<![CDATA[Amanda Marcotte]]>

Salon invokes specter of January 6th to make anti-gun argument

June 28, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Salon isn’t the kind of publication most of us pay much attention to, but there are times I think it would be almost respectable except for one writer.

Amanda Marcotte is the queen of bad takes. It’s kind of her thing, I suppose, and Salon lets her keep doing it.

As such, I shouldn’t be surprised that she’s at it again. What she understands about guns, crime, and much of anything seems to be exclusively informed by leftist media narratives, but this is especially stupid.

You have to hand it to Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Their marriage is an exemplar of spousal teamwork. Ginni Thomas worked hard on the inside game for Donald Trump’s coup: exchanging emails with Trump co-conspirator John Eastman, pressuring state legislators to throw out electors that President Joe Biden won and blitzing Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows with potential coup strategies. Meanwhile, her husband just handed the Trump’s volunteer street fighters, the sort of folks that stormed the Capitol on January 6, a Supreme Court decision that will make it much easier for them to arm themselves with heavy firepower in the future.

I don’t need to share more of the op-ed because it doesn’t get any better from there.

First, understand that NYSRPA v. Bruen doesn’t directly mention anything about the purchase of firearms. It doesn’t repeal background checks or waiting periods or anything that might be in place at the state or federal level regarding who can and cannot buy a firearm.

So then how does the ruling make it easier for a bunch of people with no criminal record to arm themselves with “heavy firepower,” whatever the hell she means by that, in the future?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. That’s pretty much the long answer, too.

Bruen was about whether one had a right to bear arms outside of the home. It didn’t, however, overturn licensing. That’s an important point here because Marcotte’s argument seems to be that people will turn the next 1/6 into a bloodbath or something.

However, let’s also remember that 1/6 was carried out by people who are among the most gun-owning demographic imaginable. If they’d wanted to turn it into an actual insurrection and had planned on doing so, they certainly could have.

I mean, think about it. If they wanted to overthrow the United States government, I’m pretty sure gun laws weren’t going to stop them. If a law was, the ones against insurrection itself should have done it, right?

And nothing in Bruen would change that. Absolutely nothing at all.

Oh, it means states have to adopt a shall-issue permitting scheme? So? Unless everyone who shows up to such an event has gotten a permit from Washington, D.C. they can’t lawfully carry unless they have a permit from a jurisdiction with reciprocity. That’s no different than it was on 1/6, actually, and nothing in Bruen says anything about reciprocity.

So why wasn’t 1/6 deadlier? The only person shot was one of the protestors, so why weren’t dozens or hundreds more shot and killed, only this time on the other side? Where were the photos of bleeding Capitol Police officers nursing gunshot wounds or lying dead in the halls?

Look, there are arguments one can make as to why they think this ruling was bad. I’m sure Salon would love to publish all of them, really.

However, Marcotte’s sure isn’t one of them.

Salon blames “misogyny” for boyfriend loophole friction

June 16, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Senators agreed, at least in principle, to close the so-called boyfriend loophole. For any who are unaware, this means that domestic violence charges could be applied to dating partners as opposed to now where the definition involves, basically, people who cohabitate together or have been married at some point.

Now, few people take issue with calling violent boyfriends domestic abusers. Not in and of itself, anyway.

Yet there are serious concerns about closing this supposed loophole.

Unless you’re Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, then it’s really all about what the voices in your head say it’s about.

Mea culpa time. In the latest edition of my newsletter, Standing Room Only, I was quite sour about reports about the bipartisan gun bill being negotiated by Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. The reporting I’d read suggested the bill was primarily focused on funding for “red flag” laws and mental health spending, both of which are nice but will do little to actually stem the problem of gun violence, especially in red states. But more fleshed-out details since show that one under-discussed aspect of the bill may end up being the most important: A proposal to finally close the “boyfriend loophole” in the federal background check law.
This is something that both feminists and gun control activists have been demanding for decades, only to have Republicans — no fans of either preventing gendered violence or gun deaths — get in the way.
It’s doubly frustrating for how nonsensical the allowance is. Under the current background check system, a person with a domestic violence conviction should be flagged and prevented from purchasing a gun — but only if they married or lived with the person they assaulted. Someone who attacked a dating partner they hadn’t moved in with yet can buy all the guns they want. Half of domestic violence murders, however, are at the hands of someone who hasn’t lived with their victim. So it’s not like this is a minor problem. The ugly implication has been that the Republican opponents to closing the boyfriend loophole simply see hitting a girlfriend as a lesser crime than hitting a wife.

Except that implication exists only in Marcotte’s heavily biased mind. Why else cite “misogyny” in this piece’s headline?

The problem is that there’s no objective mechanism for determining if someone is a boyfriend or not. The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization bill language basically said it was anyone who had been in an “intimate” relationship with the victim, but also stated that sex wasn’t a requirement to be considered as such a relationship.

That’s pretty vague and difficult to determine, and that’s a big problem.

Especially in an era where younger generations don’t “date” in quite the same manner as older generations did. Back in my day, you got a boyfriend or girlfriend and you were a couple. Today, many sort of gather in groups where they may sort of pair off, but not in quite the same manner.

It muddies the water as to who is really in a relationship with who.

Then there are concepts like “friend with benefits” or even just a one-night stand between people in the same social circle. Just where do we draw the line?

Of course, speaking of muddied water, Marcotte did that quite well herself. After all, she claims nearly half of all intimate partner homicides were committed by people who didn’t live together, but I actually took a look at that report. It doesn’t actually say any such thing. (She also glossed over the part of the report that noted the percentage killed with guns has been dropping since 1980.)

What it does say is that by 2008, 48.6 percent of all intimate partner homicides were committed by partners who weren’t married to the victim, but it doesn’t make any reference to where the killer was living or not.

Further, it should be noted that it also says that 48.6 percent were boyfriends and girlfriends. Funny how she left that part out when discussing the “boyfriend loophole,” which probably should be called the “boyfriend or girlfriend loophole,” if we’re going to be really accurate.

Back to the main point about the study, though, I find it awful patriarchal of Marcotte to believe that only spouses live with one another in this day and age.

Now, understand, I have no doubt that a fair percentage of that 48.6 percent weren’t cohabitating in any way. It’s probably likely that many weren’t. My point is that the study doesn’t say what she claims it does.

Then again, there are real problems with the so-called boyfriend loophole, which she also seems to be unable to grasp because of her own internal hangups.