rational support for permitting citizens freely to possess such ridiculous, I-exist-solely-to-kill-people-as-efficiently-as-possible weapons, any more than there is for permitting people to own grenade launchers and surface to air missiles. The terrifying efficiency of such an assault rifle was on display yesterday about a half-mile from my house (and much closer to the homes of some friends), and I'm pretty sure no one can think of one decent reason for him to own it in the first place. I know he had reasons, but they weren't good ones.

Which brings me to what I think is the more interesting point. The increase in gun purchases since the election, and the fact that many people obviously are wandering around seriously convinced that their ability to own reasonable proportionate fire-arms for home defense and sporting use reflects nothing so much as the triumph of the out-and-out lies told by the GOP during the course of this and virtually any election in which someone left of center is a serious candidate. Yes, democrats have proposed serious restrictions in cities that resemble war zones, but now the Supreme Court has pretty much killed that. Moreover, very few national Dems have come down hard on guns in over a decade, because the NRA has made clear that it will do everything in its power to ruin them if they say a peep, and has proven its effectiveness in this regard.

Obama was very quiet about gun issues during his campaign, and, notwithstanding the one bill Morris had so much fun rewriting to suit his argument a ways back that Obama voted for in his Illinois days, has little in his record to suggest he's going to take a serious run at gun ownership. Nonetheless, his political opponents had a ball making shit up about him, and one can draw a straight line from that to less critical partisans like the Pittsburgh shooter stockpiling guns and developing paranoid fantasies about his ability to own firearms in an Obama-led America.

Of course, none of that goes to what happened yesterday. He was very clearly a deeply disturbed person who went off the deep end, and no legislation is going to keep that from happening. But there's no denying that cheap political rhetoric on the right plays on and amplifies irrational fears like those at work in this case, and it's shameful. And bear in mind it continues, with Bachman calling for people to be "armed and dangerous," and other quasi-treasonous comments from wingnuts who know they can get away with those sorts of things, so far to the right have they managed to pull the national discussion on guns in the past ten years.

Of course, I don't think we'll be hearing any apologies. And we won't see charges pressed against Bachman, or a House censure, or anything so legally appropriate as that. Which is a pity.

By the way, the Baloon Juice peace is riddled with as-yet-uncorrected factual errors about why the cops were there, what precisely happened, and so on. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, natch, has extensive up to date coverage, and the Times has a solid article this morning as well.

Moon, have you ever handled a firearm? Just asking.

I hate to disappoint the assumption of namby-pamby east coast elitest effeteness that I sense lurking beneath the surface of the question, but yes, I have. But in any event, I don't need to fly an F-16 to know that it exists for only one overarching reason, or to question the risk-reward ratio of permitting civilians to own one.

I hate to disappoint the assumption of namby-pamby east coast elitist effeteness that I sense lurking beneath the surface of the question, but yes, I have. But in any event, I don't need to fly an F-16 to know that it exists for only one overarching reason, or to question the risk-reward ratio of permitting civilians to own one.

Also, and in fairness, had dispatch told the responding officers that Poplowsky was armed they might have been a bit more cautious.

It has just been my observation that folks who parrot Brady Bunch hysteria-lines like "ridiculous, I-exist-solely-to-kill-people-as-efficiently-as-possible weapons" don't actually know shit about what they're talking about. You don't have to be a Randoid or a survivalist to understand that these sorts of rifles are especially consistent with the reasoning behind the Second Amendment, and further, that the so-called "assault weapons ban" included in the 1994 crime bill and since repealed was an idiotic set of rules akin to dealing with the problem of speeding by banning red cars.

(Of course the idea that "we" should or should not "permit" anything isn't consistent with the Bill of Rights in general, or with the idea of anything resembling a free society, but that's a larger debate for another time.)

Well, point taken, but it's plenty of people who beg the question of what the Second Amendment's actual historic intent was, or how it might have been applied by the framers to a weapon that can kill twenty people in a matter of seconds, don't know a damned thing about what they're talking about, and couldn't recite a material fraction of its relevant provisions let alone set them in any historic context. So perhaps we can agree that pro-assault-rifle types can disregard the view of people who don't know enough about the guns (notwithstanding that their effete, liberal kids, can end up just as dead at their muzzle flash), and those of us who live in the real world where armed insurrection is not a serious prospect can disregard the view of pro gun types who haven't the first notion of what the Second Amendment is really about. Let's not forget that many of the most ardent so-called Second Amendment types were content to parrot whatever line was fed them by a man who plainly had no regard for the First or Fourth Amendments, both of which were surely viewed by the Framers as far more important day-to-day hedges against oppressive authority than the Second Amendment, and in which regard American history has taught they were surely correct.