Inside the mind of a Second Amendment rights absolutist who believes that the right to “keep and bear arms” empowers Americans to take up arms against the state, among several other charmingly evidence-free beliefs. I don’t think I’d ever say this in my lifetime, but kudos to Piers Morgan for allowing all of us to see, hear, and smell the crazy. (And of course, he’s a 9/11 Truther, and just as angry as a Scientologist about psychopharmacology. You’ve heard of the Full Cleveland? This is the Full Crazy.)
Something else I’d never thought I’d write: Alan Dershowitz is right, and good for him for reminding us that not all Americans look like that crazy guy, and that we’re still Americans if read the Second Amendment differently (as in the not-crazy way.)
Historiann 
Even employing the current baseless interpretation of the 2nd, resisting the government makes no sense. The government can listen to all your calls, read all your writing and even drone you to oblivion. Resisting with a gun is a joke.
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I know! And even if you’re not dead, you might as well be if they put you in “indefinte detention.”
I might be tempted to think that this guy was a plant meant to impersonate a complete kook, except that he appears to speak for a number of our fellow citizens.
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Y’all are talking like this man — Alex Jones — is a stranger both to media exposure and to conspiracy theory, but he and his website have made their bones stirring up F.U.D. since the Clintons and Mena Airport.
How can we be surprised that now it’s his turn to cash in — and whether he’s opposing initiatives from the left or right, whichever way the wind blows hard, that’s where he’ll ride….
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Appropos of not that much, I was walking down a street in Central London years ago when I was tapped on the shoulder by two (unarmed but uniformed) police officers, who asked if I was willing to “…assist Her Majesties’ Metropolitan Police with a criminal investigation?” Why not, so I hopped in their van, with an intern who they were showing around the beat. About six blocks later they backed into an alley and down a ramp into the basement of the Lambs Conduit precinct sub-station. I was going to appear as a ringer in an “Identification Parade,” which is English for what we Yanks call a “lineup.” What ensued would never have flown as a pilot on an American police procedural, although maybe on Monty Python. We were in the shabby precinct weight room, where about ten other grizzled regulars were waiting around for the event to begin. There wasn’t a weapon in the house, unless you planned to drop a bar-bell on somebody’s foot. They had to wait an hour until the witness closed his shop in Wembley and came over. This was a homicide investigation, and I was sweating bullets by then; I had an undeveloped picture of the crime scene on a camera in my backpack which I had taken that day because they put up little billboards at the scenes of crimes to solicit witnesses. The officers had assured me that even if the gent fingered me as the trigger-man, there was no chance that I would be charged, it would just be a big plus for the suspect.
They finally brought the witness in, and we were sitting on shabby folding chairs. He went down the line, hands behind his back, stopping to stare aggressively into the faces of us pigeons. He finally picked out his man (not me) and it was over.
Before he came in the officer in charge of the station (The Guv’nor) heard that his boys had reeled in an American tourist (me), and he came out and stood in front of me talking about baseball for twenty minutes, presumably as a protective gesture. It was apparently not a good career move for the two officers that they had inadvertently disobliged a hard-working tourist. Anyway, the Guv’nor brought out a huge leatherette bag of pound coins and proceeded to dole out six pounds a head to us plants as compensation. The other guys in the parade were local bar habituees, who apparently did this on a regular basis for drinking money. They gave me a nice piece of paper to document my service on the Group W bench, which I still have, and I had a tourist story for the ages. What does this have to do with guns? There WEREN’T any guns!!! It felt kind of civilized. Then they invented the Internet, but I’ve still never been able to find out how the investigation came out. I’m sure there’s a record out at Kew!
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Well, H’ann, it just goes to show that reasonable people will sometimes agree, just as we sometimes disagree with people we generally agree with…
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Wow. That is a lot of yelling for 6am, which is when I clicked on the link. My favorite part would be when he attempts to mimic the British accent. What I find sad, really, is how a fairly moderate position – Morgan’s – gets categorized as if it had been ripped from Mao’s Little Red Book.
I have to say that, coming from Indiana, my facebook feed has been drawn in two directions on this issue. Many of my dearest friends there are gun owners, and none of them are nuts. I’ve never heard any of them prattle on about the 2nd amendment, or black helicopters. The don’t have bumper stickers on this issue. They aren’t NRA members. They just have guns – hunting rifles (for, you know, hunting) and pistols (for, say policework or varmint shooting). They’ve always had guns. They don’t appreciate this sort of fellow. But they also don’t appreciate the “all guns must go” school of thought.
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And now the NRA is claiming at an Arizona gun buy-back that it will be illegal for the state to destroy the guns, because the state has to sell abandoned property. The NRA talks about guns the way the anti-choice folks talk about fetuses.
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“The NRA talks about guns the way the anti-choice folks talk about fetuses.”
Ain’t it the truth? Some enterprising American Studies grad student should analyze the rhetoric of both political movements to explore the similarities, especially when it comes to the violent fantasies (or sadly, the violent realities) that each extremist movement engages in w/r/t their political opponents. (Unless this has been done before–I don’t know.)
And Lance: yeah, that British accent he whips out is just weird. Like I said, one could almost accuse Morgan of finding a parodist, but as cgeye points out, this guy has been around the block.
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More on the fear and paranoia that animates many of the Second Amendment crazies–the whole show is worth watching, but the fear part comes towards the end of the second half of the segment.
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It’s all, to this day, about eugenics.
If you can’t control how your women breed, then you can’t control your family as a work unit, let alone as a multi-generational one. (Boys are great for work, but surplus for reproduction, so boys’ sexual behaviors, as long as they leave enough variety for Dad (and don’t embarass the compulsory gender roles), aren’t under a heavy a set of manners.)
If you can’t defend your ideas of how your family should act, through a cache of guns and ammo, then they can choose new ideas.
We’re sinking back into the same intellectual mire of family abuse that made the Old Testament such a delightful place to live.
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Great story, Indyanna!
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