How the ATF, Key to Biden's Gun Plan, Became an NRA 'Whipping Boy'

[jamil]

#3 is also a policy issue. We're having new laws implemented in several states that are making it more difficult to vote, and the reason given is that we just had an election stolen. The reality is that we didn't have an election stolen.
Most of the new laws aren't stopping anyone qualified from voting, but they are designed to make the process harder in order to discourage citizens from exercising their rights. The best analogy I can come up with would be if they made Form 4473 an extra ten pages longer.


Jobs.

I don't think you have a complete view of this issue. This is a very leftist way of framing the issue. "Designed to make the process harder to vote" is one way of saying, "designed to make the process harder to cheat". But the two concepts are not subtly different. They're completely different.

Here's something I'm fairly certain you'd disagree with. I flat out disagree with mail-in voting the way it was done in many states. It is just way to easy to cheat. Yes, it makes it easier to vote. But the integrity of the election can't be assured. If you're of the opinion that it's worth degrading the integrity of an election to enable people to vote that might not have been able to. Well, first, if you disagree that it degrades the integrity of the election we will not reach common ground on that. It makes me sure that your head is in the sand. But if you think making it easier to vote overrides degrading the integrity of the election, I think that's a copout. If voting is important, then people will vote. And if ease of voting supersedes everything else, then people's votes will be stolen. Why isn't that at least as much a disenfranchisement as having to register with ID.

 

[KLB]

#3 is also a policy issue. We're having new laws implemented in several states that are making it more difficult to vote, and the reason given is that we just had an election stolen. The reality is that we didn't have an election stolen.
Most of the new laws aren't stopping anyone qualified from voting, but they are designed to make the process harder in order to discourage citizens from exercising their rights. The best analogy I can come up with would be if they made Form 4473 an extra ten pages longer.


Jobs.

Please give an example of one of these laws that makes it harder to vote. I have yet to hear of one that makes it harder

 

[jamil]

You want to know why I voted for Biden? Just come out and say what you mean, then. I haven't been explaining why I voted for Biden; I've been arguing why no one on this forum should have voted for Trump.

I voted for Biden for several reasons. Here are the first few off the top of my head.

1. There was no question where Indiana's electoral votes were headed. My vote on that first line was was meaningless, so I could issue the world's smallest political statement if I chose to. And so I did.
2. I think Trump is the worst person in my lifetime to have been on the ballot in all 50 states. I wanted him to lose.
3. Trump had been actively undermining faith in the election process since before the 2016 vote. I expected him to lose, and I hoped it would be by such a margin that he wouldn't be able to claim he was "robbed."
4. I hoped the sheer volume of votes against Trump would be read by the Republican Party as not just a repudiation of Trump but a repudiation of Trumpism, of the changes Trump made to the Republican platform and ethic.
5. I'll pick a wolf over a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing 10 times out of 10. At least with a wolf someone might fight back. When Obama wanted gun control, Republicans said no. When Trump wanted gun control, Republicans were somewhere between silent and complicit.
6. I care about the environment, and Trump's administration made some choices that were very bad for the environment without having any real upside. It was basically some of it was anti-green virtue signaling. The rule change re: logging the Tongass National Forest, for instance, would have been a net-loss to taxpayers, a likely net-loss of jobs, a loss of an amazing forest full of 800-year-old trees, and probably only a positive for China (where most lumber harvested in Alaska is shipped).
7. Supporting bad Republicans perpetuates bad Republicans. Trump wasn't just "impure" as a conservative or bad on the 2A; he was bad for the country.

I remember your list of attributes which attach to "Trumpism" that got banished because people can't handle a simple conversation between opposing views (yes I'm still pissed about that). My rebuttal to this is about the same as what I was typing up as that threat was being ****-canned. I think that list looks to me like perception way more than reality. I don't disagree that Trump was a bad candidate, but he turned out to be a better leader than I thought. He did some bad things, some really bad things, but for the most part he actually did some good things.

You talk about a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's nonsense. The media painted him out to be a wolf from the start of the 2016 presidential election. But he led more like the sheep. Okay, a bombastic, narcissistic sheep. Some things I disagreed with at first but they worked out. I thought him going to NK to suck Kim Jong's nub was a bad idea, but after he wiped his chin we had no more sabre rattling until the DHIC (dick head in charge) took over and now NK looks like they're going to rattle sabres again. I didn't agree with how Trump was handling some things in the ME, but he got some peace deals signed that I never thought would be. Was nominated 3 times for a Nobel Peace Prize which the press just ignored. And it's looking like the BDIC is going to **** that up.

I think it is you who picked the wolf in sheep's clothing. Okay, he'd be a senile, geriatric wolf, but a wolf anyway. People thought they were getting a moderate, and he has been pushing all kinds of woke, progressive ****. People thought they were getting someone who would try to unite the country, but what they got was an ideologue who only wanted everyone to unify under HIS ideology.

 

[jamil]

Please give an example of one of these laws that makes it harder to vote. I have yet to hear of one that makes it harder

By "harder" it means you can't just hire an army of community organizers to push ballots on people and coerce them to vote Democrat.

 

[BugI02]

Get a Republican candidate who is more interested in protecting peoples' rights than violating them, and I'll be happy to put my vote that way. Lip-service paid to the 2nd while working to undermine the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 10th isn't good enough.

So vote for a Democrat who is working just as industriously to undermine the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th and 10th (in slightly different ways that you find more palatable?) while also crashing the economy and creating a government dependence constituency solves that how? It gets you a little taste of all that gov't largesse?

Real conservatism seeks to preserve elements of the past that have been PROVEN to work while cautiously embracing incremental change in other areas

If you are arguing Trump is a sinner but Biden is not, you are exhibiting a very slanted and superficial understanding of mankind's position in God's creation

 

[IndyDave1776]

#3 is also a policy issue. We're having new laws implemented in several states that are making it more difficult to vote, and the reason given is that we just had an election stolen. The reality is that we didn't have an election stolen.
Most of the new laws aren't stopping anyone qualified from voting, but they are designed to make the process harder in order to discourage citizens from exercising their rights. The best analogy I can come up with would be if they made Form 4473 an extra ten pages longer.


Jobs.

You can spew this **** with a straight face? I knew you were guilty of defective reasoning, but you really think requiring people to present the same ID they need to conduct any official business including but not limited to collecting .gov benefits is an insurmountable hardship? News flash: It's only a hardship if you're trying to cheat.

You have apparently dismissed the irregularities in the election, many approaching or exceeding the point of impossibility for an honest election, and apparently support seeing to it that the evidence never sees the light of day.

You apparently do not have a problem with dead people, foreign nationals, young children, fictional characters, cats, dogs, and horses voting.

This level of dishonesty places you squarely in thd company of liars and thieves.

 

[BugI02]

I think the psychology is simple. “If I have a firearm, I can stop whatever the govt does that I don’t like.... ‘cept, I’m not quite ready to do it yet.” For all the things people say the 2A is meant to do, in modern times, you rarely see it occurring, at least vis a vis with the govt.

I think cheerleading for people to take that irrevocable step because you think they won't, and you can rile them up and score points in the interim, is playing with fire in a very real sense

An agitator isn't just something found in a top-loading washing machine, and stoking the wrath of others while discussing Christian obligations in other areas seems ... counterproductive?

 

[jamil]

So vote for a Democrat who is working just as industriously to undermine the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th and 10th (in slightly different ways that you find more palatable?) while also crashing the economy and creating a government dependence constituency solves that how? It gets you a little taste of all that gov't largesse?

Real conservatism seeks to preserve elements of the past that have been PROVEN to work while cautiously embracing incremental change in other areas

If you are arguing Trump is a sinner but Biden is not, you are exhibiting a very slanted and superficial understanding of mankind's position in God's creation

The problem is that he doesn't think that Democrats are trying to undermine those other amendments. Just like you don't think Trump was undermining the 2nd.

About that (here goes a thoughtstream) I kinda think that people who think like Josh in a way are thinking in binary terms. Trump ordering the ATF to define bumpstocks as machine guns, and his support of red flag laws, erases all other instances of Trump supporting the 2A. Notwithstanding the organizational reasons people stopped donating as much money to the NRA, a major reason was that there is no boogie man to fight with Trump in the White House. People felt assured that he wouldn't sign any new gun control and he didn't. And to be fair, the bumpstop thing was the NRA's brainchild. They advised Trump to do it. And he was naive enough to go along with a bad idea. Anyway, I think that saying that two bad positions == anti-gun is applying binary thinking. Overall Trump is a net pro 2A candidate.

Let's think of it this way. What's Trump's wishlist regarding guns? Worst case he's a 2A moderate. What's Biden's wishlist regarding guns? Well, with Democrats controlling both houses, they have to rely on Democrat's incompetence not to get sweeping gun control.

 

[BugI02]

He has the ability to appoint the director of the ATF.

and they apparently have the ability to redefine anything and everything as they see fit at a whim if they so choose.

Oh, I wouldn't stop there. Besides what you describe he has the ability to push for AWB's as soon as the next horrific slaughter happens (I'll leave it to the ones like Kut and those who share his viewpoint to speculate why this happens so much more often when anti-gun folks are in the WH) and registration and/or digitization of existing 4473s into a searchable database

Ammunition is also a key weak point in RKBA and not only can they argue disingenuously what the 2A means relative to ammunition restrictions, he could outlaw ammunition and component imports with the stroke of a pen

He could require submission of all new models or modified models of existing firearms to exhaustive government review to ascertain that they don't 'violate' some government regulation or other - think the equivalent of environmental impact statements

The possibilities for infringement really are quite varied, and given an evenly split congress with Democrats more willing to vote in lockstep on some issues, as well as republicans like Cheney and Murkowski and Collins who let revenge or personal ambition determine their vote instead of MAGA, many of them could be enacted and affecting us while challenges wend their way through the courts. Given the recent performance of the courts at all levels, how many of you would be willing to take the risk that they would do the right thing?

Vis a vis rule by Democrats, people need to recognize that Kut is firmly in the 'lie back and enjoy it' camp. I can only conclude it is a misguided belief that such strictures are unlikely to affect him that allows such self delusion

 

[jamil]

You can spew this **** with a straight face? I knew you were guilty of defective reasoning, but you really think requiring people to present the same ID they need to conduct any official business including but not limited to collecting .gov benefits is an insurmountable hardship? News flash: It's only a hardship if you're trying to cheat.

You have apparently dismissed the irregularities in the election, many approaching or exceeding the point of impossibility for an honest election, and apparently support seeing to it that the evidence never sees the light of day.

You apparently do not have a problem with dead people, foreign nationals, young children, fictional characters, cats, dogs, and horses voting.

This level of dishonesty places you squarely in thd company of liars and thieves.

Well, c'mon. Be fair. His is from a different point of view that just sees things differently than you do. You and I disagree on some things. I don't attribute you having a different outlook on those issues as you being dishonest. I think he thinks the way he does because he can't see it from your perspective anymore than you can see it from his.

When you say, "You apparently do not have a problem with dead people, foreign nationals, young children, fictional characters, cats, dogs, and horses voting," that's not really all that different from people like David Hogg saying that the Senators who refused to vote for gun control have the blood of dead kids on their hands. I don't think either one of those things is true. I think it's that he see that all those people who aren't eligible to vote are voting. If we continually accuse each other of saying or doing things they're not actually saying or doing I really don't see the point. It's just people talking past each other.

 

[jamil]

Oh, I wouldn't stop there. Besides what you describe he has the ability to push for AWB's as soon as the next horrific slaughter happens (I'll leave to the ones like Kut and those who share his viewpoint to speculate why this happens so much more often when anti-gun folks are in the WH) and registration and/or digitization of existing 4473s into a searchable database

Ammunition is also a key weak point in RKBA and not only can they argue disingenuously what the 2A means relative to ammunition restrictions, he could outlaw ammunition and component imports with the stroke of a pen

He could require submission of all new models or modified models of existing firearms to exhaustive government review to ascertain that they don't 'violate' some government regulation or other - think the equivalent of environmental impact statements

The possibilities for infringement really are quite varied, and given an evenly split congress with Democrats more willing to vote in lockstep on some issues, as well as republicans like Cheney and Murkowski and Collins who let revenge or personal ambition determine their vote instead of MAGA, many of them could be enacted and affecting us while challenges wend their way through the courts. Given the recent performance of the courts at all levels, how many of you would be willing to take the risk that they would do the right thing?

Vis a vis rule by Democrats, people need to recognize that Kut is firmly in the 'lie back and enjoy it' camp. I can only conclude it is a misguided belief that such strictures are unlikely to affect him that allows such self delusion

Well. Let me put my thinking cap on:



There. Man it does seem more than coincidental that high profile random shootings seem to happen more when we have Democrats in the White House. Trump had his share, but more early in his term. It seemed like as the economy picked up the mass random shootings seemed to die out. But then covid hit and we had zero. Hard to have these things when there are no masses out to terrorize.

But to me it does seem like Biden has brought back the mass shootings to the national forefront. But I'll stop short of saying that they're controlling people to go out and do these things so that they can amplify the collective mood for gun control.

 

[BugI02]

Yes, but what powers does he expect that position has, at least legally? I’ve seen the EO Biden submitted. It says nothing about directing anybody to restrict existing 2A rights, but rather it’s directives to look into changes that could be made within the confines of the law.
We all know about the handwringing people did with Obama concerning the 2A. What did he do? He followed law didn’t he? Of all the things people said he signed off on that folks believe was illegal, he left the 2A relatively untouched. Why?

He either lacked the clout to get it done or realized he would burn all of his political capital to do it, and he calculated that Obamacare would do him the most good politically and he could tackle other issues with the enhanced political clout 'fixing' access to medical care would grant him. He obviously chose unwisely and the enhanced clout never materialized and the time when his party controlled everything was never repeated

The lesson of Obama is not to conclude that because evil failed once it will always fail, given enough chances bad things WILL happen

Some part of the electorate is willing to trade their birthright for a mess o' pottage (UBI, college tuition forgiveness, universal health care etc) because they don't value certain rights as much as they probably should and value certain transfer payments more than they should

I wish more people would put more thought into the old maxim that 'A government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take it all away'. IMO they think that their failure to remake government at the state level and force their neighbors to do what the want means they need to go national and force EVERYBODY to do what they want. They seem unable to understand what so many state legislatures being republican controlled portends

 

[Ingomike]

#3 is also a policy issue. We're having new laws implemented in several states that are making it more difficult to vote, and the reason given is that we just had an election stolen. The reality is that we didn't have an election stolen.
Most of the new laws aren't stopping anyone qualified from voting, but they are designed to make the process harder in order to discourage citizens from exercising their rights. The best analogy I can come up with would be if they made Form 4473 an extra ten pages longer.


Jobs.

One question should a valid ID be required to vote?

 

[JettaKnight]

So like Kut you voted for him basically out of TDS, it would have been faster to say you voted for biden because you're a democrat and he was the democrat candidate, no reason to rationalize it.

This is why I find that the "TDS" is just a stick that used to beat down conservative that steps out of line and offers up their own opinion and dissension. It means nothing; it's just a straw man attack.

The guy offered up a well reasoned explanation of why he thought Trump was, in his mind, unfit to be president, and best you got is to accuse him of being a democrat.

 

[JettaKnight]

I remember your list of attributes which attach to "Trumpism" that got banished because people can't handle a simple conversation between opposing views (yes I'm still pissed about that). My rebuttal to this is about the same as what I was typing up as that threat was being ****-canned. I think that list looks to me like perception way more than reality. I don't disagree that Trump was a bad candidate, but he turned out to be a better leader than I thought. He did some bad things, some really bad things, but for the most part he actually did some good things.

You talk about a wolf in sheep's clothing. That's nonsense. The media painted him out to be a wolf from the start of the 2016 presidential election. But he led more like the sheep. Okay, a bombastic, narcissistic sheep. Some things I disagreed with at first but they worked out. I thought him going to NK to suck Kim Jong's nub was a bad idea, but after he wiped his chin we had no more sabre rattling until the DHIC (dick head in charge) took over and now NK looks like they're going to rattle sabres again. I didn't agree with how Trump was handling some things in the ME, but he got some peace deals signed that I never thought would be. Was nominated 3 times for a Nobel Peace Prize which the press just ignored. And it's looking like the BDIC is going to **** that up.

I think it is you who picked the wolf in sheep's clothing. Okay, he'd be a senile, geriatric wolf, but a wolf anyway. People thought they were getting a moderate, and he has been pushing all kinds of woke, progressive ****. People thought they were getting someone who would try to unite the country, but what they got was an ideologue who only wanted everyone to unify under HIS ideology.

The media's portrayal doesn't really matter here on INGO. In fact, it's"opposite day". CNN paints someone was a wolf? We see them as a shepherd.

Trump spent most of his live cozying up democrat elites, but come election time, suddenly he's a conservative quoting passages from "Two Corinthians".


However, actions are louder than words, and for the most part, Trump's actions were quite conservative. So for me on election day, it was, "Well he might be a goose, but he walks like a duck, and talks like a duck... and the other guy is clearly a not a duck but a loon..."

 

[drillsgt]

This is why I find that the "TDS" is just a stick that used to beat down conservative that steps out of line and offers up their own opinion and dissension. It means nothing; it's just a straw man attack.

The guy offered up a well reasoned explanation of why he thought Trump was, in his mind, unfit to be president, and best you got is to accuse him of being a democrat.

I'm sorry so campingjosh is a conservative Republican?

 

[Ingomike]

This is why I find that the "TDS" is just a stick that used to beat down conservative that steps out of line and offers up their own opinion and dissension. It means nothing; it's just a straw man attack.

The guy offered up a well reasoned explanation of why he thought Trump was, in his mind, unfit to be president, and best you got is to accuse him of being a democrat.

He is a democrat and everything he offered up was exactly what the mockingbird media indoctrinated the people with, otherwise known as TDS. (although I despise the use of that name, they are leftists, not democrats, same way an electric Harley is not a real HD)

At some point there either will be a real republican party that is decided by republican voters in closed primary's or it will die off.

 

[JettaKnight]

I'm sorry so campingjosh is a conservative Republican?

Yeah, probably. At least five years ago he would have been near the center of the big tent, like me.


However, that tent has been getting increasingly smaller as more and more people have been kicked out for not passing the new purity standards. This makes Republicans more "true conservatives", but it also decreases the Republican voting block to point where elections are unwinnable.


EDIT: Have you seen a post from CampingJosh call for gun control, higher taxes, more LGBTQIA rights, increased welfare, govt healthcare, open borders, or anything else the Dems are pushing? No? Then why would you call him a Democrat?

 

[KLB]

Yeah, probably. At least five years ago he would have been near the center of the big tent, like me.


However, that tent has been getting increasingly smaller as more and more people have been kicked out for not passing the new purity standards. This makes Republicans more "true conservatives", but it also decreases the Republican voting block to point where elections are unwinnable.

Just like they make fun of the Libertarian Party

 

[IndyDave1776]

Well, c'mon. Be fair. His is from a different point of view that just sees things differently than you do. You and I disagree on some things. I don't attribute you having a different outlook on those issues as you being dishonest. I think he thinks the way he does because he can't see it from your perspective anymore than you can see it from his.

When you say, "You apparently do not have a problem with dead people, foreign nationals, young children, fictional characters, cats, dogs, and horses voting," that's not really all that different from people like David Hogg saying that the Senators who refused to vote for gun control have the blood of dead kids on their hands. I don't think either one of those things is true. I think it's that he see that all those people who aren't eligible to vote are voting. If we continually accuse each other of saying or doing things they're not actually saying or doing I really don't see the point. It's just people talking past each other.

He is entitled to his own opinions but not his own facts. If he cannot accept the fraud caught dead to rights, which has been caught basically by accident in a very porous system, and objects to measures to make fraud more difficult while crying about excessive difficulty in moving away from doing things in a way based entirely on the honor system, we are too far apart for me to consider his position reasonable.

Any fool should be able to see that you cannot have honest elections without accountability. I see no productive end in arguing with this level of stupidity.