“We don’t have to vaporize all the guns,” writes Andrea Grimes, senior editor for RH Reality Check, a lefty journal dedicated to “Reproductive & Sexual Health and Justice.” “Let’s just vaporize white men’s guns.” Although she adds that eventually firearms should be taken away from everybody, white men are a good start. “As a bonus,” she notes, “we can collect their tears for research and resource purposes while they line up to surrender their weapons.”
Within days of Ms. Grimes’ pronouncement, one Jamal Thrasher, a columnist at the (central Pennsylvania) Patriot News and PennLive.com, stated, “I realize now that guns are selfish and bring nothing productive to the conversation. Therefore, civilian gun ownership should be banned.” He goes on, “I guarantee, that if guns are outlawed, murders would decrease.” He confidently makes this claim even as he cites a study to the contrary.
More and more anti-gunners are now admitting their endgame. Although the “official” anti-gun line still touts things like “gun safety” or “universal background checks” or “getting guns out of the hands of the mentally ill,” street-level hoplophobes are increasingly admitting what they really want. They want all guns gone. Except of course guns in the hands of government agents.
What’s most remarkable about these strident, arrogant proclamations against guns and gun owners is their sheer, bloody—and I do mean bloody—cluelessness.
Take Ms. Grimes (please). She apparently believes that white men are so attached to their firearms that they’ll weep to lose them. Yet at the same time, she pictures guys quietly lining up to surrender every last AR, AK, and .22—just because somebody passes a law.
For the moment, we’ll disregard her racism. According to people on her point of the political fringe, women and minorities can’t actually be racist, anyhow, because whatever they do, they’re merely victims responding to white racist oppression. And her racism, egregious though it is, is less stupid than her contradictory belief that a) white men are violent crazies who love their guns more than their children or their body parts and b) that they’ll meekly give up those very same guns.
Then there’s Mr. Thrasher. Who can barely write a grammatical sentence. Who makes assertions that he doesn’t even attempt to support. But who is glowingly confident that if the Constitution were amended to reword the Second Amendment, all guns would just … go away. Like magic. No black markets. No illegal imports. No homemade firearms. No guns stashed in attics or hidden in PVC pipes in the woods. No angry gun owners saying, “Hell no!” No armed defense of rights. No violent enforcement and no dead enforcers, dead gun owners, or dead bystanders. Just poof! Bye-bye to all guns!
Because, you know, the law would make it so.
I refer Ms. Grimes and Mr. Thrasher to Kit Lange. Not that they would listen to her. But they should. Kit Lange is a rising star and spokesperson for the Washington state “I will not comply” movement. This movement arose—along with similar ones in other blue states—after new restrictions were imposed on gun ownership in the last couple of years.
Now, as various groups battle in the courts over whether Washington’s Bloombergian I-594 is a “valid” law or not, Ms. Lange says, in essence, who gives a damn? She writes: “They seem to think that if … I-594 stands, that those affected by it will simply sigh and start complying. Surely, they think, these ‘gun nuts and ammosexuals’ will start doing as they’re told … and if they don’t, we’ll just arrest them and imprison them.
“They are wrong.
“The sentence ‘we will not comply’ is not temporary. It does not have an ‘if, then’ clause. It does not mean ‘We will not comply until you make us understand that it’s The Law.'”
She continues: “The real question is not ‘will we comply eventually?’ It is not even ‘How far are patriots willing to go to defend their right to refuse slavery and tyranny?’ The answers to those questions have been answered many times over, both on this blog and in the hearts and minds of those patriots who are standing on the line. The real question, as Mike Vanderboegh has asked, is ‘What are your appetites for our liberties?’ In essence, what is the government prepared to do? What are the lackeys of tyranny and the enemies of liberty prepared to give up in order to take our unalienable rights from us?”
Amen, Sister Lange!
Kit Lange and Mike Vanderboegh both may speak for only a minority of gun owners. That’s a difficult thing to know, though in some blue states passive resistance to new anti-gun laws may be as much as 85 or 90%. But as Mike has repeatedly pointed out, all it takes is 3% willing to resist with arms and you have a revolution on your hands. Just 3% of the gun-owning population. That’s still millions of men and women ready to say no and hell no even at the cost of their own lives, and the lives of those who try to take even one more iota of our freedoms.
Ms. Grimes and Mr. Thrasher see none of this. They don’t want to see any of it because it’s not pretty. Like children, they envision giving up nothing while getting everything. They expect us to surrender silently so they can have their fantasy of peace (and presumably have purple unicorns and free government-supplied lollipops as well). If we surprise them by failing to weep and comply, well then, only cops and soldiers will have to deal with the fallout.
And that’s another aspect of hoplophobic double vision. In the eyes of people like Grimes and Thrasher, cops and soldiers are a) noble, judicious, spectacularly well-trained defenders of law (the only ones fit to be armed) and b) completely disposable human beings whose lives can be sacrificed for someone else’s idea of the greater good.
And the “greater good” is defined as whatever fantasy makes the Grimes-Thrashers of the world feel good as they sit down at their keyboards and conjure up Utopia.
Utopias are dandy in theory. In real life, every attempt at imposing paradise on earth (see Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Rev. Jim Jones) has ended up a blood-drenched disaster.
Ms. Grimes and Mr. Thrasher, be careful what you wish for.
