What exact difference should that have made to the police shooting the unarmed - as they did?
Samuel was not unarmed. He was involved in a shootout with the marshals, one of whom also died.
His mother was unarmed, but from what I understand, they were aiming for Randall Weaver and it struck her behind the door and killed her.
It's the behavior of the government forces that "qualifies", that is at issue. Are you defending it?
Against the Weavers? Ya, I do. Dude involved with violent white supremacists fails to appear in court on weapons charges, is involved in an armed siege that lasted what? A year? All efforts made to end the siege peacefully failed. When the marshals attempted to see what was going on, his son and the son's friend engaged in a shootout with the officers. Do you expect the authorities to light a bonfire and sing Kumbaya? Or just ignore the law completely because hey, dude's a citizen and he has guns, so it's all good?
Shooting the unarmed, for example. Apparently because they were in the vicinity of someone with a gun, hanging out with the wrong crowd, etc.
Sound familiar?
Yeah, Vicki Weaver is just like Stephon Clark...
It makes no sense to most people, including a clear majority of NRA members and almost all the judiciary of the US. There isn't much in political life as easily isolated and beaten as something like that - how do you suppose the gun control folks are fucking that up?
I guess it comes down to people who claim to be for reasonable gun control, pitching a fit at the very mention of gun control.
What do you think, iceaura?
You're missing the point.
The point was that the gun control advocates's continual pointing to the exceptional status of police and so forth, as a justification for disarming the entire population except for the police, has little basis in reality, and instead stokes the paranoid fear of the kind of government they will in fact impose (whether they know it or not).
That the central majority of the gun rights folk have a better grasp of the reality here, and are making more sense, than the gun control advocates with the loudest platforms. That the central majority of reasonable folk face a choice between two feckless and dangerous irrationalities backing fantasy driven agendas - one of which involves simply abiding with the status quo - and are split accordingly.
Yes, and citing Ruby Ridge, where after a year long siege because of a paranoid couple determined that the apocalypse was coming and decided to hunker down and defied a legal notice for the father to attend court, which started the armed siege, a teenage boy is shot and killed after he engaged in a gun fight with US Marshals, and his mother is also killed through a door as they were shooting at his armed father (by all accounts, the shot that killed her was accidental) and the father then made the remaining children remain in the cabin with the body of their dead mother in the hallway for over 10 days, is a really good thing to cite as an example of Government overreach...
Ya, you are all making a huge amount of sense...
And sheer inertia - the US has been armed to its teeth for centuries, the first country in which an effective, high quality, essentially modern firearm was a normal possession of an ordinary citizen. Everybody else had more of a chance to think about it.
Oh yeah,
we are all thinking about it.
Most Australians would remember where they were when they first heard something bad was going on at Port Arthur.
I was walking through the common room at my university residential college and there was a group glued to the old picture tube television in the corner — strange for daylight hours.
Scraps of information were seeping out from the windswept historical site on the southern shore of Tasmania, not far from the bottom of the world and already stalked by the ghosts of its brutal penal colony past.
No one was Tweeting. Social media barely existed. Mobile phones were a luxury and spots as remote as Port Arthur had no coverage anyway.
A gunman was on the loose. Five, ten, 15 people shot. Preposterous numbers that just kept growing.
Local police scrambled down the narrow road in, unaware what horror they approached. In the end the toll from ‘the Port Arthur Massacre,’ as it’s etched into Australian vernacular, was 35 dead and 23 injured.
April 28, 1996. Twenty years next year.
It’s sometimes cheap to say an event changed a nation — but Port Arthur changed Australia.
A whole generation of young Australians is now coming of age having never borne witness to a mass shooting in their own country.
They don’t remember Port Arthur because they weren’t born when a 28-year-old with a low IQ stalked through a tourist attraction picking off innocent men, women and children with high-powered weaponry for reasons none of us will ever fathom.
Young adults who have graduated high school, can vote, drive and legally drink alcohol (in Australia the drinking age is 18) have never walked on to campus fearing the weirdo from their economics tutorial might turn out to be a gun nut with a death wish.
That’s freedom.
But just not the way you think.
