I never thought about this, somehow, but ohmigod...

In today's NY Times, to the editor:

“ 'What an AR-15 Owner Sees in Every Single Place He Goes,' by Matthew Walther (Opinion guest essay, April 9), is a wonderful exploration of the psychology of military-style assault weapon ownership. Permit me to state the problem more simply.

"The No. 1 reason offered for why our fellow citizens own military-style assault weapons is recreation. (I include hunting, target shooting and collecting in this category.) For most owners of these weapons of mass destruction, military-style assault weapons are adult TOYS.

"Can these adults not sacrifice their recreational interests in favor of saving the lives of our children? We are talking about TOYS.

"I know we live in an age when we cannot expect adults to wear masks for the greater good or get themselves vaccinated for the greater good. But shouldn’t we reasonably expect our adult fellow citizens to give up their TOYS for the sake of our children?

"No one can seriously argue that the founding fathers intended to enshrine a right to recreation as a constitutionally protected Second Amendment right. Military-style assault weapons in the hands of civilians serve no lawful purpose other than recreation. Let’s get rid of them for the greater good."

Zachary W. Carter
North Bethesda, Md.
The writer was U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York and corporation counsel for New York City.

In the previous article, Lenona <lenona321@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I never thought about this, somehow, but ohmigod...
>
> In today's NY Times, to the editor:
>
> [...]
>
> Zachary W. Carter
> North Bethesda, Md.
> The writer was U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York
> and corpo= ration counsel for New York City.

I am embarrassed beyond words that a trained attorney who has
obviously risen high in his profession could indulge in such false
dichotomy, other absurd logical fallacies and a particularly silly
appeal to emotion in print and be taken seriously by anyone.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------

On Friday, April 28, 2023 at 4:15:21 PM UTC-4, J.D. Baldwin wrote:
> In the previous article, Lenona <leno...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I never thought about this, somehow, but ohmigod...

In the USMC when I was a young nipper we used to call our rifles "Matty Mattels" because
the non-metal pieces were made by Mattel and some of the real early ones had the parts
stamped with the Mattel logo. Mattel never made a complete rifle and "Matty Mattel" was
more of a sardonic joke than anything else which seems to have stuck in popular culture

In article <1b88e99a-9b50-49a1-9032-f56e4c71d65fn@googlegroups.com>,
Big Mongo <bigmongo1963@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday, April 28, 2023 at 4:15:21?PM UTC-4, J.D. Baldwin wrote:
> > In the previous article, Lenona <leno...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > I never thought about this, somehow, but ohmigod...
>
>
> In the USMC when I was a young nipper we used to call our rifles
> "Matty Mattels" because the non-metal pieces were made by Mattel and
> some of the real early ones had the parts stamped with the Mattel
> logo. Mattel never made a complete rifle and "Matty Mattel" was more
> of a sardonic joke than anything else which seems to have stuck in
> popular culture

Matty Mattel was the cartoon spokesman for the company ca. 1960. "You
can tell it's Mattel -- it's swell!" IIRC kidvid host Claude Kirchner
(who'd been the ringmaster on Super Circus and was the host of
Terrytoon Circus on WOR in NYC then) supplied the narration for all the
commercials, although he didn't voice Matty. Here's Matty:

https://patchesofpride.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/matty-kid-12.jpg

Matty had a sibling, Sister Belle.

I never knew the Mattel cartoon pitchkid had a name; his "It's SWELL" tagline was sure catchier than Remco's obnoxious animated bird squawking "It's Remco; it's FUN!" (To my early '60s experience, Mattel products were sturdier than Remco's, too.)

Hey J.D.--I'd be interested in your specifics as to why the NYT letter-to-the-editor writer was dispensing idiocy. (Actually, I tend to agree with you--and I'm not a gun owner--but I'm curious as to what so annoys you about his thinking.)

Meanwhile, just last night a half-hour north of Houston, some short-fused Mexican took out five members of a neighboring Honduras family after one of them complained about the noise generated when he was shooting off his AK-15-style gun. (I suppose I would have complained too, and been surprised at his over-reaction...at least for the two or three seconds I had to contemplate things before he pulled the trigger and forever lights-outed me.)

And the Hondurans* probably thought they left that sort of thing behind when they fled Central America--that G-d-forsaken banana republic has been noted for its rampant organized-crime violence for decades.

That may finally be changing, inasmuch as a Drudge headline from just last week claimed that nowadays Honduras is the new low-cost-of-living retire-to locale*, replacing Costa Rica for would-be ex-pat American seniors. (I didn't bother to read the article, since the only way I'd live in Latin America is if I got deported there ; heck, nothing short of a total eclipse of the sun could have coaxed me into deserting the legal protections of the U.S.. Constitution and heading down to Baja California on the Tropic of [Skin?] Cancer for that week in July 1991**.)

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
==================* For my society-exclusionist money, this applies ONLY those who can speak FLUENT Spanish--that is, an as-fast-as-Speedy-Gonzalez command of that Romance tongue, and without a thick American accent--and are willing to do so even while at home; if you want to speak English, stay in the USA...just as every Honduran ex-pat should be 100% fluent in accent-free English if they want to settle HERE.
** We had 6 minutes 56 seconds of totality for that one (and the astronomical max is only 7:06, with the moon in its 20th Century orbit); this Monday, April 8, 2024 TSE shall be CONSIDERABLY shorter in duration...but STILL well worth traveling whatever distance required of you to witness. Sure hope you'll be able to reach its path of totality SOMEWHERE...and if you're heading to RHL III-hometown Cape Girardeau, Missouri, maybe I'll see you there.. (But unlikely, as I'll be looking straight up.)

Here's the story on the Mexican madman who wasted the Honduran family north of Houston.

Authorities say gunman by this point "could be anywhere", so don't answer any frantic knocks at your door.

STYBLE/Florida
=============
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/29/cleveland-texas-gunman-kills-five-8-year-old/

In the previous article, radioacti...@gmail.com
<radioactiveseattle@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey J.D.--I'd be interested in your specifics as to why the NYT
> letter-to-the-editor writer was dispensing idiocy. (Actually, I
> tend to agree with you--and I'm not a gun owner--but I'm curious as
> to what so annoys you about his thinking.)

Dude, USENET only has so much bandwidth. I'll restrict myself to a
couple of salient points.

First off: singling out particularly well designed and smoothly
functioning rifles (a set of which the "AR" family are definitely
members) as "TOYS" (caps in original) is just silly. Not everything
with a recreational use is a "TOY." And of course these particular
"toys" are specially enshrined in the Constitution to which this twit
presumably has sworn his allegiance (being a lawyer and all).

And drawing a connection between responsible recreational shooters and
the criminal gangs that misuse firearms[1] is just the worst kind of
bloody-shirt-waving sophistry. It's designed specifically to sway the
dumbest kind of people. To have an attorney make such a wildly
specious argument targeted to the stupid is the part I find most
embarrassing.

[1] And of course as a liberal Democrat, this guy is part of the
problem of catch-and-release, "sanctuary cities" and all the other
criminal-coddling measures that have created the current plague of
lawlessness and street violence that dominates many of our urban
landscapes.

> Meanwhile, just last night a half-hour north of Houston, some
> short-fused Mexican took out five members of a neighboring Honduras
> family after one of them complained about the noise generated when
> he was shooting off his AK-15-style gun.

His what, now?

> And the Hondurans* probably thought they left that sort of thing
> behind when they fled Central America--that G-d-forsaken banana
> republic has been noted for its rampant organized-crime violence for
> decades.

Apparently not, if they thought it was okay to shoot off rifles in
densely populated areas just for their noisemaking properties.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------

In article <u2m3jq$lu9$1@reader2.panix.com>,
J.D. Baldwin <news@baldwin.users.panix.com> wrote:
....
>First off: singling out particularly well designed and smoothly
>functioning rifles (a set of which the "AR" family are definitely
>members) as "TOYS" (caps in original) is just silly. Not everything
>with a recreational use is a "TOY." And of course these particular
>"toys" are specially enshrined in the Constitution to which this twit
>presumably has sworn his allegiance (being a lawyer and all).

Key fact: When someone tells you the Earth is flat, they are not telling
you anything about the Earth. They are telling you something (*) about
themselves. Posts from gun nuts are similar.

(*) And that "something" is not good.

--
The randomly chosen signature file that would have appeared here is more than 4
lines long. As such, it violates one or more Usenet RFCs. In order to remain
in compliance with said RFCs, the actual sig can be found at the following URL:
http://user.xmission.com/~gazelle/Sigs/DanaC

J.D. Baldwin <news@baldwin.users.panix.com> wrote:
>radioactiveseattle@gmail.com wrote:

>>Hey J.D.--I'd be interested in your specifics as to why the NYT
>>letter-to-the-editor writer was dispensing idiocy. (Actually, I
>>tend to agree with you--and I'm not a gun owner--but I'm curious as
>>to what so annoys you about his thinking.)

>Dude, USENET only has so much bandwidth. I'll restrict myself to a
>couple of salient points.

>First off: singling out particularly well designed and smoothly
>functioning rifles (a set of which the "AR" family are definitely
>members) as "TOYS" (caps in original) is just silly. Not everything
>with a recreational use is a "TOY." And of course these particular
>"toys" are specially enshrined in the Constitution to which this twit
>presumably has sworn his allegiance (being a lawyer and all).

>And drawing a connection between responsible recreational shooters and
>the criminal gangs that misuse firearms[1] is just the worst kind of
>bloody-shirt-waving sophistry. It's designed specifically to sway the
>dumbest kind of people. To have an attorney make such a wildly
>specious argument targeted to the stupid is the part I find most
>embarrassing.

>[1] And of course as a liberal Democrat, this guy is part of the
> problem of catch-and-release, "sanctuary cities" and all the other
> criminal-coddling measures that have created the current plague of
> lawlessness and street violence that dominates many of our urban
> landscapes.

Aren't you a genius, complaining about the O.P.'s over-the-top rhetoric
and using plenty of your own.

You may disagree with state and local response to the presense of illegal
aliens, but "sanctuary city" was not a crime-coddling measure. I won't
argue that the unintended consequence was violent criminals who were
illegal aliens were not longer being safely transferred to federal law
enforcement officers under controlled conditions like from a courthouse
or jail, or even prison.

You just took a cheap shot that illegal aliens are responsible for a
dispraportionate amount of violent crime without needing to make the
case for it.

Way to raise the bar on Usenet debate here. You two are two sides of the
same coin.

>>Meanwhile, just last night a half-hour north of Houston, some
>>short-fused Mexican took out five members of a neighboring Honduras
>>family after one of them complained about the noise generated when
>>he was shooting off his AK-15-style gun.

>His what, now?

I haven't seen a statement from police as to what the weapon was. The
news reports say "AR-style rifle" or "AR-15 style rifle", whatever the
hell that means. I guess just some semi-automatic rifle.

>>And the Hondurans* probably thought they left that sort of thing
>>behind when they fled Central America--that G-d-forsaken banana
>>republic has been noted for its rampant organized-crime violence for
>>decades.

>Apparently not, if they thought it was okay to shoot off rifles in
>densely populated areas just for their noisemaking properties.

Oh for ghod's sake. The Honduran family members were the murder victims.
I have no idea what the ethnicity or nationality of the perpetrator was.
Yes, other neighbors were saying it wasn't uncommon for men in the
neighborhood to just shoot off rifles but no one stated what their
ethnicities were.

Was that cheap shot really necessary? Couldn't you have just expressed a
tiny bit of empathy for the innocent victims? It was just before
midnight on Friday the 28th. They just didn't want their sleep
disrupted. That's not provocation for mass murder.

In the previous article, Big Mongo <bigmongo1963@gmail.com> wrote:
> In the USMC when I was a young nipper we used to call our rifles
> "Matty Mattels" because the non-metal pieces were made by Mattel and
> some of the real early ones had the parts stamped with the Mattel
> logo. Mattel never made a complete rifle and "Matty Mattel" was more
> of a sardonic joke than anything else which seems to have stuck in
> popular culture

When I was in the service (not the Marines, though I played with them
a few times) I thought that story had to be bullshit. The McNamara-
era M-16s had such a bad reputation that I figured it was pure scorn
without any real factual basis. But a (Navy) armorer I knew later in
my career set me straight and told me he'd personally seen the Mattel
logo stamped into plastic stocks on early M-16s. One of those weird,
weird little service ironies, I guess.

(Once they worked out the kinks, the M-16 was a *great* infantry
rifle. But for most of the Vietnam War, deploying kids with nothing
but the crappy excuse for a rifle that the contractors were turning
out without any real QA was one of McNamara's hundreds or thousands of
crimes against his countrymen.)
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------

In article <u2ombq$jij$1@reader2.panix.com>, J.D. Baldwin
<INVALID_SEE_SIG@example.com.invalid> wrote:

> In the previous article, Big Mongo <bigmongo1963@gmail.com> wrote:
> > In the USMC when I was a young nipper we used to call our rifles
> > "Matty Mattels" because the non-metal pieces were made by Mattel and
> > some of the real early ones had the parts stamped with the Mattel
> > logo. Mattel never made a complete rifle and "Matty Mattel" was more
> > of a sardonic joke than anything else which seems to have stuck in
> > popular culture
>
> When I was in the service (not the Marines, though I played with them
> a few times) I thought that story had to be bullshit. The McNamara-
> era M-16s had such a bad reputation that I figured it was pure scorn
> without any real factual basis. But a (Navy) armorer I knew later in
> my career set me straight and told me he'd personally seen the Mattel
> logo stamped into plastic stocks on early M-16s. One of those weird,
> weird little service ironies, I guess.
>
> (Once they worked out the kinks, the M-16 was a *great* infantry
> rifle. But for most of the Vietnam War, deploying kids with nothing
> but the crappy excuse for a rifle that the contractors were turning
> out without any real QA was one of McNamara's hundreds or thousands of
> crimes against his countrymen.)

Mattel's commercial for the toy version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=due92VSljwA

In the previous article, Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:
> You may disagree with state and local response to the presense of
> illegal aliens, but "sanctuary city" was not a crime-coddling
> measure.

Tell it to Jacqueline Vigil. And Kathryn Steinle. And Karen Ruiz.
And...

> I won't argue that the unintended consequence [...]

If it happened a few times and then the promoters of these policies
stepped back and said, "Oops, looks like we were wrong" and then
changed their stances, the notion that it is an "unintended
consequence" might be defensible. But they didn't and it's not.

> You just took a cheap shot that illegal aliens are responsible for a
> dispraportionate amount of violent crime without needing to make the
> case for it.

I said nothing at all about the "proportion," and using "sanctuary
cities" to actively protect violent criminals from being arrested and
safetly removed from the society they threaten is just *one* of the
criminal-codding measures that have become popular among lefty
politicians, DAs, etc. "Defund the police" ring any bells? How about
letting the *murderers* of Zaria McKeever walk away consequence-free
because a 17-year-old's "brain is not fully developed"? I could go on
for paragraphs about the current lunacies that let mobs descend on
retail stores like hordes of Visigoths, looting freely and secure in
the knowledge that the police won't be permitted to raise a finger to
stop them, along with dozens, hundreds of other outrages against
public order and basic decency. But I am sure you know the stories
just as well as I do.

> >>Meanwhile, just last night a half-hour north of Houston, some
> >>short-fused Mexican took out five members of a neighboring
> >>Honduras family after one of them complained about the noise
> >>generated when he was shooting off his AK-15-style gun.
>
> >His what, now?
>
> I haven't seen a statement from police as to what the weapon
> was. The news reports say "AR-style rifle" or "AR-15 style rifle",
> whatever the hell that means. I guess just some semi-automatic
> rifle.

That's all an "AR-style rifle" is, after all: a semi-auto rifle. Big
deal.

> >>And the Hondurans* probably thought they left that sort of thing
> >>behind when they fled Central America--that G-d-forsaken banana
> >>republic has been noted for its rampant organized-crime violence
> >>for decades.
>
> >Apparently not, if they thought it was okay to shoot off rifles in
> >densely populated areas just for their noisemaking properties.
>
> Oh for ghod's sake. The Honduran family members were the murder
> victims.

Yes, they were total innocents. I misunderstood the reports. (Not
that making noise would have been justification for murder, but that's
a separate issue.)

> I have no idea what the ethnicity or nationality of the perpetrator
> was.

There's a reason for that: it's not being reported by the major
"news" media that he was a Mexican national here illegally who'd
already been deported once but just waltzed back in thanks to
intentionally lax border security.

> Was that cheap shot really necessary? Couldn't you have just
> expressed a tiny bit of empathy for the innocent victims? It was
> just before midnight on Friday the 28th. They just didn't want their
> sleep disrupted. That's not provocation for mass murder.

You want "empathy for the innocent victims"? I want prosecutors who
will vigorously prosecute violent criminals, not simply let them go.
I want illegal aliens who commit crimes to be deported. I won't
defend lax policies in this area by pointing out that they might not
be a disproportionate number of criminals overall. I really don't
care and I don't understand why that ought to matter.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------

J.D. Baldwin <news@baldwin.users.panix.com> wrote:

>>I won't argue that the unintended consequence [...]

There's no point in continuing this discussion given your wont to take
my remarks out of context and debate dishonestly. You got the last word.

In article <u2plr4$dm44$3@dont-email.me>,
Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:
>J.D. Baldwin <news@baldwin.users.panix.com> wrote:
>
>>>I won't argue that the unintended consequence [...]
>
>There's no point in continuing this discussion given your wont to take
>my remarks out of context and debate dishonestly. You got the last word.

You're now finally figuring this out for yourself. Congrats.

--
He continues to assert that 2 plus 2 equals 4, despite being repeatedly
told otherwise.

On Wednesday, April 12, 2023 at 6:43:30 PM UTC-4, Lenona wrote:
> I never thought about this, somehow, but ohmigod...
>
> In today's NY Times, to the editor:
>
> “ 'What an AR-15 Owner Sees in Every Single Place He Goes,' by Matthew Walther (Opinion guest essay, April 9), is a wonderful exploration of the psychology of military-style assault weapon ownership.

And if anyone wants to read that guest essay...

https://dnyuz.com/2023/04/04/what-the-owner-of-an-ar-15-sees-in-every-single-place-he-goes/

Guess what? The author is a hunter.

From elsewhere:

"Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow."

And:

"Matthew Walther is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times. He is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a media fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. He lives in rural Michigan, where he was born and raised, with his wife and their four children. He is currently researching a biography of Ignatius Sancho, Britain's first Black man of letters."

J.D. Baldwin <INVALID_SEE_SIG@example.com.invalid> wrote:
>
> In the previous article, radioacti...@gmail.com
> <radioactiveseattle@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hey J.D.--I'd be interested in your specifics as to why the NYT
>> letter-to-the-editor writer was dispensing idiocy. (Actually, I
>> tend to agree with you--and I'm not a gun owner--but I'm curious as
>> to what so annoys you about his thinking.)
>
> Dude, USENET only has so much bandwidth. I'll restrict myself to a
> couple of salient points.
>
> First off: singling out particularly well designed and smoothly
> functioning rifles (a set of which the "AR" family are definitely
> members) as "TOYS" (caps in original) is just silly. Not everything
> with a recreational use is a "TOY." And of course these particular
> "toys" are specially enshrined in the Constitution to which this twit
> presumably has sworn his allegiance (being a lawyer and all).

The Constitution's language needs to be interpreted more narrowly
than to allow effective use of firearms as toys.

And FWIW from the military standpoint the AR-15 is considered
obsolescent...advances in body armor have impelled the selection
of its replacement,the (X)M-7 (civilian version SIG MCX Spear,
mounted belt-fed version (X)M-250) which has already been contracted
for and fires a larger,higher-powered bullet (SIG .277 Fury) more
accurately at a greater range.

AR-15 fans complain that the larger bullets mean smaller
numbers of bullets per clip or belt.

Perhaps if the next tech advance is a time machine to take the
new rifles back to George Washington's army in 1776-7,once they
get through an abbreviated Revolutionary War the latter will think
better of setting their new Constitution with an Amendment that
would let every Joe Minuteman keep one in his barn.
> And drawing a connection between responsible recreational shooters and
> the criminal gangs that misuse firearms[1] is just the worst kind of
> bloody-shirt-waving sophistry. It's designed specifically to sway the
> dumbest kind of people. To have an attorney make such a wildly
> specious argument targeted to the stupid is the part I find most
> embarrassing.
>
> [1] And of course as a liberal Democrat, this guy is part of the
> problem of catch-and-release, "sanctuary cities" and all the other
> criminal-coddling measures that have created the current plague of
> lawlessness and street violence that dominates many of our urban
> landscapes.
>
>
>> Meanwhile, just last night a half-hour north of Houston, some
>> short-fused Mexican took out five members of a neighboring Honduras
>> family after one of them complained about the noise generated when
>> he was shooting off his AK-15-style gun.
>
> His what, now?
>

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.

In the previous article, Louis Epstein <le@main.lekno.ws> wrote:
> The Constitution's language needs to be interpreted more narrowly
> than to allow effective use of firearms as toys.

Ah, there's an instance of that use of the verb "needs." It's a weird
construction and it's a kind of oddly passive "voice" (though not
strictly the same as what we call "passive voice").

Look, I'm not going to get into the weeds on this. I already went way
farther than I normally go on gun-rights discussions in groups without
"politics" in the name. I just objected so strongly to having useful
recreational, hunting and defensive rifles casually reclassified as
"TOYS" for the purpose of disarming law-abiding American citizens that
I couldn't quite keep my mouth shut. I'm switching back to my normal
policy after hitting "send" on this one.

If you think only the state should have the means to defend against
aggression and violence -- and to commit same -- just come out and say
that. I'd at least respect the intellectual honesty it would
represent.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------