Mission statement:

Armed and Safe is a gun rights advocacy blog, with the mission of debunking the "logic" of the enemies of the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms.

I can be reached at 45superman@gmail.com.You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/45superman.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

Of 'Fairness' and the slippery slope

This will be another post that has only a tangential relationship to gun rights. Gun bloggers are sometimes accused of focusing so intently on the right to keep and bear arms that other rights are ignored. In my case, I suppose there's something to that--I very rarely talk much about other rights here. For that, I make no apologies. I consider gun rights advocacy my specialty--a cancer researcher isn't condemned for not doing enough to cure AIDS, and the gun rights issue is where I think I have some competency.

Still, today's post will deal primarily with the First Amendment. We've been hearing rather a lot in the last few days about a push to revive the so-called "Fairness Doctrine." Indeed on election day, Senator Chucky Schumer (in)famously compared conservative talk radio to pornography.



Here's a transcript of that particular segment:

“The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.”
As offensive as the comparison of certain political opinions to pornography is, my point is not so much the offensiveness of it, but what this says about the statist mindset.

Specifically, I would like to point to " . . . you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent."

The only way I can interpret that is that it means that regulation of one aspect of communications media is being used to justify regulation of every other aspect. That seems the very definition of the "slippery slope" argument. When the existence of one law is used as justification--for the sake of "consistency"--for more laws (which themselves can then be used to justify still more laws), the police state has indeed arrived.

Senator Chucky could just as easily have said that because the government prohibits felons from possessing guns, it would be "inconsistent" to say that it cannot prohibit anyone else from owning them.

Hmm . . . maybe this post had more to do with gun rights than I'd thought.

11 comments:

bwaites said...

Check this clip from the
Glenn Beck show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTDmGt1Pafw

Talk about a slippery slope!!

Kurt '45superman' Hofmann said...

Pretty eye-opening stuff.

chris horton said...

No doubt Schumer has an agenda.
I believe he has always been the WORST of them all.

Now we're gonna see it,and him,for what it is....

Kurt '45superman' Hofmann said...

No disagreement here about Chucky, Chris.

Now we're gonna see it,and him,for what it is....

Let's dance, then, Chucky.

III

Anonymous said...

Does this mean that the NRA gets equal time on NPR?

Here in CA the left got minoritys to vote in record numbers knowing that almost all of the votes would go to Barry. Wouldn't really have made that much difference, CA would have gone for him no matter what. What bit them in the a** was that these same minority voters were instrumental in voting for Prop. 8. The Law of Unintended Consequences will bite the left in the a** every time.

Joe in CA

Kurt '45superman' Hofmann said...

Yeah--folks on the other side seem to have a knack for stepping into unintended consequences.

Anonymous said...

Well, you beat me to it. I was going to discuss, using this exact example, how the "pro-gun" types are working against themselves. Setting aside the details for a moment, Schumer is actually telling us something important about the mechanisms that limit our liberty. You may think he's a party hack, but that means he understands how Washington works.

I figured it was too early to pull back the curtain, considering how the election results are turning a lot of Republicans into alcoholics.

Anonymous said...

If I was an elected Republican, I would shout from the rooftops that I was a hopeless alcoholic. Whether I had ever had a drink or not.

Alcoholism or frontal lobotomy, or both. I would swear I suffered from both. Any such excuse would be preferable to being known for what they really are. Cowardly pragmatists who sold out and then didn't get the benefit of their traitorous activity anyway.

Fuck them and the donkey they let ride them in on.

tjbbpgob said...

I don't ever recall anyone putting a stop to pornography, can you say "cable" and now even the regular shows before 8pm are full of four letter words and inuindo.

the pistolero said...

Gun bloggers are sometimes accused of focusing so intently on the right to keep and bear arms that other rights are ignored.

...but it isn't true, is it?

Kurt '45superman' Hofmann said...

Agreed, Pistolero--but I left that as a point for another day.