The TAB’s Jonathan Dame brings us this story about Ed Gardner, an Auburndale Upper Falls resident and blogger who says he’s politically a liberal and he likes guns.
The [Liberal Gun Club] had its genesis around seven years ago, founded to be an oasis for liberal gun owners tired of showing up to shooting groups only to be shunned after even so much as hinting at their liberal worldview.
“So even an offhand comment about how you think … that Barack Obama might not be a bad president, you very quickly become a pariah and get banned from the floor,” Gardner said.
At risk of throwing this thread off topic even before it starts, I must say that I believe Gardner has a Constitutional right to bare arms. But the Constitution DOES NOT grant him the right to write IN ALL CAPS ON HIS BLOG.
This must be stopped.
GO, BERNIE, GO
He even has the right to hairy arms! *rimshot*
and hey, that’s Small Caps
Bob Burke has been on Bernie’s bandwagon since Day One. Now that lonely ride has gotten pretty crowded. I’d love to see Bernie square off with The Donald in the general election. That would be epic!
To the issue at hand, guns… I support the 2nd Amendment, as I do the Constitution and entire Bill of Rights. I believe guns and ammunition should be more closely regulated as consumer products. In particular, I think gun manufacturers should be required to include fingerprint locks on all new handguns. I do not believe that the 2nd Amendment affords people the right to own military style assault weapons, anymore than it gives them the right to own a missile launcher.
Bernie Sanders comes from Vermont so, of course he supports gun rights. When my wife, who was my fiance at the time, first took me to meet her grandparents in Vermont, we sat down on the living room couch across from her grandfather. Behind him was his gun cabinet, which was wide open and all of his guns were freshly cleaned and oiled just for show. She had warned me that he didn’t care for liberals from Massachusetts (which he called “Massholes”), so when he asked me whether I was a communist, I politely replied “No sir. I am a pedestrian.” Well he looked at me sideways with that crusty old Vermonter face and then broke into a smile and laughed. “You’re alright,” he said, and he kept the gun cabinet closed after that whenever we visited. My wife and I both have family who are liberals and also gun owners. It just depends where you come from.
Yes it does depend on where you come from. My parents were liberals who grew up in large families witn land in Virginia and Georgia. When I was 9, I learned to dance, play tennis, and shoot.
I met my husband to be in college. When he graduated, I moved into his apartment to finish my classes. He came in one day witn a hand gun and took me took the police range to teach me to shout it because he was worried about my being young and living alone for the sumner. He was quite surprised, and a little annoyed, when I scored a bullseye on every target. Still I told him to return the handgun so I wouldn’t shoot him if he came in unannounced.
Well, it doesn’t look that way on a PC 🙂
Looks a lot like this site on a PC. Arial or some other font.
Carry on 🙂
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-bIXGE4hNQtk/VdUFbcZFDgE/AAAAAAAABLc/CEvhT4plQ14/s144-c-Ic42/August192015.jpg
So technically, I am not the blogger, others contribute, and that seem to be an artifact of how you linked to the stories, must be a bug in the template.
Try this:
http://www.theliberalgunclub.com/
Hmmm – Auburndale? The Tab article says Upper Falls.
It’s hard to identify him by seeing the back of his head in that photo, but I think that this Ed Gardner is also our favorite drone pilot/video editor. Clearly Ed is a man of many interests.
… now if he just combines a couple of his hobbies we may soon have weaponized drones patrolling the streets of Upper Falls 😉
Clearly the heat is getting to me. Changing references from Auburndale to Upper Falls.
And yes Adam I meant to say I’m against these but support one’s right to these.
@Ed, author section, only:
style.css, line 508
.author, .auxilary a{font-variant: small-caps;}
That’s a bit of a stretch. He’s from Brooklyn, and even if you consider him (and his hair) to be fully transplanted, his mayoral fiefdom of Burlington is by no means a gun-friendly city. Bernie’s an intelligent guy and he knows full well what damage firearms have done to this country and how absolutely primitive gun ownership is. There’s really no way to make any excuses for him on this, although I wish there were.
PS does anybody know why Village 14 is blocked in Turkey? In Istanbul I can get it while roaming on my (American) T-mobile account, but it’s blocked for all domestic accounts and on landline connections. Is the website run on some underlying platform like WordPress that the Turkish government has censored (as they’re very prone to do)?
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/01/02/the-safest-states-in-america/4/
Vermont is listed as the safest state in the nation (in the above report) and next to nothing in the way of restrictions on guns. Is it any wonder why a senator from that state might not be pushing for gun control?
Michael, I know Bernie Sanders originally came from Brooklyn, but he has been living in Vermont full-time since 1968. He was also Mayor of Burlington (1981-1989) and a Congressman (1991-2007) long before he was elected US Senator from VT (2007-present). But I agree with you that I cannot excuse his opposition to reasonable gun control laws. I wish he would lead rather than follow on this issue, too. On the one hand, there is at least one gun owner in over half of the households in VT, and they tend to support gun rights and oppose gun control. On the other hand, the majority of Vermonters do support reasonable limits on gun ownership, like closing the gun show loophole and banning the sale of assault weapons.
According to the most recent (2013) data from the CDC, the fitearms death rate per 100,000 inhabitants was 9.3 in Vermont. In Massachusetts it was 3.1. In just about every civilized country it’s well below 2.0 (most of which are suicides).
http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/firearms-death-rate-per-100000/
“Firearms death rate” is a red herring when it comes to overall crime rates, especially since the majority consists of suicides.
And I hope Ted can define both the gun show loophole and what an assault weapon is if he is advocating legislation on these issues.
That may be. But it’s incredibly accurate (almost 100 percent!) for determining the number of deaths caused by firearms.
I’m not sure why self-inflicted firearms deaths are somehow less worthy of gun control measures, but regardless, even if we say that 60 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides, it doesn’t change the equation that you’re still much less likely to get killed by someone else’s firearm in Massachusetts than in Vermont.
My point being that ‘having next to nothing in the way of restrictions on guns’ puts your life at much greater risk, even out in West Podunk where life is simple and everybody knows your name (and may even share the same last name).
On the subject of gun control, I quite like Chris Rock’s recommendation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZrFVtmRXrw
Michael,
Given Japan and South Korea’s essential bans on firearms ownership, yet high suicide rates, I don’t see any sort of gun control measures being able to stop people intent on self harm from doing just that.
The “Firearms Death Rate” also includes justifiable homicides and accidents, so anything that is not a suicide cannot be immediately deemed to be murder. Let’s look at gun murders by state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state
Vermont – 0.3 per 100k
New Hampshire – 0.4 per 100k
Maine 0.8 per 100k
Massachusetts – 1.8 per 100k
Washington DC – 16.5 per 100k (!!!)
In 2010, one was 6 times more likely to be murdered with a gun in Massachusetts than Vermont. Are you really going to try and tell me that Vermont has a gun violence epidemic? My recollection of recent news would tell me that Boston has much more of a gun problem than Burlington (VT). U.S. gun ownership is at an all time high and violent crime has been trending down for decades. I feel that societal problems (especially gang violence and urban poverty) are the true issues to focus on.
But given that you see firearms ownership as “absolutely primitive” I am not sure you can be convinced. Marksmanship is integral to many Olympic sports — I encourage you to give it a try sometime. There are several indoor ranges in the area that are very welcoming to beginners.
Michael can come see me, pretty sure I am not a monster.
Come see me to try it, that is 🙂