[ If you are new to Ethics Alarms and don’t understand the significance of a Kaboom, go here.]
Should you need any further proof that anti-gun mania turns some people into clinical phobics, melting their ethics alarms and leaving all rationality behind, I give you this, a recent public service video out of San Francisco’s Sleeper 13 Productions:
Could such an ad be more irresponsible? It urges children to
- Go looking for their parents guns (and why did is the gun in the video where a kid can have access to it?);
- Pick them up and handle them (Is the gun loaded?);
- Steal the guns ( Any gun? Shotguns? Rifles? Semi-automatic weapons?)
- Take the guns to school, breaking the law in the process;
- Turn them over to their teachers, who also may have no business handling one.
In the process of this well-intentioned, hysterical brain rot, the PSA also encourages children to be terrified if their parents own a gun, though there is no context at all in the video. Is a parent a cop? An FBA agent? A gun collector? A hunter? A trained marksman? Clint Eastwood? James Bond? Never mind: steal the gun. This attitude is the tell-tale symptom of an anti-gun zealot: it’s the gun itself that is dangerous, and who owns or wields it is irrelevant.
I can conceive of several scenarios where the conduct of the kid in the video would be laudable. A parent is drinking heavily, depressed and suicidal. A parent has threatened a family member with the gun. The parent is Son of Sam, or the parents are Bonnie and Clyde. In those situations, however, the problem is the owner of the gun, not the gun itself. A child in a household with a law-abiding, trained and responsible gun-owner has a reason to feel safe, not threatened, and convincing children otherwise is as wrong as trying to spread racism, eco-terrorism, radical Islam or any other dangerous and warped belief.
Eugene Volokh argues persuasively that the ad passes First Amendment muster. It’s protected speech: vile, dangerous, idiotic, hysterical, ignorant, unethical protected speech. Those who approve of such an ad, as well as those who could devise it, have long abandoned rationality in their blind, mindless fear of firearms.
I knew they were willing to argue almost anything, make up statistics, demonize gun owners, threaten and scream, as well as work to indoctrinate school children with ignorance, fear and hatred regarding guns. I did not believe the zealots were capable of something like this.
Ethics Alarms 
“In the process of this well-intentioned, hysterical brain rot, the PSA also encourages children to be terrified if their parents own a gun, though there is no context at all in the film. Is a parent a cop? An FBA agent? A gun collector? A hunter? A trained marksman? Clint Eastwood? James Bond?”‘
Or how about this:
Is the parent an
God DamnedAmerican?Because if they are, they have a
God DamnedRight to own a fire-arm.You should do a you tube search of “liberals shooting guns for the first time”.
How can it be people have been so brainwashed as to have a physiologically adverse reaction to even holding a gun???
HOW????
My children won’t be drone-ass government kissing wimps…
I can see Christmas has put you in a great state of mind.
It’s not people holding the gun, see. If that were true, then, these nuts would care about who was doing the holding. It’s the gun that is innately deadly and evil, all by itself, no matter where it is. Remember what Jacques Brel said (or his translator)—“If we only have love, we can melt all the guns…” Guns are hate!!!! That’s why pictures of guns and poptarts shaped as gun and deaf kids named “Gunnar” are all so scary in school: it’s the guuuuuuuuun.
Actually, it’s been a great Christmas. But even the serenity of truly meditating on the Miracle of the Incarnation doesn’t bring me to peace with those busy-body Leftist’s who wish to ruin life for all of us in the name of their secular “good”…
See, Christ didn’t want to ruin life for all of us in the name of good.
(to be fair, I did wait until until AFTER Christmas before diving into the many posts I’ve not responded to)
That explains the EA traffic slump over the last two days.
Liberal morality is generally about the righteous individual striving against external evil forces (poverty, big business, Washington fat-cats, inequality, etc.) Conservative morality is generally of the more traditional, religion-based variety, in which the individual struggles internally against himself.
So it makes sense that when confronted with gun violence, a more secular liberal mind will gravitate towards blaming racism in law-enforcement, poverty, lack of opportunity, or even the gun itself. Looking inward is a last resort. Even guys doing life without parole for rape and murder generally place the blame for their hardships somewhere other than within themselves.
This is not irresponsible: it’s insanely dangerous.
What could possibly go wrong?
#1] Sonny does not know how heavy mommy’s gun is. It is loaded. The safety isn’t on because mommy wants to be ready to shoot whoever is waiting to rape or pillage after she’s done retrieving it from the upstairs dresser drawer. Or it’s is released when he handles it, drops it in his backpack*. It goes boom, without any ka-warning. He loses a foot, or a life.
….* drops it in his backpack?? Then what does he have wrapped in the droopy towel he is carrying when he gets to school, walks past the lockers into the classroom, and THEN drops into his backpack.
#2] Sonny is stopped at the metal detector (de rigeur at most schools these days), searched, disbelieved regardless of lack of ammunition (even if that’s the case), arrested, . . . . best case scenario for Sonny is being expelled, distrusted by shamed family, loads of publicity (closed records or not) so his reputation will follow him thru a ruined life. The school administration has justified cost of metal detectors and guard(s), hire more, institute stop-and-frisk measures on school grounds.
#3] Sonny arrives at school, goes directly to classroom, (does not pass GO signs that would take him to assistant principal or advisor), transfers bundle to backpack, sits quietly (“he must have planned it so very carefully” they said afterward, “that he could be so patient”) until class is over, then goes up to the teacher’s desk and instead of speaking first, PULLS OUT A GUN — . Not waiting a split second for the boy-monster to kill her and desirous of saving other innocent lives in the building — much less waiting for him to lay the obscene weapon oh so carefully on the desk and speak his careful speak — she will scream. And scream and scream.
And all the macho male teachers will come and jump on him and beat him half to death. He will be in jail for a long, long time unless he goes the mental institution route. No one will believe him because what he did and how he did it does not make a lick of sense.
No one will believe him when he says he saw it in a movie – because no one could make a movie that stupid. Not even about going over to North Korea and … oh, never mind.
And if the kid does achieve the vidiots’ goal of getting the gun out of the home, what then? Do schools have gun safes? This is receiving stolen property. What if some other kid takes the gun away and makes trouble? If a gun is that unsafe in a home with one or two kids, let’s move it to a school where there’s opportunities for hundreds of mistakes. I have no wish to use or own a gun for security or hunting, but this level of idiocy makes a stronger case against their goals…
I was appalled to see this traveling the internet the last week.
First and foremost, I think we can all agree that any kid taking a gun into school and handing it to a teacher runs the risk of being suspended, expelled or even arrested. We’ve seen enough inanity to know that even kids with the best of intentions are put through the zero-tolerance ringer.
And, as pointed out in the entry itself, the child is essentially stealing his parent’s legal property. That kid has no right to take something that belong to a parent, take it to school and give it to another person, even a teacher. It doesn’t matter if the property is a gun, a butcher knife, a propane tank or an R-rated movie.
It sets a dangerous precedent for teaching kids to report parents for what is, essentially, thought crime. If the gun is not being handled by a dangerous or unstable person, it’s no one’s business, especially the school’s, what goes on at home.
All immaterial to the gunophobic liberal. The ends ALWAYS justify the means.
Excellent justification for several things:
1) If you have kids, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS keep your hand gun in a gun safe, clip out, action open, if possible
2) Assume that the gun is loaded, no matter what. I won’t even bother to list statistics on the number of people shot with “unloaded” guns.
3) If you are going to keep guns, teach your children to handle them safely. At an early age. Impress upon them that a 9MM is not a toy.
4) Make sure that your child understands that NO weapon is to go to school; gun, knife, big stick, nothing.
5) Do NOT, under any circumstance, watch or allow your child to watch, an Internet video made in California.
Especially number 5. Seems surreal to me. When I was in high school, we brought our target rifles to school twice a week, when we would practice for varsity 4-position. It was a magnificent Anschutz .22, worth more than $3000.00 new. This thing printed 1/3 minute of angle or less when kept clean and fed at least CCI Green Tag, and even better with RWS. Never got a second glance.
Okay, so having gotten the serious stuff out of the way, here is the back-story on the video. The sweet young thing seen reading at the beginning of the video is the kid’s mother, even though she herself is only 5 or 6 years older than the boy. However, she is also a member of the Northern California Militia, a far right wing group that advocates the violent overthrow of the San Francisco City Council and the arrest of Nancy Pelosi. She has the gun (which she has no idea how to use) because they stole it from a white police officer who could not shoot them because they were wearing black-face and he thought it might not be politically correct to do so. They subsequently cut his throat. She was hiding the pistol under her pajamas in the hopes that the boy, whom she and her Serbian boyfriend kidnapped when he was 2, would not find it and deduce her nefarious activities. Unfortunately, the kid is way smarter than she is, and knows he has TO DO SOMETHING. Unfortunately, he is not smart enough to know what…like calling the cops on his burner cell phone.
You are sick.
Just like me !!
Submit this to a San Francisco newspaper- or Newsweek- and watch them eat it up!
All you need to know about this is that the closing credits take up 25% of the “film.”
Patting each other on the back is about 75% of the essence of liberalism.
Is that not the most depressed looking group of kids ever? … Except for the isolated fidgety one with the withdrawal jitters.
Jesus, this is infuriating. An amateur effort, but don’t doubt for a minute that every liberal educator intends to make this sort of thing a reality, when the time is right. Sometimes, I feel like an alien race has taken over. By the way, my kid would be in an orphanage if he ever pulled something like that on me.