Sorry, Alan. No.

I have to put in the usual disclaimer of veracity, but that may be a faint hope as David Codrea is as solid as anyone you will ever meet.

I'm talking about this:

“Just so you all know, I am in support on the Manchin-Tooney substitute bill to knock out the bad Schumer Background Check bill,” Gottlieb wrote. “I and our CCRKBA attorney lobbyist had a hand in influencing and writing parts of it.

Alan Gottlieb has done some fine work over the years, and I take nothing away from that.  But sorry, Alan.  No.  Hell no.  Even "aw HELLno".

Some, of course, will defend the action.  It's a chess move, for sure;  I've got little doubt that Gottlieb doesn't actually want to see the law on the books.  Perhaps he has convinced himself that by crafting a contender he can kill both the "worse" bill, and his own as well;  he may even be right that the thugs pushing the "worse" option would kill anything short of it, or anything authored by "the other team".

I don't give a flying duck-fuck about any of that.  Here's why.  It's really very simple.

1. It's morally wrong, period.  Alan Gottlieb certainly has the right to gamble his own life on the outcome of an agreement into which he enters.  He does not--not--have the right to gamble the life of anyone else, no matter what the potential reward might be, nor how many other people might agree with him.  (Further, he does not have the right to enter into an agreement on behalf of anyone else without their consent, and expect it to be binding upon them.  But that is all politics, not simply "gun politics".)


2. The chess move is pointless.  Defenders will claim that the "nice" bill explicitly prohibits a national registry, with a penalty clause, and that it "restores" other gun rights.  Well shit, Alan, if all it takes to restrain Leviathan from abusing its powers against us is a law, then maybe you can explain what, exactly, this shiny new thing is going to do that, say, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Fourteenth Amendment have all (QED, ferchrissakes) failed to do?  The way I always saw it, the concept behind the Second Amendment was that that was the damn penalty clause--and one a sight more rigorous than a 15-year "prison" term, don'tcha think?  

On one hand, I suppose I can't be surprised.  Play long enough in the political realm, and maybe it's just inevitable that you start believing that politics can be a solution to politics.  But I did want to believe better.  To believe that someone in Gottlieb's position would not go and Ruger us all over again.

Last time I checked, "No" is still a complete sentence, and a perfectly suitable, unambiguous answer to tyranny.  Even--especially--tyranny that is crafted to benefit me.

Sorry, Alan.  No.

"No" even if it's pissing into the wind.  "No" even if it's certain defeat.  The answer is still "no", because it simply cannot be anything but "no".