I recently wrote a diary that was really a draft or a trial balloon to develop some thinking on the subject of what seems to be going on with the gun control debate, if you can get a sense of it through reading online material such as ammoland.com. I made a mistake in assuming that the acronym "RKBA" was understood generally in the way I understood it. I learned - again- about not making such assumptions without questioning them first. That process, would seem to be an issue whenever people are getting hot over an issue, whether gun safety regulation or something else.
This is a newsletter that is part shooting sports support and part lobbying in parallel with the NRA. Note the mention of Daily Kos:
http://www.ammoland.com/...
There is a lot of really heated rhetoric in the posts at Ammoland, which isn't surprising, given that there is a real debate about where to draw lines between individual autonomy and societal safety. That debate should be intense and every proposal should be subjected to questioning. Such issues are about the hardest sort of thing we could take up. But the element that has come into it that seems to me alarming (whether on Ammoland or Huffington Post or anywhere else) is that which is becoming more and more threatening.
To me, when you see right wing rhetoric start to take on a character beyond merely being emphatic, it can be a predicate for someone deciding that engaging in heated rhetoric isn't enough and going out, locked and loaded is an imperative. Remember Dr. Tiller?
What is the difference between the paranoid and anti social thinking of Jared Loughner or Adam Lanza and those bloggers whose comments evoke those people and a culture that seems to have something in common with Ted Kazinski or Timothy McVeigh?
When someone gets arrested for a crime, we seem to set them across a line as different, assuming there is no cultural or social context that they drew encouragement from. Maybe we should be more interested in that context.
As a First Amendment activist, I don't think there is anything aside from making an argument like this and putting it out there somewhere, that ought to be done. But the way the debate has gone to increasing boorishness ought to alarm thoughtful people and the derailment of reason should be called into question.
The author of the post on Ammoland thought that merely naming a diary on Daily Kos "Keeping Track of the RKBA Crowd" was some indication that a denial of service attack had resulted. Obviously, where people are very angry and given to paranoia, just about anything feeds that paranoia. Dots are connected that have no connection in order to create outrage.
The apparent tactic in the Ammoland cultural arena is to move away from rational and fact based argument into hyperbolic and emotionally hysterical screed writing, so as to whip up those who respond to that. If the intent is to get more people to call Congress members, then the goal is likely to be achieved. However you get those calls going in gets them going in.
But there could be a cost if it produces a few people who take it all too literally and to its logical conclusion. There could be some gun violence and real blood spilled.
If that happens, there will be hotly protested denials that rhetoric ever leads to action.
It is true, there is nothing as tangible as fingerprints there. But if there are such a thing as responsible gun owners, I would hope they would have the courage to speak up against heated rhetoric boiling over the top before it produces tragic results.
After all, an unintended consequence could be another round of calls for regulation against whatever the cause seems to be. There will be an increased intensity of interest in figuring that out, at the least.