Twiddlers
11th October 2015
Freeberg looks at the Oregon shooting.
A common refrain is that doing something is better than doing nothing. This is yet another example of liberals failing to understand the motives of their opposition. This is a special strain of ignorance that is shrink-wrapped with a companion-brand of matching apathy, with a side order of pride in the apathy. See, liberals don’t know what motivates conservatives, because they don’t care what motivates conservatives. They’re proud of not knowing and of not caring. They’ll be the first to tell you so, and they’ll also be the first to opine about it. If you merely recognize all of these things at the same time and point out what this means, that they’re forming opinions about a matter on which they have yet to gather any reliable facts, they’ll surely take offense. It is not within their method of understanding the world around them, to recognize that their offense is taken at the mere calculation of the sum of the parts, which they have so unabashedly provided.
They speak of magazine capacity restrictions. So far, reports have held up that the shooter had six weapons on him, seven more at his home. So although the state of Oregon doesn’t have these restrictions in place, nevertheless it seems that whole topic has already gone ’round and ’round in this case, and screwballed its way into irrelevance. They want background checks, but the shooter, again according to the information we have thus far, acquired his weapons legally and therefore in accordance with these background checks. They want registration databases. Again and again I’ve asked the question: How does that work? Alright you have a database record that says one person has all these guns. Then what?
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It’s just another “Those People” Conversation, about what most-recently-tweaked New Perfect Rule should be imposed upon distant strangers. How should we twiddle with the public policies, under which those people shall be living? There are people walking around, among us, building (hopefully not often) things we actually use, sharing highways with us, voting, and even accumulating levels of influence far greater than what’s available to the average voter. But not thinking. My questions about How Does This Registration/Background Check/Magazine Capacity Restriction should actually WORK, remain for the most part unanswered…can we stop pretending there is rational thought going into this rule-twiddling?