Posted on 10/22/2002 12:25:02 PM PDT by Grig
The rumour, gravely reported here yesterday on one of the all-talk radio shows, was that among the bumper stickers spotted on the white van whose driver was arrested in a dramatic high-risk takedown just hours earlier was one for the National Rifle Association.
It was not much later that the same station was gaily trumpeting the news that the arrested man, and another taken into police custody about the same time along the same commercial strip, were but illegal workers, one from Mexico and the other from Guatemala, who are either the unluckiest or stupidest men in America -- innocents or dopes unconnected to the massive ongoing manhunt for the Beltway Sniper.
At this writing, the two reportedly had been turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.
But the fact is, there's a sizeable number of folks -- both in this country and in Canada -- for whom an NRA link to the person or persons who have thus far killed nine and wounded three would be cause for almighty celebration and wondrous proof that Americans have invited such random viciousness by failing to regulate the gun-friendly culture here that has its origins in their Second Amendment right to bear arms.
This is part of a sub-theme that is slowly but surely developing as the sniper continues to move about undetected in a widening seven-county area centred near Washington and who has been himself, or has had his representative, in telephone contact with the multi-jurisdictional task force running the show.
Just as in the wake of the 9-11 terror attacks last year, a chorus of voices began to point the finger of blame at the very nation that had suffered that enormous loss of life -- seeking to make the connection between U.S. foreign policy and Islamic terrorism -- so is the temperature of this particular crisis likely to soon shift in a similar direction, to what in the criminal courts is denounced as blaming the victim.
The early signs are all around: Federal politicians are again calling for a national ballistics fingerprint system (its effectiveness untested, it ideally would hook up every bullet in the country to the weapon that fired it); CNN duly derisively reported last weekend that, "believe it or not" one of the few events in Rockville, Maryland, that was not cancelled because of the sniper was a local gun show, and some leading American newspapers have begun running opinion pieces about the need for gun control.
It is becoming more clear by the day that one way or another, Americans will wear it for this sniper: If he turns out to be a foreign national, the prototype of some new version of a homicide bomber, apologists will trot out the old 9-11 root-causes rationale to explain him, and blame them; if it turns out he is a home-grown assassin, he will be pronounced the inevitable product of a country in which there are an estimated 222 million firearms and they will be blamed for that.
Curiously, the very night before the sniper last struck, seriously wounding a 37-year-old man as he left a Ponderosa restaurant with his wife in the suburban town of Ashland just north of Richmond, Michael Moore's new pro-gun-control documentary, Bowling for Columbine, was opening to sold-out audiences at select theatres in the beltway area.
The film, which premiered to rave reviews at Cannes in May, where it won a protracted standing ovation, has been highly rated by critics everywhere.
A clever amalgam of old newsreel footage of American bombs falling (in places from Vietnam to the former Yugoslavia), current shots of Mr. Moore (either coldly using or rudely haranguing his interview subjects), it purports to tie together America's gun culture, foreign policy and the rise of multiple murderers such as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who rained death down upon their classmates at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in the spring of 1999 -- and, presumably, this sniper.
One of its final scenes has Mr. Moore, in his usually dishevelled and not terribly clean state, appearing unannounced at the posh Hollywood home of the NRA president, actor Charlton Heston, who actually invites him back the next morning for a chat.
During it, Mr. Moore demands Mr. Heston explain why the United States has so many gun-related homicides while other nations with equally well-armed citizens do not, berates him for failing to offer an easy answer, and then tries to force him to look at the picture of a little girl killed in a horrid tragedy of a gun incident at a Michigan school -- a little girl to whom Mr. Moore has no more or less legitimate or honest connection than Mr. Heston.
This is the best illustration of the film's astonishing tone, which manages to achieve the impossible, in that Mr. Moore successfully cloaks himself as a pacifist while at the same time behaves with overt aggression.
But the scene is also a perfect, tragic metaphor for the way in which gun advocates and the urban liberals who are their foes are inevitably portrayed in the major media.
By any fair measure, Mr. Heston behaves as a reasonable man remarkably civil to his ingrate visitor, perfectly willing to discuss the subject in a sensible way if not to be called upon to come up with a facile response for Mr. Moore on demand. But Mr. Moore controls the camera, and the editing room, and Mr. Heston is left looking foolish, flat-footed and a little feeble-minded, with, guess who, Mr. Moore, appearing the noble-intentioned hero.
This odd result -- that the polite soft-spoken man should emerge the villain, and the bully the good guy -- is also a recurring theme in the sort of American tragedy that began here on Oct. 2, when the first of the sniper's victims was killed.
Americans are perhaps the most generous people on the planet.
Picture this: You are travelling with your husband, and decide to stop for dinner. Afterwards, on the way to the car, he is felled by a single shot to the abdomen. He is flown to hospital, undergoes two separate three-hour surgeries to save his life, during which he loses bits and pieces of various vital organs, and still faces another round of surgeries and probably the raging sort of infection that typically follows gunshot wounds to the gut.
When you have something to say publicly, what do you say?
Well, the wife of the sniper's latest victim yesterday issued a brief statement.
Through Nancy Martin, the trauma program director for the Medical College of Virginia hospitals, this unidentified woman thanked her husband's doctors, area residents and those from their unidentified home town, and asked only for their continued prayers. "Please pray also for the attacker," the woman added, "and that no one else is hurt."
I found the same forgiving folk on my recent trip across this country preparatory to the 9/11 anniversary in New York City. The relatives and friends and co-workers of those who were murdered at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon and in a plane that fell into a field in Pennsylvania field responded almost uniformly in this remarkably charitable and unvengeful manner.
It is instructive to watch Mr. Moore's film.
He uses Canada, and Canadians, as a constant point of comparison to his own country and fellow citizens. He takes his camera to Sarnia, Ont., and to Windsor, and to Toronto -- three cities I know well -- and in each, he claims Canada is so safe, so without violence, that he routinely walks into unlocked front doors. He interviews a selection of dullards who burble that, why, of course there's no need to lock a door! He asks about a slum in Toronto, and offers as the worst one a brief shot of a neat, mixed-income development -- the Woodgreen co-op in the east end of the city, I believe, but I saw it only for a few seconds and was so shocked I could barely take it in.
His journalism, in short, on the subject of Canada and Canadians, is nothing short of shoddy, manipulative and untrue. The same can be said for his journalism on his own country, and indeed on the terrible and complicated issue he purports to adjudicate.
At the theatre in Bethesda, Md., where I saw Bowling for Columbine, there was a rare scattering of applause when the credits were rolling. I've no doubt many Canadians will adore both the documentary and its premise.
The truth of America is that it is a place open, ludicrously free, in every regard, not merely in the ability to get and own a firearm. The truth of Americans is that they are in the main good, God-fearing and forgiving people. They are no more responsible for creatures like this sniper than they were for 9/11, or as Mr. Heston is for that dead child whose picture was held before him by Mr. Moore, quivering with righteous rage.
Christie Blatchford can be contacted at cblatchford@nationalpost.com
It's gotta be jelly, cause jam don't shake like that...
A good article, but the above statement is misleading and demonstrates a widely held misconception. Our gun-friendly culture does not have its origins in the Second Amendment right. The Second Amendment simply recognizes the culture of individual responsibility that was expected to drive every aspect of American free society.
A gun is a tool. It is no better and no worse than the one who uses it. In a society premised upon individual responsibility and freedom, the right to bear arms for protection of family, property and self, is axiomatic. In a society dependent upon the willingness of its members to be responsible for maintaining and preserving the social order, the duty to be armed in many situations, is also axiomatic. (See The Right & Duty To Keep & Bear Arms.)
Why don't the Leftists make a movie with an hysterical figure who goes around and confronts State Highway Authorities for allowing high speed roadways where people can go out and kill themselves and others? Surely that would be a real gripper, if you had a sobbing pansy show graphic pictures of children killed or maimed in car accidents to the confronted officials. Or what about a documentry with an hysterical pansy confronting the local gas company with pictures of children burned in home fires resulting from gas leaks; or electrical companies, etc.. An imaginative director could certainly have a lot of impact, confronting all sorts of people over all sorts of tools, devices, commodities, etc., which are sometimes involved in misdeeds, accidents, etc.. Clearly, we need to put all children into incubators, in fire proof and bullet proof vaults, until they are grown, to make certain that not only is "no child left behind," but that no "child is ever injured."
I have said it before. But it continues to be more and more obvious, that 21st Century America needs its own Dean Swift. Gulliver never encountered anything this looney.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Judge by the number of donations and their lower average size, or by the relatively modest wealth of its senators, or by the majority it won in 2000 everywhere but in the cities and the toney suburbs, and the Republican Party is the predominant party of the average guy in the middle class.The Democratic Party is the predominant party of the rich and famous, snobbishly demeaning the middle class with affected moral superiority. And of the entitled class--journalists, government employees, minorities, and women.
The classes for the Democrats and those for the Republicans obviously overlap, and not even blacks are 100% politically monolithic; there are after all Republican voters in cities, and Democratic ones in rural areas.
But, it wasn't just 8yrs of the Clintonistas. It started with the immigration act in, i think, 1964.
Granted, the Democrats have keep giving the immigrants more and more free goodies, but the Republicans haven't done hardly jack squat to stem the tide.
A couple of years ago I read an article about how the Western part of Canada, because of immigration from the Pacific Rim, had become a new hotbed of neo-Nazi activity and anti-immigrant sentiment. Haven't heard much about that since, so it may have subsided, but that really isn't my point. The point is that every country has its particular warts and blemishes that someone grinding a particular axe could seize on to make some political point.
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