A Nice Cheery Little Sunday Post

The board is set... the pieces are moving

Gandalf, LOTR

First, read this piece by Mark Steyn from NRO:

A government that lies to its own citizens should command no respect. To accord them any is to make oneself complicit in their lies, which is unbecoming to a free people. 

Which brings us to that other death of November 22: Aldous Huxley. “Don’t you want to be free and men?” rages a dissenting voice. “Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Gee, he sounds like a talk-radio guy demanding to know where the outrage is. 

Written in 1931, Brave New World isn’t as famous a dystopia as Orwell’s 1984 — because it posits tyranny not as “a boot stamping on a human face” but as a soft, beguiling caress of a human face, a land in which enslavement takes the form of round-the-clock sensory gratification: drugs, sex without love, consumer trinkets, sensory distractions . . . Crazy, huh? Like that’d ever happen.

Read the whole thing, of course. So gosh, what have our busy little Orcs in Washington been doing this week, since they're already wrecked our healthcare and driven the economy in a near-death stupor?  Well, they did manage to work out a deal that will ultimately allow those rollicking, fun-loving mullahs in Iran to go nuclear. Super! Is there anyone with an IQ greater than a snowball's who believe that the kids won't use the fire once they have? Come on now, raise your hands...sorry, you don't count, Mr. Kerry! You never counted...

Oh yeah, completely remaking the Senate! I know the Repubs are salivating at the chance to use the changes in rules when it's their turn at bat, but it got me thinking about John Stuart Mill and his essay On Liberty, specifically this part:

The third, and most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government, is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government, causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government.

So why "go nuclear" over 3 judges added to the D.C. District of the U.S. Court of Appeals? That's the court that will be ruling on what I expect to be a flood of regulations to be coming out of the White House over the next 3 years. Let's face it, Obama is a broken toy; his legislative agenda is pretty much finished. But Kings govern by fiat...not the car, either. And oh baby, the regulations will be coming!

And I believe this will have a direct effect on us. We've already seen moves on ATF regulations both on Firearms Trusts and FFL regulations. I mentioned the other day the new proposed BLM regs forcing shooters off public land, a policy USFS has been beta-testing for several years. If you recall, initialy there were repeated reassurance to the hunting community that it was only those damn recreational shooters. You'll notice the BLM regs no longer make such a distinction...conclusion? The Feds feel the once-insurmountable "hunting lobby" has been neutralized.

Sebastian at Shall Not Be Infringed had been doing the heavy lifting on the rise of antihunting sentiments...this from his excellent post "Hunting is Doomed, Part B:"

This kind of attitude [I'm a hunter, but I don't support...] is what’s going to kill hunting, because hunters still think it’s OK to argue about what hunting is and isn’t. This guy has just giving close to 6000 people, on a page “liked” by millions, moral cover for their outrage at a fellow hunter. Hunters will sell the animal rights movement the rope they will use to hang them. If you want to understand why in the shooting community, we’re so quick to knife traitors, this is why. Hunting has to develop the same kind of message discipline if they want their pastime to survive.

Yes, we in the shooting community have our "litmus tests," but quite frankly we have had to develop them to survive. I mean, "divide and conquer" may be one of the oldest, and still the most valid, piece of military wisdom on the planet. The reason that it is still valid is that it works. We have decades of our blood enemies trying to shave off little strips of the gun culture and either turn them against the majority or destroy them outright — "Saturday Night Specials," "cop-killer bullets," "assault weapons," "AR-15s," "handguns," ".50 BMGs," "sniper rifles," "stand-your-ground," and on and on and on and on.

Ironically, one of the areas most exploited by the antigunners was the perceived split between hunters and shooters (hence the development of those litmus tests I spoke about). Now we see, as Sebastian noted, the same tactics being used against hunters.

In the shooting community, we eventually adopted what I think is a very simple trope, "All guns are the same." Whether you shoot a specialized O/U for sporting clays, a .50 BMG in long-range competition, a bolt action hunting rifle,  a CCW handgun, a vintage Sharps rifle, your grandfather's double-barreled shotgun, a USPA Open gun, a .22 plinker, or an AR-15, an attack on one is considered an attack on all.  If you say you own "X" but you don't mind banning "Y," you can and should be considered a pariah to our community. Harsh rules, but these are harsh times. Our enemies will accept even the slightest gain as a huge victory and look toward more such victories in the future.

I think it's time for the hunting community to step up and say an attack on one is an attack on all. Read the brilliant South African article by Ivo Vegter that Sebastian linked to in his post:

The knee-jerk reaction of the chattering classes is that you don’t protect animals by killing them. That seems self-evident, but, as Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” 

The notion that hunting harms the survival of species, or the environment more generally, happens to be false, and demonstrably so.

 As a commentator to Sebastian's post noted, hunters have allowed themselves to be lulled into the "pseudo-hippy 'moral' position that only the mythical 'Native American' model of 'using every piece of what we kill.'" That's because the position is super easy to defend to our enemies who will happily concede that subsistence hunting is A-Okay with them...for today. Let's table the issue of whether any pseudo-hippy mythology is true, although I do notice the paucity of North American Mammoths and giant sloths (other than our veteran dopers) up here at the Secret Hidden Bunker and if you'd like a glimpse into the past of Native American buffalo hunting, I refer you to the magnificent and troubling bronze casting Buffalo Jump at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

The point is that hunting is now where we were in the 1970s...remember, shotguns were A-Okay! Hunting rifles were A-Okay! Handguns...you know those Saturday Night Specials are only meant to kill people...so maybe if you'll help us get rid of Saturday night specials, we'll leave you grandpa's double barrel and that squirrel gun. We as a culture now understand and accept that the only agenda the antigunners have is confiscation.

"If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here."

— Senator Dianne Feinstein

February, 1995

As I've written before, after Newtown, when our enemies incorrectly believed the national "landscape" on guns had changed, the first word out of their collective mouths was, "Confiscate!" When it became obvious they'd overplayed their hand, it was too late...genie...bottle...etc.

One thing we saw in the Colorado battle was the extensive use of "false flag" hunting groups, most of them generated by Michael Bloomberg's organization, in favor of gun bans. It is time we learned that the only agenda for antihunting groups is the complete elimination of hunting. That's it. When they say anything else, the other side lies.

In war, the end justifies almost any means.

—Saul Alinsky, 1972

Do you doubt we are at war?