One or two of those are actual quotes - I’m willing to bet they all are.
The thing about the Wild West is that everybody went armed because there was no strong central government - no cops, or not enough. Is there anybody in this country who is busy trying to weaken centralized government?
Well your government looks kinda tyrannical from over here and seems to be doing a bang up job of eroding your freedoms, so I’m wondering why you still want to keep your guns.
Can’t seem to find a video link for this, but there is a transcript page. http://snltranscripts.jt.org/82/82cnukes.phtml
SNL sketch “Nukes are for Kooks”
“Kinda tyrannical?” Perhaps, perhaps not. One could argue that all governments are “kinda” tyrannical, particularly when compared with anarchy. That said, looking at history, armed revolution and civil war doesn’t seem to have a very good track record when it comes to improving things, and I have a difficult time picturing NRA members implementing a much improved form of government in the US if they took over by violent armed revolution.
It would, however, go a long way to solving global warming and overpopulation, until the well armed immigrants started arriving from Mexico, Columbia and the Middle East.
I think the West was a lot less wild than people would expect from watching old westerns.
Yeh, but one could look at the Patriot act, NSA surveillance, etc., as definite signs of encroaching totalitarian methods. Which the gun guys have done exactly nothing to prevent.
Also, if you substitute governments for individuals in the comic, you get what the 1980s sounded like.
I love how, even in comic form, you can still identify Ted Cruz, because he’s the one who looks like he just caught a whiff of something supremely foul.
Cocaine being snorted and Culture Club?
Individual towns were able to ban guns and require them to be left with the Marshall. That right has subsequently been eroded.
I seem to recall reading that as guns were expensive then, only a minority could afford them. The same would be true at the end of the 18th century - the well regulated militia would consist of middle and upper class people like Paul Revere, hence the well regulated. I doubt the framers of the Amendment ever envisaged the lower classes getting access to guns except as part of a militia run by their social betters (which is how it was in the UK).
Perhaps the Second Amendment should indeed be extended to ballistic (and cruise) missiles. Deterrence worked well during the Cold War. The prospect of having your police station taken out by a Tomahawk if you shoot an unarmed person might concentrate minds wonderfully. As might the equal prospect of having your neighborhood leveled by police if there was a crack house in it. [irony alert]
The idea isn’t to enable NRA members to form a paramilitary (AKA “terrorist”) organization to go toe-to-toe with the US military. The idea is that a hostile mercenary army (since US military is US citizens, most gun owners seem to think they would be on our* side) might be discouraged by the prospect of occupying territory where a significant proportion of residents own firearms.
*“Our” means “US citizens”.
Yes, though it’s an idea that hasn’t made sense for decades, given how the state’s growing relative power increasingly reduces citizens’ weaponry to mere pea shooters.
To win a war, you still need to occupy territory. To occupy territory, you still need “boots on the ground”. “Boots on the ground” in the US are just as vulnerable to small arms fire and improvised explosives as they are in contemporary Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
What do you think the answer to “the state’s growing relative power” would be that wouldn’t entail violence or at least the threat of violence?
Supremacy in weapons is kind of low-value when the tactical situation favors the current inhabitants of the area, even if light-armed.
- Viet Nam
- Afghanistan
- Iraq
…and more
Even Ireland could perhaps go on the list. Brits with all their imperial might had quite some Troubles there.
From Wikipedia:
Dad’s Nuke, first published in February, 1986 by Donald I. Fine, is a science fiction dark comedy novel written by Marc Laidlaw. It is a parody of middle class suburban life, and tells the tale of a nuclear family in the post-nuclear (holocaust) age. The protagonists are a father, mother, daughter, and eight biologically-engineered children living in a gated suburban enclave following the near collapse of modern civilization. The story consists of a series of episodes demonstrating the ridiculousness of the family’s sheltered, conformist lives, and culminates in the collapse from within of the suburban community. The title refers to a trailer mounted nuclear missile purchased by the family’s father figure, as part of his hostile, one-upmanship, “keeping up with the Joneses” competition with his next door neighbor.
I’m not so sure everyone on the right is in agreement over that particular view.
He who smelt it dealt it?
