Posted on 05/09/2006 9:29:18 AM PDT by neverdem
GUEST COLUMNIST
With Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels essentially shilling for the small but vocal Washington CeaseFire, Evergreen State anti-gunners have opened a new gun control campaign that typically offers nothing but wants a lot.
Exploiting the Capitol Hill murders and other recent Seattle incidents, the gun control lobby has launched a massive assault on this state's gun owners, but with the same old goals that are irrelevant to current problems.
Despite the fact that the Capitol Hill gunman Kyle Huff did not use the .223-caliber utility rifle found in his truck after the killings, Nickels and CeaseFire want a statewide ban on so-called assault weapons. Despite the fact that none of the shootings was preventable, they want mandatory trigger locks. Huff legally purchased his firearms and brought them from another state, yet Nickels wants to close a mythical gun show loophole in Washington.
Gun prohibitionists bring nothing to the table in exchange for freedoms they want gun owners to surrender. Nickels never even came to the table and has never met with the firearms community. He simply announced what he and CeaseFire want the Legislature to take away from gun owners.
CeaseFire President Ralph Fascitelli recently promised to put in writing that law-abiding citizens have a right to own handguns and "non-military hunting rifles" provided gun owners essentially agree to his group's wish list. That's not an olive branch, it's a noxious weed.
Besides, where did he get the arrogant notion that CeaseFire grants rights?
Fascitelli attempted to marginalize the National Rifle Association as "a body mostly of white men who live outside urban centers." Unlike CeaseFire, the NRA's president is a woman, Tucson, Ariz., attorney Sandra Froman; very urban, very sophisticated. Today's NRA is a model of diversity with its own women's magazine, women's programs and members from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds.
CeaseFire talks about gun safety; thousands of NRA certified instructors teach it. How many certified instructors does CeaseFire have? NRA has about 90,000 members statewide. CeaseFire claims 3,600 members.
Meanwhile, Nickels, fresh from an anti-gun mayors' summit in New York, appears to have taken CeaseFire's agenda, put his name on it and is using their rhetoric.
They complain about "easy access to guns" and "lax gun laws," yet guns were far more accessible 50 and 75 years ago, when the laws were far less strict. Where was the urban violence then? Where were the school shootings? People carried guns in bars. There were school rifle teams. There were no background checks. What changed?
Violent crime is not the fault of law-abiding gun owners, who should be able to own whatever firearm they want. If they're not harming people or committing crimes, who cares what kind of guns they have?
The gun control lobby cares. If they can make it acceptable to ban one kind of gun today and restrict gun ownership, tomorrow they can try to ban other guns and demand further erosions of gun owners' rights. When the firearms community justifiably fights back, they'll be demonized as "unreasonable gun nuts."
CeaseFire admits that gun control laws could not have prevented the Capitol Hill shootings. Why do they think such laws will prevent future crimes?
Why do they want you to think so?
Dave Workman is author of "Washington State Gun Rights and Responsibilities" and senior editor at Gun Week (www.gunweek.com).
If you see a politician spouting this Democrat brand of gun control you know it is an election season and you know who to vote against. This is not to do with guns at all...but because you know the politician has no plan to keep the crime rates low.
Hmmm.... a proposal to restrict private ownership of firearms comes from someone whose name almost begins with the word "fascist".
There is one upside to this. At this point the midterm elections are looking to be a massacre for us, but this is the losingest issue the 'rats have ever had. If they decide to push this one we might just be able to avoid disaster.
It is not now nor has it ever been truly about gun control. It is about people control. I have tried, mostly in vain to get the few moron mommies of my acquaintence ( I try to avoid that type) to understand that today its something you agree with banning. Tomorrow it will be something that matters to you.
They came for the gunowners but I wasnt a gunowner so I didnt speak up
They came for the smokers but I wasnt a smoker so I didnt speak up........
Shameless paraphrase :)
It'll be the same thing tomorrow.
Anyone saying otherwise deserves a slander/libel lawsuit.
PING and
BANG!
I'm seeing a lot of pro-gun stuff from the SP-I. We have friends in Seattle?
No politician ever benefited from a problem solved.
I blame television...and call for mandatory waiting periods to purchase one of the infernal devices.
Exactly, the gun grabbers have to push it. It's not that the GOP can be held up as a shining examplar of the RKBA after El Presidente said he would have renewed the assault weapons ban if Congress would have passed it.
The sad part is that in the upcoming election, where the dems have a competitve chance of beating the pubbies, the dems won't say anything about the issue if they are smart.
Surprisingly: "Of the 25 biggest papers in the country, 20 reported drops in circulation. Of the five that did not drop, the gains were all less than 1 percent. Those were USA Today (2,272,815), The New York Times (1,142,464), the Chicago Tribune (579,079), The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., (398,329) and the Detroit Free Press (345,861)."
Sadly they'll try to pass anti-gun legislation packaged with other public policy legislation. We MUST rely on the NRA and other pro-gun associations to shed light on these grievious perversions of justice.
I'm of the opinion that another 9/11 or random terrorist attacks on soft-targets are the only things that will bring the rest of America to see the light of the 2nd Amendment. Am I faulty in that thinking?
I just noticed that the column says "GUEST COLUMNIST" at the top. Guess they're not our friends after all.
Have you taken them shooting? It's never failed for me. I've had several friends with little exposure to guns, who understandibly were fearful from lack of experience with them. A perspective of never having had a gun leads one to think no one really needs them. They key to talking to them is to understand and be sympathetic to that. It's foreign to them.
But I've had great success talking to them by taking them to a nice, clean, safe place to shoot, showing them my well cared for guns and impeccable range safety habits: I have shown them what the bullets look like and how to load and unload the gun, talked about the different types, and then have let them HIT TARGETS WITH them. They ALL grin after hitting a target with a big handgun. You can show them that it can be very safe to own guns and shoot them, and it's not just something scary people do, it's something normal people do. I'm a somewhat pudgy woman in her upper 30s, not a threat. By the end of the day I've never had anyone tell me they'd still vote for a law that would take my guns away. Not once.
Sometimes, but not always, it leads to discussion about self defense, and with the experience of shooting fresh in their mind, they feel more able to imagine what an empowering feeling it is to know there is a way for any person, large or small, strong or weak, to defend themselves when no one else can.
Some have become gun owners.
...hmm...must be part of the guest worker program...interesting.
"I just noticed that the column says "GUEST COLUMNIST" at the top."
The PI and the Everett Herald have been doing the "Guest Columnist" thing a lot. Must be a form of self-torture as they make their own editoralists look really bad quite often.
IMHO, yes because many of the gun grabbers and the hard left can't be reasoned with. Just look at their response to Iraq and the war on terror when Saddam had all sorts of connections with various terrorist organizations.
Unless you want to take someone to a range for the first time, I would save my words for mushy moderates and independent voters. United 93, the movie just came out, and the memory of how the New Orleans Police Department performed during Katrina is still pretty fresh in everyone's mind.
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