Reply #41: Oh well.

[Lexingtonian]

Apparently Republicans haven't fully cornered the market in stupidity just yet.

You know what would really drive them up the wall and scare them? Saying "I could care less about guns, whatever you or I do with them is irrelevant to the outcome."

No matter what we do, some people simply will engage in murder/suicide behavior when Times Change and they are psychologically unable to cope. That's Japanese commanders in caves on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Nazi snipers in French and Russian villages. In American history they tend to be psychiatrically diagnosable fruitcakes who slipped past the social nets- David Koresh, Jim Jones, Timothy McVeigh.

Arming up with guns is useless against these people, probably totally counterproductive even. Look at how fervent the 'militias' became that the ATF teams sent out to confiscate their massive caches of military weaponry were a conspiracy to enslave and kill them. ("They hate us for our freedom." Obviously.)

What worked against the 'militias' in the mid-Nineties was mainstream society deciding they were near-homocidal jerks and idiots and racists and criminal/psychopathic organizations unless they proved otherwise. McVeigh put the burden of proof on them to show otherwise and they couldn't. Their wives, parents, kids, and coworkers told them they were being ridiculous- if they just wanted to tote guns and shoot up stuff in the woods and get drunk together, they could do that without the wacko political crap. If the political crap was serious, they were talking criminality and mayhem at odds with being the moral high ground and Real Americans, and they should just join a political party and put up websites and such.

The 'militias' mostly just vanished during the late Clinton years of their own accord. Most the membership just walked away. A lot probably joined normal gun clubs or paintball fighting clubs. A bunch became this whole diffuse Internet webpage white supremacy thang.