Jon Stewart spoke about the South Carolina shooting yesterday. I'm sure you'll see it on liberal blogs and broken down into meme form, where liberals can share it without having to actually think and form an opinion on their own. That's how they do.
I want to start off by saying that I appreciate Jon Stewart's sincerity. If you're looking for "You won't believe what Jon LEIBOWITZ said about guns," you should know this isn't the website for you. Everyone has had an emotional reaction to what happened, and Stewart's always been good at handling these tragedies with relative class and tact. I wish more of his blind devotees would take that from him, as opposed to trolling Conservatives on Twitter who flat out called the shooter a racist terrorist... by claiming that they're just racist and not calling him a terrorist enough anyway. Fox News lies, all that crap.
That said, it doesn't change the fact Jon Stewart is wrong about a number of points.
The "we don't do shit" is a straw man. This is exactly WHY so many states have enacted Castle Doctrine laws, and opened up to more
CCW. Here's the thing,
statistically it works. Consistently. Violence is down in these places across the board. Some other states (like Illinois for a long time) have tried to create more stringent gun control laws with less than desirable results. The point is that the country is doing "shit" all the time!
Also, domestic killers are VERY different from terrorists. Why? Because freedom complicates things. For better or worse. Foreign terrorists aren't and should never be afforded the luxuries that come with the freedom of being an American citizen. We have to still allow freedom, it's the central weave of the fabric that creates American culture. It also comes with consequences. Freedom is a good thing, a great thing. But it also comes with the very real risk that certain people will abuse it.
Just like driving a car. It provides incredible freedom. Trips that would take weeks (and a bad bout of scurvy) can now be accomplished in mere hours, people can get better jobs, families can visit each other more often. It's incredible. At the same time, we are affording that freedom to a sixteen year old girl with poor reaction time and an iPhone. The kind of damage that can and regularly does occur, is immense. Life-changing.
Jon Stewart has regularly lambasted the Patriot Act and NSA. Why? Because of their violations of freedom. I agree with many of his positions on these issues.
But listening in on someone's sales call is not nearly as offensive as the idea that some government bureaucrat can remove my ability to protect my family. Jon, I just hope you think about that before you start sliding down this slippery slope.
Freedom still matters. It always matters.
