An FBI provocateur caught the Hutaree ROLE-PLAYING an event and claimed they were going to kill cops. Almost every 'Homegrown-Terrorist' plot has the FBI right smack in the middle. The media only shows the crazies on TV to discredit the people who have legitimate claims against the Government. Personally, I think the media works with the Government to hype threats, like the Hutaree, to provide a base for their tyrannical police state policies, IE the Patriot Act, and the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act. The FBI seeks out useful idiots to pin terrorist charges on them to keep their failed system afloat. Don't buy into it.

The last sentence of the penultimate paragraph (and the concluding one that immediately follows) is equally applicable to an internationally truculent president, if you substitute "as commander in chief of an army out to aggressively attack another" for "to buy a gun in defense of their" in the text not well thought out above.

Dear William
I understand your frustration, but you MAY NOT ignore these farts in the wind !! You are one of my favorite and most respected commentators and I beg you not to forget the responsibility of your very important platform. If you promise to give up a few hours of sunshine to spread the message, I promise I will give up the same to read your words and to pass them on to all my friends. Keep the faith, don't give up. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. Don't be indifferent to the hate these stinking farts are spreading, keep a level head and spread reason and love.

Another good one Will.
Stupid, uneducated and undereducated people is a crippling social phenomenon these days, with the attendant results on the nightly nuz.
A civics test for gun owner ship is a tantalizing idea.
Just don't let the Texas board of education write it though...

Thank you, Mon 17:03 for proving that the wingnuts on the right haven't cornered the market on stupidity. Your statements are not worth the electrons that carried them.
Our First Amendment allows you to spout ignorant drivel; the Second Amendment allows law-abiding citizens to own firearms. These are civil rights.
You could never find any statistics to support your asinine claims.
Firearms are designed to shoot; it's up to the human to decide the target. Making sure the right choices are made is the business of education, not prohibition.
I don't know what crime-ridden city you live in, but if you ever got out of it and experienced rural life you would meet countless people who use firearms safely and responsibly for recreation, competition, and personal security.

Perhaps a more PC title would have been, “When Stupid People Are Allowed To Own Guns.” My grand dad was an FDR Progressive, I continue that grand ideology.

William F. Buckley, Jr. thought that there should be an IQ cut off line in order to qualify for the privilege of voting. He and I are both born Catholics, but our theologies, and ideologies are miles apart, and unless his IQ was above 173, we had differing tools with which to begin.

But we agreed on one thing, the thing above. When our Founding Fathers separated the popular vote from the Electoral College, they saw only that a small population, (about 2.5 million, could be controlled by a filter. Well the filter no longer works because the size of the population now is almost 120 times greater.

We need to neutralize those easily led astray. The only and most complete way of so doing is to limit the vote to those with IQ above 125 or 130. We also need to do the same to limit gun ownership. The problem is that both the Right and the Left would begin faking results as they always did and still do.

"I'm fine with guns. I believe Americans should have them if they want them.... buy a gun in defense of their country and their liberty..."

There is no conceivable reason to need a gun to defend anything. If other idiots have guns, that is a problem, not a solution. Guns beget more guns.

The only real way to defend freedom and liberty in by democratic participation.

Nobody gets shot, everybody wins.

Thank you Mon 21:26 for illustrating how a fifth column of rural idiots is ruining our country. Whining about the Second Amendment-passed over two hundred years ago by people who had no way of knowing what our current realities would be, they are the reason why criminals in this country have such ready access to firearms. They think their right to engage in recreational killing trumps other Americans' right to safety.

I would rather see people pass a civics test in order to vote.

Dear William,
Thank you for an excellent article.

My question is this: when will both parties come together,put down their "weapons", and logically attempt to save this beautiful country?
When will the people finally protest against wasteful spending on other countries?

Be well, my friend.

Mike Dallos

@Anonymous that was talking about not liking guns

You mean some people are nuts in regard to guns. Guns were created with the intention to kill, but that doesn't mean that you truly want to use it for that purpose. Many of us have one simply for protection, if a once in a lifetime event happens and someone armed enters your home while you're asleep.

I agree that I don't like people using guns for greed and purposeful violence, but almost 95% of those guns are unregistered and were purchased illegally, so the majority of the guns used in gang murders and the like are rarely registered. I also believe that the new "rap" sensation simply glorifies drug dealing, killing people over money, buying flashy cars/clothes, and fucking sluts, which in turn poisons teenagers' minds saying that it is okay and cool to do that. It's disgusting, because these gang members in almost every single major city have full arsenals and possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars more to buy weapons.

Legalize all drugs, and you take away all of the dealers source of income, because they can't sell at an insanely high price anymore! (Especially Marijuana)

There exists many countries where the citizens are not compelled to wear firearms to 'protect' themselves from the invisible, or visible enemy. I think any rational person could conclude that there is a tremendous amount of money tied in with 'our right to protect ourselves'. As a matter of fact, the same money that's tied into our right to invade other countries and steal their stuff. Follow the money. I don't own a gun. I feel safe. I live in rural America. I have a mountain lion who lives nearby. I have small children. I am safe. You gun nuts are not safe simply because you spend your time worrying about being safe and imagining that you could somehow defend yourself against the 'enemy'. Remember the words of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and they are US!"

"Take the average guy, and realize that 50 percent of the people are stupider than that." George Carlin.

Sadly, the priorities of our fascist state have equated unfettered deregulation with liberty, corporate greed with societal good, militarism with common defense, etc. Their media lapdogs have imposed a cognitive fog upon us through entertainment and paranoia, and thoroughly filtered/coarsened the dialog necessary for a functioning democracy.

My perspective has shifted from ironic detachment to angry engagement. I'm tired of the morons, (Vic Anderson, "environmental sciences major", and others from the right-wing blogosphere) who harass progressives with gleeful ignorance.

Do you people have children or other loved ones who you expect to inherit this mess? When will you begin to care?

Look, I too am a die hard liberal but I'm also a realist. You said, "At least we can disarm them"? Who are "We"? Are YOU going to go door to door serving search warrants and disarm every American? You're probably saying, "The cops of America can do it." There isn't a cop out there that would attempt that. Not only because they want to live but cops know that people NEED guns. Let's talk about ways to squash crazies WITHOUT GIVING UP OUR RIGHTS! I need to defend my family against an intruder with a gun. Sorry.

Whoa, the Hutaree, very frightening, all NINE of them.

You have a problem. Gun owners are at least as well educated as non-owners and, on average, earn 31% more income than non-owners. Oops, there goes your stupidity argument.

Additionally, it's readily apparent who needs the civics lesson here, and that person is you. The right to be armed is not granted by the Constitution, it is protected by it. The right is intrinsic to human existence as a subset of the right to self defense.

Last, the upshot of all this brings me to those immortal words uttered by King Leonidas at Thermopylae centuries ago, Molon Labe!

Don't go outside! We are practicing with our guns.
Better hide, there is to many of us. 12 million firearms went into private hands in 2009 ALONE and some 10 billion rounds of ammunition also found their ways into the homes of Americans during the same time.
Combined, the armed forces and law enforcement of this country doe not reach 2.5 million. Even if you got all of them to ignore the Constitution and begin a home by home search & destroy mission looking for guns, How long do you think it would last?
Again, we are the majority, we are the vast Middle America. And we are armed.
Deal with it or move to France.

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The reason for this phrasing becomes apparent when viewed alongside the history of militias and slavery in 18X colonial society illustrated by the following quote from Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton. "The eight thousand captive blacks easily dwarfed in number the the one thousand whites, 'a disproportion,' remarked one visitor, 'which necessarily converts all such white men as are not exempted by age and decrepitude into a well-regulated militia.'"

The mainstream media echoes these people's words as though they were part of a national address, giving credibility where none exists. For example, the TEA "movement", which is apparently being led by idiots. Only the locals know who they really are. Blame the media, and the Republicans, for using uneducated hayseeds to incite fear and confusion on a national scale. Media ownership laws must change!

History has taught many times that the pen is mightier than the sword. But without the sword resting in the corner to support the pen the freedom of ideas is quickly stamped out. The founders understood very well that the 1st Amendment would not last without the support of the 2nd Amendment.
Blaming stupid people with guns for our nation's troubles is akin to the very stupidity the article rails against. Clearly we don't hae the well educated populace the Founders knew democracy needs to thrive but again guns are not at fault here either.
I have spent years seeing first hand what guns do to people, reading after action reports, and chasing bad guys. I for one sleep well at night with my Glock.40 in the nightstand so my family won't be among those killed.
I would urge some research into the number of shootings where the weapon is used by the gun's registered owner. You will find a very very low number of criminal complaints. Almost all gun violence in America is done by criminals with stolen or otherwise illegal guns.
This debate really is like a fat person blaming the spoon for their weight problem.

As the offspring of a Lifetime Master pistol target shooter I must weigh in. Rivers Pitt is right about guns not belonging in the hands of stupid people. That doesn't make the flaming crazies wrong about civil and constitutional rights. Flaming crazies are frequently wrong about rights and other ideas because, well, they're flaming crazies. In this country, flaming crazies have the same rights as sober intellecturals. Part of the problem in the USA today is that so far, our gun control is too simplistic to solve the complex problems surrounding lethal weapons that flaming crazies can get. My dad was not a flaming crazy; he taught us how to handle firearms, and how NOT to; he taught us gun-safety. I appreciated Michael Moore's film "Bowling for Columbine" because he never let up on the tough questions. I do realize however, that flaming crazies don't like pedantic movies like Moore's and will get nothing out of watching it, except perhaps manipulated by the flaming rightwing pundits who try to forestall their waking up to greater knowledge.