Posted by
Mostly Genius – September 9, 2009
According to this article they are discouraging Boy Scouts from carrying pocket knives. Apparently the criminal “knife culture” of Britain trumps the “Scout Culture.”
A Boy Scout without a pocket knife is just wrong. I started carrying a pocket knife (even to school) when I was about six or seven years old. Every Cub Scout I knew had a pocket knife. When we were full fledged boy scouts we graduated to fixed blade knives, hatchets, and machetes.
So much of the great tradition of Scouting has been pansyfied to the point that it is no wonder that kids would rather play video games than go to the woods. If all of the scouting adventure is going to be nerf, they might as well just stay home.
Posted by
Mostly Genius – August 31, 2009
So after the debate regarding open carry at political protests, via Confederate Yankee I come to learn that the guy carrying the AR15 has made statements about hoping for the presidents death:
When asked if he was advocating violence against the President, Broughton said he wouldn’t answer the question directly.
“I don’t care how God does it, I’m not going into further detail than that,” said Broughton. “It would be better now than later.”
So for all of the rhetoric about normalization, not hiding, etc. It turns out that this might not be the best spokesman for the gun rights movement after all. While I am not a fan of our current president, I think praying for his assassination is clearly over the top.
Posted by
Mostly Genius – August 27, 2009
Ironically this is not going to be commentary on crime, but rather on the gun rights movement. I found this little rant in a Seattle alternative weekly. All of the emphasis is mine.
… It scared me to no end. It also pissed me off. If you all four hadn’t had guns, we would’ve had a completely different situation. Instead, you got all six of us tied up while you stole what you deemed worth jacking. What also pisses me off is that you were all black. Why the fuck would you feed the stereotype? I couldn’t see more than your eyes and a little bit around them, so I found myself racial-profiling out of fear. I stopped doing that, because I’m stronger and better than that…
…I work hard as an attractive woman to be intelligent and interesting, because I don’t like perpetuating negative stereotypes. I wish you would work just as hard to rid the world of the stereotype that black men should be feared because they’ll put a gun to your head and steal…
I cannot read this article without wondering if the author would have been happier if her home invaders were more racially diverse. Now for the gun rights portion of the post. When we talk about “normalization” or similar sentiments regarding gun rights, this is part of the audience we are trying to convince. These are people who worry about ethnically stereotyping the home invaders that victimized them. I don’t think they get reached by shock therapy (or even lobotomy.)
The idea that people would have some kind of practical (or tactical) answer to a home-invasion robbery (regardless of race) is totally alien to those of the authors ilk.
Posted by
Mostly Genius – August 25, 2009
Marko has a well meaning but misinformed post in favor people carrying guns. The early UFC matches didn’t have weight classes and the big guys didn’t always win. Smaller trained fighters routinely prevail against larger untrained fighters. Regardless, professional criminals are armed criminals and gun control isn’t going to change that. I am all for armed citizens, but it has nothing to do with disparities in size or training.