BETRAYAL: Trump Says Government Should 'Take The Guns First, Go Through Due Process Second'

I hope that's all it is...

CPT Jack Durish - I am suspecting this was a bit like the immigration open session where he intended to get people out in the open and on the record etc. If he was to move to the left on weapons and implement or support legislation that punished legal gun owners for things done by a criminal that should have been stopped, he will not get re-elected and he may get primaried. That is a minefield you don't make it out the other side of.

Do you ever get tired of defending his foolishness?

That's a helluva good question. We have psychiatrists and psychologists being asked to evaluate patients and convicts daily. What will they do if released? Indeed, what will they do? Has a person been "cured"? Do they represent a danger to themselves or others? Clearly, no one knows. The "experts" can guess, but they don't really know. Infringing on a person's rights is serious business. So is allowing them to run amok when we had suspicions about their future behavior. Forgive me, but I'm going to ramble here. I once had a contract to develop a computer system for use on ships. I visited a San Clemente class tanker regularly to work on board. I was standing with various workmen waiting on the dock when it arrived in port. We had to get on board and do our work quickly, because it was expensive to have such a massive ship sitting around. When we boarded, a crewman was assigned to each work party. Their primary responsibility? To insure that no one smoked while on board. Fires could smolder for days unnoticed and then the crew would be the ones fighting them at sea. In other words, they would rather prevent a fire than fight one. I used this story to impress gang kids with the idea of avoiding trouble is better than dealing with trouble. Well, it's true with deciding if we should restrict people from having guns. Remember, the gun isn't the problem, it's what people do with guns that is the problem. How can we predict what they will do with them? Well, past performance is always the best indicator of future performance. In simplistic terms, if a person shoots up a school, it's a good bet they'll do it again if we let them. But that doesn't answer the problem of how we prevent that first occurrence, does it? One suggestion is to disarm everyone, but that's impossible. You can't take away every gun, knife, or blunt instrument nor saw off hands and feet which can also be used to kill. The person bent on murder will use whatever is at hand. So then we turn to defense. I will always remember Patton's famous observation that fortified positions are monuments to man's stupidity. He was correct. Where does that leave us? It seems that life is a risky business and we'll have to learn better ways of dealing with the risk and accept that there will be tragedies. That doesn't mean we should stop trying. It would help if we could continue this conversation when the passions cool at bit, but I doubt it will happen. We'll be too exhausted from hurling insults at one another and forget about it until the next tragedy. Come to think of it, that's a tragedy in itself, isn't it?

No worries. Give him a day or two and he'll say the opposite and claim he never said it to start with.