[Billthedrill]

I giggled when someone - was it Jeff Cooper? - came up with the neologism "hoplophobia" do describe an irrational fear of firearms but I'm not laughing now. How an otherwise rational person can project the sort of wild mischaracterizations we hear commonly about gun owners in general and American ones in particular, all without the most elementary acquaintance with any of them, is a little hard to fathom. One would hope even the densest of these would recognize a couple of fundamental realities - (1) armed criminals don't care about laws, and (2) people honest enough to obey the law weren't the problem in the first place.

I recently had cause to be contacted by authorities who asked if I might feel safer with police patrols outside my house or, should the need arise, a brief relocation to somewhere unfindable.

You can't put an entire nation on the Witness Protection Program. You can either allow its citizens to defend themselves or you can abandon them. And if your government says to you "it's too unsafe for everyone for you to have a gun, but we'll protect you from everything you might need one for" and then they don't, that is abandonment and the parties making that promise ought to be held responsible for the lie that they knew it was when they made it.

[45Auto]

"You can't put an entire nation on the Witness Protection Program."

That sure is the truth. Howard has his good points, but his irrational fear of his own citizens is not one of them. Some of the worst tyrants in history were those who just wanted to "do good". The Aussies who fought at Gallipoli are turning over in their graves.