Why I stopped commenting at Common Gunsense... Again

For those who don't know, Common Gunsense is a blog run by a board member of the Brady Campaign, Joan Peterson.  She happens to be bat shit crazy, but she IS a gift that keeps on giving.

I heard a little birdy tell me that she was slamming Alaska so I trolled over to check out the posts.  Sure enough she was claiming that decreased training for CCW = increased gun deaths.  See Alaska has the highest gun deaths in the country and they have so called "Constitutional Carry."  Oh noes!  Case closed!

Of course, reasoned discourse broke out after my first comment or two.  Her reply:

Dear Chris,As you can see, several of your comments were published by me. Some were not. Your paranoia is showing. I don't publish comments that attack me and lecture me. Have a nice day.

My first comment was long, near the word count limit.  It got Reasoned Discoursed so I provided a shorter bullet format summary using smaller words because I suspect she has some sort of learning disability.  Sadly, I rebooted my computer with the notepad file so I lost the original.  I suppose Joan could do me the favor of posting it but the cognitive dissonance would probably make her cranium explode.

The key points were as follows:

• At most, "better safety training for people carrying guns in public" would have affected 2.5% (or 3 out of 120) of 2007 Alaska gun deaths, and likely many fewer.  80% of the "gun deaths" in Alaska in 2007 were suicides (CDC WISQARS data).  17.5% of them were homicides (FBI data), the majority of which were almost certainly committed by prohibited persons who could not touch a firearm legally (my own analysis and ADN reporting).  The remaining 2.5% were either unknown causes, cops shooting perps, civilians lawfully defending themselves (justifiable homicides), or accidents.  Resources are limited and attention focused on one thing so if we want to really bring down "gun deaths" why not reduce suicides by looking at mental health service access, substance abuse in rural areas, endemic domestic violence, and other proven interventions?
• Training is expensive.  It also takes time.  If it is going to be mandatory then the "common sense" compromise is for the training to be subsidized via a refundable tax credit, along with allowances for child care, as well as making training available on nights and weekends.  Such a scheme is argueably quite constitutional (likely as a federal-state program) under the powers defined in Article I/Section 8 of the Constitution.  After all, if training is effective in reducing accidents then it should be available to as many people as possible, right?
• Efforts to deny suffrage to minority groups through "poll taxes" and "literacy tests" were evil.  Even Joan describes voter ID laws as "voter suppression efforts" and seems to dislike them.  I suspect that charging people a fee to worship in a particular type of place (imagine NYC charging a "Jihadist Monitoring Fee" to people going to mosques?), requiring expensive training to order books on Amazon or right a letter to the editor, or getting an expensive permit before being able to assert fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination would be deemed unacceptable suppression of civil rights.  Why is it ok to suppress the exercise of the 2A based on income?
  
  I guess the straw that pushed her over the edge was my comment that "in my vision of America, a poor working single mom with three kids in the inner city has just as much an ability to exercise her rights as a wealthy doctor in the 'burbs.  We shouldn't parcel out rights in this country based on income or zip code."  For those who don't know, Joan has described her husband as a doctor and I suspect that she lives in a comfortable wonderbread suburban lifestyle -- oh, yeah, and she's a gunowner (I still don't understand how she can keep guns in the home and simultaneously believe that having guns in the home increases her risk of death at the hands of a family member 43 times or whatever the nonsense is these days).  So I guess it hits close to home when you point out the "rights for me, but not for the poor 'urban' people" inconsistency in her mindset.

Apparently those points are "paranoid."  That's right, the entire fricking civil rights movement was apparently paranoid because they saw poll taxes and literacy tests as having the result of suppressing exercise of a right.  Joan has made it clear that she has a very different vision of America, one where the privileged elite who make "enough" money, went to the "right" schools, and have the "right" kind of friends/connections have rights and the "urban" proletariat just don't.  How "progressive."

Joan is absolutely right about one thing though.  People need to stop lecturing her.  I stopped for a long time and this latest incident reminds me why.  People like Joan Peterson shouldn't be lectured, because lecturing implies some sort of teaching/learning process is occurring   People like Joan are bigots who want to systematically strip civil rights from the poor and powerless.  It is fairly disturbing to believe that people in general should worship/vote/assemble/speak their minds/keep arms/refuse to quarter soldiers/etc less.  It moves into evil territory when the people in society who are relatively weak and powerless are specifically targeted to have their rights stripped first.

She is simply pursuing an agenda best defined as "troubling" in a manner which is best described as "opportunistically evil."  Cognitive dissonance does not bother her.  She cannot be appeased with compromise.

Joe Huffman is right:  driving the anti-rights bigots to political extinction and irrelevancy is the only way to proceed.

UPDATE:  She actually posted one of the shorter rebuttals and claimed to not understand the issue.  She also wrote...
"Migo- explain to me how self defense is an inalienable right. "
This nonsense about requiring training disenfranchising the poor is ridiculous and specious. If you want to eliminate training using that as an excuse, you are using a very poor and dangerous argument. If poor people can afford guns, they can afford the training."

So, basically -- "BAH!  Let them eat cake!"  It must be easy to say, "oh, if you can afford a gun you can afford to pay over a grand for the permit process (Cali, NYC, DC, for example) from the point of view of a priveleged housewife married to a wealthy professional living in a nice suburb.  THe view probably looks a little different from the other side of the poverty line.