Nick Freitas of Virginia on gun control
[Hat tip: commenter Geoffrey Britain.]
He’s talking about gun control, but it’s a primer on how to talk about heated issues in general:
Freitas bears watching. When I say that he gave a primer on how to talk about these issues, I certainly don’t mean that a productive talk ensued. In fact, a few Democrats walked out and accused him of—you guessed it—racism.
By the way, the pundits were wrong about Texas this time. I’ve always been reluctant to make political predictions, although every now and then I’ve gone out on a limb to do so. But it’s only become more difficult to make them, not easier, and the polls—always iffy in terms of predictive value—have become more and more discredited in my eyes.
Hear, hear.
I find the whole hysterical debate on guns amusing. What you see is a massive bureaucratic failure and a big CYA operation to divert attention elsewhere. Nicholas Cruz was involuntarily committed to a mental institution. It was not reported to the NICS/FBI background check database. That would have disqualified him from the purchase or possession of any firearm anywhere. He had also violently assaulted his mother who had to be hospitalized. This was not reported to the NICS system. He had been caught with a dangerous weapon at school, a felony, a violation of the Gun Free School Zones Act and this was not reported to the NICS either. He had also assaulted fellow students at school, maybe a felony, again not reported. Cruz broke all these rules and laws and nothing happened to him. So what do we see now? People demonstrating against the NRA and demanding that guns be banned. It looks like Cruz isn’t the only psychotic person out there. The Secrete Service did a study on school shootings and published two reports. They state that these shootings follow a pattern and are predictable and preventable. It’s like the shooters follow a script. They don’t just wake up one morning and decide they are going to get a gun and go to school and shoot some people. They provide plenty of warning signs before they turn deadly.
https://www.secretservice.gov/data/protection/ntac/ssi_final_report.pdf
Forgot the other report.
https://www.nccpsafety.org/resources/library/threat-assessment-in-schools-guide/
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” – Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
Ray:
Sources, please.
I have never read that Cruz was involuntarily committed to any institution. He was recommended for an evaluation, a worker was sent to do some preliminary assessment, and declared him not bad enough to warrant further action. The police were also called to his home many times, sometimes for arguments, sometimes for him throwing things and once for hitting his mother with a plastic vacuum cleaner hose (and once for throwing her against a wall), but never anywhere near to the point where she needed hospitalization (see this, for example). He talked about guns and threatened people verbally, but there is no suggestion that he had actually brought a gun to school—until, of course, the day of the murders.
However, there were other things for which he might have been arrested, such as threats against the school, and things for which he could have been temporarily committed, such as the likelihood of his being dangerous to self or others. His physical assaults on his mother (the plastic hose, the pushing) were also actionable, but I doubt she wanted to press charges.
hit enter too fast
One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.
[SNIP]
[Rote Zora was the feminist terrorists…artfldgr]
Most ’70s of the bombings were done as protest actions. Unlike today’s jihadists, ’70s underground didn’t try to max body count. And ’70s papers didn’t really give a shit. A Puerto Rican group bombed 2 theaters in the Bronx, injuring eleven, in 1970. NYT gave it 6 paragraphs.
[family been to that theater way long ago – artfldgr]
Protest bombings started on college campuses. The guy who moved them off-campus was a dude named Sam Melville.
Melville was an older radical (mid-30s). He’d thought idly about bombings before, but in February ’69 he hooked up with two Quebecois separatists on the run. Melville was fascinated by their knowledge of revolutionary tactics. He admired them so much, he even drove them to the airport so they could hijack a plane to Cuba.
[SNIP]
Logical next step for Melville start a bombing campaign against United Fruit Except United Fruit had moved their warehouse, so he bombed a tugboat company instead. Whoops. Next: a bank, injuring 20. A bombing spree ensued, but the FBI had an informer, and Melville was busted red-handed with a sack full of bombs. He became a hero to the movement, and later a martyr: he was one of the inmates shot in the Attica uprising.
[SNIP]
Burrough traces black radicalism through guys like Robert Williams, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Huey Newton, but for me this particular thread really takes off when it gets to Eldridge Cleaver
[SNIP]
Example #1: Huey Newton, Malcolm X used the idea of violent resistance mainly as a recruiting tool. Eldridge Cleaver believed that shit.
Example #2: Some white leftists (like SLA) worship black revolutionaries, crave their leadership. Others (like the Weathermen) want to lead.
[SNIP]
Cleaver hooked up with the Black Panthers
[SNIP]
In fall of 1968, there were 41 bombings and arson cases on college campuses. We’re not talking letters under doors or vandalism, here. We’re talking about Molotov cocktails setting shit on fire. Here’s how radical SDS was: Burrough notes that Weatherman’s opponents for leadership in SDS elections were “Progressive Labor,” who were literal Maoists. To distinguish themselves, Weatherman called for white radicals to live like John Brown: ie, to kill the enemies of black liberty.
[SNIP]
Weatherman tried to suck up to the flower children by helping Timothy Leary (doing 10 years for 2 joints) escape from prison and to Algiers. They thought about freeing Huey Newton, but Leary was in minimum security and Newton was in max and WELP (Newton was free soon, anyway).
But none of it mattered. Nobody cared.
Weatherman had fucked themselves. They’d abandoned the Black Panthers, who now looked down on them. They were leading nobody. They could have made a difference with the organization of SDS, but they’d set it on fire to build Weatherman. And now they’d decided they weren’t going to kill people any more.
A reminder: during this period Weatherman is being hunted by the FBI. So how are they staying fed, sheltered, alive? Part of it is fake I.D.s. The other part of Weatherman staying alive and free is: they are being funded and supported by the National Lawyers’ Guild.
Weatherman bombed the Pentagon in ’72, but by 1974, they’re fighting among themselves, arguing about feminism (hence their name change to Weather Underground).
[feminism again… radical, with black underground, and genocide, and bombings and more… but guns were easier… no? – artfldgr]
And this is where Weather Underground becomes incredibly relevant to 2016 again: because they decided to re-enter mainstream politics. To do this, they decided, they would take over the radical left, and use that as wedge/entry point to change society.
[SNIP – anyon remember this stuff besides ME]
Moving from the white Leftists to the black revolutionaries, let’s talk for a second about George Jackson. Massive criminal history, seriously violent dude: his own father actually testified against his parole. Jackson was in Soledad prison in 1970 when a fight between white and black inmates broke out in the yard. With no warning, a white guard ended the fight by shooting three black prisoners dead. In retaliation, George Jackson and two other inmates murdered a guard by throwing him off the tier. They became known as the Soledad Three.
Fay Stender, who’d defended Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton, also defended Jackson. She got the radical community backing his freedom and published a book of his letters. So George Jackson got famous
This is where radical professor Angela Davis comes in. Davis, if you don’t know, is so dedicated to communism that she literally got her Ph.D. behind the Iron Curtain. From a moral perspective, that’s a little like somebody getting a Ph.D. in old South Africa specifically because they dig apartheid.
[yeah, and ya know, obama and the left really liked these killers… without saying it to thepeople who forgot them]
[SNIP]
Burrough’s Days of Rage provides a quite good overview of several parts of black radicalism. We’ll review three groups here: BLA, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Family. (There’s also a little mention of the NWLF, who aren’t a black radical movement but fit in timewise with the SLA.)
[in honesty i have to point out i know the Hearsts, i never met mom, but i do know pattys daughter]
in 2016 we saw a lot of news stories about police being targeted for murder, including a spectacular attack in Dallas…and I didn’t seen a single news article mentioning the Black Liberation Army. That’s how forgotten this stuff is!
“Who were the BLA?” is “they were a splinter group of the Panthers.”
[SNIP]
If you’re going to have a war, it makes sense to organize for one. So a NY Panther named Dhoruba Moore organizes the Black Liberation Army. One of Moore’s BLA recruits is a young woman named Joanne Chesimard, later known as Assata Shakur. Another is a fellow named Sekou Odinga.
[these are the people that started RAP, after H RAP brown… not bebop… its Tupacs mother… the war between the panthers never happened]
[SNIP]
In May 1971, BLA started going out shooting cops in NYC. Two cops were killed with a submachine gun fired from a car. Then two more were brutally short down in the street (Burrough gives the details; they are horrifically graphic).
Eldridge Cleaver, BTW, is totally down with this mayhem.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Yeah: in 1971, you could get in a gunfight with cops, shoot a cop, be carrying a gun stolen during a different state’s double cop murder – and get out of prison in less than a year!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
BLA attacks continued, a lone wolf perp in New Orleans, a black radical named Mark Essex, shot 19 people, killing 9, 5 of them cops. Then NYC saw two BLA attacks on cops in 53 hours, and people started thinking that there was a nationwide conspiracy. (It wasn’t that huge.)
[snip]
In 1972, a group called Venceremos, from the Bay Area, literally broke out a black convict named Ronald Beaty during a prison transport so he could train them in guerrilla tactics and lead a revolution. That was their actual plan. That was their entire actual plan.
Exactly that one bit from South Park, but a bunch of ’70s white Bay Area radicals going, “Token, you’re black; you know guerrilla tactics.”
this was when the SLA kidnapped hearst, raped her over and over and basically she joined them… (go figure) – artfldgr
[snop]
what about that NWLF thing?
NWLF was an oddity: domestic terrorism by creative commons. If you wanted to detonate bombs in their name, you could! That was its thing. And people detonated bombs in the name of the NWLF. Regularly. For three years.
In 1975, NWLF bombs went off in San Francisco once a week for nine months. They targeted local politicians, including Dianne Feinstein’s house. NWLF bombed a trial, country clubs, the opera. The bombings didn’t wholly stop until 1978. The reason NWLF bombings stopped: the guy who did most of them went insane and killed his girlfriend with an axe.
[snip]
this led to the taking over of lincoln hospital… holding it hostage for a drug treatment program, getting the program too!!! and running it!!!
the only logical thing to happen at this point in the story is for Tupac Shakur’s future stepfather to study acupuncture.
It turns out that Marxist education is not actually helpful in curing drug addiction, so clinic staffer Mutulu Shakur learns acupuncture. He learns from a doctor working at Lincoln Detox, but his education is interrupted when the doctor dies of a heroin overdose. IN THE CLINIC.
But he finds a new teacher and he and others eventually get doctor of acupuncture degrees from the Acupuncture Association of Quebec. Naturally, with a cushy city gig and a growing acupuncture practice, Shakur comes to the same decision you would in such a situation: “I should use this place and its connections to start robbing banks so I can raise money to start a revolution.”
“Also,” he doubtless added, “to pay for a cocaine habit that is already considerable *fnorrrrrrrrkkkkkk*”
Reminder: this is all happening at a drug treatment clinic that is fully funded by the tax dollars of the City of New York!
But Shakur has never robbed a bank. He needs an experienced bank robber and oh look here comes Sekou Odinga, formerly of the BLA! Naturally, Shakur and Odinga need some logistical support,
and what better place to find this than a bunch of white communist feminists
The feminists are the May 19 Communist Organization, whom Odinga knows through a white radical named Marilyn Buck, who had bought ammo for BLA. Black leadership fetishization is in full effect, so May 19 looks at Shakur and Odinga and assumes OF COURSE they know WTF they’re doing. This union of Lincoln Detox, the last of the BLA, and a bunch of feminist commies gives birth to the radical group known as the Family.
[the family… that was also the name of Mansons group… this then leads to the brinks job with the BLA to start a race war (which was the same idea of mansons family]
Turns out massive amounts of cocaine and firearms are never a good mix. The Family killed a Brink’s guard during an NYC armored car robbery, which drew serious NYPD attention. And then October 20, 1981 happened. An armored car robbery. White radicals driving, black radicals shooting.
BIG SNIP SKIP
What if fanatics made a serious and nearly successful attempt on the life of the President of the United States?
What if those fanatics got into the Capitol building and committed a mass shooting on Congress while it was in session?
What if those fanatics conducted bombing sprees, for years, in multiple American cities?
what if people really did do every one of those things, and you’d never heard of them?
The President they tried to kill was Harry Truman, in 1950, as told in the book American Gunfight. They shot up Congress in 1954, wounding five Congressmen (who recovered). They bombed American cities like mad in the 1970s.
The ’70s bombing campaign was done by a group called FALN. The FBI’s working theory is that the FALN was a creation of Cuban intelligence.
so now you may get why feinstein and others are for grabbing guns… they remember what they dont want to remind you of.. and unlike the public they know this whole thing and hwo they got to work with these people…
but guns were easy to get then.. compared to today
and they chose what?
By the way, the pundits were wrong about Texas this time.
In 2014, the Demos believed they had the candidate to win the Governor’s race- Wendy Davis, the pride of West Warwick, RI. (As a child I spent a lot of time with cousins in East Greenwich, a town adjacent to West Warwick). The more Wendy talked, the worse she sounded. I was going to say the worse she looked, but she is rather good looking. She ended up losing by a landslide 60-40.
That being said, Hillary did a lot better in Texas.
Gun control= People control
Neo,
I can’t find a source. I am embarrassed to admit that I did not verify those claims before passing them on. I’m going to pull a semi Dan Rather and say they are fake but inaccurate.
All Reps should be repeating, over and over, that the Dem party was the racist Jim Crow party — wanting different laws for whites & blacks. That the Dems put US citizens of Japanese parentage into US concentration camps – the Dems, under FDR. Not death camps, but real concentration camps. Most in Europe don’t know this, either.
The Dems, today, want to treat Reps like the Dems of the past treated blacks. To dehumanize them, insult them, and punish them as if they’re guilty of one crime or another — because they are guilty of being the wrong people.
Tribalism in Africa is hurting (almost?) every multi-tribal country. And the Dems want to create a PC-tribe with power & privileges greater than any other non-PC group.
The Dems have been, and remain, racist/ tribalist. Not treating all people as equal under the law.
Here’s another issue that could use some straight-talking from someone like Freitas:
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/03/08/the-strange-feminist-silence-on-islam/
I agree with Freitas – but this is not a great rhetorical style.
The only thing to learn from Freitas rhetorically is to refuse to play into the Left’s framing of the story, refuse the invitation to enter into the apologetic, justifying pose sketched out by the Left – and to draw that framing into the spotlight and critique it. He eventually does that… but until then, who is left listening?
For better or worse, we are in an era where emotive visuals and small sound bites rule. To the point where many people no longer have the capacity/capability to follow longer arguments.
There is no shortage of opportunities to frame the debate about the 2nd Amendment in emotionally compelling ways – and to paint people on the other side into a corner.
That is a powerful speech! Amen!