AynRandy Tries to Trade Voting Rights for More Guns

Really? Was he watching the news yesterday?

Joseph Gerth at the Courier:

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul told a largely black audience Monday in Louisville that he will push to restore the voting and gun-ownership rights of felons who have completed their sentences — and he will urge state Senate Republicans to follow his lead.

Currently in Kentucky, felons must petition the governor to get their voting rights restored.

“I am in favor of letting people get their rights back, the right to vote ... Second Amendment rights, all your rights to come back,” he said. “I know of one man who 30-some-odd years ago had pot plants in his closet in college, got a felony conviction in college, still can’t vote, and it’s plagued him his whole life trying to get work.”

It's true that Kentucky's draconian and Jim-Crow-era denial of voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences is outrageous and self-defeating.

But the Tribble-Toupeed One doesn't give a shit about that.

On the same day that shooters armed with assault weapons killed 12 and wounded dozens more at the Navy Yard a mile and a half from the U.S. Capitol, Paul tried to hide in voting rights rhetoric that what he really wants is to turn the country into an armed camp.

Steve M explains the real goal behind demands for "gun rights."

In short, gun zealots aren't standing up for freedom -- or at least they're not standing up for your freedom to live in a way they'd prefer not to. The gun-zealot movement is coercive. Gun zealots want to compel all of us to acknowledge, and arm ourselves against, the state of siege they perceive. They prefer to see the actual level of danger increase if it will make us pack heat.

They see themselves as the ones who understood before the rest of us did that society operates according to the law of the jungle -- even if the lawlessness and danger they perceive is something they helped create. They like believing that we live in a state of siege because they see themselves as the heroes in our war of all against all. They're going to save us -- not laws, not the cops. (They may say nice things about the troops or the first responders, but many of them are the same folks who have "Terrorist Hunting License" stickers on their cars. It's all about being a self-appointed hero.)

It's their fantasy. We just die in it.