Is That Legal?

Um, Tom Jefferson? John Stuart Mill? John Brown? William Wallace? Mao Tse Tung (gun control for thee, but not for me...)

Maybe Condi Rice's father? She says that when she was a girl, the men in her Alabama neighborhood organized armed citizens groups to keep lynch mobs and other hostile and violent segregationists at bay. Applying the Steve Gilliard/Michael Steele test, I realize that's probably inauthentic and outside of the Black experience (Black people doing something that looks suspiciously like an NRA-supported activity), but perhaps it might seem relevant to you if you just said "persecuted minority arms itself with civilian weapons and organizes to prevent hostile majority from bombing, raping, hanging and otherwise assaulting."

Oh, I'm sorry. Can't help the snark. I'm just amazed watching the amazing pitfalls of Steele. As if getting pelted by Oreos at speaking events wasn't enough. Yesterday it seems his campaign headquarters were broken into and all the laptop computers stolen. I'm sure it was completely innocent, thieves just randomly happened into that place. Could have happened to anybody, including the several other political HQ offices on the same street, the couple law offices, the bars or restaurants, or the jewelry shops or boutiques nearby. Totally random, nothing to see here. A little off topic but the Condi Rice thing got me thinking.

You post just isn't accurate, Eric. Kopel is responding to the remarks of a gun control advocate who essentially said Luther would have favored gun control out of Christian pacifism. Kopel doesn't make a single affirmative statement as to what Luther's stance would be on our modern political questions. Rather, he simply points out that Luther recognized that Christians have a duty to use force to defend their neighbors against violence.

Your post is as misleading as it would be to say: "Eric Muller continues to line up the historical figures who support gun control. Last week it was the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis; this week it's Martin Luther."

Shame on you!

Bumper Sticker: "I'm a gun owner and I pray."

One wonders how Mother Theresa was able to navigate the mean back streets of Calcutta after dark. The folds of a habit can be wonderful hideaways. Turning the other cheek can have poignancy and a would-be mugger might be miraculously drawn to sinner's remorse when he suddenly finds himself peering into the twin circular depths of a Remington Derringer.

No day of mine is really complete without a scolding from lostingotham.

Lighten up, friend.

Well, Jesus was a revolutionary after all-
http://www.iisg.nl/exhibitions/chairman/cub19.html

Al is certainly right in his implication about the theft from Steele's campaign. As he says, of all the places along that road the thieves only hit his office... and five others... and a couple of cars. But I'm sure that was all just to cover up the theft of four laptops with no important information on them. Nobody ever steals laptops except for politics. Sure, even Steele's campaign says that it was just a theft, not a political dirty trick, but you can't trust them. They're probably just part of the anti-Steele conspiracy!

I don't know David Kopel from Ted Koppel, but he makes several good points about Luther. There WERE at least two Luthers when it came to governmental authority: the non-violent defender of the divinely established political order, and the defender of active resistance against the Holy Roman Empire, which was attempting to extinguish Protestantism.

Citing Luther (WWLD!) either in support or against gun control is silly. Kopel was right to take the minister to task.

I'll point out that if you are a religious minority, if you can get hold of ample small arms, you can hold off a larger, better armed conventional military force. The Bosnian Muslims pulled this off in the face of the Croat and Serb armies in the early 90s.

Thanks for the update Mojo. Those are facts I didn't know.

I reckon I'm probably wrong on the other stuff too, that he was probably inadvertantly called "little black Sambo" and pelted with Orea cookies because he was standing in the wrong crowd at the time.

I'm disappointed about Kipling. Next thing you know, he'll be arguing in favor of British Imperialism.

"I'll point out that if you are a religious minority, if you can get hold of ample small arms, you can hold off a larger, better armed conventional military force. The Bosnian Muslims pulled this off in the face of the Croat and Serb armies in the early 90s."

And it of course had nothing to do with the fact that teh Serbs and Croatians were also fighting each other, that the Bosnians outnumbered the others in certain areas, and that there were some international troops around.
Of course, knowing quite a few Bosnians who fled during the early 90s, I think they would disagree with your description of their success.

Jesus Christ, that's one big gun!

Well, god did have a hell of a lot of smiting to do.

By the way, why would god create all the critters, but leave man to invent and evolve different types of guns (and toasters, cars, etc.)?

Gee, I dunno. I was there too. From a standpoint of military metrics, they did okay. If I was in their shoes as a citizen, I would think I'd lost terribly. If you look at the larger picture, they more or less got their sovereign country, they got rid of the Serbs and the Croats, and they also have an apparently permanent NATO force hanging out to protect them, which sure alleviates the defense spending burden. So I'd say they did alright. Part of it stems from the decision of Bosnian military commanders to mortar the Sarajevo marketplace, which was then spun as a Serb bombing (a line parroted without question by Christiane Amanpour) to force European intervention, but hey, you have to break a few eggs, right? Again, a military assessment of the situation, not a civilian viewpoint. I'm sure anybody defending against conventional military forces using small arms and wit would find the losses horrendous and maybe impossible to stomach; to an outside military observer (and to the invading conventional force) the horrid losses might look like an effective guerilla campaign.

I think lostingotham has a point. Either this blog is serious, in which case it is an inaccurate representation of Kopel's post, or it is sort of a drive-by sarcasm blog. Personally, it seems to me to morph into "oh that was sarcasm" when the post turns out to be flawed. Could be wrong, but that appears to happen every now and then as per above.

Eric Muller wrote:

"Lighten up, friend."

Heh. Seems I've given you the same advice a few times (especially re: Michelle Malkin).

Trying to have it both ways, friend?

Fair enough. I'll ease up when you do. ;)

But Lostingotham, there's one key difference between my contact with you and yours with me. You visit my blog regularly, and so you get to see me in a number of different moods. I see you only through your fairly frequent comments, which are almost invariably stern, disappointed, scolding, or lecturing.

I *do* lighten up here, Lostingotham, pretty often, actually, and I share it with you. You, on the other hand, never lighten up here.

So lighten up!

(Or don't; I'll continue to post your comments anyhow, as they're always worth reading.)

I coulda sworn I posted a "sorry that the comments are always rags since you're usually so brilliant" comment a while back. Please consider it included by reference herein.

I also hope you realize that I don't bother to gripe about 99.9% of the tripe I read (Michelle Malkin's continuing flow of "work," for example), mostly because I doubt the writer has the self-respect to care even if my complaints prove valid. When you're not fobbing off an error as sarcasm (see RWS's post above), you're an exception. As your mother probably told you, Eric, "I'm only critical of you because I love you."

More historical figures in the gun control debate:

For: the Ku Klux Klan
Against: Jonathan Bingham, drafter of the privileges & immunities clause of the 14th Amendment

source: Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309 (1991).