Oh, Gun Laws Were Tougher, Were They?

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2018/10/kat-ainsworth/time-magazine-gun-laws-were-much-tougher-150-years-ago/?bt_alias=eyJ1c2VySWQiOiAiMTIzZDMzYWQtY2QzNi00ZjQyLThjODMtNTg4MDAxYTM1YTU4In0%3D

Last week marks 50 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Gun Control Act of 1968 into law on Oct. 22 of that year. It was the first major gun control measure in the United States in 30 years, but its passage earned this dismissive take in the pages of TIME: “better than nothing.”

http://time.com/5429002/gun-control-act-history-1968/  “Forget the democratic processes, the judicial system and the talent for organization that have long been the distinctive marks of the U.S. Forget, too, the affluence (vast, if still not general enough) and the fundamental respect for law by most Americans. Remember, instead, the Gun,” the magazine had noted earlier that year, in a cover story about the role of guns in the United States, which was prompted by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. “All too widely, the country is regarded as a blood-drenched, continent-wide shooting range where toddlers blast off with real rifles, housewives pack pearl-handled revolvers, and political assassins stalk their victims at will. The image, of course, is wildly overblown, but America’s own mythmakers are largely to blame. In U.S. folklore, nothing has been more romanticized than guns and the larger-than-life men who wielded them. From the nation’s beginnings, in fact and fiction, the gun has been provider and protector.”

TIME Magazine says, in the final paragraphs of its own article, that there were hundreds of gun laws in the 1800s, and going back to the 1600s in early colonial America.

What do people get wrong about the history of gun control? Are there any myths you find yourself debunking?

“One of the great myths is the idea that gun-control laws are an artifact of the modern era, the 20th century. Gun laws are as old as America, literally to the very early colonial beginnings of the nation. From the beginning of the late 1600s to the end of the 1800s, gun laws were everywhere, thousands of gun laws of every imaginable variety. You find virtually every state in the union enacting laws that bar people from carrying concealed weapons. That’s something people don’t realize.”

“When we were all colonies, there were laws in the 1600s making it illegal to discharge a weapon near a road, near buildings, populated areas or on Sundays, and that barred discharge of a gun during social occasions. In New Jersey, there was a law that said you weren’t allowed to discharge a weapon when you were drunk and the two exceptions were at weddings and funerals. In the old ‘Wild West,’ they took people’s guns away when they were in a populated area, only to be retrieved when they left. That exemplifies how laws were much tougher 150 years ago than in the last 30 years.” – TIME Magazine

It appears that we’re supposed to just take their word for it, without any references or backups of any kind. I know that in general, after the Civil War, the South was essentially disarmed.

However, in The New Republic’s article from 2013,  https://newrepublic.com/article/112322/gun-control-racist , the NRA’s origins stem from attempts to bar newly-emancipated blacks from owning guns.

“As Keene notes, after the Civil War there was a rash of gun control laws aimed at disarming blacks. Southern blacks who had long been denied access to firearms were finally able to obtain them during the Civil War. Some served in colored units of the Union Army, which allowed soldiers regardless of skin color to take their guns home with them as partial payment of back-due wages. Other blacks purchased guns in the marketplace, which was flooded with the hundreds of thousands of guns produced for the war. Many predicted, accurately, that they might need those weapons to defend themselves against racist whites unhappy with the Confederacy’s defeat.” – Article

We have to remember, also, that the reason we have a Constitutional law – a federal law – that gives us the right to bear arms is specifically because the British government not only taxed everything under the sun in Colonial America, but also confiscated weapons any time they had a chance.

They also forced colonists to house and feed British soldiers without compensation, which is against the law now.  Read both the Articles and the Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

While I wouldn’t mind having a couple of Marines in my house impatiently waiting for roast beef and gravy with new potatoes, I know they’d also be paying room and board to stay here.

In regard to the Time Magazine article’s opinion about gun control, there was, a while back, a Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’ cartoon about how 19th century Philadelphia’s streets were so hazardous with people shooting at each other that commuter trolleys were clad in steel armor to protect passengers. And while Hollywood glamorized shootouts in the Old West, they were really rather rare. Wm. Bonney, nee Henry McCarty, was a glory-hounding idiot whose sole purpose was to be known for what he did – shoot people to kill them.  And as I recall, the drive-by shootings in Chicago during the Depression were gang wars between Al Capone’s people and other hoodlums trying to cash in on Prohibition’s burgeoning illegal alcohol business. And there are, frankly, more drive-by shootings in Chcago now than there were during the Depression.

The nutball who went into a synagogue and killed 11 people, including 4 police officers, had a hair up his backside, as did the “student” at Parkland HS in Florida earlier this year, the whack job from southern Illinois who shot up a GOPer softball game practice session, and the psycho who went to a hotel in Las Vegas last year for the sole purpose of shooting fish in a barrel at a concert near the hotel. They all want one thing: soft, easy targets combined with the element of surprise.

Many of you have asserted that concealed carry laws reduce the number of lost lives. I would be quite comfortable patronizing a restaurant with a sign on its door that read “Responsible Concealed Carry Owners Welcome Here” if it meant a solid chance of stopping some warped creature from coming in and shooting the place up.

Sometimes, I really do think these crackpots are in cahoots with the Lefterds.  Find a wacko with a chip on his shoulder over imagined wrongs (Trump won! Gaaaah!) and give him a pat on the back to go shoot people.

And the response to that? Take away the soft target aspect by arming everyone; remove the element of surprise by posting notices that welcome CCWs. Stand up to “lawmakers” and these useless buggers whose butthurt crap is only relieved when they slaughter people.

The hysterics about gun control are not going to quit. And it isn’t about gun control at all.  We all know that.

It’s about destroying freedom.

Category: "The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves", Gun Grabbing Fascists, Guns