I know this phrase is way the hell overused, but it fits — some gun owners among us have officially jumped the shark. (And I DON'T mean Mike Vanderboegh, or even Linoge.)
Once again, the whole "Three Percenter" thing has reared its head, with certain folks in our ranks weighing in once again on the heated rhetoric of Mike Vanderboegh and people like him and the angry words have been flying back and forth the last few days. Are they hotheads, cowards or whatever? I don't know enough about them personally to make a judgment on that one either way. But I've found it amusing that some of us assume Vanderboegh and his kind haven't been politically active, that they've just automatically jumped in with threats to send the lead flying. I laughed out loud when those folks got their collective pee-pee smacked.
But here was this comment from someone with the nom de Internet of Dock, which I wholeheartedly agreed with:
"Instead of fracturing our community, is there any way that we can instead try to mend fences with the 3 percenters? I know, I know, they’re (insert bad thing here) and they are intractable and everything else. Fine. Someone has to wear the big boy pants and be smart enough to realize that we can no longer afford internal warfare of any kind. The modern political reality has robbed us of this luxury."
Yep. There are those who say the Three Percenters can play bad cop to the other 97 percenters' good cop. Apparently this has even happened in the past, as Vanderboegh pointed out:
it would behoove the so-called “pragmatists” of the gun world to use us as Martin Luther King did Stokely Carmichael. Instead of calling us belittling names and trying to discredit us, you should be saying, “Look, Senator, these people have a point and they’re angrier than we are. We wouldn’t go that far, BUT THEY WILL, and you’d better have the good sense God gave a goose and back off the seizure of control over the private sale of arms. And for your own sake, don’t try to ban another previously legal class of weapons. These people will fight, and they’ve already said that after your first shots at them they’ll take the fight to YOU. Not just the ATF and the FBI, but to YOU. Senator, I beg you, is it worth it?”
But, apparently, some are too willfully obtuse to grasp that simple truth, preferring instead to compare the Three Percenters to, well, just read this reply to Dock's question...
...that would be kinda like getting Islam to tame the terrorist groups among them… not impossible, but it would be easier to loudly let everyone know that these wackjobs do not represent the rest of the shooting community.
Classy move there, comparing the Three Percenters to folks who strap bombs to themselves and kill women and children. FUCK YOU, dude. FUCK YOU in the ass, sideways and unlubricated. I haven't been writing letters to anyone threatening civil war or anything like that — one could say my rhetoric is closer to Sebastian's than Mike Vanderboegh's — but as for political activism, I think he and his kind serve a valuable purpose, and I for one wouldn't throw them the wolves as some propose. AND, if you carefully read what Vanderboegh said, you'll note that he said the Three Percenters would fire ONLY after being fired upon — or, as Vanderboegh has said before, "No Fort Sumters." That's a key distinction there, I think, and I think it would be enlightening to know how many on our side are purposefully overlooking that distinction so they can justify their name-calling. One wonders where blacks would be today had Martin Luther King told Stokely Carmichael and his folks to sit down and shut up, or if he had told the Deacons for Defense and Justice to take their guns and go home, that "you wackjobs don't represent the rest of us." Odd how out of one side of their mouth some like to tell us not to use words like Fudd, and out of the other they're perfectly willing to tell certain other factions to go to hell...
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