You Might Be A Coward If …
BY Herschel Smith5 years, 7 months ago
Remember our little scuffle with Lucian K. Truscott IV?
Apparently he got his pink panties in a wad over others [I presume he isn’t referring to me in his followup] fisking his piece. So he now comes with Youuuuu might be a gun nut if …. (I know, some editor at Salon should have told him to stop doing drugs and rewrite the title).
I don’t care what they say. That’s not a civilian weapon. That’s a weapon designed for use by the military to kill human beings. The thing costs $1,249.95. It is, of course, sold on the open market to any civilian who walks in with the scratch to buy one. The people who buy weapons like this are, strictly speaking, gun nuts.
[ … ]
But less than one percent of our population is in the military. The rest of us are civilians, and these things are being marketed and sold to civilians. They use of the term “tactical” to yank at the heartstrings of arm-chair warriors, to make them feel like they’re buying something big and powerful. “Tactical” is a purely macho word. It’s used to appeal to gun nuts. Sadly, it seems to be working.
I am a gun owner. My guns are locked away in a storage locker right now. I own a 12 gauge Remington pump-action shotgun, a .32 revolver, a .38 revolver, a .22 bolt action rifle I inherited from my grandmother, and a .177 bolt action rifle my brother gave me. I’ve never owned a semiautomatic weapon. Not even one. The last one I shot was an M-14 in the Army in 1965.
I come from a military family. You would think a family of Army officers would have owned a lot of guns. You’d be wrong. My father owned the 12 gauge pump-action shotgun I inherited from him and the .45 caliber Army-issue Colt pistol he inherited from his father. My grandfather, a four-star general, owned two guns: the .45 pistol he gave to my father in 1951 when he left for the war in Korea, and the German Luger taken from Field Marshal Albert Kesslering, commander of Nazi forces against whom grandpa had campaigned the Fifth Army in Italy.
That’s it.
The whole commentary is so emotional, disjointed and hysterical that it’s really difficult to boil it down to a few quotes, but I’ve tried. Here you get the gist of this.
A man who has never seen combat is trying to tell you that if you want semi-automatic weapons, you’re nothing but an “arm-chair warrior,” a tacticool LARPer who wants to hurt people.
A man who received an other than honorable discharge from the U.S. military is trying to trot out his creds having shot an M-14.
A man who was caught making $600 worth of long distance telephone calls on a stolen credit card is posturing the military history of his honorable family to tell you you’re some kind of nut.
A man who never intended to deploy to Vietnam nonetheless parasitically sucked off of the good will of the American taxpayer for his education, and then got out because they threatened to send him to war.
Here at this web site we debate and discuss the theological and philosophical roots of the American system, the God-given duty of self defense, and the necessity of the amelioration of tyranny to preserve human life, among many other things. We try to dive into the deeper issues of mankind, ethics, epistemology, truth, and justice.
So in summary, thanks Salon. If this is the best you can do, we’ll continue our scholarship unabated. You can keep your shrieking cowards. But do please try to do a better job of editing poor Lucian next time. He rambles so much it sounds sophomoric.
On April 1, 2019 at 4:24 am, Roger J said:
I oppose ERPOs, but given his paranoid rantings, Lucien Truscott IV is a good candidate for one. If he wants to live in the 19th century, fine, but no one is going to force me to follow him. I could go on about Teddy Roosevelt hunting with a semiauto rifle but readers know about that. Does Truscott know that the bolt action rifles he has likely have features derived from Mauser and Enfield military rifles? That the revolver was a standard military sidearm in the armies of Britain and the USSR* right up until 1945? Truscott is a hypocrite and a hysteric.
*The Soviets never had enough Tokarev pistols to arm their officers, so the obsolescent Nagant revolver remained in production nearly to the end of WWII.
On April 1, 2019 at 4:57 am, Duke Norfolk said:
Yeah, I’m supposed to believe what this guy says about the gun ownership of his family? (or anything?) Who knows what the truth is, but it’s not liable to come out of this guy’s mouth.
On April 1, 2019 at 6:25 am, Roger J said:
I forgot to mention that pump action shotguns very similar to Truscott’s have been used as combat weapons in WW 1 and 2, Korea and Vietnam, and likely other wars. So Truscott owns one of the weapons of war that he abhors.
On April 1, 2019 at 6:40 am, Mark Matis said:
The 2nd Amendment is NOT about “hunting”. Or more accurately, it is indeed about hunting two-legged traitors.
On April 1, 2019 at 8:19 am, Fred said:
If the family history he lays out is true, this is a classic example of generational failure. He brought up his dead relatives so no apologies from me for pointing out their failure to beat the snot out of this boy. Therein is your root cause. This may be emblematic of an entire generation gone soft.
It seems like everybody nowadays has a need to force others to understand their preferences and not only to acknowledge them but to accept them and even to adopt them as their own. I never liked art or poetry but I have no desire to take away everybody else’s. And lest anybody think there is no equivalent, art can be powerfully persuasive and often more effective than gunpoint. I like firearms and have no desire to force anybody to like them the same way or as much as do. The whole country has gone communistic.
National and social media have turned the small group dynamics of coming into agreement on a set of basic tenets by which the group can operate into a national sport where everybody must agree with what others see as absurd such as owning a quality rifle or parading as a sodomite down main street. 300 million people are not 8 or 10. This is the communists root failure, to understand that these dynamics do not scale, or they just don’t care and simply want power. That’s why the combination of private property and the autonomy to pursue your own form of happiness was such an excellent combination. Communists ruin everything.
The Holy Bible provides the basis by which individuals may own real property, defend themselves and that property, and join in mutual defense pacts with neighbors, family, tribe, and city-state. Never forget that an attack on gun ownership is an attack on God and His foundational precepts by which men must live in civilization. We’re going to lose the ability to own real property and pursue our dreams, we’re going to lose our civilization but we deserve to, we didn’t believe God, we could not keep it.
“Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Job was a righteous man.
“In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.”
On April 1, 2019 at 11:11 am, Frank Clarke said:
@Fred: “…their failure to beat the snot out of this boy… It seems like everybody nowadays has a need to force others to understand their preferences…”
Ahem…
Back in the day, I thought VietNam was “the good fight”, save the world from the dastardly commies, etc. I don’t believe that anymore. VN was a PR effort from the git-go, and it only cost 58,000 dead Americans. We’re such good trading partners these days that our veterans can even go there on vacation!
Peter, Paul, and Mary were right all along, but some people never figured out what they were singing about.
On April 1, 2019 at 11:35 am, Herschel Smith said:
@Frank,
Back in the day, I thought VietNam was “the good fight”, …
I thought someone might bring this up and thought about pre-empting that objection, but decided against it.
The point isn’t whether Vietnam was a “good fight.” For the man entering West Point, he doesn’t get to decide since the taxpayers are putting him through school.
The point is that he didn’t have to join and take the oath. He did, and then reneged. That makes him a coward.
I didn’t think OEF was a “good fight” either, but my son took an oath and did his duty, and he didn’t even go to West Point.
On April 1, 2019 at 12:27 pm, ExpatNJ said:
Apologies, Captain, I did not know where to post this so you would see it ASAP
(I have not tried to verify the information):
New Zealand Semiautomatic Ban Covers Pump Shotguns Too
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/01/new-zealand-semiautomatic-ban-covers-pump-shotguns-too/
New Zealand Gang Leader: We Will Not Give Up Our Guns
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/31/new-zealand-gang-leader-we-will-not-give-up-our-guns/
On April 1, 2019 at 12:53 pm, Fred said:
@Frank,
A father and/or grandfather properly disciplining and raising a boy does in no way equate to State force or societal communism or forced preferences. One is a command of Holy God right and proper, the other makes the States an anti-Christ. By teaching a boy that there is individual responsibility and accountability they are then much less inclined to later seek collective solutions. The State is not God, the State is not the head of the family, and the State would be way less out of control had our generation been properly disciplined as boys. When a father fails to discipline his sons they will seek that structure elsewhere, it being a male need. If he had been properly raised he wouldn’t be a commie. Somebody should have beat the snot of him. Period.
On April 1, 2019 at 3:29 pm, Pat Hines said:
LKT IV is a well known coward and criminal. He’s been doing this for years at least partially because his father’s friends and his grandfather’s friends shunned him completely as well they should have.
LKT IV only has a voice because of his family and his anti-family stances. He is, to be kind, a POS.
On April 1, 2019 at 5:49 pm, John Richardson said:
He should have been expelled from West Point for violating the Honor Code – “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal or tolerate those who do.”
Using a calling card belonging to SDS, no matter how despicable they may have been, was stealing. I imagine he was absolved of the crime due to his illustrious forebearers.