This one is going to bother some of the devout gun rights protectionists. By the way, don’t try to convince me you love the Second Amendment more than me. We can both be 100% hardcore gun rights advocates, and not agree on everything.
Hear me out: Stop setting the parameters by being unrealistic. This is our problem. Gun rights people are horrible at PR outreach in the basic media forums.
The Taliban being given guns does not equate to a great reason to complain about having no bump stocks, or NFA, or having no access to AR-15’s.
Stop moving the goalposts, and leave that to the people who we want to look like idiots. Don’t give them a reason to make stupid comparisons like that in media channels too.
Here’s my hot take on the Afghanistan Exit and Gun Rights in the USA…
The Taliban is bad. The exit from Afghanistan was bad. Helping to arm these idiots with weapons and equipment was suboptimal. But we shouldn’t be lobbying to be compared to the Taliban. The optics are perverse. We should be lobbying for ousting gun-hating, freedom-hating politicians and reforming the argument about gun control from one based on emotions, to one based on the core fundamentals of the gun rights movement.
What the hell does an antiquated political and ideological group of trash humans have to do with adhering to Second Amendment guaranteed rights in a different country.
Have you been to Afghanistan? Even if you haven’t it’s not hard to see that it’s not America. Furthermore, the idea that they cannot get guns over there and somehow we are gifting them these firearms, and other equipment is iditotic. Most of these items were what we gave to the Afghan soldiers to help them win a prolonged war against these saem Taliban.
All of this is not entirely without context or tradition, however – remember, we sponsored these “brave Mujahideen” fighters for decades in the cold war. We (the administration and therefore the US Government) still refuse to acknowledge that they are bad. Just yesterday a State Department spokesperson avoided saying that we oppose what the Taliban is doing. They chose instead to focus on other matters in Afghanistan. The same matters that our Presidetn poo-poo’d on live television.
The President of the United States dodged a question on a nationally televised interview by saying: “That was 4 or 5 days ago”. He was referencing people falling from planes to their death while desperately trying to leave the country, having found no place inside the plane taking off. When your death is so imminent at the hands of the Taliban, because you have helped the American forces so much, maybe your rational thinking isn’t at it’s best.
A woman gave away her baby, because she believed that she and that baby would not be in existence in the near future. When you must give away your child as the only hope for their survival, this is not ideal.
Again as disturbing as this all is, how does it have anything to do with the United States and the Second Amendment?
Stop talking about how Liberals have no argument for gun control since we gave the Taliban guns.
We left a country we helped to occupy for a decade. It was done in the worst possible way. As a result of this abrupt decision, things had to be left behind; the troops we spent money to help train had to be left behind. These guns were probably negotiated FAR before we left the country. It was likely a bargaining chip to allow us to avoid a firefight in a very public venue like the Presidential Palace or the airport runway.
Did you think for a second that the US Government didn’t know all the soldiers dropping heroin day in and day out would crumble as soon as we left?
Did you think for a second that the US Government led by a vocal supporter of gun control would not Iran-Contra style, leave behind guns in a war torn country? It’s ridiculous to think that just because someone who hates guns is the President of the United States, that they somehow would alter their gun grabbing nature because they gave bad guys guns. Do you not remember Fast and Furious? Maybe we need to coin the new phrase “Dementia and Disastrous”.
Here’s the thing though: We shouldn’t be trying to flex how stupid we look as a country right now on the heels of our Afghanistan exit, by acting like we should somehow allow our citizens to be respected on par with the Taliban by the leaders we have. These are not people who love freedom. Joe Biden has been playing culture wars and race games, and taking away freedoms for decades. Did you really think that he values the law abiding US citizen higher than the Taliban?
They espouse the same concepts that Biden himself desires: take away the people’s freedom, by force if need be. By the way, The Taliban is doing the very thing that Every Progressive Gun Control advocate has been advocating for for decades. They are moving house to house collecting guns because: the new improved Taliban government is here to protect the people, they won’t need their guns anymore.
Stop acting like we deserve rights because our leaders respect tyrants more than this country’s citizens.
The argument should be and always should have been: we deserve rights because we are free.
We need these particular rights to be more protected and respected so that we never lose that freedom. Stop moving the goalposts for the people who seek to have them moved to further their destructive agenda.