Tag Archives: Luke McKinney

5 Reasons Gun Owners Should Join the NRA

Luke McKinney at Cracked has an(other) idiotic article lacking that substitutes snark and insult for anything resembling logic or reason over at Cracked on why we should hate the NRA (Spoiler alert: Because they think you should be free to own a gun). So, I’m going to reply to his distortions:

#5. They’re Paid By Gun Manufacturers

In 2013, Business Insider reported that less than half of the NRA’s revenue came from membership dues and fees …

Which means almost half of its funds come from member dues and fees (it has 5 million members according to wiki). Compared to other lobbying groups, that’s pretty high. For example, the AMA (the second largest lobbying group next the the Chamber of Commerce) supposedly represents physicians. It gets only 16% of its fees from dues.

In this section, Luke throws out a bunch of random unrelated trivia, but never gives any reason why they matter. Why is it bad that the NRA is half-funded by the industry? Luke never explains, he just says it is. In fact, I’m happy that the gun companies support their customers and their freedoms.

Also, notice how Luke links an article saying the NRA engages in illegal activities, when the article’s big findings (after the updates are taken into account) were that a website page was accidentally improperly routed, that taxes were properly paid but incompletely documented, and that a single box was left unchecked on tax papers (not effecting taxes paid).

So, Luke McKinney believes that if your webmaster screws up a link and you screw up your tax forms, nobody should ever associate with you again. I’ve done both, you all must never read my blog again.

#4. They’re Allowed To Casually Talk About Shooting People

Ted Nugent made a joke about shooting senators, therefore the NRA is evil. (That is literally his argument).

Cracked made multiple jokes about beating retarded children, therefore Cracked is evil. If Luke McKinney has any decency at all he will quit writing for Cracked. Or does Luke support beating developmentally disabled children?

#3. NRA Board Members Are All Kinds Of Scary

According to McKinney, because one NRA member argues for school paddlings you should leave the NRA. Maybe you don’t agree with school paddlings, but it is a normal practice and is hardly that frightening to support. 26% of the US supports school corporal punishment: so Luke literally thinks a quarter of the US is so evil you should not interact with them.

Fellow board member Don Young, a congressman from Alaska, described the BP Gulf oil spill as a “natural phenomena,”

What he actually said, right where Luke links is:

Young said: “This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a national phenomena. Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. … We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover.”

If you are not retarded (sorry Luke) you can easily read, even in that conveniently clipped quote, that it is referring to oil spilling into the sea is a natural phenomena, not that the BP spill itself was.

Then Luke just flat out lies:

and thinks wolves would be a great solution to the homelessness problem.

Actually, if you read the article Luke linked, you can see that he wasn’t talking about solving the homeless problem at all. He was talking about how wolves are dangerous and how urbanites who never had to deal with the danger of wolves are making laws to prevent rural folk from protecting themselves. Of course, Luke, being an ignorant urbanite, has no idea about the danger of wolves in rural areas where their aren’t a lot of police and where animal control is far away. It almost seems like he supports wolves killing people.

So, if you are one of the quarter of the US who support paddling in schools and believe that rural people don’t deserve to get eaten by wolves, you are so scary that everyone should disassociate from you.

#2. They’re Pretty Racist

The NRA’s 2015 annual meeting featured a presentation on how whole swathes of American cities had been turned into Muslim “no-go zones,”

It seems Luke McKinney thinks Muslims are a race. I think that makes him a racist, not to mention just plain ignorant of biology, sociology, and religion.

“Demographically symbolic” is a masterpiece. Nine syllables that would be less obvious if he’d just screamed, “Racism sexism racism!” It’s a code word, but not a disguised code word;

He links to this:

Eight failed years of one demographically symbolic president is enough. Eight years of the Obama-Clinton regime has sent our nation into a tailspin of moral decay, deceit and destruction.

I guess Luke McKinney thinks the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein is racist for thinking of the emotional symbolism of Obama’s victory, or Habib Aruna for thinking of the sybolism of an African American winning resoundingly twice, or NBC news, or CTV news, etc. The symbolism of the first African American winning the presidency was a huge topic in 2008. I guess Luke’s ignorant of recent political history as well.

He went on to blame the president for all problems, to describe how guns solve all problems, and to explain, “For that right, NRA will always fight and, believe me, the fight is coming.” Of course, there’s no possible problem with the leader of an armed group blaming a single named individual for all the problems in the world in public and insisting “the fight is coming.” Not even in a country where a Cracked writer can be placed on the No-Fly list for writing a satirical article. Right now the only difference between NRA talks and Al-Qaeda videos is production value.

Do I honestly need to explain how retarded this is?

Maybe I do. Luke believes that using a fighting metaphor to describe a political battle (oh no, a war metaphor, I must be Hitler) is exactly equivalent to to literally talking about blowing thousands of other people, and yourselves, up. (But only when the evil NRA does it).

I am sure Luke has never used a war metaphor before.

#1. They Blame Victims (And Everything Else)

The NRA makes the very accurate point that if you vote against people’s ability to defend themselves they won’t have the ability to defend themselves. This makes them evil (somehow, he doesn’t exactly explain how).

After Sandy Hook, Wayne LaPierre blamed music videos, movies, video games — they’re on course to blame every object in existence for shootings except for objects that actually shoot. Blaming everything except the gun is their only job, and the angrier it makes people, the better it works.

Luke McKinney believes guns are magical objects that have their own agency and willfully kill people. People who don’t share this belief are implied to be evil (for some unexplained reason).

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Finally, though, through all the distortions Luke finally gets to his real point:

Their sole function is to prevent rational debate…They’ve buried the country under so much bullshit that even intelligent Americans start talking about individual rights and waiting periods, as if there was any sane sequence of words that ends with a peacetime civilian holding an AR-15

He wants to limit any discussion of guns to “rational debate” and by “rational debate” he means people who agree with him that guns he doesn’t like should be banned being able to talk and everybody else should shut up. He wants to control the discussion and he wants to limit your ability for self-defence. And he is willing to distort the truth and slander others to do so.

The whole point of his rambling, illogical, unconnected anti-NRA rant was that he hates the fact that civilians can own a semi-automatic weapon. He wants to take them away from you.

Join the NRA so he can’t.

Join the NRA: where business and citizens work together to protect freedom, where celebrities make jokes, where people don’t believe rural dwellers deserve to be eaten by wolves, where people make and understand common metaphors and use basic communication skills, and where people don’t believe inanimate object have agency.

If you value sanity, join the NRA!

Ruining Games

I didn’t really have anything to write about today, but it’s post day, so I’ll say just a bit more on gamersgate, inspired once again by Cracked and Mark Hill. Two articles were up today.

One was yet another anti-gamergate piece, (sadly, Cracked has now reached my Unvisit list) this one so stupid. For someone who is as supposedly pro-reason as Luke McKinney this is based very strongly in unreason. Despite this I’m going to engage it from points 7 to 1: genetic fallacy, irrelevant ad hominem, fallacy of composition/anecdotal, irrelevant to anything (his argument in #4 boils down to ‘people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss’), ambiguity fallacy, straw man, and, finally, genetic fallacy again. I should also note that the asinine immaturity of Luke McKinney in this piece is rather ironically humourous given that point #1 in last week’s article on gamersgate was “We’re Incapable of Mature Conversations About Gender”.

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At this point, I’m going to make a small aside on the term Social Justice Warrior (SJW), as Luke McKinney is not the only one I’ve seen commenting on how SJW sounds awesome.

SJW is a term of pointed mockery. The mockery comes exactly from the fact that SJW’s are the farthest things possible from warriors. Fatties who revel in their obesity, feminists that go into conniptions when its pointed out that sluttery and tattoos go hand in hand, women that become physically ill from words, people who try to ban trashtalk from games because it hurts their feewings, and psychologically ill perverts who can not tell fantasy from reality are as unlike warriors as is humanely possible.

Using the term social justice warrior simply points out, in an ironic fashion, the pathetic weakness of the SJW’s (on an individual level; as a screaming, anonymous lynch mob they do have some social power).

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Cracked and the rest of the SJW’s seem so very confused by gamers’ motivations against SJW’s that they can posit no explanation but ‘those evil mysoginists hate women’. Which bring us to the second article, where Mark Hill goes on about why video game narratives need to change. At first glance, this article seems relatively benign, what’s wrong with making suggestions to improve video games, but if we look at it closely, his arguments essentially boil down to:

6: Stories should have fewer sociopaths. He specifically points people who do things that make games fun as sociopaths, but, in context of other anti-gamersgate Cracked articles, it is clear that anyone deviating from SJW orthodoxy is a sociopath.

5: Villains should be made more morally grey, so the difference between heroes and villains are less stark (ie. break down traditional morality and replace with prog morality).

4: Games should decide your character’s emotions and reactions for you, the game should think for you, rather than you reacting to the game yourself.

3: The reason we’re shooting at people can not be ‘fun’, there must be a justifiable reason that is very easy to understand without reading.

2: Suggestions having to do with pacing and structure, which are not relevant, one way or the other, to my point.

1: Games should dictate morality, particularly SJW morality, rather than let gamers figure out moral quandaries for themselves.

Why, oh why, would gamers be against this? Why would gamers be against people trying to remove the fun parts of games and turn games into morality lectures?

Mark Hill is a perfect demonstration of why gamers are against the SJW’s entering gaming, and it has nothing to do with misogyny. They want to turn games away from the objective of fun and towards the objective of forcing their SJW moral system on people who just want to relax for a few hours.