Opinion | Arizona Just Chose a Senate Candidate More Extreme Than Donald Trump
By: Sam Adler-Bell (nytimes)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Aug. 3, 2022 Blake Masters, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, has been running ads showing him cradling a rifle "designed to kill people."
By Sam Adler-Bell
Blake Masters's first campaign ad opens with a shot of the Sonoran Desert. A plaintive piano theme tinkles as Mr. Masters, a 35-year-old venture capitalist and, as of early Wednesday morning, the Republican nominee for Senate in Arizona, delivers a monologue in voice-over. "The truth is, we can't take America for granted," he says. "And if we want to keep it, we've got to fight for it."
The angles are wide, and the focus is deep. The camera floats above the ground, drifting after a boy's legs running over the dunes and peering upward at Mr. Masters and his family hiking at the golden hour. In another video, from November, Mr. Masters stands in the desert cradling a gun. "This is a short-barreled rifle," he says. "It wasn't designed for hunting. This is designed to kill people."
Mr. Masters has saidthat his ads, which mingle scenes of wistful domesticity with bellicose rhetoric and stark vistas of Arizona wilderness, were inspired by the films of Terrence Malick, the enigmatic American director. Mr. Malick once told an interviewer that in filming "Badlands" — a movie set in 1958 about young lovers on a killing spree — he tried to minimize '50s-era visual cues. "Nostalgia," he said, "is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything." Instead, he wanted the film to feel like "a fairy tale, outside time." This, he hoped, would "take a little of the sharpness out of the violence but still keep its dreamy quality."
Perhaps Mr. Masters is trying to strike a similar balance. Juxtaposing pastoral serenity with masculine violence, his ads conjure a latent darkness — an eagerness to subdue through coercion and threat — undergirding the American dream.
In his victory speech in Chandler, Ariz., on Tuesday night, Mr. Masters — who was endorsed by Donald Trump in June — echoed the themes of his campaign: America is in trouble, riddled with crime and disorder; illegal immigration is an invasion; Big Tech is censoring conservatives and colonizing young people's minds, while globalist corporations outsource jobs and make American life all but unlivable for middle-class families. In his speech, Mr. Masters attacked "a small minority of hard-core Democratic Party activists" who, he said, "control newspapers and television and schools and universities — and you better believe they control Big Tech, too," framing the race as a battle against "the cartels," "giant global corporations" and "a system that's actively trying to destroy families."
ImageWhere Donald Trump was merely a vehicle for disruption, Mr. Masters sees himself and his allies as midwives of transformation.Credit...Mario Tama/Getty Images
To close followers of conservative politics, this message may sound familiar. Mr. Masters is unmistakably a figure of the New Right: militant, internet-savvy culture warriors who position themselves as insurgent challengers of the sclerotic establishment in both parties. No longer doctrinaire libertarians, they see coercive state power as an indispensable tool for achieving conservative ends: mandating patriotic curriculums in schools, supporting the formation of "native-born" families, banning abortion and pornography, and turning back the rights revolution for L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.
"If you're not using any political power to shore up a good society that follows the rule of law," Mr. Masters warned recently, "you'll get rolled." Locked in civilizational battle with the radical left — the "enemy of true progress, the enemy of everything that is good" — conservatives who insist on libertarian orthodoxy are, for Mr. Masters, like pacifists in wartime: "You can recite an eloquent poem about pacifism right before they line you up against the wall and shoot you."
For many young Trumpists, Mr. Masters is a dream candidate: a true believer who — as a ubiquitous New Right shibboleth has it — knows what time it is. He wants to ban "critical race theory" from schools and defund "gender ideology." His campaign distributes yard signs that read, "Blake Masters won't ask your pronouns in the U.S. Senate." And he recently told the conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk that Dr. Anthony Fauci "will see the inside of a prison cell this decade."
Likewise, his Twitter account is an endless stream of insular right-wing watchwords. In April, he called the Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson a "pedophile apologist." In November, he tweeted, "When a society celebrates Antifa looters, arsonists, and pedophiles as heroes, while turning brave people like Kyle Rittenhouse into villains, it is a society that is not long for this world." He frequently amplifies Mr. Trump's 2020 election lies and he recently suggested that Democrats will "cheat" in the midterms.
But Mr. Masters also represents a distinctive innovation upon the swaggering MAGA message of other Republican hopefuls. A quintessential nerdy jock, he seems more Menlo Park than Capitol Hill; even in his pastoral campaign videos, he can sometimes be seen holding an iPad. He keeps a great deal of his wealth in cryptocurrencies. He is the well-groomed avatar of a hard-right Silicon Valley brain trust, including his former employer, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, and an array of farseeing, anti-democratic titans of industry who see America as a stagnant and feeble empire in desperate need of vitalist reinvention.
Where Mr. Trump was merely a vehicle for disruption, Mr. Masters sees himself and his allies — including his fellow Thiel-backed Senate hopeful J.D. Vance of Ohio — as midwives of transformation .
ImageA Masters campaign event in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. His nomination is a sign of a growing conservative appetite for radical solutions to American decline.Credit...Bridget Bennett for The New York Times
Their diagnoses of American malaise are not fantastical; everyone can see the country is in trouble. But their prescriptions for how to fix it, the means they are willing to entertain to do so, are far outside the American mainstream, drawing on a political vision that sees democracy as an obstacle to the urgent interventions of enlightened philosopher kings.
Most strikingly, Mr. Masters's presentation — mannered and serious; boyish but grave — is utterly devoid of Trumpian camp; there is none of the irony and kitsch that clung to Mr. Trump even in his cruelest moments. What's left is only bitterness, enmity and a histrionic vision of a world being torn apart by the globalist left.
Mr. Masters faces a vulnerable Democratic incumbent, Mark Kelly, in November, but even if he doesn't prevail, his nomination is a clear sign of a growing conservative appetite for radical solutions to American decline. If Mr. Masters does win, however, it may well be his bizarre and menacing vision of American politics — not the rosy amnesia of Mike Pence or the truculent populism of Ron DeSantis — that defines the future of the Republican Party.
Like many conservatives of his generation, Mr. Masters started out a libertarian.
At 19, he blogged on LiveJournal under the username kinggps in support of drug legalization, unfettered immigration and the elimination of the Supreme Court, which, he wrote, is "little more than a coercive microcosm of democracy." As for national borders, Mr. Masters wrote, "Are we really supposed to believe that a government can draw a line in the sand, and that the people living on one side are somehow inherently different or deserving of more or less rights" than "those on the other?"
Mr. Masters shared his political musings in forums for body builders, CrossFit and gun enthusiasts, his online presence exuding the overconfidence, haughty logic-chopping, and occasional paranoia typical of late-aughts libertarianism. "I don't mean any disrespect — but it takes years to understand where I'm coming from, let alone agree or disagree," a beleaguered Mr. Masters posted on a CrossFit message board in 2007. He then signed off, recommending a workout for their minds: "taking 30 min. of your day" to read antiwar.com, the libertarian Mises Institute website, LewRockwell.com and CounterPunch.
A handful of dorm mates from Mr. Masters's undergraduate years at Stanford told me he once recorded a liberty-themed rap, which, to my great regret, is no longer available online — though Mother Jones did uncover one 2008 video in which Mr. Masters wears Native American war paint and freestyles, "I've got the war paint on, as you can see/Who said what about cultural insensitivity?"
ImageMannered and serious, boyish but grave, Mr. Masters has none of the irony and kitsch that clung to Mr. Trump even in his cruelest moments.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
Mr. Masters's life and political trajectory changed in 2012, when, as a law student at Stanford, he took a class taught by Mr. Thiel, the early Facebook investor who co-founded PayPal and Palantir.
When they met, Mr. Thiel was on his own journey away from hard-core libertarianism toward a more traditionalist and muscular nationalism. Like Mr. Masters, he had backed Ron Paul for president in 2008. And in a programmatic essay published the following year, Mr. Thiel declared that he no longer believed democracy and freedom were compatible: "The great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms."
Lamenting that there were "no truly free places left in our world," Mr. Thiel placed his hopes in "some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country." That country, he wagered, would be found in cyberspace, outer space or in the open ocean. (At the time, Mr. Thiel had begun investing in "seasteading," which entails building libertarian communes on seaborne platforms in international waters.)
This worldview, pervasive in Silicon Valley at the time, can be summarized as a libertarianism of "exit." In 1970, the economist Albert O. Hirschman identified the choices for dissatisfied constituents of a troubled organization, business or nation: They can "exit," leaving the organization behind and building something new, or they can use their "voice" to improve it from within. ("Loyalty," a third choice, mediates between the other two.)
"The fate of our world," Mr. Thiel wrote in his 2009 essay, "may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."
By the time Mr. Masters was his student, however, Mr. Thiel was losing confidence that unfettered capitalism, alone, would lead to a better future. He was preoccupied with stagnation and a sense that the motor of technological change had stalled out. ("We wanted flying cars — instead we got 140 characters," he complained in 2011.) In his Stanford class, Mr. Thiel — seeming to draw as much from the writings of French philosopher and literary critic Rene Girard as from business economics — described the impulse to imitate competitors as the death knell of true innovation, which requires visionaries to zig while everyone else zags.
Enthralled by these lectures, Mr. Masters began posting his meticulous class notes, in essay form, on a blog. The notes became a sensation, leading Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters to collaborate on a 2014 book, "Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future." (The book is attributed to "Peter Thiel with Blake Masters.") Since then, the two men's lives have been entangled. Mr. Thiel invested in Mr. Masters's start-up in 2012. And after he graduated from law school, he began working for Mr. Thiel, eventually becoming chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation.
ImageMr. Masters is unmistakably a figure of the New Right: militant, internet-savvy culture warriors who position themselves as insurgent challengers of the establishment in both parties.Credit...Bridget Bennett for The New York Times
In "Zero to One," Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters describe the ideal founder as a sort of trollish uber-mensch: undaunted by censure, eager to offend, and constantly asking himself "the contrarian question": What important truth do few people agree with me on? True innovation, they imply, requires heresy. Leaders must be willing to scandalize.
It was this philosophy that helped them see promise in Donald Trump. Where most conservative elites saw Mr. Trump's offensiveness and vulgarity as a liability, Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters saw it as an asset, a sign that he could disrupt establishment politics and break things open. As Mr. Masters said in an interview last year, "You can think of his administration as a start-up of sorts."
But by investing in Mr. Trump, Mr. Thiel was also subtly reorienting his political posture. Once a leading advocate for "exit," Mr. Thiel has since found his "voice,"using his wealth and power to shape American governance to his liking. In just a few years, he went from pining for off-world colonies and funding anarchist barges, to a prominent role on a presidential transition team.
In 2016, Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters were charged with recommending appointees to populate the administrative state — a dream job for reformed libertarians convinced that their brilliant colleagues should be running the government. But their list of 150 names, Max Chafkin reported in his biography of Mr. Thiel, included people who were "too extreme even for the most extreme members of Trump's inner circle." The person they proposed for the F.D.A., for instance, was a tech mogul and bitcoin investor who had suggested replacing the agency with a "Yelp for drugs."
"It was too much," Steve Bannon told Mr. Chafkin. "People thought Trump was a disrupter. They had no earthly idea."
For Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters, the transition was a sign of greater disappointments to come. Despite all his bluster and chaos, Mr. Trump barely got anything done. Mr. Masters told National Review in November that an America First agenda "can't just be doing tax cuts and deregulation and assuming that everything will work out." But that's basically all Mr. Trump accomplished.
Curtis Yarvin, an influential neo-reactionary blogger who is close to both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters, has furnished an explanation for this failure: Even a more dedicated nationalist than Mr. Trump would be thwarted in accomplishing his goals because he doesn't actually control the state. Nothing happens without the consent of an unelected oligarchy of status-obsessed elites: the journalists and professors who shape the nation's political reality, the corporate leaders who set its economic priorities, and the tenured agency bureaucrats empowered to decide, ultimately, how and whether to carry out the president's will. This cabal, which Mr. Yarvin calls "the Cathedral," has no investment in America's national interest, only in the perpetuation of its own cultural hegemony.
A creature of Silicon Valley, Mr. Yarvin sees American governance as a piece of old software larded with junk code: an accumulation of inefficient solutions to coding errors encountered in its long existence. The best way to radically improve its operation, Mr. Yarvin reasons, is to cease adding more workarounds and get rid of the junk code in one fell swoop. How? By replacing the president with a "Caesar" figure or "monarch" who would bypass the Constitution, shut down independent news outlets like CNN and The New York Times, and abolish many federal agencies.
That may sound nuts. And yet, a sense that the American state has become too weak to achieve its own aims is common among intellectuals across the political spectrum. The economist Tyler Cowen's "state capacity libertarianism" and the Times columnist Ezra Klein's "supply-side progressivism" are distinct flavors of the same plaint. All of them identify an accumulation of regulations and administrative procedures as a hindrance to delivering the things people need — energy, drugs, housing and infrastructure — in greater and cheaper abundance.
What's distinctive about Mr. Yarvin is his hostility to democracy as such, which Mr. Masters and Mr. Thiel seem to share. As James Pogue reported in Vanity Fair, Mr. Masters has taken to citing Mr. Yarvin on the campaign trail. He has repeatedly referred to his own campaign — like Mr. Trump's presidency — as a "start-up." And according to Thielite doctrine, start-ups are not democratic . As Mr. Masters records in the notes from one of Mr. Thiel's lectures that didn't make it into "Zero to One," "A start-up is basically structured as a monarchy. We don't call it that, of course," because "anything that's not democracy makes people uncomfortable."
Founders should not run an "absolute dictatorship," Mr. Thiel said, according to Mr. Masters's notes, but they do need to be "more tyrant than mob" to give their companies the nimbleness to execute a singular, revolutionary vision. "The best arrangement," Mr. Thiel said, "is a quasi-mythological structure where you have a kinglike founder" who can "do more" than a democratic ruler. Many members of the New Right have called for a "refounding," a moment when the rules are suspended and rewritten from above.
In a rambling conversation with a former Trump administration official, Michael Anton, on a podcast last summer, Mr. Yarvin described in detail how a future Trump-figure (or Mr. Trump himself) could seize dictatorial power, even elaborating a blueprint for a more organized and successful version of Jan. 6. It would require federalizing the National Guard, the participation of sympathetic law enforcement, and a mass mobilization many orders of magnitude bigger than Jan. 6.
Of course, Mr. Masters and Mr. Thiel have never endorsed such a plan. And Mr. Anton is careful to emphasize repeatedly that he and Mr. Yarvin are having a merely "theoretical" discussion.
But given how catastrophic Mr. Masters believes America has become — a "dystopian hell-world" he has called it — one wonders what exactly is justified and when. "The usual narrative is that society should be organized to cater to and reward the people who play by the rules," Mr. Masters wrote on his blog in 2012, once again summarizing Mr. Thiel's lecture. "But perhaps we should focus more on the people who don't play by the rules. Maybe they are, in some key way, the most important. Maybe we should let them off the hook."
The Masters campaign declined to comment for this article. Mr. Masters's adviser, Katie Miller, grew impatient when I told her I was hoping to trace his intellectual journey from libertarianism to Trumpism, telling me she didn't want another hit job trying to link Mr. Masters to the "alt-right." No doubt Ms. Miller and Mr. Masters will dismiss the analysis above as guilt by association, too. Sure, Mr. Thiel and Mr. Yarvin are Mr. Masters's friends and donors; that doesn't mean he shares all their beliefs.
Mr. Masters, for his part, has insisted that if elected, he won't be Mr. Thiel's puppet. "I'll hear him out because he's smart," he told Politico. "And I'll take some votes that piss him off." (It's not clear which votes those might be. But Mr. Masters has said, despite having teared up at Mr. Thiel and his husband's wedding in 2017, that he believes the Supreme Court erred in its Obergefell decision and that marriage ought to be "between a man and a woman.")
In any case, it may not matter if Mr. Masters has some bonkers ideas; one senator with monarchist sympathies does not a counterrevolution make.
Just as socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were elected on transformative platforms only to find themselves bogged down in the daily muck of legislating, surrounded by adherents to status quo policy and norms, this new crop of right-wing militants may likewise resign themselves to largely symbolic dissenting votes, Twitter provocation and media spectacle. (I, for one, would happily watch Blake Masters read from the Unabomber manifesto while preparing a casserole on Instagram Live.)
Then again, unlike the Democrats, who hastily sidelined Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as soon as she entered Congress, the Republican Party — belligerent, on the march, but deprived of an undisputed standard-bearer — may be more inclined to take leadership cues from young ideologues like Mr. Masters, who will enter office with a governing vision more coherent and radical than anything Mr. Trump espoused.
Already, Mr. Masters's campaign is more embedded and on better terms with his party elite than left-wing insurgents were with the Democrats. His campaign manager, Amalia Halikias, was a press assistant for Jeb Bush in 2016. Despite the populist noises he occasionally makes on the trail, Mr. Masters is endorsed by the anti-tax billionaires of the Club for Growth PAC. Ms. Miller was Mike Pence's press secretary and, later, communications director; she's married to the senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller.
Most important, Mr. Masters's vision, idiosyncratic as it may sound, comports with the basic governing impulses of the modern Republican Party. That vision might be summarized as "exit from within" — an escape from the inefficient obligations of democracy: oversight, dialogue, compromise, humility. It may be impossible to free the next Republican president from the tyranny of "the Cathedral," but he will enjoy the fruits of the long conservative war on democratic institutions: a rubber-stamp Supreme Court, a geographically disenfranchised opposition, and state officials who sow doubt about election integrity.
The Thielites want to see the government hollowed out — to eject the administrative state and erase its memory — not to enhance liberty, but to make our nation's current operating system more suitable for coercion. They wish to unseat the liberal technocratic elite only so they can install their own: a more competent, compliant and unfettered one.
ImageMr. Masters's vision resonates in a Republican Party that longs for escape from the inefficient obligations of democracy: oversight, dialogue, compromise, humility.Credit...Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
What this vision is not, is a conservatism of limits . Rather, it is Promethean, progressive , in the most basic sense: It deplores any constraint on its power to govern, shape the future, despoil the planet, innovate, and expand the American economy. All limits — pluralism, democracy, ecology, human frailty — must be overcome in pursuit of winning the world game, reasserting American dominance and dispelling our decadent malaise. (At one time, Mr. Thiel and Mr. Masters were both interested in overcoming the ultimate limit: death itself.)
"The future is coming, whether or not we try to ignore it," Mr. Masters wrote on Facebook in November 2020, endorsing Mr. Trump. "We can act to shape that future," or wait "until it crashes down upon us. That vital impulse — of action over surrender — is what Trump represents."
Mr. Malick's films take a more ambivalent stance on the martial virtues. The man who fights is rarely morally superior to the man who stands completely still — though, often, they are the same man. "The Thin Red Line" (1998) depicts a proud moment for American empire, a pivotal battle on the Pacific front in World War II, from the standpoint of a dozen indistinct and alienated Army grunts. "This great evil, where does it come from?" a voice-over wonders, as our somnambulant soldiers kill the remaining Japanese. "How'd it steal into the world?" Mr. Malick, meditating on theodicy, not history, has no interest in worldly answers.
What Mr. Malick reveals about war, however — that it rewards bravery no more than cowardice, love no more than hate, and pity least of all — is perhaps a lesson Blake Masters has internalized. Mr. Masters treats politics as a game of moral and physical carnage in which nothing is precious, and rules are for losers and marks. Great nations are those that allow great men to rise above the law, while binding the rest of us ever tighter to its dictates. And Blake Masters wants to make America great again.
Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) is the co-host of the podcast "Know Your Enemy."
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A little long, as many NYT articles are, this is a must read for those who want to understand the ideology behind the new right.
In essence , they want a libertarian dictatorship.
You may have heard of the plans for Trump to dismantle civil service in the federal government if he wins in 2024. This article discusses the ideology behind that plan.
The trouble is that a libertarian dictatorship is an oxymoron. Like a well done steak. Like the meek inheriting the earth. The dictator will have to take the liberties from the libertarians at some point.
There is absolutely no such thing as a "libertarian dictatorship."
It is an oxymoron as you said.
That is not to say that the political party which calls itself "Libertarian" does not want to gain power and control.
I would call it more of a fascistic populism.
And
More people promoting freedom from freedom.... just as long as "I get what I want."
Not really. There will be elites who run things and they will impose libertarianism on everyone, a dictatorship.
There is no dictatorship, there will not be one, stop fear mongering.
So you believe a democratically elected government is a dictatorship?
Orwellian.
It probably would have helped if you read the article.
You can't impose libertarianism, at least not the kind that I espouse, it is one step away from anarchism.
libertarian lib·er·tar·i·an | \ ˌli-bər-ˈter-ē-ən , -ˈte-rē- \
Definition of libertarian1: an advocate of the doctrine of free will
2 a: a person who upholds the principles of individual liberty especially of thought and action
b capitalized : a member of a political party advocating libertarian principles
It probably would have helped if you understood. Thiel is talking about business startup, which is conflate with yet another person musing about how a coup would actually happen.
It's a poorly written article designed to manipulate you accepting Masters has endorsed all of these things by some sort of transitive property. Masters studied under Thiel, who likes Yarvin, therefore Masters endorses everything Yarvin says.
Remember when Dmeocrats thought it was outlandish to even criticize Obama for holding a fundraiser in the home of a domestic terrorist? This article is the equivalent of claiming Obama is a domestic terrorist because he held a fundraiser in the house of a domestic terrorist.
Even in a libertarian society there would be leaders and elites. Most likely the people with the most money to coerce people with, or by. Hence we get the billionaire Peter Thiel believing and promoting this crap. He intends to be one of the elites (if he hasnt died of old age by then).
lol. This article is extremely well written. That is the first thing one notices about it.
They only have one person to look up to - the one who authors their own 'articles' for the multitude of readers on said 'articles' that appear to be written by a very immature teenager.
That was my first thought.
No. Absolutely not. I mean, you can call it that if your heart is set on it, but that makes about as much sense as calling the former Soviet Union a capitalist stronghold. It isn't, period.
There is no coercion in libertarianism. Call it Fascism if you want, it is closer and more accurate.
"...stop fear mongering."
Can't be helped as that is a hallmark of liberal left agenda(s).
No, that doesn’t work, and the article even describes the new right as eschewing libertarianism. They want a conservative dictatorship. They want to force everybody to live the way they want them to live. The new right seeks totalitarianism. A libertarian wants less government. These people want a smaller, but more powerful government.
Lol, cradling a rifle designed to kill people? The primary isn’t even a day old and the leftist attacks begin. Sad!
By the way, that rifle is no more “designed” to kill people than a car is.
Although a rifle is mentioned , mention of the rifle is about 1/2 of one percent of the article. The article is about the new right wing ideology of libertarian dictatorship. The new US Senate GOP nominee in Arizona is a proponent of this ideology.
So what? One cradles a baby but saying the guy is “cradling” gun manipulates the target anti gun work drones just as planned. There is only one reason to use rhetoric like that. To push a narrative.
I understand that anti gun kooks eat prose like that with a spoon but there you go.
I don’t know why people engage in this kind of dissembling. Stop trying to downplay what guns are designed to do. It destroys credibility when you say guns aren’t designed to kill people. Many absolutely are. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
Short barreled rifles are usually designed to kill people. Why deny it? The short barrel facilitates maneuvering in tight spaces - just the kind of setting where you might be trying to kill someone.
I own certain guns specifically because they were designed well to kill people. In fact, a gun’s proficiency at killing people (specifically criminals attacking me or my family) is the best reason to insist on my right to own it.
A lot of people try to pretend the AR-15 is for hunting. It’s not. You can use it for that, but that’s not what it was designed for. I have a 20 gauge shotgun with a really long barrel, and that thing was definitely designed for hunting, but you can use it to kill a person.
They're also pretty handy in the thickets- just the kind of setting where you might be hunting. The AR-15 is the 20th century equivalent of the Henry/Winchester repeating rifles. What were they designed for?
I specifically said you could hunt with it.
Both were designed for the military to kill more people than they could before. Here is what Henry Repeating Arms has to say about the development of their firearms:
Nothing in there about hunting.
Here is what Armalite has to say about the development of the AR-15:
Again, the gun was designed to make the military more effective at killing people. It was not designed for hunting.
And again: nothing at all wrong with that.
Yes you did, and suggested that
Which is just inaccurate. Guns are tools. Yes, they are designed to kill but what they kill has more to do with the person whose finger is on the trigger than the design of the weapon.
Of course they were. Do you think that's why civilians bought them?
Yes. The allure of an AR-15 is precisely related to its appearance as a "military" (i.e. made for killing people) weapon.
I disagree. I think the "allure" of an AR-15 is related to its utility as a weapon.
Well, then I disagree. I think that it's allure is derived from the looks of the weapon.
It looks like a military weapon. All of the points (except the extended magazine and off the shelf automatic fire) are there.
Why would a gun to be used for hunting have a cooling shroud around the barrel?
As opposed to gripping the barrel when fired?......
Let's not overlook the allure of it being something that people want to outlaw.
As opposed to a standard stock.
A cooling shroud is in place for a reason, and that reason is that the barrel heats up when fired repeatedly.
When you are hunting, you need one shot if you are accurate. Two, maybe three at the most if you are not. Any more than that, put the fucking rifle down and go home. Hunting is not for you. Or you might try a shotgun, but personally, I would recommend needlepoint.
What's a standard stock? In your opinion.
While I am unsure of the amount of tounge that is in your cheek, I know of several people personally for whom that consideration would be first and foremost.
Wood or composite material configured to allow for gripping the gun to allow proper control in aiming and firing.
Ahhh thanks
Thanks guys. That was an amusing discussion.
Yes. Absolutely, yes.
Almost 2-to-1 over hunting.
Why is all of this so hard for you to admit? I celebrate it.
Tools are designed for a specific purpose.
For example, all of these types of hammers exist:
You can use them all to pound . . . whatever . . . but each was designed for a specific kind of work. And we’re talking about design.
And yet all were designed to strike something...
Let’s see, so much to “assemble” there.
First I’m not disassembling anything. You’re trying to rationalize that one thing that can kill, guns, are design to only kill but another thing that can kill, cars, are not. Fine but I disagree and there’s no reason to be ashamed of anything in that regard. That’s just crazy talk on your part.
Short barrel weapons are just that. Weapons with shorter barrels. Nothing more. Again you are trying to rationalize it’s something else to push your targeted anti gun narrative.
I have a weapon that I prefer to use for home defense. Home defense ..... not killing people. Big difference there. It works much better for that than an AR platform in that regard IMO. That weapon is my upland bird gun. Ruffed Grouse, Woodcock, etc. A Remington 870 with the minimum legal length barrel of 18.5”. Short because it is easier to maneuver in thickets and such.
Can I keep that weapon in your opinion or should I get rid of it because it has a short barrel and is apparently designed to kill people because of that? Sorry but I just find that argument obtuse.
Perhaps to you but not to many people who buy them.
AR’s are no different than any other consumer product. People buy them because they want to own one. In the end, in a free country, it’s really no one else’s business why they want to own one.
As far as looks go I prefer my custom 300 Win Mag. Monte Carlo McMillan stock, glass bedded 26” Krieger barrel and FN action.
Now THAT is a real beauty.
Should someone be allowed to walk down a city street with a loaded flamethrower attached to his back?
It is a free country right?
AR-15's are a consumer product sure, but not because they have any worth to society, but because of lobbying and political pressure that has succeeded.
Should someone be able to race formula one cars down your residential street? Stop with the ridiculous rhetoric John.
One persons “worth it” is another persons “no worth.” I find it amusing that liberals are the ones always touting they are advocates of individual rights/liberties and then are arrogant enough to pick choose which are acceptable and which aren’t.
It simply drips of hypocrisy.
Ar-15's and flamethrowers are both weapons, and intended as such. A race car would only be a weapon under the most unusual circumstances.
The comparison to a flamethrower is to suggest that weapons can be regulated. There is absolutely nothing in the second amendment that prevents AR-15's from being regulated or even banned.
Just to clarify: Your position is 1) cars are designed to kill? Sorry, but that’s lunacy. Cars are designed to transport people and cargo. When used incorrectly, they can kill people.
And 2) Guns are not designed to kill? Again, that’s crazy talk.
How do you intend to use it then? As a noisemaker? Are you like Biden who recommends just blasting your shotgun into the air? I have a home defense weapon because if someone breaks into my home, I intend to shoot them.
A Short Barreled Rifle (SBR) has a definition and it includes a barrel less than 16”, so your shotgun wouldn’t qualify. Government began restricting such guns in the 1930s because they were favored by criminals - criminals who used them to kill people.
I will refer you back to my original response to you in @2.2 where I said “many” guns” are designed to kill and SBRs are “usually” designed to kill people. I never said “all.” I am well aware that some guns are designed for target shooting and some are designed for hunting animals. I am also aware - and have said so more than once now - that any gun can be used for some other purpose beyond its intended design.
In general, shorter barrels are found on guns designed to shoot people and longer barrels are found on guns designed for hunting animals. The short barrel makes the gun lighter and more maneuverable. It also allows the user to place a suppressor on the end (where legal) without making the weapon absurdly long. A long barrel, on the other hand gives the gun greater range and accuracy at range. Great for hunting, but shitty for maneuvering in a building. There are, of course exceptions - to everything.
None. They definitely are more popular because people want to outlaw them.
It's a black rifle, therefore it is evil!/sarc
I agree.
Irrelevant. The people that could be killed by illegal use of such tools are just as dead.
Your understanding of how weapons like the evil black gun are already regulated, is sophomoric at best. Your fear of them is irrational. A rational fear would be to fear handguns. They kill scores more than the evil black gun ..... scores.
Wrong, my point is that they both can be used “illegally” to kill.
Not lunacy. Guns are designed to shoot. Car are designed to drive. Guns are no more “designed” to kill than cars are. Saying that guns are designed to only kill is an irrational black gun haters mantra and is the real lunacy.
Nope, see above. Gun hater drama, drama, drama.
I shoot it. See above and below. It is clearly not killing people when used.
My gun wouldn’t qualify for what? I clearly stated it was the minimum legal barrel length. Below that length requires special licensing that most private citizens like me are not interested in. I also clearly stated what I use it for. Most of which has NOTHING to do with possibly having to “kill” other human beings.
Not sure what your point is other than to misinterpret what I’m writing.
No. As you expressed your position initially, you wrote of “design,” not “use.”
Designed to shoot what? Is it your position now that guns are mere noise-makers? Do you imagine that gun designers were sitting around with a box of useless bullets, thinking “what can we build to throw these really far for no particular reason?”
No it isn’t. I think I have made it abundantly clear that I am not a gun hater. I own several guns myself, and I have also said in this seed that the entire point of me owning a gun and having it available for use in the home is to shoot and kill intruders. The guns I chose for that job were designed for that.
I advocate for gun ownership and against so-called “assault weapon” bans. I have done so in this seed multiple times and I have done so on this site for years. Your repeated attempts to label me as a gun hater are either ignorant or deliberately dishonest.
Your desperate and bizarre need to characterize guns as being designed with benign and neutral purpose would be comical if it weren’t so damned weird.
Furthermore, my initial point in all of this was that ridiculous deception like you have demonstrated here (aimed at both yourself and others) serves only to sabotage legitimate gun advocacy because it is so obviously dishonest. The problem is credibility, and going around making ridiculous like a rifle “ is no more “designed” to kill people than a car is” damages the credibility of anyone advocating for free gun ownership.
Your gun does not qualify as a short-barreled rifle. As I explained, SBRs have a legal definition and 18” shotguns do not qualify. There is such a thing as a “short barreled shotgun,” but that is a different thing, and your shotgun still would not qualify because it has to be less than 18” to be a short barreled shotgun. Here is the relevant law:
As I have clarified multiple times now, we are not talking about “use” unless you want to change the subject or retract your statements. We are talking about design , specifically with respect to the type of gun described in the seed. You’re even ignoring the words of the manufacturers of both the AR-15 and the Henry rifle. They state clearly that their guns were designed for the military. The military is not a hunting club - unless you count hunting people.
So what? I never claimed cars or guns could be used only to kill. That was you. Your silly word games are starting to bore me.
Well let’s see, paper targets, metal targets, wood targets, tin targets, clay pigeons, old stumps, tin cans, abandoned cars, water balloons, old CD’s, old computers, old fax machines .... are just a few of the things I’ve shot but didn’t kill. Your line of reasoning here, as I noted earlier, is sophomoric at best.
No, those are your words not mine. Although they can make a lot of noise.
No, see above.
And I’ve made it abundantly clear that you are a “black gun” hater and possibly worse. Folks need to look no further than this discussion for proof of that. In your infinite wisdom you have decided the only thing you can use a black gun for is killing. I have proven that wrong here again and again and many other times on this site. That you can’t admit that or don’t agree with that is just irrational for a “pro gun” person.
There is no “need” desperate or otherwise. The only weird thing here is your response to people who disagree with you. You seen almost pathological prepositioned to freak out about by calling other opinions bizarre and dishonest. Liberally throwing insults for no reason.
Opinions do vary. Mine is that your irrational stances does more to damage gun rights than anything I’ve said here. And it’s not even close.
Lol .... didn’t need the help since I wasn’t talking about short barrel shotguns. That was your tangent not mine and doesn’t apply to what I was talking about at all.
Nah, you are trying to have your cake and eat it to.
Nothing more.
This conversation is going nowhere but bad so feel free to have the last word. Suffice it say I disagree with your position here almost completely.
Are you not reading the thread? Because you’re either not reading, or you’re just lying. I literally said @2.2.23 that guns could be used for other things - and specifically cited target shooting and hunting.
All you have done is repeat the same lie. I own black guns.
Nope. I never said any such thing.
It’s clear to me that you don’t even understand my position and - in knee jerk fashion - you assume that anyone who disagrees with you, even a little, hates guns. And the facts be damned.
I own a Mossberg M 702 Tactical Plinkster that I have had for about 8 years. Externally it resembles a AR style weapon except for one small detail. It is chambered for .22LR caliber rather than .223 caliber rounds. It is my primary home defense weapon and uses a 10 magazine round. I use alternating hollow point and snake shot every other round. A while back I went to Walmart to get a few boxes of .22LR rounds because I was on my to the range for some practice. I noticed the car next to my SUV had California plates and numerous bumper stickers that were Obama/Biden and Biden/Harris and anti-gun in nature. As I was putting my items into the back of my vehicle, the owner of the vehicle next to me walks up and notices my rifle in the back of my Dodge Journey and demands to know why I have a automatic assault rifle in my vehicle? That woman should have had a California leftist liberal tourist on her I♥️California T-shirt. I took a deep breath and tried to explain to her the difference between between semi-automatic, and automatic and that my rifle was .22 caliber and Turned out to be a total exercise in futility. She could not get it and threatened to call the police on me right then and there for having a illegal weapon. When I asked what was illegal about my rifle she replied "Well, for one thing, it"s a black rifle that looks military issue!" I'd heard enough and just started laughing. I told her to go ahead and call the police and that I would even provide the phone number and wait right there till the arrived. I think she figured out she had overstepped herself, told me I was insane, got in her vehicle, gave me the universal symbol of friendship with a raised middle digit and drove away in her little Prius. True story.
I hate that I have this bigotry in me, but in my experience, Prius drivers are the worst people in the world.
Well, all black guns are just evil.
Any self respecting big city koo-koo chachoo from Cali knows that.
Bet you got a good chuckle out of that.
To this day even.
Blank Just Chose A Blank Candidate More Extreme Than Donald Trum
The line that will be used to describe pretty much every Republican for the next decade or so.
Brought to you by the party that claimed Mitt Romney was going to put black people back in chains.
Thanks for reading and commenting on the headline.
Just remember that every time you claim X is "worse than Trump." Which will be a daily thing.
You dont seem to understand what is going on.
Or just maybe he understands much more than you think he does or give him credit for.
Happy to know you are so easily amused./sarc
Remember that when they make this claim they also set their own hair on fire and run in circles screaming.
This opinion piece hit all the triggers for a lemming leftist. "Trump", "fire arms", "militant", even fear mongering with BS like "America has become — a "dystopian hell-world""
But that's just it. It's an opinion piece written to trigger the feeble minded. And as expected they, the lemming leftists, are lapping it up as they set their hair on fire and run in circles screaming.
It must suck to live in that fashion.
Thank you for the content free contrubution.
And thank you for another one of your "but TRRUUUMMMPPPP" articles.
Sorry you are still in denial .....
Never left it.
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