tagged w/ Right-Wing Lies
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A video of a 15-year-old Maryland girl who effectively argued for the Second Amendment and against gun control to state lawmakers in three succinct minutes and who holds political aspirations has gone viral.
More than 1.5 million have clicked on it on YouTube in just a week's time. In the video, Sarah Merkle told lawmakers that she had been shooting for years and is now proficient enough to one day seek scholarships to universities for her firearms abilities. Strict gun control laws, however, could put a halt to that, she said.
Sarah Merkle, on the video: "Because of [my gun background] I have become eligible for various shooting scholarships around the country to a wide array of even the most prestigious colleges that have shooting teams," she said in the video. "Achieving stricter gun control laws would obliterate any opportunity I could have had to attend a decent college on a shooting scholarship."
And she added: People are the problems, not guns."Chicago, Illinois has had some of the strictest gun control laws in America enacted in the last few years, and it is currently more as twice as likely for you to be killed in Chicago than in the Afghani war," she said, adding that of the 3,371 killed in Chicago in 11 years, only 37 or 1 percent were killed by rifle.
"So creating gun control legislation that targets 'assault rifles' has statistically proven to only weed out less than 1 percent of the problem if you're lucky," she said.
Fox News reported on Friday that Ms. Merkle hopes to one day become a congresswoman.
http://youtu.be/CRLv8XgU6j4A video of a 15-year-old Maryland girl who effectively argued for the Second Amendment... more
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Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their history dangerously wrong.
Excerpt:
The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”
In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”
And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.
Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.
(more at link)Gun rights activists who cite the dictator as a reason against gun control have their... more
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An Update on ALEC from Stew Blogger Beth:
The Koch Brothers front group, Americans for Prosperity, along with their Tea Party drones, are trying to counter the rising backlash against the billionaire's efforts to hijack our Democracy. They're holding training sessions for Right-wing bloggers on how to lie to the public.
Imagine that...the Koch Brothers are using their other front groups to defend/spin another of their front groups...
http://veracitystew.com/?p=34192An Update on ALEC from Stew Blogger Beth:
The Koch Brothers front group, Americans... more
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The way some of the media report on climate change can be simply stunning. For example, an opinion piece in The Financial Post has the headline "New, convincing evidence indicates global warming is caused by cosmic rays and the sun — not humans".
There’s only one problem: that’s completely wrong. In reality the study shows nothing of the sort. The evidence, as far as the limitations of the experiment go (that’s important, see below), do not show any effect of cosmic rays on global warming, and say nothing at all about the effect humans are having on the environment.
(read all about it at link)The way some of the media report on climate change can be simply stunning. For... more
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