I've been blogging for 13 years now and thinking critically (meaning reading history, philosophy and theology) rather than buying into the "flavor of the day" from ANY news source ... left or right for 40years. I have no need to virtue signal -- I have no virtue, I am the most filthy of sinners, completely unworthy of the mercy that I pray and believe that Jesus Christ bestows on me without the least shred of merit.
In the "80's", I believed that our society had been heavily damaged by the "sick sixties", and if we merely saw the error of our ways since then, we would return to a virtuous society. Now I know it is MUCH deeper than that ... William of Occam, the Reformation, the "Enlightenment", the advance of technology (ease, mass communication, birth control, etc) and a few other things ALLOWED (not "caused") the decline of not only America, but "Western civilization" in it's entirety.
To talk of "school shootings" or "gun control" is like a 95 year old terminal cancer patient seeking treatment for acne compared to what the fact of mass shootings, massive addiction, massive death by overdose/suicide, and the utter hopelessness that most of the population of our broken excuse for a "cutlure / civilization" are experiencing . It is COMPLETELY meaningless given our plight. I covered the idiocy of concern for shootings after Vegas. Just look at FB -- lots of virtue signalling from many ... signifying exactly nothing except "this is my tribe, please agree with me, lots of people in my tribe agreeing with me gives my life the illusion of meaning".
As I posted on one friends FB lament, in 1974 when I graduated HS, we took our guns to school to go hunting after school or to work on them in shop. The idea of a "school shooting" was just as far from our minds as the idea of "texting" ... it simply didn't exist. M-16's however DID exist -- guys used the full auto versions in "Nam" and some of them started hunting with the semi-auto versions of them because they were light and accurate, and since the body mass of a deer is pretty much exactly like a person, they were of course great deer guns.
"Made for one purpose only" is one of the zanier lines out there relative to guns. It is true that guns are single purpose items ... they are built to send projectiles downrange as accurately as possible. The VAST bulk of projectiles hit PAPER or some similar sort of target, because that is what they are used for. The best comparison for me is golf -- correct, nobody NEEDS to have multi-thousand dollar clubs to put a white ball in a hole on a field, but humans OFTEN do MANY things that nobody "needs" to do. Here is Robin Williams on the sense of golf (many f-bomb warning)
The fetishization of guns is a pretty good proof that something in the nature of man wants to imbdue objects with purpose and meaning.
So our lives are FILLED with all sorts of things that we "don't need", many of which are even explicitly harmful (like cigarettes). However, we DO need to feel virtuous as part of our human nature, so thousands of people signalling their virtue on FB by declaring that "nobody NEEDS an "assault rifle"", when probably 1% of them could tell you what the difference between an "AR" and some other gun was. The answer is of course "nothing but style". I have a nasty looking "black gun", a .223 Bushmaster, and a nice wooden stock Remington 742 Woodsmaster 30-06. I can put a 30 round magazine in either one of them and shoot those rounds as fast as I can pull the trigger, because they are semi-auto.
I'm not much in the shop, but given a not too huge amount of time, if I need to convert 5 or 10 round mags into 30, 60 or whatever, I can ... however the time would likely be better spent working on mag change dexterity which with even a klutzy guy like me a medium level of skill can pretty much make magazine size moot -- "wait till he changes mags then rush him" is wishful thinking if the shooter is even moderately skilled at a mag change.
Short of ceasing to honor the 2nd amendment (which just makes it REALLY clear that there are no "laws" in BOistan), or actually repealing it -- legal, but unlikely, all the virtue signalling about "Assault Weapons" is just virtue signalling. Preventing car companies from putting "SS" (Super Sport) on ttheir cars ... or wide tires, or dual exhausts, etc because "it makes them seem like Race Cars" is of similar use.
"This highlights the problem with capitalism. As Irving Kristol observed in one of his greatest works, “When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness,” there is a difference between a “free society” and a “just” or “bourgeois” society. The Founders worked on the assumption that the people themselves would be the guardians of virtue, probity, norms, and even public safety in their own communities. And, as Kristol notes, for the first century or two of capitalism’s existence, it was largely synonymous with a just/bourgeois society."
In the 20th century, we did away with "just" step by step until we ended up with a mass of individuals with no idea of right or wrong ... and even less of the eternal consequences of "wrong".
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