Category: Friday Quote

First they came for the blacks, and I spoke up because it was wrong, even though I’m not black.

Then they came for the gays, and I spoke up, even though I’m not gay.

Then they came for the Muslims, and I spoke up, because it was wrong, even though I’m an atheist.

When they came for illegal aliens, I spoke up, even though I’m a legal immigrant.

Then they came for the pornographers, rebels and dissenters and their speech and flag burning, and I spoke up, because rights are not only for the establishment.

Then they came for the gun owners, and you liberal shitbags threw me under the bus, even though I’d done nothing wrong. So when they come to put you on the train, you can fucking choke and die.

Michael Z. Williamson, author

This quote came from this blog post. RTWT, because it rightly sums up how I feel when it comes to those considered to be “on the left” of our political spectrum.

When the Clinton AWB was passed, I was in the infancy of my awareness. I knew it was happening, but not how it would affect me. Now, I am fully aware of how the proposed legislation would affect me and those I care about.

Molon Labe, biotches.

We found that gun buyback programs have not shown to be effective….They’re rifles, shotguns, things like that. Less likely to be small handguns, which are really more likely the types of guns to be used in gun crime.

Matthew Makarios, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin Parkside

The above quote was found in one of the local TV station’s investigation into the effectiveness of gun buybacks.

From the article:

We found that the vast majority of guns turned in aren’t the type of weapons typically used in crimes. We also found many cases where people turned in BB and pellet guns, guns that were visibly broken, and even a flare gun.

At two Clearwater Police Department buybacks in 2011, 20% of the guns turned in were BB and pellet guns. The Largo Police Department held their buybacks jointly with Clearwater, and 12% of the guns they took in were BB or pellet guns.

If this was a private organization sponsoring these gun buybacks, I really wouldn’t care. The problems is that it’s the local law enforcement agencies. That’s my money being used to buy and then dispose of those guns. Why should I be forced to pay for a program that doesn’t accomplish its stated goal and serves little point except for propaganda for gun control and the police?

What’s worse is some of these people are selling their property at far below their value in this gun market when they could really use the money. On a purely anecdotal basis, I told one of my co-workers about the buyback and she wanted to take some unused guns down. I convinced her not to and to let me take a look at them. I was pretty sure she could get more for them than what was being offered.

If we’re going to have a gun buyback, shouldn’t they at least be forced to pay market value? Kind of make it like Antiques Roadshow, the firearms edition.

Everytime something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people.

Penn Jillette

There was the temptation to use Franklin’s quote concerning liberty and temporary security, but that’s been overused to the point that it’s become background noise or such a canned phrase that you’d need a Turing test to determine if the user is human and not a spambot.

If there’s one thing I’ve become more and more annoyed with, it’s the idea that we can make the world safe for humanity. To put it bluntly, that is utter bullshit. There’s a risk for living on this planet. It comes from the flora, the fauna, other humans, the planet itself, and from the cosmos that the Earth lives within.

From my observations, humans thrive the best when they have the liberty to do as they see fit and a strong rule of law to ensure that they suffer the consequences for their actions. For their actions. Not for the actions of others. Collective guilt is one of the tools to divert power from the individual to the authority. To strip liberty under the auspices of the “greater good.” To make humans less than what they could be.

Currently, this quote rings true surrounding the current debate about guns. Yet, what about the other intrusions. Frank-Dodd, Obamacare, the PATRIOT act, Sarbanes-Oxley…the list goes on and on. With the crisis immediate, the people are willing to sacrifice their freedoms for the promise that the government will prevent such things from happening again.

But do we get our freedoms back when those promises are broken? Please?