Posted on 05/15/2003 1:07:48 PM PDT by SoDak
ELK CITY, Idaho - Some folks just hate guns. They hate them worse than they hate red meat, bluegrass music and tubs of yogurt without a "fat free" label." They hate them worse than they hate neighborhoods which aren't gated and patrolled, those anachronistic wastelands free of zoning laws and aesthetic committees.
They rail against the right to keep and bear arms because they long ago lost the desire or ability to care for themselves. After all, one afflicted by an anxiety attack at the sight of a full recycling bin or a leaking faucet can hardly be expected to understand self-reliance.
The vast majority of gun-haters reside on the far left side of the ideological fence. Most are snobby elitists who feel it is the government's duty to wipe their noses, spray Bactine on their scraped knees and protect them from life itself. They can't tell you why they hate guns, except to say "guns are violent."
I suggest these people heed the advice of their own role models. As espoused by a plethora of enlightened gurus who aim to heal the national psyche, irrational hatred is based upon fear and ignorance. Oprah, Dr. Phil, Deepak Chopra and the like all provide such insights. By their philosophy, irrational hatred revolves around a refusal to understand that which is outside one's realm of experience. It is a terror of the unknown, akin to a small child being scared of the bogeyman under the bed.
Syndicated columnist Anna Quindlen should study these fonts of wisdom. Judging by her recent column ("Immunity for guns," May 2 Journal), the poor soul is quaking in her Birkenstocks. Her latest tirade against the Second Amendment described her disgust at the passage of "Reckless Lawsuit Pre-emption Legislation" by the House of Representatives. Now headed toward the Senate, this necessary bill is intended to halt frivolous lawsuits, many of which have been aimed directly at the gun industry. It is a response to Clinton-era attempts by some city governments and anti-gun organizations to bankrupt firearms manufacturers by making them responsible for the misuse of their product by the lawless.
Quindlen wrote, "If a hospital leaves a sponge in your mid-section, you can sue. If a car dealer sells you a clunker it hadn't properly inspected, you can sue." That's true, but the examples she cites involve work performed incorrectly or products that fail to live up to reasonable standards of operation.
You can't hold a surgeon liable if you take it upon yourself to yank the stitches and poke around your small intestine with a butter knife. You can't sue a car manufacturer because your overly hormonal son got Cindy Lou pregnant in the back seat of a defect-free vehicle. You can't sue Titelist because you were beaned in the head with an errant golf ball. You can't sue Kmart because people laughed at your ugly clothes. If a product works as promised, and if it is sold legally, neither the company that built it nor the firm that sold it should be held accountable for its abuse by the purchaser.
But that's not how Quindlen thinks. She appears to presume that all guns are faulty and dangerous, simply because they are guns. By her logic, if a criminal uses a gun in the commission of a crime it is the fault of the manufacturer and the seller. By her logic, the individual is never responsible for his own behavior.
Then again, isn't this the liberal credo? Isn't everything someone else's fault? The fast-food outlet is responsible because you ate too much. The casino is responsible because you blew your paycheck at the blackjack table.
And of course, guns are responsible for crime.
Quindlen's column - brimming with insecurity, anger, half-truths and unfounded assumptions - was a stereotypical excuse to attack the NRA. "It's easy to find NRA members who say they have no problem with gun licensing or registration," she claims, implying that such is the "sensible attitude" of the average gun owner.
That's just a lie. Most gun owners are vehemently against licensing and registration. True, you probably can find an NRA member here and there ("here and there" being defined as San Francisco and New York) in favor of more government control. But the percentage of the total NRA membership who support such illegal actions are too small to be statistically measurable. It's also easy to find a Democrat who supports George Bush, but they are hardly a driving force within the liberal cadre. They are certainly not representative of the Democratic Party.
So Quindlen rants and raves against guns; her argument is not really against proposed legislation, but in fact against the very existence of the Second Amendment.
Ron Marr is publisher, editor and janitor of The Troutwrapper magazine. Contact him at www.troutwrapper.com.
Yea, verily.
The leftmedia is starting to stoke the fires of hysteria in light of both the "lawsuit protection" bill that just passed in the House, as well as the upcoming sunset of the onerous "1994 Assault Weapon" bill. By the time these come up for final decision, they hope to have the masses of dumbed-down sheeple that pass for "citizens" nowadays whipped into a foaming, panicked and unthinking frenzy.
Hey, it worked before...
Oxymoron?
I'm so sick of the anti-gun whiners. The very idea of the God-given right of self-defense and owning firearms is completely foreign to them. They're completely clueless. It can't be very good going through life that ignorant.
Stated that 80% of NRA members wanted the 'Assualt Weapons Ban'. Can you believe such an idiotic statement??
BTW.. He was talking of banning ALL semi-automatic weapons.
The whole demonratic party would like nothing better than this, though many of them are far too cowardly to admit it. They know that Americans as a whole reject gun control, but they will continue to try to "educate" and chip away til they get them.
Other than a couple of slide action shotguns, one for hunting the other for serious social purposes, that's all I've got. He's welcome to come to my place and try to take them. But of course he won't, he'll send a couple of dozen black clad BATFErs armed with fully automatic weapons.
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