A few years ago I was talking with a Hollywood friend about guns. She was unhappy that I’m a gun owner.
Honest—unlike most lefties—my friend told me that the Second Amendment was “out of date and should no longer be valid.”
She wanted guns to be confiscated.
“Do you think the gangs in LA or NY or Chicago are going to give up their guns to the authorities?”
She shrugged and told me that gun confiscation “was the right thing to do regardless of how gangs react.”
I pondered the phrase “the right thing to do.” I hear it all the time from my Hollywood friends when they are discussing politics. Though never when discussing the movies they produce.
Those five words, within the context of our conversation, seemed positively suicidal.
In addition, she wanted Obama to sign some kind of executive action that would nullify or repeal the Second Amendment.
My friend, a talented Hollywood writer, is not exactly a constitutional scholar.
Her lack of wisdom aside, I decided to test her ideas in the only way that really works when dealing with Hollywood lefties. I made it personal.
I asked my friend if she approved of Gun-Free Zones.
She did. In a big way.
“Great, how about putting a sign on your front lawn letting everybody know that your house is a gun-free zone?”
My friend froze.
“That’s a rhetorical trick,” she said acidly.
“If it’s good enough for the local school and mall, why not for your home?”
My friend got pretty angry and accused me of playing “mind-games” on her.
In fact, my friend was angry because she understood that my proposition forced her from the theoretical to the actual. And for the average leftist, this is deadly.
As Margaret Thatcher once said: “The facts of life are conservative.”
Anyway, this news item is quite interesting:
A gun rights group on Monday called for liability in mass shootings to be shifted to the entity or person who created a gun-free zone on which the incident occurred.
The Second Amendment Foundation released its report on resolutions adopted at its September policy conference in Phoenix, Arizona, where the gun rights group reaffirmed its belief that that prohibiting guns in specific areas makes them vulnerable to mass shootings.
“Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.”
Robert Conquest.
My own opinion. Reality is conservative and also painful.
Growing up and into my adult years, I was an avid reader of science fiction.
In all the stories of the future, there was usually the unspoken premise that, overall, Man would be wiser; more advanced in his thinking; better able to problem solve.
This “future” never happened.
I truly wonder what the future will make of us, who live in a world where the overwhelming communications from those in the public eye are, by and large, fantasy.
People speak with great authority on opinions and ideas that are utter nonsense.
To question the efficacy of wasting trillions of dollars on useless “Green” energy makes a person a “Climate Change Denier.”
To state the common sense perspective that “Gun Free Zones” are targets for nutcase psychos – makes one a cruel gun nut.
The cult of “Self Esteem” has given rise to incomprehensible horror – from the world at large excusing brutal Arab thugs who knife people at random as suffering from “oppression” (low self-esteem) – to the truly insane world doing the same to “trans-what in the hell?” boys who want to be naked in the girls locker room because their self-esteem will suffer if people don’t let him act like a girl…
One hears politicians and pundits and talking heads discuss issues in the theater of the absurd, seriously believing that the drivel they are spouting has some bearing on reality.
There is a desperate craving for Truth and stability in This World, which is why so many people turn to religion, for Good or, in the case of the Islamo-facists, for ill.
However, all too often this desire for “reality” makes ordinary people love the rhetorical, narcissistic lying bombast of a Donald Trump as an alternative to the rhetorical, narcissistic, lying bombast of a Hussein Obama just because they are in opposition.
I hope to live to see what The Future makes of this all…
There’s a lot of science fiction of the kind you describe; Asimov and Clarke are examples of that kind.
I was fortunate to discover in my early adulthood that there are also better writers: Robert Heinlein, Neil Smith, James Hogan among others. Recently I’ve learned that there are many more like that, some in the earlier days of SF (E.E. Smith, or H. Beam Piper especially), some active today (Vox Day, Rolf Nelson, Sarah Hoyt).
In recent years I’ve gone back to re-read some of my Asimov and Clarke collection, and was amazed how flat and unappealing they are now that I’ve learned about real writers with a respect for the individual. I still have the books, and probably will hang on to them, but it’s not likely I will reach for them much in years to come.
I was a Zelazny fan especially “The Lord of Light” and “Jack of Shadows”.
Lord of Light is still a masterpiece! “He preferred to drop the Maha and the atman and call himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god but, he never claimed not to be… Things being what they were, neither admission would be of much benefit…”
Or something like that.
The first Amber was good. The rest… Mostly passable.
Tried to read the Amber’s, but they kinda bored me. I also liked “This Immortal”, at least that was the name I knew it by. Old Sam out messing around playing dice with the demons and giving heaven heart burn gotta love em. The end of “Lord of Light” was a disappointment, but I loved the rest. To me the most fascinating character was Yama. Since we’re on books I also loved “Canticle for Leibowitz” and the mysterious old Jewish guy.
I first read Lord of Light as a young teenager. I did not realize that the entire story was a flashback until after I read it a second time. So, the end made perfect sense to me because I did not understand the book at first.
A canticle for Leibowitz is one of the all time great, perhaps 10, pieces of science fiction.
I also first read both when I was in my teens. I still laugh thinking about the monks pedaling like the devil to light the light.
Read everything they all wrote as a kid. All of Heinlein who now appears, from my adult and Orthodox Jewish point of view, as someone who was obssessed with adolescent sexuality and someone who, in reality, knew bupkus about religion, a favorite theme of his…
My reading nowadays tends toward alternate history and War ala Weber and Ringo.
Heinlein wrote more than his share of utopian nonsense, especially as he grew older.
Well it’s quite a mind game when the bad guys do the rhetorical trick of kicking your door in at 3 am.
As Margaret Thatcher once said: “The facts of life are conservative.”
What did Margaret Thatcher say, only a few months after the Falkland Islands War, about Operation Peace for Galilee? It was alright for her to send the British Navy thousands of miles to defend what comedian Mark Russwll called “a pile on penguin dung,” but it was wrong for Israel to confront a menace on her border.
One of the most powerful accounts I ever read for gun ownership (and responsibility) was your account of being trapped in the middle of the Rodney King riots with your family.
As far as your friend as you noted put the situation into an actual scenario and she comes unglued.
What I don’t understand is for your friend to be a talented screenwriter she has to form a screenplay in her mind – see how an action sequence she inserts at point A affects things down the line at Point B – and yet she refuses to see actual consequences to proposed actions.
I don’t know if I am expressing this as well as I should but in the fictional sense she is a good writer and can see consequences but refuses to see them in reality?
Well done, Robert!
SJWs don’t understand logic or dialectic. You can’t deal with them except by rhetoric. The only thing they understand is rhetoric. Notice that she didn’t reply to the point of your argument but attacked the method you used and then shrieked about (probably) everything but the issue at hand, reducing herself to a blathering mess.
Well played!