Stupid Quote of the Day: Why liberals should love the Second Amendment

Even liberals can make my head hurt

I usually find myself in agreement with much of what is published on Daily Kos – as would be expected, I suppose – and the little I disagree with, I usually just shrug it off as a difference in viewpoints. However, I just came across this piece by user Angry Mouse that’s so stunningly wrong that I just have to make the day’s Stupid Quote post out of it. Sorry, Daily Kos, but I just can’t let these sorts of dumb claims and over-generalizations – and awful prose – get away without some due scorn.

So why do liberals have such a problem with the Second Amendment? Why do they lump all gun owners in the category of "gun nuts"? Why do they complain about the "radical extremist agenda of the NRA"? Why do they argue for greater restrictions?

Why do they start performing mental gymnastics worthy of a position in Bush's Department of Justice to rationalize what they consider "reasonable" infringement of one of our most basic, fundamental, and revolutionary -- that's right, revolutionary -- civil liberties?

This … I … o_0

Okay, I’ll ignore the lazy over-generalization, the unfounded claims (which don’t have a single statistic to support them) and the prose, which just numbs my mind. So, according to Angry Mouse, opposing the legal right for the general unwashed masses to own and bear arms, when there’re no actual reasons why John (or Jane) Six-Pack should own guns (not to mention how most people should never touch one to begin with), puts us on par, intellectually and morally, with Bush and his rights-suppressing, liberties-infringing, phone-tapping, unlawfully detaining, evidence-hiding conspiratorial cronies? To claim such absurd things takes a whole new level of mental acrobatics in itself.

Simply put, of all the ways this could have been said or written, that was a particularly dumbass way to put it. Second Amendment-opposing liberals are not infringing upon anyone’s rights, for starters. We are not ripping guns out of people’s hands or banning them from gun stores. We are merely advocating that the amendment itself be removed (or changed, or however it works) so that gun laws can be much saner and reasonable, as with most other developed countries. Besides, we have statistics on our side. For just one example, take a look at Canada. Harsher gun laws = far, far fewer shooting deaths on average. It’s a simple correlation.

However, most of all, the claim that the right to bear arms is “basic, fundamental, and revolutionary” is, quite frankly, just a few choice words short of delusional, at best. In what land of purple skies and rain made of donuts is the legal right to own and carry lethal weapons, “basic and fundamental”? “Basic and fundamental” rights are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as the Declaration of Independence so famously and rightfully states. Those are rights that are inherent to anyone brought into this world, as decreed by morality and society. The right to own weapons meant to blow each other away is far more secondary, if even that. I’ll also tackle the claim that these rights are “revolutionary”; sorry to say so, but plenty of countries espouse the very same rights and civil liberties. Such as, most of the developed (ie. Western) world. Some of them arguably espoused such rights long before even the U.S. was formed, so to call them “revolutionary” is simply wordplay and demagoguery.

Why do liberals have “such a problem with the Second Amendment”? Because it’s entirely, utterly and demonstrably pointless in this day and age. People do not have the need, and nor should they have the responsibility, to carry firearms around with them or even stocking them at home. All the various impassioned arguments and excuses brought up in Angry Mouse’s lengthy twaddle are trite and nonsensical (and that’s considering the bits of it I managed to read before his logorrheic and disjointed manner of writing got to me). There truly are no good moral, legal or judicial arguments left against the right for just anyone to bear arms, or else those who oppose gun rights, wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that.

The sooner people accept this simple and obvious reality, the better.

(via @todayspolitics)