Cowboy Confessional

You just can’t take Dennis Henigan seriously.  Then again nobody has, does, or plans to.

While wasting electrons more valuable than he, Dennis defiled yet another page on the Huffington Post (motto: We’ll Print Anything!) in a rather disorganized rant about a non-interesting topic.  As the vice president (or perhaps president of vice) at the Brady Center, one of the canard casting cabals within the gun control industry, Dennis denounced just about everybody he dislikes, which might be everybody.

This is what is often called a “teachable moment,” one where we can exercise our aptitude for propaganda analysis (reference my latest book Shooting The Bull and the associated Catalog of Canards for a case study on the topic).  Let’s have a little look at Dennis’ disinformation before we dive into the details about the actual issue.

“…pandering to gun lobby insanity is far more important to them than national security.” Dennis provides a triple set of deceit in a tidy little package, all via the use of inaccuracies and emotionally charged rhetoric.  “Pandering” is a word with heavily negative connotation, paralleled with concepts like bribery, corruption, and working for the Brady Center. The allegedly insane “gun lobby” is later identified as the NRA, who does not represent firearm makers (that is the National Shooting Sports Foundation) and thus does not lobby about guns (see The Lie of Definition).  The assertion that their position is “insane” is merely opinion (The Lie of Authority) and that their position being a threat to national security is entirely speculative (The Lie of Invalidatable Conclusions as well as that old bedrock of political pandering, The Lie of Fear).

I could continue with the level of linguistic dissection all day, because Dennis’ deceits are as plentiful as gun control industry truthfulness is not.  The issue within Henigan’s harangue is terrorists trying to acquire firearms (“of course they are, they’re freakin’ terrorists”) and how to stop it (“not the overreaching way Dennis proposes”).

Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Barack Obama’s back yard of Chicago, proffered a jest suggesting that an unelected bureaucrat have the unilateral power to prevent people from buying a firearm.  His one paragraph amendment was so vague that it would provide no real limitations on the power of one agency nor any checks or balances.  Then again if you love government and think that Washington D.C. is a sophisticated and hyper-intelligent repository of benevolence, then you might take Quigley’s quest seriously.

In earlier incarnations of this canard, the Attorney General (the same fellow who is disobeying congressional investigations over his running guns in Mexico) was instructed to disallow firearm purchases to anyone on the government’s terrorist watch list.  As sane as it sounds to keep jihadists from any potentially deadly tool, there are a number of problems with government databases of people and their unproven criminality.

Just ask the late and not-so-great Senator Ted Kennedy who was once bumped from a flight because his name was on the terrorist “do not fly” list.

With both lists, there is zero transparency.  The government won’t tell how you get on the list.  You cannot discover if you are on the list.  They even keep secret how you can effectively get off the list.  Thus any American could be put on the list for any reason a petty bureaucrat desires, and nothing short of an act of Gawd would get that person removed.  In short, the Attorney General is being given a license to eradicate an enumerated civil right, one class of victim at a time.

In batches, kinda like Nazi ovens.

More to the point though is that terrorists in general, and Al-Qaeda in particular, need and want mass carnage.  Keep in mind that the late Osama bin Laden (praise Allah for Navy SEALs) ordered his followers to deal wholesale death.  Documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq showed plans for blowing up your apartment building using natural gas lines, and terrorists continue to try bombing airplanes (shoe and underwear bombers thankfully were failures … in more ways than one).

Hunting rifles are slow paths to jihad.

Let’s get back to Dennis and his deceptions.  “A recent survey shows that 88 percent of registered voters, and an identical percentage of gun owners, want to ‘prohibit people on the terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns.’”  The survey source in question is another gun control group and the people polled were likely all Democrats and left-of-center campaign donors (have a look at the pollster’s other clients).  The average voter lacks the time to dig into this instance of Dennis’ dishonesty, as it requires chaining through three separate web sites, having insight into the polling company and their other clients, and being able to pick apart poor polling practices (The Lie of Methodology).

Rest well Dennis, for I fear you have spent both your spleen and former good name as well as the patience of the public.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Monday, May 23rd, 2011 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Buncombe, Gun control, Politics, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.