Mindless navel gazing at the New Yorker
Andy sends us a link to some idiot crap at The New Yorker by John Cassidy in which he takes the bombs out of the hands of the Tsarnaev brothers and gives them evil, scary black gun instead;
What would have been different?
Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. AR-15s can fire up to forty-five rounds a minute, and at close range they can tear apart a human body. If the Tsarnaevs had started firing near the finish line, they might easily have killed dozens of spectators and runners before fleeing or being shot by the police.
At first, Cassidy had written than an evil, scary black gun could fire 45-rounds/second, but then he corrected it to read 45 rounds/minute. His note of the correction is at the end of the article. I’ll give him that one, though. I’ve written things wrong in the past a time or two – my fingers have their own brains sometimes.
But, Cassidy is under the impression that somehow the brothers could smuggle a rifle under their jacket – obviously he doesn’t know that a standard AR 15 is about a meter long. A little hard to conceal, especially when you’re pulling it out from under your coat in a crowd – then your rate of fire drops to about two rounds before you get your ass beat with the rifle by your intended victims. These weren’t grade school children. That’s probably why the brothers didn’t use their hand gun as part of their plan. They wanted to get away.
Then Cassidy goes off on how we would react to a mass shooting rather than a bombing, because we’re, as a culture, accustomed to mass murders by firearms. He assumes that the vote in Congress might have gone differently on the background checks/prospective gun grab – and he says that it should have, because somehow we four million members of the NRA would have shut our mouths as an expression of our collective guilt over something that clearly the millions of Americans who own guns wouldn’t have been involved. And oh, yeah, we wouldn’t have suspected Islamist terrorists, because mass shootings are the modus operandi of crazed white guys.
That assumptions falls apart when you look at the target – like I said in the opening hours of the tragedy, Islamists target crowds of people while crazed white guys with guns usually look at making a statement about their target – WHAT they’re attacking, not just random people milling about on the street.
Then Cassidy tries to make a vacuous case that AR15 rifles are WMDs;
Finally, there’s the question of what would have happened to the Tsarnaevs after they had been caught—that’s assuming one or both of them had survived the attack. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say things had developed pretty much as they did, with Tamerlan, the elder brother, being killed, and Dzhokhar, the younger brother, being wounded and captured. Would the government have charged him with conspiring to use “weapons of mass destruction,” a count that could lead to the death penalty? And if they had done this, what would it have meant for the future of assault weapons? Once they’d been classified as W.M.D.s, would that have not made a difference to the public debate about how freely available they should be?
Now, this is discussion about phantom guns that weren’t actually used in an actual shooting, but somehow they were “freely available” to our criminals. The gun that the Tsarnaev did have wasn’t legally purchased by either of them, so how are the guns that they used in Cassidy’s fantasy “freely available” in this scenario?
Yes, this is only a counterfactual exercise, which, like all such riffs, shouldn’t be taken too literally.
But, taken not too literally, it is just wishful thinking on Cassidy’s part. He just wants to scare people with something that didn’t happen the way he wanted it to happen. I guess he couldn’t help but take advantage of a tragedy, turn the facts on their heads and make an idiot statement about scary black guns and demonize those of us who pay the NRA to represent our interests in Washington.
Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists
I’m sure that every time there’s a shooting or explosion, the liberals all sit around masturbating, hoping that it’s a white, conservative male veteran.
UpNorth #1: Ya beat me to it.
Willful ignorance writ large.
If you read the comments, most of those people think Cassidy is an idiot and a poor journalist. Why not just rent a truck and mow down the runners in the marathon? You’d do a lot more damage?
Don’t worry, boys and girls. Cassidy is one of those people whose feet never touch the pavement, who never gets cold or wet, whose coffee is always just SO, whose meals are prepared for him by a professional chef (because he doesn’t know how to cook), and whose laundry is done by someone working for minimum wage or less.
He’s on his own cloud and will never come down from it.
I just thank my lucky stars that I never have to mingle with him at a soiree.
I unfortunately read Cassidy’s article and now I feel that my IQ dropped like 50 points, btw is kinda funny no “big” newspaper picked up this one:
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_23102600/officials-dead-bomber-name-terrorism-database
Saw it in print while getting my morning coffee so I had to order 2 after spilling the first one.
(sigh)
Never underestimate the stupidity of the Lib-Cong.
Like many gun grabbers he probably WISHES it had be ARs and had played out with many more dead. They would trade 20 dead at that marathon for it to have been ARs and the ability to use it to push an agenda.
That is how they are. He WISHES it was an AR and there are plenty of them that wish this fantasy were true. It wasnt their friends. Just stats and props they could use to hit the agenda.
45 rounds a minute? What the fuck? I thought the AR-15’s cyclic rate was more like 650-750 rounds per minute?
(Then again, what would I know?)
MAJMike, am liking that “Lib-Cong” more each time I see it!
This clown will likely get reined in rather quickly. Even the most idiotic libturd understands that they really, really, REALLY don’t want to mess much with the definition of WMD.
To put it another way for JACKcASSidy, ‘isn’t it a shame the terrorists didn’t use rifles and handguns? They, perhaps, would have killed more innocent people and we could use that to pass the legislation we want. But, alas, they used explosives and I’m left only with wild conjecture. But, hey, maybe my article will be read by the next terrorist or home grown nut case and he’ll use guns! I can hope can’t I?’
More often than not, it’s a white male conservative veteran that removes the bomber/shooter. They only need two words in return. Those words are THANK YOU.
Fortunately, for him, a similiar scenario has played out. An Islamist DID go on a shooting spree in the Detroit area, at a college campus. It has been a few years, and I forget most of the details, but fewer than most it would seem. Turns out he didn’t kill many, for reasons I forget at the moment, but as I recall it was about 2008 when it happened, oh and I think he was using a shorter weapon.
Oh yeah, there was also that Hassan thing, but he hasn’t yet been proven guilty for some reason, and for some reason its not considered terrorism, and oh yeah, his victims were in a gun free zone.
Or there’s that Little Rock thing, but no one seems to remember that he also failed at doing the same thing in Kentucky, and that he also failed in his attempt to fire-bomb a Jewish Priest’s house in Nashville, but that’s not considered terrorism either.
Perhaps, instead of pointing out ways that Islamists could help our politicians curtail rights of law-abiding American Citizens, he should point out that the terrorists are Islamists, that had New York set as their next target.
WOTN: Judaism doesn’t have priests anymore.
As for Cassidy: gotta pity the sucker for having to be the one to try and keep the anti-gun meme up for the base. Just like the looming immigration reform defeat, Obama’s playing for the Dems to take over Congress in 2014. Suckers like Cassidy get to remind the base to keep their wallets open.
In real news: how ready is DHS to handle another West, Texas – but in someplace like Philly or LA?
DaveO, it doesn’t really matter what the title is, the same terrorist that killed Army Recruits in Little Rock, first tried to kill a Jewish religious leader in Nashville, and failed to kill Army Recruits in Kentucky.
How ready is the DHS to another West, TX event on barges in Mobile, AL, on the smaller scale that it was? They aren’t.
They COULD HAVE used propane tanks as boosters for the bombs (Anyone who has served in the M.E. knows that “Hadji” uses them in as many IED’s as he can), so are they going to go on another “Bawl-fest” to ban them? “OOOOH, they could have used an AR15….”
You can’t make this shit up, what a bunch of snot-spined ultra-limp dicks!!
just so everyone knows, tonight on CNBC they are going to have an hour special on about the AR. Hmm, CNBC, story about guns. What could go wrong?
@12 & 13, if you’re going to speculate on the explosions at West, Texas and the Mobile,Alabama fire, you need to have an understanding of how volatile the materials are that detonated at the fertilizer plant (ammonium nitrate and anyhdrous ammonia), as is the liquid both of those barges were carrying (natural gasoline). All of that stuff is extremely volatile, all of it is dangerous.
There was a report that the fertilizer plant had more anhydrous ammonia on hand (used for making fertilizer) than the allowed amount, which may mean nothing more than it was over-ordered or an extra delivery was made. Whatever, it’s lethal stuff and anything, including static electricity, can set it off. It is a ticking time bomb.
Likewise, both of those barges were filled with a liquid called natural gasoline (not what you put in your car), which is extremely volatile – explosively so – and very unstable. I used to live in Blackwood, NJ, and worked in Philadelphia, across the Delaware River from a massive oil storage tank farm. It’s still there. There were always tankers berthed there to offload crude for the refineries and on a regular basis, someone would make a stupid mistake and an oil tanker blew up. I was awakened in the middle of the night by one of those fires, and I was ten miles away from it. I also saw, from where I worked, refinery fires when cracking tower blew up. You could see the shock wave move across Philadelphia.
I’ve seen grain elevator fires that could not be put out because they just kept feeding on the grain in the concrete grain bins, and concrete burns just like any flammable substances.
All it takes for those nasty substances to explode is some simple mistake. I doubt there’s any conspiracy involved, just a mistake.
I need to chill from all my personal stress, relax and kill a few functional brain cells.
Where can I buy an ounce or two of whatever Mr Jack-Assidy is ingesting??
Corner of 5th and Broadway in NYC, just don’t let Mayor Bloomberbutt’s cops see you standing there like a zombie. They are doing racial profiling on zombies, including strip searches if you’re leaning on a lamp post and talking to yourself.
#18 Ex-PH2
Nah, I’d be in and gone quick, depending on how much it weighs. Is it more then 16 ounces of liquid sugery soda?? Wouldn’t want to upset Hizzonor.
Sounds about right.
I would like to be the person who is unjustifiably accosted by Bloomer’s pseudo-cops just for blowing bubbles in front of city hall while singing “Xanadu” and roller skating.
Those people do not know how to have fun.
PH, I’m not speculating on TX and Mobile. I’m just not ruling out what appears to be a curious coincidence of time. Unfortunately, given the Admin’s current record, I don’t trust that they would tell us that it was more than an accident.
There were 3 significant events inside of a week: Ricin (with a cleared suspect), the Boston Bombing, and the Canadian arrest of Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Oh, WOTN, there are disasters all over the place that don’t make big headlines. That quake in Sichuan province in China earlier this week hardly got a mention in the news, despite the numbers of dead and injured. Likewise, a major quake in Iran near a city with a reactor hardly warranted a blink from the admin. It goes on all the time, and the timing is coincidental.
Do you recall an awful accident in the desert a couple of years ago in 2011, between a semitruck and an Amtrak train that originated in Chicago? The driver was killed, and while witnesses said they could see that he was trying to stop the truck, which was empty, but he couldn’t. And it happened in the middle of the desert, with nothing blocking his view of the train or the rail line, or the road on the other side of the crossing. That one generated a huge number of conspiracy theories, and there was nothing to them.
Geebus f-ing cripes!! Another bed wetter!?!? What is it with these nancies??? They come out of the woodwork after every such tragedy and attack to tell us how big their mangina is and that we should be just as afraid as them. My gawd, my daughter would kick his ass 3 ways from Sunday and she’s anti-gun! (well, a disclaimer: She was on the girls high school hockey team when she was in 8th grade, plus after the first couple of beatdowns, the other girls from high school stopped messing with her off the ice. Oh; she’s 5’2″ and weighs all of about 115-120)
That article should have been sub-titled, “What if C-A-T really spelled ‘dog.'”
Ugh. Did you see this guy’s Avatar? This is one of those creeps who won’t look you in the eye when you pass him in the hallway, but wallows in violence in his head. I would rather run into gangbangers than one like this, because you never know how many body parts they have in their freezers.
I’m already seeing faux intellectuals posting this on FB with stupid comments like “wow really raises some interesting questions”.
I just want to reply some outrageously ridiculous what-ifs of my own, but I don’t want them to think I’m agreeing with them.
What I really don’t like about the article as many of you have already pointed out is just how much the writer speculates on something that didn’t happen to begin with.
45 rounds per minute with the AR15, if they were taking careful aim, and assuming they knew what they were doing.
If they fired their weapons, it’s EXTREMELY likely that they would not have made it out of there alive, or even got off more than a few rounds before one of the MANY police on scene would’ve taken them out.
Even if they had used the AR15s to kill people how would it have made them anything but terrorists anyway? Terrorism isn’t about what was used to maim and kill, but the motive behind said violent acts is it not?
If the government classified the AR15 (and thereby the M16) as a WMD then our whole military would have to rewrite the LOAC and ROEs as many going downrange would each have their own personal WMD… or am I just not reading this right?
This whole article stinks. What is the intent here?
Somehow I think an ambush initiated by explosives would have been a lot worse than what happened. Thank God these terrorists didn’t incorporate firearms of any sort into their attack.