It had been some time since I had scooted over to my favorite comedy site, Conservapedia. For those who don’t know, Conservapedia is the creation of Andrew Schafly, nitwit son of Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schafly, who continues to plague school districts with autonomic minions whose sole objectives are to devolve school curriculums.
Anyway, how is this related to Gun Follies? I came across one of the funniest Schlafly creations ever — The Conservative Parable. These purport to illustrate conservative insight, at the expense of libruls. The following was the first one I read. Enjoy today’s gun folly.
“A woman had been fasting for several days and was quite weak. It was Sunday morning, and she wondered whether she had enough strength to attend church. It would have been easy to justify not going, as she had already shown her love and devotion to God that week. But she decided to attend the services anyway. Without eating any breakfast, she prepared herself for the late morning service. She got dressed, gathered her purse and belongings, and drove off to the church.
The church was filled for the late-morning service, with many hundreds of worshipers. The woman sat near the back and watched the pews fill up with members of the community, young and old. The service was about to begin. The woman then heard an unusual commotion outside, including several loud noises and shouts. She turned around several times to look at the door to the church. Her intuition told her something was wrong.
Suddenly, a large man burst through the door and began shooting at the hundreds of worshipers, children and all. The woman mustered all her strength and pulled out her gun from her bag. She then shot the intruder. Stunned, and expecting to die from her shot, the intruder killed himself. The worshipers in the church were all saved. Afterwards, the woman said that she had been “praying to God that he direct me” in what to do in life.”
God, guns, conceal/carry and the Judeo-Christian right-wing ethic all rolled into one. I can’t believe they write these with a straight face.
It’s always about the magical fantasies. They believe they’ll be carrying when the fracas happens, they believe they’ll be close enough, they’ll correctly analyze the situation in a split-second, they’ll be the only one with a gun, anyone else with a gun who draws second or third won’t be confused about who’s the bad guy, they’ll have perfect aim, no bystander will be hurt.
It’s a miracle.
Actually there was a trained gun owner inside during the Luby’s massacre. If she had not been required to keep her pistol in her car per Texas law in 1991, she could have saved as many as 21 lives, including those of her parents.
According to her testimony she had an ideal line of fire from the floor, at the only standing person in the room. It doesn’t take “perfect aim” to deliver a disabling shot, especially at such a short range.
John Foust, you are the one who is indulging yourself with magical fantasies here. Dr. Suzanna Gratia Hupp is a real person; the “fasting woman” is admittedly fiction.
The authoritarian Republicans that most like to call “conservative” are a real threat to this nation. It will take many smart and also sane and sober people to counter this very real threat.
Newton’s Third Law doesn’t apply to stupidity. An equal and opposite dose of lunacy does in fact add to the damage already done. If you’re afraid of firearms, then just STFU and let more expert and more reasonable people speak up.
In no way am I afraid of firearms. I own them. Got my first deer at age 12, so I suppose my hunter safety certificate is still good enough to let me carry. I’m old enough that I remember bringing a gun to school so I could hunt after school. I’ve always considered myself a crack shot, too. At the local Kiwanis turkey shoot, I’ve earned mine on the first shot several times – what, 50 yards and a two-inch target? – with someone else’s iron-sight .22 I’ve never touched before.
I still believe it’s all about the fantasies. I understand the logic is similar to buying lottery tickets. One can reasonably assume that you need to buy a ticket to win (barring any second-chance ticket you find on ground.) But I think the odds of a successful fantasy are extremely slim, and I don’t see the fantasy of someone you know and like being shot nearly as often as the only the bad guy gets shot. Why’s that? Which is more probable?
@Memory Man: You were doing fine until the last paragraph. I am unafraid of firearms, I simply believe carrying them in public is a recipe for disaster. Why? Because it won’t be the reasonable man blasting away.
Thank you for your comment.
Coulda shoulda woulda never proved anything, Memory Man. Show me one confirmed case where the good samaritan packing heat saved the day. I’ll be waiting.
BTW, of the firearms I’ve fired, the Browing M2 was my favorite.
It seems that many folks believe that writing and publishing a story makes it come true on some level. This is a media phenom resulting in agony over what happens to soap opera and serial book and movie characters. And has great influence in our media saturated environment around the world and especially here in the USA.
John Foust, I showed you a case study that debunked your fantasy. You lost your own argument-live with it. (BTW, I don’t believe that you were Ted Nugent all along and forgot to mention that. Same for the others.)
Other Side, your “reasonable man” argument has merit, and applies to far more things than firearms. Why aren’t you speaking out about keeping potentially lethal things (like cars) out of the hands of unreasonable people? I may never encounter a mad gunman, but I’ve been attacked by countless road-ragers. I’d also like a rational explanation as to why the predicted slippery slope never happened in the 49 states that allow concealed carry.
Rich, instead of “waiting” unproductively like a bump on a log, you could have lifted a finger to learn for yourself. The truth is that armed citizens HAVE saved the day, from long before the Austin Clock Tower massacre in 1966 to the North Hollywood bank robbery and beyond. On 9-11 it was citizens (albeit w/o firearms) who stopped 1/4 of the terrorists that day.
Society’s ghoulish obsession with the evil people hides the good deeds, but if you look they ARE there. There are the armed, off-duty cops who use the threat of deadly force to affect peaceful arrests every day. There are armed citizens who hold burglars at gunpoint until the police arrive. They’re no less real because they aren’t sensationalized like other things.
The fact that all those success stories in which shots were NOT fired never get any love speaks volumes about the Chicken Little’s of the world.
Cat Kin, thanks for the reasonable, rational input. Nice to know that at least one person “gets it”. I’d like to add that we all have the freedom to make up our own minds, do our own research, and not become the “armchair quarterbacks” of life. We CAN do better. But to do that, we must DO that, not blather from positions of ignorance.
“Case study”? What are you talking about?
I was talking about a fantasy that I claim is in the head of many who carry, or who simply dream of carrying. I didn’t create it out of thin air. It’s seen all the time in discussions of open carry and concealed carry. Many believe they’re going to be in the right place at the right time, they’ll have proper judgment, no one else will misjudge their gun, they’ll have a clear shot, and they’ll be the hero.
They don’t fantasize about getting anything wrong. They don’t realistically assess the chance of them being the hero against the chance of anything else going wrong.
You don’t believe I’m Ted Nugent? What’s that supposed to mean? “Forgot to mention that”? Have we talked before? Oh, no, you’re one of those brave Pseudonyms. What are your other names? Are you one of those brave BadgerBloggers, come here to pee in the pool?
Memory Man: “On 9-11 it was citizens (albeit w/o firearms) who stopped 1/4 of the terrorists that day.”
That’s a beautiful story, and I would really like for it to be true.
But the passenger cell phone call from one of that jet’s bathrooms that reported an explosion while airborne and a puff of white smoke visible outside the window, before the call cut off — since the closed door may have kept the caller alive a few seconds longer than the passengers in the main cabin — together with the scattering of plane parts over a wider area than in-one-piece ground collision and subsequent fragmentary bounceback could convincingly explain — suggest strongly that United Airlines Flight 93 was shot down by an air-to-air missile from a trailing fighter jet.
That SecDef Donald Rumsfeld actually referred to “the plane over Pennsylvania” as having been “shot down” when speaking in Iraq three years later (Christmas Eve 2004) supports that view.
I’d prefer the “Let’s Roll” explanation, but I just don’t think it fits those facts.
@Memory Man: I appreciate your comment. Nonetheless, your argument is a straw man and not really relevant. I do understand what you are saying about road rage victims. But when was the last time a car was used to provoke violence, such as in a grocery store. The rages may be similar, due to losing control, but road rage rarely results in violent altercation as opposed to the immediacy and intimacy of guns.
Regarding the slippery slope argument, why don’t you spend the time enlightening me?
Thanks for your comment.