Gun control, gun control, gun control.

It is an issue that just won’t go away.  I usually find myself of the mindset that says, sure, we should make people prove both their ability to use a gun without “accidents” before we let them buy one.  However George Jonas makes an interesting point about gun control and the Indian terror attacks.  Essentially, he says that the law abiding citizens in India, with the strictest gun control on earth, were victims largely because the gun wielding terrorists didn’t follow the law and the gun wielding policemen did not do anything until it was too late.  By keeping guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens the Indian government gave the terrorists a leg up.  Jonas says,

“Guns don’t kill, people do.” The gun lobby’s old slogan is true enough, but it’s also true that guns make people more efficient killers. That’s why gun control would be such a splendid idea if someone could find a way to make criminals and lunatics obey it. Since only law-abiding citizens obey it, it’s not such a hot idea. It’s more like trying to control stray dogs by neutering veterinarians.

He goes on to say,

There are Second Amendment absolutists in America, and libertarians elsewhere, who regard a person’s birthright to own/carry a firearm beyond the state’s power to regulate. I’m not one of them. I think it’s reasonable for communities to set thresholds of age, proficiency, legal status, etc., for the possession of lethal weapons, just as they set standards for the operation of motor vehicles, airplanes and ham radios. But it seems to me that, within common sense perimeters, you’d want to enhance, not diminish, the defensive capacity of the good guys, and increase rather than decrease the number of auxiliary crime-fighters who are available to be deputized when the bad guys start climbing over the fence.

Exactly.

Update: License is one of those words that always gets me.  Post retitled accordingly.

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One of two things is about to happen.  We are either going to have an election, or the liberals are going to have to do some serious backpedalling.  Today the Government released it’s motion to extend the role in Afghanistan to 2011.  The most important feature of this motion (and I think the closest thing to an olive branch the Government is offering the opposition) is:

whereas the results of progress in Afghanistan, including Canada’s military deployment, will be reviewed in 2011 (by which time the Afghanistan Compact will have concluded) and, in advance, the government will provide to the House an assessment and evaluation of progress, drawing on and consistent with the Panel’s recommendations regarding performance standards, results, benchmarks and timelines; and
whereas the ultimate aim of Canadian policy is to leave Afghanistan to Afghans, in a country that is better governed, more peaceful and more secure;

therefore, the House supports the continuation of Canada’s current responsibility for security in Kandahar beyond February 2009, to the end of 2011, in a manner fully consistent with the UN mandate on Afghanistan, but with increasing emphasis on training the Afghan National Security Forces expeditiously to take increasing responsibility for security in Kandahar and Afghanistan as a whole so that, as the Afghan National Security Forces gain capability, Canada’s combat role should be commensurately reduced,

It then provides the two conditions that have been in the news from the Manley report.  Helicopter and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle support from allies and 1000 more troops from our NATO allies.

There are two things about this I want to comment on.  The first is the acknowledgement that should we leave in 2009 we will leave an unstable region to further destabilze.  Further to this the goal is for Canadian troops to play an increasingly supplementary role through 2011.  The goal is not to wait until 2011 to renew the mission but to work to 2011 to complete it.  As opposed to leaving in failure in 2009.

The second is what I found interesting in the commentary.  The government doesn’t see this as necessarily a winning proposition in the election.  It is believed that the Liberal party will actually gain support for opposing the conflict in Afghanistan.  Far be it for me to judge what is politics and what is not, but it looks as if this motion is something the Conservative party believes in.  Because if the Government falls on this motion they don’t stand to gain much.

(you can read the whole motion here)

I thought this article by Mark Steyn was pretty interesting.  He’s (if I remember correctly) a  fairly conservative writer, but he does hit on some pretty interesting points.  Instead of engaging in dialogue the group he’s criticized has decided to fight him.  Not legitimately in a regular court for libel but by going to the Human Rights Tribunal.  He raises another valid point with this.  Why is it that the human rights tribunal here in Canada has a 100% conviction rate?  That sounds suspisciously like a system that can easily be milked, and according to Mark Steyn, that’s what’s going on.

Sick and tired that is. I’m not one for politics in general but I have to say that I’m borderline hating the Liberals. I’m not quite sure what it is. Sure they’ve stolen millions of dollars (Maybe even billions if we ever hear where all the money for the gun registry went) from the Canadian people. Sure they’ve been dishonest and openly insulted our closest ally and trading partner (that would be the US). But maybe it has to do mostly with their sense of entitlement. I just read the Toronto Stars (first mistake) coverage of Dion’s unveiling of his caucus. Between the reporter/columnists slant and what Dion was saying I was insulted. According to Dion, “We have a government that is very far right and out of touch with most Canadians”. First, I think it is insulting that right has become an insult in Canadian politics. I happen to be further right than the Conservative party which still puts me in agreement with much of what the NDP has to say about the environment. But more importantly is the idea that the Conservatives are out of touch with most Canadians. This is what gets me going. Are the Liberals so quick to forget that they stole from the Canadian people, not just money, but our trust too. What really scares me though is that Canadians themselves may be quick to forget as well. I just hope Stephen Harper works well with the NDP in terms of revamping the Conservative environmental strategy. They need their support. Winston Churchill said that “if you are under 30 and a conservative you have no heart and if you are over 30 and a liberal you have no brain”. I’m only 20, I guess I’ve had my heart stolen from me.

 

And by that I mean you can stop yelling at men. I know it seems that the world is unfairly skewed our way. It actually is. However this has ceased to be mens fault. Either start yelling at the women who decide to dress like sluts. Or stop dressing like one yourself.

Every time I hear about girls going to a pimps and hoes party, or some such thing that involves guys remaining modestly, if garishly, dressed while the girls dress like they stopped buying clothes after hitting kindergarden, I get mad. Every time I see a girl walking around in public wearing less than she probably should, I stare, then I get mad.

Why am I mad? it could be because that these pimps and hoes parties normally take place at university or at the earliest late high school. These institutions are the bastions of liberal thought, yet girls are taught the paradoxical idea that somehow a liberal view of sexuality and using the fact that men find women more attractive than women find men can somehow be balanced with women being mens equals. If you are willing to dress the way men want you to dress and fall into the stereotype that other women have fought and are fighting against you have lost your right to criticize the unbalanced nature of the world as it stands right now.

Or maybe it is because it is false to say that men are pigs for staring at you, and than to dress yourself provocatively. There is a constant fight for the idea of a “woman”. A woman can complain as often as she wants that men have over-sexualized their view of women. However until women start to take responsibility for how they dress and how they present their image en masse you can’t fault men. “But men design and sell the clothes”, Don’t buy them. “But that means not buying any clothes, they’re all designed that way”, not necessarily, maybe look a little harder. I know a number of women who manage to dress attractively without overly emphasizing their womanly features for lack of a better term. How hard do they have to look to do that, I don’t know, I don’t shop for women, I rarely shop for myself.

I can see some of you saying that this is an unfair comment, how can we judge people based on what they wear. However I think it is fair to say that we judge people if they dress like a punk, or a skater, or have an eyebrow piercing. Are these judgments fair? Maybe not, but you know what you are getting yourself into when you decide to make these things a part of your appearance. There are still enough women dressing in an inappropriate fashion that I feel these comments are merited.

There is a certain irony that the women’s lib thing really took off in the sixties right about the same time that this overtly sexualized image started becoming popular. It is almost as if there has been a fight over what woman means and what her place in the world is since then. I think the best thing for feminists to do is to shift their sights off the evils of men and start closely analyzing their role in equality. At least the role image plays in mens perception of women.

UPDATE: This should be read in conjunction with Men and Feminism; an improvement in tone.

 

Good ol’ activist judges…

I just saw this from the national post. Apparently a panel of three Ontario justices has decided to legally recognize a lesbian couple and a sperm donor father as the parents (that’s right three parents) of a child. I’ll lay the greater ramifications of this aside for now.

Essentially this is just further breakdown of the idea of the “nuclear family”. So here is my prediction. Frankly it’s unfair to allow a child to have two mothers but to deny a man two wives (or a woman two husbands, we’ve got be egalitarian now). So long as everyone in the situation consents to the relationship(s) what’s the harm right? So my prediction is that this is the next step in the breakdown of the traditional idea of the family: multiple spouses.

It’s weird to actually see this stuff playing out before my very eyes. What disturbs me the most is that as far as I can tell there was no democratic process involved in this decision. Three appointed judges got to make a decision with lasting ramifications without the people of Ontario being consulted. Is this the future of lawmaking in Canada?

In my next post I’ll try and talk about some of the predictions Douglas Farrow made about the greater ramifications these sort of decisions are leading to.

 

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