HOT TANK BRASS ARCHIVE
2021
- “Laws are terrible preventatives. Their ability to affect deterrence is, generally, on the light side of moderate and this effect is always context dependent. At the level of politics, laws are used as totems and their efficacy is often oversold. Moreover, our fellow Progressives seem to be entirely out of touch with the idea that you do not give governmental authorities total control over important matters. If one of our goals is to properly consider legislation as a potential means to gain capacity towards mitigating gun-related death, and if our historic analysis shows us the tendency towards governmental abuse, then the whole scheme needs to be congruent and tailored to the task while not allowing the balance of power to shift to the governmental authorities.”
- “When gun people continue to display the attitude that absoulte rights mean they can do whatever they want, wherever they want, however they want – alongside a casual, indifferent, or at worst, jubilant attitude about loss of human life…they actively create anti-gun people from those who were previously indifferent. We have observed this among friends and my wife admits freely she has been pushed in that direction by what she sees in the news and the typical, desensitized, gun-people reactions to it. The attitude about ‘fuck around and find out,’ ‘got what they deserved,’ ‘muh rights’ makes other people get to a point where they’re okay with those rights just going away.
That part of the culture has to change for gun rights to survive.”
- “Taking three cases selected by the media for their outrageousness and trying to make sense of the legal system is like going to a Long John Silver’s to understand marine biology.”
- “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”H. L. Mencken