XDA

Mike Lupica is the classic definition of a fanatic. He can't change his mind but he won't change the subject, and the subject is how evil guns are. I never realized until today, however, what a poor writer he is.


Hey, Mike, objects aren't evil, people are evil.


Today's sermon is 95% tugging at the heart strings, appealing to pity, the rhetorical fallacy which is the title of my piece. It's 95% wallowing in the pathos of people in the town where the Sandy Hook school shooting took place nearly 3 years ago. I'll look at his more or less logical statements.

But when a couple of good jihadists doing the shooting with their Adam Lanza guns in San Bernardino, that gets the blood boiling on the Republican campaign trail, does it ever. It is so much easier to get tough with a religion than the high church of gun manufacturers whose sales just keep going up, as the number of guns in private hands in this country becomes as insane as any statistic of American life.

Good jihadists? Mike, what bizarro moral world do you live in? And the phrase  'the high church of gun manufacturers whose sales just keep going up' is pretty stupid. Guns are tools, highly specialized tools, but just tools. Change the tool and you see just how stupid-- the high church of reciprocating saw manufacturers whose sales just keep going up. There are fans of guns in the shortened version of the word 'fanatics' way but no one worships guns. Pathetic extended metaphor there, Mike.


But the worst is the last clause; 'as the number of guns in private hands in this country becomes as insane as any statistic of American life.' First, statistics are usually statement of facts and are not insane in any way, so to call statistics insane is pretty stupid. Since no statement of fact is insane, what Mike is saying is that the 312 million guns owned by Americans is as insane as any other statistic, which is to say gun ownership at that level is not insane at all. An actually competent writer who just had to use the words 'statistics' and 'insane' in the same sentence about despised gun ownership would have called the statistic of gun ownership more insane than any other statistic of American life.

Still they all hide behind the Second Amendment, which will eventually kill more Americans than ISIS ever will.

I thought it was the guns that were doing all the killing? This is reaching way beyond the strained conceit that the inanimate tools do the killing without any human influence or human responsibility, it's blaming the recognition that Americans have a right not to die just because of someone wants to kill them. We can fight back and we can fight back effectively, using the weapon of our choice and not the government approved weapon.


Mike, ISIS is a group of very evil people, all Muslims. The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution is ink on parchment, but deeper, an idea, a beneficial idea that we have a right to life, to self defense, to keep and bear arms (because it's a good idea to have a civilian militia to oppose a coup by government armed forces). This is your typical stupid comparison of two completely unlike things because, Mike, I hate to break this to you, you're none too bright.

Labels: Dim Bulb of the Gun Haters, Mike Lupica

Like many lefty true believers, sports writer and anti-gun fanatic, Mike Lupica, is unhappy with the George Zimmerman verdict. He thinks it was unjust. Why? He really doesn't make a coherent argument. I'm not sure Mike would know justice if it bit him on the ass.

Here are two or three things I, a former prosecutor, would like to point out for the people who seem to be woefully ignorant of the law like Mike Lupica.

Lupica writes:

Zimmerman walks now, leaves court a free man, does that in a state with its stand-your-ground laws where you thought the prosecution was fighting a losing game from the start. It no longer matters that Trayvon Martin, unarmed teenager, was supposed to have the same stand-your-ground rights that Zimmerman did. Only it never mattered once they were on the ground and Zimmerman got his gun out and shot him. If you think justice was really served in that courtroom on this night, you were watching the wrong movie.

Labels: Mike Lupica, Zimmerman Trial

The rabid anti-gunners are wailing that there weren't even 40 votes in the Senate for Democrat Sen. Feinstein's "assault weapon" ban, and it has been dropped, probably forever. They use their favorite word to apply to people who disagree with them about how best to combat senseless mass murder, that is, they call them cowards. The gun haters' idea of cowardice is my idea of common sense.

Enter once again the most passionate anti-gunner and quondam sports writer, Mike Lupica, who generally displays stunning ignorance of guns every time he talks about them. He writes:

Any fool knows that Lanza couldn’t possibly have killed as many children as quickly as he did on the morning of Dec. 14 without an assault weapon in his hands.

There is nothing especially rapid about the rate of fire of the AR-15 he used. Every semi auto gun fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. There's no inherent advantage in the gun mechanism because our trigger fingers are slower than those machines. Nor is there anything special about the AR-15's lethality. The two hand guns he carried would have fired just as quickly and would have killed the poor victims just as dead.

I'm not sure why Mr. Lupica is so falsely convinced that there was something especially lethal or rapid about the AR-15. He is just as wrong to blame the normal size, 30 round magazines used, as this is what Wikipedia says:

He reloaded frequently during the shooting, sometimes firing only fifteen rounds from a thirty-round magazine.

So much for stopping gun violence by limiting magazine sizes to 15 rounds. Right, Governor? The shooter got off 152 rounds in between 11 and 14 minutes. That's not a particularly high rate of fire, at worst, 14 per minute, and it would certainly be obtainable with pistols, even with revolvers.

Let's compare some recent mass murders.

The evil psychopath in Norway in 2011, killed 69 and injured 110, 55 seriously, with a Ruger mini 14 and a Glock pistol. Neither of these weapons was counted as an "assault weapon" in Feinstein's bill.

The evil psychopath at Virginia Tech in 2007 killed 32 and wounded 17 (before he self executed) using a Glock and a Walther pistol, not with "assault weapons."

Let's go to the stats:

In 2011, in the United States, there were 12,664 murders and of those 8,853 where the murderer used a gun. Of those, 323 were committed with rifles, not "assault rifles" but all rifles--single shot to bolt action to semi-auto but not mean looking and the mean looking ones. So the number of "assault weapon" rifles used for murder in 2011 is necessarily less than 2.5% of all the murders. Not exactly the most pressing gun violence problem out there.

Lupica, like a dog and his sick, returns to his ignorant misstatement.

Again: Ask any gun owner if Lanza could have killed as many children as he did in as short a time as he did — before he was a sure shot putting a bullet from one of his handguns through his snake-filled brain — if he didn’t have an AR-15 in his hands.

Labels: Gun Moron, Mike Lupica

Here is a long piece I wrote about sports writer Mike Lupica's jerk column a few weeks ago which was pretty much 100% invective against NRA leader Wayne LaPierre. Here are come choice quotes from Lupica's public tantrum:

So now Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, who attacks the mental health system in this country even as he sounds like he needs to be in it, goes on “Meet the Press” and continues to double down on his notion that the only way to keep our schools safe is to put armed guards at the front door and the side door and in every home room in America and maybe on every school bus, too.

The other day there was a terrific Daily News front page calling LaPierre, the NRA’s executive director, the “craziest man on Earth,” and he was clearly referencing that Sunday morning, even as he continued to sound like just one more coward made brave and tough by a gun.
 

“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre said. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe.”

Of course, that is a lie from LaPierre, who also lies when he says any new gun control measures in this country are some anti-American attack on the Second Amendment, as if any parent or politician now calling for more gun control is going after the Second Amendment with the kind of assault weapon that Adam Lanza used to shoot up a principal and teachers and 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

See, to the enlightened left, everyone who disagrees with what they believe is crazy or a liar or both. So I wonder what Mr. Lupica makes of this?

President Obama proposed, inter alia, that more police "resource officers" be hired to help guard schools against mentally disturbed gunmen. I'm sure Mr. Lupica, when he stops praising ineffective New York state gun law changes (some of which are clearly unconstitutional), will jump on the President for the lie he's telling about added safety through additional armed officers at school and all the crazy, cowardly ideas that go with that proposal.

He'll probably write it tomorrow.

Labels: Gun Control; Ignorance and Lies, Mike Lupica