So the anonymous conservative blogger who runs the blog called, er, Anonymous Conservative, is upset that The Human Rights Campaign, an influential LGBT group, is calling for stricter gun laws in the wake of the Orlando massacre.
To Anonymous Conservative, calling for gun control rather than, well, Muslim control is evidence that gays are too illogical to ever be trusted to tell the truth. Or at least it’s a good excuse for AC to pretend that he thinks gays are too illogical to ever be trusted with the truth.
And if gays are this illogical, AC concludes, gun owners should never vote to convict anyone charged with hate crimes.
Dear reader, your immediate reaction to this leap in, er, logic may be the same as my immediate reaction:
So let’s try to make sense of AC’s rather novel argument. Near the start of his post on this subject, AC sets forth his thesis:
[I]f these gays want to try and attack the rights of gun owners, all gun owners need to point out is that if they begin to feel hostile to gays, and begin to see gays as too emotional and illogical, they might begin to not believe the testimony of gays in trials.
Huh. It sounds like these hypothetical gun owners are deciding to dismiss testimony from gays out of spite, not because they genuinely believe that gays are unreliable witnesses. But AC insists he’s sincere, though I’m pretty sure he’s not being sincere about that.
Personally now, I am quite confident that nothing a gay says could be believed, if they cannot come to terms with the fact that Islamic fundamentalism, and not a gun, was the cause of the Orlando shooting. I can’t help but realize how that realization of their illogicality would contaminate any testimony from any gay in a trial setting. I would even question whether any physical evidence was manufactured by an overly emotional gay, unable to deal with simple reality as it exists.
If all gun owners felt this way, AC concludes,
it would in effect jury-nullify all hate crimes laws, and possibly affect any trial involving a crime committed against a gay.
AC thinks this brilliant scheme would be easy as pie to pull off:
There are about 102 million gun owners out there (32% of all Americans), and all a defense attorney would need to do is find one to put on the jury of a man who beat a gay guy, stabbed a transgender, or murdered a transvestite. Did a transgender man use the girls locker room when a pee wee swim team was changing, and get beaten to a pulp? Don’t think the beater is going to get convicted on the word of the gay.
Yeah, it’s not like there would be other evidence or anything. Except maybe “the gay’s” physical injuries, bloodstains on the assailant’s clothes, an entire pee wee swim team’s worth of witnesses, surveillance camera footage of the beater fleeing the scene, or, wait, that does sound like a lot of evidence.
If gays think guns should be banned, then the gay’s testimony is meaningless, and I would assume any evidence had been fabricated in an overemotional meltdown.
Ah, yes, because gays have the ability to fabricate injuries, video footage, an entire locker room full of witnesses.
[I]f gays are this unable to perceive simple reality, I could probably never vote to convict in any such case. I suspect if I had been on the trial of the Orlando shooter tomorrow, I am not sure I would have been able to vote guilty, given the stories of a second shooter, the gay holding the door shut, and the fact that the shooter himself appears to have been gay.
Dude, you’re aware that the shooter is dead, right? Dead men aren’t generally tried for murder.
It would all have been too convoluted, I suspect. I would probably have let him walk out the door of the courtroom a free man, and I would have felt it was the only moral outcome, given my convictions regarding the gay’s inability to perceive simple realties such as Islamic radicalism, and the fact guns reduce crime when the law abiding have them.
I’m pretty sure it’s not “the gay” who is having trouble perceiving reality here.
The potential consequences against gays would admittedly be dangerous. Millions of people who want to commit crime might begin targeting gays specifically, knowing that they would be unlikely to be convicted, given how all it would take is one of the 102 million gun owners to land on their jury – and the lawyers of the perpetrator would undoubtedly be looking for gun owners to put on the jury.
Nice justice system you’ve got here, pity if something were to happen to it.
Also, dude, you do realize, don’t you, that prosecutors also get to screen jury members, and could veto anyone who seemed to believe any of the nonsense you’re peddling.
Gang members, who need to kill somebody as an initiation might seek out gays as victims, thinking they would be a free kill, and sadly there would be nothing I could do about that.
Would these gang members flash their car lights at gay drivers to get them to pull their cars over?
Those prone to engage in violence against gays specifically because of homophobia might be emboldened, and gay attacks could increase precipitously, and obviously all of those gay attackers going free without any consequence would be unfortunate.
Nice justice system you’ve got here, pity if something were … oh wait, we did that already.
However gays do not seem to consider our safety when contemplating their actions. They are all too happy to try and make us and our families less safe by preventing us from getting the guns we want to protect them. So the idea that gays would be less safe due to our realization that gays are too emotional and cannot be trusted, would not be of concern to me. I would have to vote my conscience – every time – and I suspect most other gun owners would as well.
And as an added bonus, this dumbass idea might bring about the collapse of civilization itself!
Once a group is, from a practical perspective, unable to appeal to the justice system for justice, it will not be long before the entire system’s foundation is in question. I suspect most politicians, rather than see this come to pass, would rather let everything cool off.
Perhaps this is the only path forward for the nation however – one step closer to Apocalypse.
Dude, why wait for the possible apocalypse? Seal yourself up in your doomsday bunker right now and avoid the rush!
I was always think it’s hilarious when “demonologists” go on about how dangerous Ouija boards are. It’s fine for a movie, but when people clutch their pearls over a Hasbro game in real life, it’s pretty ridiculous.
Shorter AC: “Yeah, that’s the reason. It’s definitely not that the average gun nut is also a raging bigot with a persecution complex and a deep-seated longing for revenge.”
@ proudfootz
Ooh, here was I thinking I was being off topic when all the time I was posting about a feminist; spooky! Wonder what the mystic hippos would have to say about that?
@Eleni
Also, we don’t use ableist slurs here. Check the comments policy.
Off topic, but the Trump campaign paid money to a sketchy “advertising” firm named Draper Sterling.
Lots of people asking if I’m joking about Trump’s 35K in payments to an ad firm called “Draper Sterling”
I’m not https://t.co/NMBXKjNLLn
Hopefully the tweet actually embeds.
For those who didn’t watch Mad Men, Donald Draper and Roger Sterling were the names of two of the main characters. Wow.
ETA: Damnit. Oh well. Click on the link to see a screenshot of the documents from Trump’s campaign finance report.
These are the types of people who go on about “the bullet box” and how if you don’t get your way through democratic elections, well, you can always vote with your bullets.
And it’s liberal gun-control types who, by virtue of being in favor of things like background checks on all gun purchases, regulations on magazine sizes and the sale of hollow point ammunition, “no fly no buy”, and restrictions on the sale of semi-automatic rifles, are “tyrannical” and “despotic”.
You hear it over and over: “We have the guns, we make the rules.” That’s actually a much better argument for repealing the 2nd Amendment than it is for protecting it.
“Who cares what my fellow citizens vote for? I have a gun!” — says the person who’s totally not advocating tyranny.
Not sure why rational people believe that citizens should have an unfettered right to own semi-automatic weapons. For what purpose would a citizen need such a weapon? Certainly they would be overkill for hunters as they would render the meat inedible. And they are overkill for self-defense purposes.
Hoping that Secretary Clinton works towards gun control reform if she’s able to get the House and Senate in November. This should be a priority issue for the Democrats.
Clinton actually succeding at imposing gun control ? I can’t see it.
Surely AnonyCon is trolling. It is too ridiculous to be otherwise. At least I hope it is… ?
@Ohlmann
Especially consdiering she gets massive donations from the NRA.
But back on topic “we think guns are for protection so much that if you take them away we’ll take away your protection from hate crimes.” Bloody bigots, they can hardly get their hate right. Frankly sometimes I think the only reason why they’re mad is because a white guy didn’t cause it or it hasn’t killed enough people to please their cowardly bloodlust.
@WWTH
Spoilerz for MADMEN:
Obviously fake. Trump shoulda known that Don was still at his spiritual retreat. Wait, they’re both named Don? Conspiracy! Then again, Draper’s name actually is a conspiracy, so what’s Trump hiding? Where’s his long form birth certificate? And his school records?
Funny how he imagines people whose sexuality and/or gender he disapproves of purely as victims of crime, to the point of gloating about it.
Because if these stains really think they should discount any testimony given by “the gay”, presumably that means also testimony as witnesses, as jurors, as arresting officers, as judges and lawyers. As human beings in society, in fact.
Also, it would be impractical unless he’s able to instantly identify everyone whose testimony he can dismiss as worthless. Tattooing their faces? Some kind of badge? Electronic tagging?
What could possibly go wrong with that?
@wwth
Someone in the comments on that tweet wrote, “No Vandelay Industries?”
The American Conservative is running with a picture of the Hindenberg disaster for this story.
I dislike waking up in a country where Congress barely tries to keep people safe from being shot, but is very eager to keep women from controlling their reproduction, and to tell transfolk where they should pee.
“Patriots for America”, brought to you by Draper Sterling:
http://moscout.com/patriots-for-america-brought-to-you-by/
FEC complaint against Patriots for America (pdf)
Soooooo much projection about ’emotional responses’ in that ridiculousness. And this guy has once again shown that those who endlessly announce their superior reason and logic have never been in the same multiverse as either concept.
Sticking to the subject of gun control after massacres (as this man has produced the most bizarre and piss poor argument about gun control and hate crimes I have ever read), the UK has made changes to the laws on gun ownership after every massacre by gun/s we have suffered.
3 in the last 30 years – all by ‘angry white men’.
Our gun control laws work pretty well – the vast majority of gun crime is related to other crimes, and the average person in the UK has never been near a gun.
I do not object to people shooting as a hobby, or farmers having guns, but the relationship between guns and the pro gun far right in the US seems less than ‘healthy’ – the right to bear arms being seen as an essential to show patriotism, it would appear.
Spree killings are of course the most distressing, but just the every day that the US has to accept as the norm would be absolutely unthinkable in Europe.
@ ellesar
I’m a keen shooter, rifles now but pistols back in the old days. I remember when the new laws came in. Remember that ‘self defence’ had never been accepted as a reason to own a gun (actually says that on the application for a firearms ticket) so gun ownership was the province of target shooters, deer hunters and farmers.
There was some half hearted suggestions that the problems could be addressed by ensuring that pistols were kept at approved ranges rather than home but the mindset, especially after Dunblane, was nothing was more important than preventing kids being murdered and we can always get a new hobby.
Now pistols are generally illegal and rifles are restricted (no more than 2 shot capacity with full bore ammo, if you want more capacity than that you’re limited to .22)
If I do want to pistol shoot it’s easy to arrange trips abroad but, like most of my fellow shooters, I’m happy just plinking away with a .22 rifle.
ETA: I can remember Hungerford and Dunblane but what was the other one?
Cumbria came up when I googled Dunblane and Hungerford.
I like to reference Dunblane and the Wolverhampton machete attack: close in time, but very different as to result, due partly to the difference in weapons.
It’s like they don’t even read their own writing.
I’m trying to imagine what a transgender man would be doing in the girls locker room unless he hasn’t come out or transitioned yet.
@ ledasmom
The Wolverhampton case is a handy rebuttal to the “if they didn’t have guns they’d just use knives” argument. Horrible as it was no-one was killed. Hats off to the very brave school teacher who protected the children too. She suffered an appalling injury but she wouldn’t have been able to stand in the way against a gun.
Ah, you know you’re deep into far-right fringe territory when people start muttering about jury nullification. Wingnuts think it’s a magic solution to any law they don’t like.
Somehow I doubt the sincerity of Anonymous Conservative’s concern for that “gay,” if he’s so gleefully raising the spectre of transgender people creeping on little girls.
@ ledasmom
Lisa Potts GM, the nursery teacher in question is a health visitor now, has written some childcare books and is also involved with a charity working with vulnerable kids. Glad to say she’s made a full recovery.
http://c8.alamy.com/comp/BWJBY0/ten-years-ago-lisa-potts-became-a-household-name-after-receiving-the-BWJBY0.jpg
The dumbest part of this is that he thinks anyone will believe that this is a change in attitude for him.
He already hates gay people, and all he’s got in his toolbox “I’ll hate you even more unless you agree with me.”
Entirely unrelated but funny: I keep getting an ad for “20 rare historical photos declassified”… Illustrated by a Photoshop from the Russian Sleep Experiment creepypasta.
Future ads: “Candid pics these 10 celebrities don’t want you to see” illustrated by Slender Man, “15 bizarre deep sea creatures to haunt your dreams” illustrated by Freddy Krueger.