The Institute has noted that wars haven't been the same since WW II. There is no way the Vietnam war could have been fought WW II style with like those groovy tank battles with enemies in sinister uniforms. The other thing was that it looked to the folks at home like a battle to defend civilization, whereas Vietnam looked to Americans like a faraway flyspeck that had little or nothing to do with America and they wondered why their boys were going there and coming back in boxes. In fact if you're looking for the They who lost the war in Vietnam, you would have to conclude that They were the majority of the American people who were sick of it and urging their representatives, who had their ears to the polls, to end the war. That's why Nixon finally withdrew, not because he was part of some sinister cabal of Them, but because it was hugely unpopular. If it weren't for that he would have gone on until the cows came home.
The last three games of the season the Cubs faced the Cincinnati Redlegs and won the first two and lost the last one. Myself I think that had a lot to do with pitcher performance and the eyes of the batsmen and the occasionally oddly lying pebble that sends the sure thing double play grounder just out of reach of the shortstop. I don't think Joe Maddon decided that he wanted to win on Friday and Saturday, but Sunday he decided to lose.
These knee jerk reactions do occur every time one of these super gun shootings occur. People look at all the dead people, and then they look at the super gun in the hands of the nut and they think, you know, if that guy didn't have that super gun a lot less people would have been killed, which seems like pretty airtight logic to me. We've gone through the gun control argument in these posts many times before. Indeed I daresay this argument has come closer to bringing strong emotions to the normally sedate Beaglestonians than any other issue.
Beagles has several skirmishing arguments like why pass laws against guns if we can't enforce them, but I would reply that we can't prevent burglary from happening, but that doesn't mean we make it legal. The other argument today is to hold concerts, tall buildings, and crazy people equally culpable to the super guns in committing massacres, but tall buildings have their purposes and people like to have fun (would Beagles ban the pre rock and roll festivals they used to have in his neck of the woods?), and crazy people we will always have with us, just part of the broad panoply of humanity..
Super guns (automatic, and the easily-converted semi automatic) give cheap thrills to some idiots on the gun ranges, but other than that serve no useful purpose. If I weigh the cheap thrills of a few against these regularly occurring massacres, I come out in favor of making them illegal. A counter argument here is that there are scads of them out there already, but you'll note that indications are that the current nut bought all his guns nice and legal-like at gun stores. If that avenue had not been open and he had to haggle with gun nuts (and there is a reason they call them gun nuts) for every super gun in his battery he probably would have had fewer super guns and likely would not have killed as many people and I am going out on a limb and say that is a good thing.
But these are skirmishing arguments and Beagles's main argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is that he doesn't want to have Old Betsy torn from his arms. If the gun control nuts win the battle of the super guns, then they will come after the next most potent gun, and the next one after that until finally they have the prize that Beagles knows they have been after all along, Old Betsy, and the deer will roam Beagles's front yard and snicker at him. It is kind of like the domino theory, kind of like Vietnam, which by the way did fall, but did not lead to a global chain that ended up with the commissar moving in next door to Beagles.
There is some truth to it, I am not a big fan of all the pistols that the kids of today are popping off at each other and hitting innocent bystanders (like perhaps myself), and I would like to see them gone also. But once the super guns are gone (Which will never actually happen, but I'm making an argument), the part of the anti gun coalition that were against super guns would drop out and my coalition would not be as strong and the closer it got to Old Betsy the weaker it would be. That is the nature of compromise.
I for one, will be glad when these hurricanes and massacres are over and we can get back to talking about Trump, or hell, even ice cream makers. Say, isn't it deer season?
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