Break Out the Tinfoil Hats
One more comment on the INS registration debacle, which really does irritate me to no end. Pop-culture stuff after this, I promise.
I've hung around Usenet and the Web long enough to have seen a dozen different incarnations of the Neverending Gun Control Flamewars (my favorite posts on the subject are "Charles Dodgson's" (scroll up for more), for whatever that's worth), and one of the things that's always sort of puzzled me about those arguments (other than the weirdly dissonant combination of fear and machismo involved in a lot of pro-gun arguments) is the hard-core wing nuts' insistence that any attempt to control guns is Eeeevil, and only a prelude to confiscation and oppression.
The idea is that, once you make everyone register their privately-owned machine guns, it's only a matter of time before the government uses the handy database of gun owners thus produced to go round up all the heat-packing free thinkers, and then the last defense against tyranny will have fallen, and we'll all be forced to kneel before the Antichrist. Or something like that.
This has always struck me as ridiculously paranoid, but the recent round-ups of Arabic undesirables have made it seem less like paranoia, and more like a policy statement...
Posted at 11:15 AM | link | follow-ups |