when all else fails, blame someone else

This particular anti-rights bigot has all but lost his entertainment value for me, but I am going to take one last metaphorical swing at the spineless, violent coward known as “Alan C. Baird” before I relenquish him back to the dustbin of history from which he crawled – in his most-recent update to his aggrieved, oh-woe-is-me, I-am-the-victim-here post (which you can search for on your own – I shall not link to him), Alan had this to say:

In nearly four years of living in this state, I felt relatively safe.

Notice the use of the world “felt” – he may or may not have actually been safe, but he felt safe, and that is all that matters to him. Feelings. Assumptions. Whims. Was he safe? Was he not? Would he even know the difference? Would he care?

Anti-rights nuts across the country employ “gun-free zones” to “feel” safe, and yet those feelings amount for naught – those “victim disarmament zones” are the sites of so many mass-shootings that it almost seems like criminals prefer unarmed victims. What a novel thought!

But through your willful delusions and self-imposed blinders, you “feel” safe, and reality be damned. Forgive me if I am unimpressed.

Then I saw my first OC (open carry) a month ago, and things went downhill.

This, short, incomplete sentence impressively encompasses the entirety of Alan’s problems, and we are only two sentences into our fisk.

Seeing the individual openly carrying did not cause things to go “downhill” for Alan.

The individual openly carrying did not cause things to go “downhill” for Alan.

His reaction to the individual openly carrying is what precipitated this whole groundward spiral, and yet, rather than accepting responsibility for that irrational reaction, Alan casts about for anyone or anything else to blame.

Why am I not surprised?

Open carry has been legal in Arizona for far longer than he has lived there, and if he does not possess the personal responsibility to be cognizant of his state’s laws (and I sincerely doubt he does), the fault is his, not ours. Hell, if he missed out on the entire “Constitutional Carry” debate that has been embroiling the state for the past year or so, he has his head more-firmly planted in the sand (or up his arse) than he would initially have us believe… and yet his immediate reaction to seeing the person lawfully open carrying was that of shock, amazement, and emotional distress.

Apparently, the left and right hemispheres of Alan’s brain are not on speaking terms.

After satirizing the incident using dramatic devices like exaggeration, hyperbole and caricature,…

Really? Is that what you call blatant intolerance, blind bigotry, and irrational hatred? Let us take another look at your words, only changing things up a little:

‘Sure enough, some corpulent 80-year-old f*ggot was standing in front of the donut peaches, packing a purse. Rainbow-colored body, tooled-leather straps, the whole bit. Not a drag queen, just some retired jerkoff who evidently wanted to enhance the perceived size of his schlong.’

Or how about…

‘Okay, back to Mr. Fourteenth-f___ing-Amendment: when I saw that n*gger in the grocery store, steam started shooting from my ears. I marched up to the front office and loudly demanded to see the manager. When he arrived, I was apoplectic: “If you’re gonna allow those people in your store, I’m not gonna shop here anymore.”’

Is that still “satirical”? Does that still count as a “caricature”? If so, why? If not, why not? Perhaps Alan would be good enough to answer my question of how discriminating against one right is any better than / different from discriminating against another right?

…I received death threats from people who didn’t understand the humor.

Ah, yes, the nebulous, undefined, unseen-by-anyone-but-you “death threats” that you did not repost for the world to see and judge for themselves (and, in fact, may have intentionally deleted), did not report to Open Salon, did not report to your local police department, did not report to the originator’s ISP, did not do a damned thing about?

What was that about “exaggeration, hyperbole”? Suffice to say, without actual evidence of an honest-to-God “death threat”, I have little to no reason to believe he ever received such a thing.

It’s fine if they don’t get it; my writing is not meant for every taste.

Too true – “Jump Jim Crow”-style humor went out of vogue a few decades ago. You might want to catch up.

But threating to kill the author because he mocked a nameless caricature? That seems a little excessive to me.

And what is a caricature, Alan? According to my handy-dandy dictionary, it is “a picture, description, etc., ludicrously exaggerating the peculiarities or defects of persons or things” – notice the emphasized portion.

Do not mince words – you were mocking, insulting, attacking, and demeaning all open carriers, and, arguably, all people who carry firearms, not only by attacking this supposed-caricature, but also by creating it in the first place. Here we go again with his apparent inability to take responsibility for his actions…

I was reminded of the Ayatollah’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. My fellow countrymen were acting like Muslim extremists.

Ah, yes, as if he was not yanking the, “I’m a persecuted victim” chain hard enough already, let us pull out some specious analogy to some actual victim, while simultaneously throwing down a little stereotyping and racism to boot… ’cause, y’know, two (probably fictional, exaggerated) “death threats” from people who have almost unquestionably never murdered a single person in their lives is obviously equivalent to a public, open, and vociferous claim for a man’s head from an organization that has a tendency of delivering those on wooden platters.

On the other hand, let us re-examine what Alan’s reactions were to a person lawfully exercising their right to peacefully carry a firearm on their hip, in the open – by his own words, he flew into a hateful rage, he threw specious and assumptive accusations at a man who had broken no laws and was, in fact, simply minding his business, and he and his wife seemed to conspire to entrap, provoke, and murder the individual in question. Remind me again who is “acting like Muslim extremists”?

And speaking of that provocation, your wife said, “And if he tries to walk away, we will laugh at the size of his tiny shriveled-up fasz [Magyar: 'dick'].” You have unquestionably “walk(ed) away” from your very own words by deleting your previous posts on the topic – I have to wonder, is your wife currently pointing and laughing at you?

All those bloodthirsty people…

What “bloodthirsty” people? “All” two of the people who supposedly sent you “death threats”? Or are you taking the actions of those (possibly fictional) individuals and using them to extrapolate some grandiose stereotype about firearm carriers in general? Or, perhaps, are you referring to yourself, and your apparent desires to mow down an innocent, private, retired gentleman who is only concerned with his own safety and security?

Or are you committing the classic anti-rights nut logical fallacy and equating “violent and predatory” with “violent and protective“? This comment is made all the more ludicrously hypocritical with the soon-to-come revelation that you now own firearms… but, then, we already know how violent you can be, do we not?

…claimed to own guns for protecting their families and their homes, so obviously they don’t feel safe in Arizona.

Ah, but those claims are just so much hogwash, are they not? You just have to love the blatant innuendo oozing off Alan’s writing…

Regardless, there he goes again with “feelings”. Do criminals exist in Arizona, or do they not, Alan? Do those criminals prey on whatever victims they can come across, or do they not? Are people murdered, raped, assaulted, battered, robbed, mugged, and otherwise criminally attacked, or are they not? Those are the questions that address the facts of the matter, not some head-in-the-cloud, completely-irrelevant-to-reality “feelings” that you may or may not have; and the fact is that the world is inherently an unsafe place already, whether you are willing to admit it or not.

And once you can address those facts, you can start taking actions to actually be safe, not just “feel” it – being more aware of your surroundings, having plans on how to respond to certain situations, practicing those responses, learning or practicing how to remain calm in stressful circumstances, knowing what your limits are and how to work inside them, so on, and so forth.

But, hey, none of that matters if you feel safe, right?

Unfortunately, their attacks infected me with their fear. I now feel that *I* need to own a gun to protect *my* family and *my* home. From the gun nuts.

Bulldren. On all counts.

1. Alan again desperately tries to shift the blame and avoid responsibility.

2. Alan again allows his overwhelmingly driving force to be “feelings”, rather than thought, reason, or logic.

3. Alan again stereotypes a massive cross-section of the American public based on the supposed (and likely fictional) actions of two individuals.

Worse still, Alan seems to be of the fallacious belief that firearms are some kind of magical talisman that will automatically and mystically “protect his family and his home” simply by their presence – who wants to place bets on exactly how many times Alan goes to the range, takes training courses, reads up on lawful self-defense methods and proceedures, or does anything even remotely related to those kinds of topics? Just as his irrational fear at an openly-carried firearm is nothing more than modern-day totemism, so is his misplaced faith that a firearm’s presence will somehow protect his family… and that insistence on primal religions being equivalent to reality show just how little Alan actually understands about the topics of firearms, self-defense, or individual rights.

Oh, and, Alan, awareness that society can be and occasionally is a dangerous place is not equivalent to “fear”, and your martyr-tastic rantings and ravings would be significantly more credible if you could be bothered to learn the difference.

In other news, is anyone else somewhat bemused at how these supposed “death threats” were so very serious that Alan “need(ed)” to go out and buy a gun, but not serious enough for him to report them to the police? Ah, right, I keep forgetting… “exaggeration, hyperbole”…

Fear spreads like a virus. It’s a sad state of affairs. I want to feel safe again… but that bell can’t be unrung.

Actually, it can. Simply put, nothing has changed. Open carry was legal, is still legal, and people still do it. Carrying firearms was legal, is still legal, and people still do it. Criminals existed, still exist, and still prey on whatever victims they can. The saddest part of all of this is that Alan was probably almost certainly cognizant of all these simple facts, but his brain had simply shuffled them off into some dark crevice, never to be seriously considered or regarded… until some open carrier, minding his own business at some hoity-toity grocery store, had the unmitigated gall to unintentionally bump into Alan Baird’s tiny-assed bubble of reality.

And now poor Alan is cloak-rendingly, teeth-gnashingly emotionally distraught, without a safety binky in the whole wide world. As Captain Reynolds said, “What a whiner.”

Sorry, Alan, but from the very beginning of your pathetic little diatribe against open carriers, you came across as nothing more than a petty, abusive, overbearing schoolyard bully, and you have done absolutely nothing to change or improve that opinion, especially now that you are following remarkably similar tactics of trying to cover up your dirty work, undoubtedly blowing other people’s reactions out of proportions, and blaming anyone you can think of for what you did, of your own free will and volition. In short, and in closing, your original, inane posts, ongoing, pathetic “explanations”, and final, finger-pointing updates are “one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on the internet is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.” (And, no, you reactionary nitwit, that is not a “death threat”.).