{"id":35292,"date":"2013-04-25T18:52:29","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T22:52:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=35292"},"modified":"2013-04-25T18:57:46","modified_gmt":"2013-04-25T22:57:46","slug":"mindless-navel-gazing-at-the-new-yorker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=35292","title":{"rendered":"Mindless navel gazing at the New Yorker"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andy sends us a link to some idiot crap at The New Yorker<\/a> by John Cassidy in which he takes the bombs out of the hands of the Tsarnaev brothers and gives them evil, scary black gun instead; <\/p>\n

What would have been different?<\/p>\n

Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. AR-15s can fire up to forty-five rounds a minute, and at close range they can tear apart a human body. If the Tsarnaevs had started firing near the finish line, they might easily have killed dozens of spectators and runners before fleeing or being shot by the police. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At first, Cassidy had written than an evil, scary black gun could fire 45-rounds\/second, but then he corrected it to read 45 rounds\/minute. His note of the correction is at the end of the article. I’ll give him that one, though. I’ve written things wrong in the past a time or two – my fingers have their own brains sometimes.<\/p>\n

But, Cassidy is under the impression that somehow the brothers could smuggle a rifle under their jacket – obviously he doesn’t know that a standard AR 15 is about a meter long. A little hard to conceal, especially when you’re pulling it out from under your coat in a crowd – then your rate of fire drops to about two rounds before you get your ass beat with the rifle by your intended victims. These weren’t grade school children. That’s probably why the brothers didn’t use their hand gun as part of their plan. They wanted to get away.<\/p>\n

Then Cassidy goes off on how we would react to a mass shooting rather than a bombing, because we’re, as a culture, accustomed to mass murders by firearms. He assumes that the vote in Congress might have gone differently on the background checks\/prospective gun grab – and he says that it should have, because somehow we four million members of the NRA would have shut our mouths as an expression of our collective guilt over something that clearly the millions of Americans who own guns wouldn’t have been involved. And oh, yeah, we wouldn’t have suspected Islamist terrorists, because mass shootings are the modus operandi<\/em> of crazed white guys.<\/p>\n

That assumptions falls apart when you look at the target – like I said in the opening hours of the tragedy, Islamists target crowds of people while crazed white guys with guns usually look at making a statement about their target – WHAT they’re attacking, not just random people milling about on the street.<\/p>\n

Then Cassidy tries to make a vacuous case that AR15 rifles are WMDs;<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s the question of what would have happened to the Tsarnaevs after they had been caught\u2014that\u2019s assuming one or both of them had survived the attack. Just for the sake of argument, let\u2019s say things had developed pretty much as they did, with Tamerlan, the elder brother, being killed, and Dzhokhar, the younger brother, being wounded and captured. Would the government have charged him with conspiring to use \u201cweapons of mass destruction,\u201d a count that could lead to the death penalty? And if they had done this, what would it have meant for the future of assault weapons? Once they\u2019d been classified as W.M.D.s, would that have not made a difference to the public debate about how freely available they should be? <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, this is discussion about phantom guns that weren’t actually used in an actual shooting, but somehow they were “freely available” to our criminals. The gun that the Tsarnaev did have wasn’t legally purchased by either of them, so how are the guns that they used in Cassidy’s fantasy “freely available” in this scenario?<\/p>\n

Yes, this is only a counterfactual exercise, which, like all such riffs, shouldn\u2019t be taken too literally.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But, taken not too literally, it is just wishful thinking on Cassidy’s part. He just wants to scare people with something that didn’t happen the way he wanted it to happen. I guess he couldn’t help but take advantage of a tragedy, turn the facts on their heads and make an idiot statement about scary black guns and demonize those of us who pay the NRA to represent our interests in Washington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andy sends us a link to some idiot crap at The New Yorker by John Cassidy … Mindless navel gazing at the New Yorker<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gun-grabbing-fascists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}