https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/14/gun-control-revolt-chris-murphy-00096827
Easily taking gold in the “what the hell did he just say?” contest this month is Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) for his statement suggesting that the Supreme Court’s dedication to accurately interpreting the constitution would result in a “popular revolt”. In order to avoid putting words in the senator’s mouth, and so we’re all on the same page, I’ll quote him.
“If the Supreme Court eventually says that states or the Congress can’t pass universal background checks or can’t take these assault weapons off the streets, I think there’s going to be a popular revolt over that policy.”
Not satisfied with that head-scratcher, he made sure to follow up with “A court that’s already pretty illegitimate, is going to be in full crisis mode”. Both sides of the current political divide are rife with examples of “anything I don’t like is extremism”, but claiming that the SCOTUS is illegitimate because they have ruled against your personal beliefs is pretty wild. If you don’t like SCOTUS’ rulings, get better lawyers, or better policy. If you don’t like their composition, vote for better congresspeople.
So what does Sen. Murphy mean? I lack the mutant powers of Professor X, so I can’t actually go into his head and explain that for you, but I do have an internet connection and have googled the word revolt. It turns out that a revolt is “violent action against a ruler or government : rebellion”. So, and I hope I’m understanding this right, Murphy seems to be saying that if the government is not given the power to remove arms (and thus the genuine capacity for revolt) from the entire civilian populace, the anti-gun left –that famously unarmed portion of that populace– are going to take violent action against the government (and thus its agents), until the government agrees to… disarm us all? Have I got that right? Did they suddenly forget their own argument that the government has F-15s?
They seem to forget that all of these gun laws they support explicitly exempt law enforcement –who they constantly remind us are murdering people on the street for sport daily– and that any revolt would run up against them and their “weapons of war whose only purpose is to massacre huge volumes of people in as short a time as possible”. So is Sen. Murphy completely ignorant of not only the definition of the words he’s chosen, but the laws and their downstream effects? Or is he simply grandstanding for likes and votes, and knows perfectly well that what he’s saying is cognitive dissonance in it’s most amusingly nonsensical form? With politicians, one may be just as likely as the other, but I tend to think that Hanlon’s razor fails to cut when it comes to stuff like this, and they’re simply pandering to keep their jobs as decades of anti-rights gun control policy are undone by evidence-based judicial rulings. The only thing revolting here is the senator’s cynical play at rallying ignorant support.
