I love, which actually means “I hate”, how after every mass shooting, Fobbits come out of the woodwork to claim some sort of moral superiority on the issue of gun control. The first one this season is another intelligence analyst named Manning, who, like the other more famous intelligence analyst, is smarter than the rest of us, in Newsweek. This one is Josh, who claims to have served two tours inside the wire in Iraq. He has to tell us how he left the wire once;
When I served in Iraq, my unit and I would sometimes leave the base and head out onto the local highways. We each had a 20-round magazine in the well and a round in the chamber. After passing the front gate, our rules required us to switch off our safeties.
No matter the job (I was what infantry would call a base-sitting intelligence wimp) we kept our fingers on our triggers in the back of a half-ton Army truck.
Yeah, no you didn’t. You only put your finger on the trigger when you have your sights on a target and you’re about to fire, otherwise, you get the back of your head slapped by the nearest NCO, after he has made sure you have the trigger cleared of digital impetus. I haven’t seen a twenty-round magazine for the AR rifle in decades, maybe my memory is faulty, but that’s just odd that soldiers in combat would get something from the Vietnam era to fight in a modern battle.
He defends calling modern sporting rifles “assault weapons” because that’s what the Army uses them for – assaulting stuff.
Josh Manning, our moral better, who ran as a Democrat for a State Senate seat in Montana last year continues;
Instead of sensibly prohibiting civilian use of assault weapons, they are still legal in most places and in the wake of the Las Vegas tragedy, you can still make one fire automatically with a “bump stock.” The fact that only semi-automatic, and not fully-automatic rifles are legal, isn’t the point. What is the point: a tool meant for combat situations is widely available in civil society for no apparent reason other than to let civilians feel like they are soldiers. So we wind up with men carrying a legally-purchased weapon of war. No, they are not designed exactly the same, but when the bullet leaves the barrel at subsonic speeds to shred bones and organs, the results are often the same.
It is beyond time that we ask our representatives in Congress if the massive casualties over the past several years are worth the sacrifice. In the Army, you certainly learn to value your rifle. But the men and women around you are far more important. Let us finally put our neighbors’ interest over those of the National Rifle Association and change America’s gun laws.
Yeah, um, in 1984, I bought a rifle that Manning would call an assault rifle, I’d spent ten years in the Army and had another ten to go before I retired and I didn’t buy that rifle to “feel like I was a soldier” – I was already a soldier. I liked having a rifle that I could take to the range with it’s thirty-round magazines and maintain my weapons proficiency during my off-duty hours.
I’ve owned that rifle for more than thirty years now and it’s never been pointed at another human being, but this pipsqueak thinks that I shouldn’t own it because of some nebulous “interests” of my neighbors (who, by the way, are more heavily armed than me and I’m not worried).
I never considered the NRA’s interests when I’ve bought a gun, only my own and the interests of the criminal element. Stephen Willeford, the hero of Sutherland Springs, shot the gunman with his own AR rifle, and he’s an NRA instructor. That kind of ruins your whole piece in Newsweek, doesn’t it?
By the way, if you have to use your military service to defend your support of gun control, you have no moral superiority in the discussion. If you can’t speak to the subject by without dredging up something that you never really did, you’re just some guy with a unsupportable position on the subject.
Thanks to David for the link.
Toxick found his DD214;
