Santa Claus gun rifle Christmas
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…Holy Smoke Bullet Urns of Stockton, Alabama, has taken quite literally Shylock’s claim in Shakespeare’s 1596 Merchant of Venice: “The pound of flesh which I demand of him is deerely bought, ‘tis mine, and I will have it.”

According to the company’s cofounder, Clem Parnell, “You know I’ve thought about this for some time and I want to be cremated. Then I want my ashes put into some turkey load shotgun shells and have someone that knows how to turkey hunt use the shotgun shells with my ashes to shoot a turkey. That way I will rest in peace knowing that the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second.”

And just in time for the holiday season, in 2011, the Scottsdale, Arizona gun club offered its members the service of sending out their Christmas cards with family members, including infants, posing with Santa while holding pistols and military grade automatic weapons, fa la la la la, la la la la. Joy to the world?

I would ask, though, have so many in fact given so much for the right for us to turn our bodies literally into killing devices or for the right to own a “free” assault or hunting rifle?  Do we really want “the last thing that one turkey will see is me, screaming at him at about 900 feet per second?” Do residents of our nation really need so many guns, assault rifles, and others?

Certainly, politicians and commercial ventures like Bergeron’s, Jewelry by Harold, Cabela’s, Holy Smoke Bullet Urns, Nation’s Truck Sales, and gun clubs hold the constitutional right to market their devices of death, but what type of messages are they communicating?

Are we really “free” as a society when our right “to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”?

— Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld in God, guns & capitalism: Let’s have a Republican Christmas

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

70 COMMENTS

    • Yep! Do you suppose this Blumenfeld fellow had some hebrew ancestors who WISHED they could travel at some 900fps at a Nazi?!? Dunno about republican Christmas though. I don’t want that label…

      • People like Blumenfeld are born Jews, but they don’t practice Judaism. One of the lesser-known commandments says, paraphrasing:
        “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
        That’s God talkin’.

        • or how about this one: if you are asleep with your family and someone enters your house, you my strike him that he die. But if he remains until the sun comes up, you may ot strike him.

          Or this one: who by his hand sheds innocent blood, by the hand of man SHALL his blood be shed. (capitalpunishment for murder, established thousands of years agoby God’s own Wprd) But WE whoare SO enlightened know so much better, don’t we?

    • Ah, but you have to consider the author’s apparent definition of freedom, viz. the freedom to use force to impose his will on others.

    • By his own words it is safe to assume Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld is an unarmed accident waiting to happen in neon lights. Rest assured each and everyone of Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld’s Constitutional Rights will be infringed upon when a criminal overpowers the doctor and turns a once pompous pos into their batch…of cookies.

      How the doctor is prepared for a criminal who does not need a “device of death” or give a rat’s behind about the doctor, his family, his home is solely the doctor’s choice. What is clearly not the doctor’s choice is what the rest of America uses for legal self defense, home defense, etc. For the doctor to sit in his ivory tower and even think he can blow smoke that infringes on the rights of others shows what a self serving constipated pompous pos he is.

      • Note: “Do residents of our nation really need so many guns, assault rifles, and others?”
        The doctor has “need” and “want” confused. I wonder how many things the doctor and others have that they don’t NEED!
        Our rights don’t end where his confusion begins!

    • You need very much to care, since they care very deeply about taking you guns from you…

  3. Upside down and backwards…this is truly disgusting

    Do these people have ANY understand of what happens to someones mind and spirit when raped?

    The problem is not guns. Getting rid of them will not solve the problem. Human ash does not make for very good gun powder any more than blood would make very good mortar. These kinds of thoughts are part of what defines the difference between the good guy with a gun versus the bad guy with one. It’s what can mark the edge of sanity. Clueless doctors are part of the problem.

    • “Do these people have ANY understand of what happens to someones mind and spirit when raped?”

      Oh, they do, don’t worry. In their death cult, a woman raped is morally-superior to the woman with a dead rapist at their feet.

      This is why Leftist-Scum in charge of the big cities have been responding to complaints about rising crime by telling them that violent crime is a part of big city life, and that they need to ‘check their privilege’, since most Americans could never afford to live there.

      A first-world ‘problem’, don’t you know. You poor rich person, you can afford to have your personal possessions stolen from you, especially if the end result means a small step towards ‘social justice’ is achieved… 🙁

  4. Can I really be free if any thug a foot taller, 100 pounds heavier and 50 years younger than I can beat me to death because I’ve been deprived of the tool I need to fight him off?

    • Will your grandchildren ever be free if we’re running 3 trillion dollar deficits so we can expand the inefficient government and pay off their donors? The answer to both questions is no. They don’t want you to be free. They want you to be the silent worker bee that allows them to thrive.

  5. Absolutely, yes.

    If we allow the right to keep and bear arms to be infringed or eliminated, the other unalienable rights will quickly follow.

    Just look around the rest of the world (New Zealand comes to mind currently – tyrants like Jacinda Ardern are everywhere).

  6. The article comes form LGBTQ Nation. What do you expect? From the same site is this gem: “Smollett may well have suckered us all in the beginning with his hoax.” No, he only suckered the suckers with prejudice in their hearts, looking for a reason to hate people that are different from themselves. I assume the irony is lost on the Rainbow (Progressive) crowd. Rational people called him on his BS from day one.

    “Unifying” Puppet Joe and Que Mala Harris immediately pounced on the narrative that Trump voters hate black and gay people because it helped them gain power while dividing the country, which is the name of the game. Why isn’t the media running endless stories about that? Why was the Afghanistan story over so quickly for the media? Are people waking up to the propaganda yet?

    • New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain etc etc they rely on their audience lacking memory, pattern recognition, critical thinking, and lacking suspicion.

  8. A seemingly growing number of people are equating freedom with effectively being penned in cattle. Provided shelter, healthcare, food and protection by some external force. We’ll call him the rancher. Until slaughtered.

    • The freedom they want is FREEDOM FROM RESPONSIBILITY. That’s what those who espouse and support abortion, student loan relief, free child care and pre-school, BLM, systemic racism, etc., etc., are all about – blaming others and avoiding the consequences of their own bad behavior. Anathema to the Founders’ idea of liberty, that of individual freedom and responsibility.

  9. I’d have two responses to that question.

    First, it seems like he’s seeking an unachievable absolute in terms of freedom. Even Heinlein, a pretty foundational libertarian in terms of his views on rights, recognized that a drowning man in the Pacific has no right to life. Sure, he has the freedom to try to pursue it, but it won’t change the outcome or his enjoyment of it at the time.

    Second, giving up some freedom is inherent in any society. There hasn’t been one, ever, where everyone had total freedom. Unless someone wants to live, solo, away from everyone else we give up some freedoms in exchange for other people.

    So, for me, I think a better question is whether we’re sufficiently free to enjoy life while having some rights restricted. Sure, it sucks that I can’t just go out and buy a “real” M-4, but I’m not going to define my life and say I’m a slave to tyranny or that I’m free just because I can’t own one or I can own one. Life is about the quality of the experience — absolutes are for philosophical debates and theory, not actual practice.

    • “..Sure, it sucks that I can’t just go out and buy a “real” M-4..

      Are you suggesting that one can’t buy/own a real M-4? Because one most certainly can. Have to jump through some small hoops. Time waiting for the tax stamp being one of those hoops.

      • “Are you suggesting that one can’t buy/own a real M-4?”

        He is saying he can’t “just go out and buy it”, as one obviously can “just go out and buy a pizza.”

  10. “Are we really ‘free’ as a society when our right ‘to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’?”

    It is the unequivocal quintessence of freedom.

    • I would say that this writer, with a college degree, does not know or understand, what a free society really means.

  11. The last thing millions of babies see is a pair of forceps and a scalpel, and they are powerless to defend themselves.

  12. The article was printed in “LGBTQnation.com” which should tell you all you need to know. Among its other nuggets of wisdom: “Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), for example, used an AK-15 in a 2015 campaign ad”.

    • Yeah those guys totally know what they’re talking about so we should take them seriously. Good for Paul. Now tear up the tax code for real. We should only have business deductions that can be used for every business. Everything else should be illegal. End ALL government subsidies. It’s completely out of hand.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXkJh_rwsrE

  14. “Are we really ‘free’ as a society when our right ‘to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’?”

    Yes

    “… the constitutional right to market their devices of death…

    —- Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld in God, guns & capitalism: Let’s have a Republican Christmas”

    Yes, I know the ‘Dr.’ in ‘Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld’ stands for doctor of education, and the man is a big ‘Social Justice Warrior’ the kind which gets other riled up to go out and do the dirty work so he will have something to write about.

    By the ‘Dr.’ reminded me of ‘doctor’ as in the medical profession.

    Well, lets take a look at one of the biggest mass murder schemes going on in the U.S. and see where the ‘devices of death’ of death really lie that we should be fearful of – the medical profession. Lets start with a few pieces of history, there are many more, but lets start here…

    Genene Jones – a Texas pediatric nurse – killed up to 60 children in her care with fatal overdose injections at hospitals and clinics around San Antonio between 1977 and 1982. She was sentenced to 99 years in 1984 for killing 15-month-old Chelsea McClennan, and another 60 years for nearly killing 4-week-old Rolando Santos. But under a law in effect at the time, she was due for release in March 2018. Two new charges that allege she killed an 11-month-old and a 2-year-old in 1981 might put Jones back on trial and keep her behind bars.

    Anthony Garcia – resident – After his 2001 firing from a residency program at Creighton University School of Medicine in Nebraska — and the resulting bad references that kept him from getting work elsewhere — Garcia exacted revenge on those he blamed by killing four people. He stabbed Thomas Hunter, 11, the son of Creighton physician Dr. William Hunter, and the family’s housekeeper Shirlee Sherman, 57, in March 2008. Five years later, in May 2013, police found the shot-and-stabbed bodies of Dr. Roger Brumback, the former chair of Creighton’s Department of Pathology, and his wife Mary, both 65. Garcia was convicted of those murders in 2016.

    Donald Harvey – hospital orderly – claimed to have killed 87 people, most of them at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio — not just terminally ill patients under the former hospital orderly’s care, but also roommates, neighbors and lovers. He received four life sentences for killing 25 people and eventually was convicted of 36 murders in Ohio and Kentucky between 1970 and his conviction in 1987.

    Charles Cullen – nurse – was sentenced to 11 consecutive life terms in 2006 after pleading guilty to 22 murders and three attempted murders in New Jersey. He also pleaded guilty to seven murders and three attempted murders in Pennsylvania. After his arrest in 2003, Cullen estimated he killed up to 40 patients at 10 facilities over 16 years, but experts calculate he may be the most prolific serial killer in American history, responsible for the deaths of hundreds whose names he can’t recall. He told investigators he administered overdoses to end patients’ suffering. The label “Angel of Death” stuck to him because he was often at his victims’ bedsides. His confession spared him the death penalty, he was found beaten in his cell at Toledo Correctional Institution and died two days later.

    Kristen Gilbert – nurse – was a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northhampton, Massachusetts, where she injected large doses of epinephrine, a heart stimulant, into the IV bags of her patients, causing them to go into cardiac arrest. She then responded to the emergency, sometimes reviving patients herself. Four did not survive. Gilbert was found guilty in 2001 of four murders and two attempted murders. She was sentenced to serving four sentences without possibility of parole, plus 20 years, at a federal prison in Texas.

    Kimberly Clark Saenz – nurse – was found guilty in 2012 of killing five patients and injuring five others at a Texas dialysis center by injecting bleach into their dialysis lines. She was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for the murders and three 20-year sentences for aggravated assault.

    over 90% of medical environment/field people (doctors, nurses, orderlies) are not subjected to any sort of suitability/psychological/criminal history background check before being permitted to administer dangerous drugs and dangerous devices to patients.

    A little over 70% of medical environment/field people (doctors, nurses, orderlies) have convictions for violence and harming people or for other crimes that would keep a person from purchasing a firearm via the ATF background check. Almost all these have at least one known past incident of in some way intentionally violently harming or abusing a patient in their current work environment but are allowed to continue working and accessing patients.

    62% of female patients in hospitals are sexually assaulted in some manner by a doctor, or nurse, or orderly.

    Elderly abuse, collectively across all sectors of medical care from office visits to nursing home to hospice care to hospital stays, by doctors, nurses, or orderlies is discovered more than 120,000 times annually.

    ‘Medical errors’ (AKA ‘malpractice’) cause an estimated 250,000 deaths in the United States annually.

    47% of (collectively) black doctors and nurses refuse to care for white or hispanic or asain patients. 28% of (collectively) white doctors and nurses refuse to care for black or hispanic or asain patients.

    The biggest numbers of mass murders/killings, assault, abuse, racists events, and crime in history right under our noses, not one firearm involved, for decades and still continuing and growing. Conducted by people who are convicted felons, sadists, serial killers, rapists, thieves, racists, and morons we call ‘doctors’ or ‘nurses’ or ‘orderlies’. And being a ‘doctor’ or ‘nurse’ or ‘orderly’ is not even an enumerated constitutional right.

    Yeah, give me my constitutional right to guns any day.

    • “A little over 70% of medical environment/field people (doctors, nurses, orderlies) have convictions for violence and harming people”

      Okay, but have they had their Covid booster?

  15. A society is not free if the members of that society cannot possibly misbehave. Saying it another way, a society is not free if there is no freedom of choice. Thus, any form of prior-restraint on some activity where there is no significant quantifiable risk to society makes society less free and therefore less desirable.

    Security (true security) versus freedom (true freedom) is a continuum. The most secure situation possible is where you are locked-up in a very-tiny and very-secured prison cell with nothing in that cell that you could possibly use to harm yourself or others. Needless to say, there is virtually zero freedom in that situation. The most free situation possible is where you are not in a prison cell and able to do anything and everything you want without any consideration of anything. Needless to say, there is virtually zero security in that situation.

    In case that last consideration–total freedom–does not seem to carry any significant risk, think again. Consider an attractive young woman who is unarmed, naked, holding a sign which says something provocative, walking around a dangerous neighborhood in Los Angeles at 11:00 p.m. on a warm Friday night. That is total freedom–and incredibly risky.

  16. Blumenfeld takes his cues from Trotsky and Pol Pot, and he would have ZERO compunction for ordering your murder for being an “enemy of the people”.

  17. It’s so weird how many “How Can You Call It Freedom Without The Sweet, Sweet Taste of Boot Heel On Your Tongue?” op-eds there have been over the years. They really creep me out, and there seems to be no end to them. Do they really think anybody is fooled?

      • Larger than that. I’m thinking close to three out of four still dutifully and unthinkingly “wear the mask” just because SOMEONE said so, and without the slightest clue as to what they do/do not do. And in many areas, above 80% have rolled up their sleeve to take the experimantal gene therapy injection that has proven to be far more dangerous than the disease it is alledged to deal with. Even after the head Fed honchos openly admitted that potion can prevent neither the contracion nor the spread of “the disease” they still line up, roll up their sleeves, and take the poke.

  19. These people understand “free” the same way people in Orwell’s “1984” understood “free”; as in not inconvenienced. As in government is the source of all wellbeing. For these, tyranny is comfort.

    • “He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself.

      “He loved Big Brother.”

  20. You can only have total freedom if you live alone in the wilderness and your actions/choices cannot possibly harm anyone else (as another commenter stated). Since we are NOT talking about living alone in the wilderness, there are two underlying principles in this controversy:

    1) What is the righteous solution when someone demands the “freedom” to violate another person’s rights?

    2) How much can we righteously expose other people to risk (of violating other people’s rights)?

    In some cases the answers are quite simple and clear. In other cases, the answers are complicated and murky. In still other cases, people present non-righteous solutions because they want what they want.

    • We lost total freedom when Adam and Eve were removed from paradise. It’s been a ‘to the death’ struggle ever since.

      • One could argue that that was the original substantiation FOR freedom of choice…

        …and facing the consequences.

    • How much can we righteously expose other people to risk? In my opinion the answer is in classic risk management.

      When my activity exposes another person to a tiny probability of tiny harm, I should be free to do it. When my activity exposes another person to a huge probability of huge harm, I should NOT be free to do it. Those scenarios are simple and clear.

      When my activity exposes another person to a tiny probability of huge harm, whether or not I should be free to do it depends on how critical that activity is to me. For example, if I shoot a rifle in a random direction in a rural area, the probability of that bullet hitting someone is tiny. Of course if the bullet does strike a human, it will likely result in huge harm. How critical is it for my existence to fire a rifle in a random direction for personal amusement? Absolutely non-critical. Therefore I should NOT have the freedom to fire a rifle in a random direction in a rural area.

      Dr. Blumenfeld is exploiting this concept for our society. Where he goes wrong is implying that owning and carrying firearms exposes everyone to a high probability of huge harm. That is flat wrong. And even if Dr. Blemenfeld is implying that carrying firearms exposes everyone to a low probability of huge harm and should nonetheless be forbidden because carrying firearms are totally non-critical to the carrier’s existence, he is wrong.

      • The criminal code and/or tort law is what step in to control the “tiny probability of huge harm” scenario.

        The body of administrative law and insurance control the “huge probability of huge harm” scenario.

        Nothing controls the tiny/tiny scenario, it is where pure freedom exists.

    • Even IF you found a chunk of wilderness to inhabit, unless you got the omney and purchased it, you will still not be free. Evenif you DID buy it, the tax man cometh, thus negating total freedom. You owe, you owe, so off to wORK you go. If you are simply squatting, sooner or later some gummit uffishul will detect your presence and come “have a chat”. He will be well armed, and likley not alone. You will be his subject.

  21. Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, College of Education, University of Massachusetts at Amherts.

    The guy looks like a spineless worm and he teaches future teachers. That isn’t good.

  23. I read the article. So I will repeat myself. The LGBTQ,xyz crowd and the atheists are almost always socialist Progressive in their political orientation. And they have never been supporters of the First Amendment. Nor have they been supporters of the Second Amendment. But, some of them do support civil rights. That’s the problem, it’s just some of them.

  24. I went to the website and read the article. Mr. Blumenfeld and his type are as anti-civil rights as any white Southerner in the 1950s. And he seems to be just as intolerant of religious people as Chairman Mao or Joseph Stalin. And based on this particular website I’m not surprised. These people have always been anti-civil rights, anti-freedom, and anti-liberty.

  25. With rights come responsibilities. We should have the absolute right to purchase and own any arms we may desire. And, if anyone should choose to violate another person’s rights to life, property, free speech, etc. then they should face whatever consequences there may be. Freedom to choose your own course of action. Freedom to do what you want in life. Right up to the point of where your choices infringe upon anothers rights.
    The Doctor is advocating freedom from responsibility. Any choice or course of action we take comes with a cost or risk. It is up to each of us to choose what risk or rewards we want.

  26. I’ve no idea what the devil the man is blubbering on about.

    Guns and ammo and gun stuff generally make excellent gifts for yourself or others anytime of the year. Christmas and birthdays especially so.

  27. Can we really be free?
    Not yet, but getting closer.
    Humans ain’t going to like it much, the cockroaches are going to thrive.

  28. The guy has no clue about 2nd Amendment rights, why we have them, and why ALL of our Constitutional rights need to be recognized and fought for constantly. Doctor, I suggest you take a few night courses or YouTube video seminars on the Bill of Rights and why our Founders included this in the charter for rights that cannot be taken away by the government.

  29. Without the Second Amendment, there are no other rights. It is the glue that holds all other rights together. If Blumenfeld hates this right so much, he can freely move to another country where his happy, disarmed butt will feel so much safer, knowing that no one except crooks will have them.

      • and that concerns me, precisely HOW??????
        I have known of ny own God given rights for most of my life. The fact HE does not know is not my problem. Even if he does somehow manage to get some law passed removing those rights, they will remain. What God gives, NO man can take. Even by law or fiat They can change the words on the paper but they can never change our RIGHTS. Any more htan they can rightsouely remove my right to continue breathing.

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