It’s Friday the 12th, which means two things: it’s my Grandpa’s birthday and it’s time for the Christmas movies to begin in earnest. No more cable-made schlock, it’s time to break out the big holiday guns! And with that theme in mind, let’s get firing on this Morning Roar!
New Poll Shows Majority Support for Gun Rights Over Gun Control
In what the Christian Science Monitor is calling a first, the majority of Americans asked by the Pew Research Center about their opinion on gun rights vs. control have expressed their support for rights over control in the most recent round of polling. This is a surprising yet very welcome development.
By a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent, Americans say protecting the rights of gun owners is more important than gun control, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center released Wednesday. It is the first time Pew found more support for gun ownership than gun control in more than two decades of surveys on the issue.
“Support for gun rights has edged up from earlier this year, and marks a substantial shift in attitudes since shortly after the Newtown school shooting,” the Pew report says. The second anniversary of the massacre is this Sunday.
The public typically lets its opinion be swayed by the most recent widely covered event – i.e. school shootings, which are statistical outliers that aren’t indicative of a trend in any way. The riots in Ferguson may have helped to sway opinion back to the other side as people worry about civil unrest following acts of questionable morality by the police, but hopefully it’s simply that logic and reason have won out over the emotionally charged and reality-challenged cries of strict gun control advocates.
Berkeley Protests Over Eric Garner & Mike Brown Ruin Peter Thiel Speech
Libertarian businessman and intellectual Peter Thiel was welcomed to Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall for a speech and Q&A session this week. However, Berkeley’s rabidly liberal student body quite ignorantly decided that a protest over police actions should be carried into the hall in order to ruin Thiel’s talk, despite Thiel supporting civil liberties and non-intrusive government. Thus, they went out of their way to destroy an event attended by other students, which was sponsored by the university, in order to make some non-point to a man who already shared their views on that particular subject. That, my friends, is a Webster’s dictionary worthy definition of idiocy. And Berkeley is full of it. From Breitbart:
On Monday evening, Breitbart News had reported on the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement from within the same hall. One veteran of that event, philosopher John Searle, lamented that Berkeley had not achieved complete free speech, because of hostility towards unpopular views, particularly conservative ones. “We did not have an atmosphere where anybody could come and say anything,” he recalled.
The Thiel event had been sponsored by the Berkeley Forum, which is “a non-partisan, student-run organization at the University of California, Berkeley,” according to itswebsite, which fosters dialogue through “talks by leading experts from a wide variety of fields.” The Forum hosted Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a vocal critic of the NSA, earlier in the year. Following the disruption of the Thiel event, the Forum issued a statement, noting:
While we respect and sympathize with the protestor’s right to demonstrate, the right of free speech and discussion is a two-way street. The Berkeley Forum is founded on the principles of free discussion and intellectual exchange. Moments before the demonstrators stormed the auditorium, Peter Thiel was preparing to answer a question regarding his views on the value of political protest, after which the event was to open up to audience questions. Sadly, the opportunity to engage in productive discussion on the matter was lost.
The Breitbart article also includes some crowing by the uninformed on social media, where that sort of thing naturally finds a home.
Frankly, this is an embarrassment for Berkeley as a school and as a student body. These people profess to be the most progressive, open minded folks on the planet, yet if anyone challenges their hyper-progressives mindset they resort to disruption and shouting rather than consider another point of view. I’ve experienced it first hand, and it’s honestly just beyond pathetic. Especially considering how much crossover there is between libertarian philosophy and liberal philosophy socially.
Berkeley: a school of “higher education” for the massively uninformed and willfully ignorant.
Comedian’s Take on the Federal Reserve
I came across this video randomly today, as I follow comedy feeds and accounts as someone who himself performs stand up comedy (bet you folks didn’t know that about one of your writers! Follow me on Twitter @BrianMcWilliams).
Comedian Tom Simmons (follow him on Twitter @TSimmonsComedy) has a hilarious – and correct – take on the Fed, and what better way to start, continue, or end your Friday than with a laugh at the expense of the government’s favored private banking institution? Enjoy.
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