Gun-hating New York Times Writer Visits the City's Gun Stores (A hilarious encounter)

New York City may be a hotbed of liberals and gun haters, but a few gun stores actually do exist there. However, buying a handgun can be a frustrating experience -- thanks to burdensome regulations and lousy customer service, according an amusing article by Ariel Kaminer in the New York Times: "No Permit? No Touching the Pistols."

"To run a gun shop in this of all cities is to weather a great deal of regulatory -- even hostile -- scrutiny," writes Kaminer, a New Yorker who (surprise, surprise) all but admits she hates guns and wouldn't shoot an intruder or even a bird: She's a "pacifist or a coward," she proudly states.

New York City is "one of the hardest places in the world to buy a gun," Kaminer reports. What's more, Michael R. Bloomberg is proud of having tightened up gun laws and would like to export those laws to the rest of America, she says.

Visiting two dreary gun shops, Kaminer observes that unless you're a cop, they're not very interested in selling handguns to law-abiding people like her: Sales people are gruff or apathetic.

The most hilarious moments of Kaminer's gun-store visits occur when she enters a third store -- an elegant up-market place on Madison Avenue specializing in what Kaminer calls "hunting rifles." (Hey, Ms. Kaminer, what about shotguns? Well, maybe she doesn't know the difference between a rifle and shotgun.) At Beretta Gallery, she is mesmerized by hundreds of weapons on display and costing between $1,000 and $170,000 each. Besides the firearms, other oddities at the shop captivate her -- such as "large-game trophies that peer down superciliously from their mountings." Yikes! Kaminer also notes that Beretta has the "look of a private club and the feel of another century."

Then for the first time in her life, she holds a gun: "a 20-gauge semiautomatic (at the lower end of the price range)." Putting it to her shoulder, she takes aim. She writes:

Holding a top-of-the-line gun is supposed to make a person feel powerful, confident, in control. Instead, I felt ridiculous. My stance was all wrong, and in any case I would never pull the trigger -- not to kill an intruder, not to kill a bird. That moment of truth reaffirmed what was already beyond doubt: I am a pacifist, or a coward, depending on your perspective. But just as important, I am a New Yorker. In a city where we all live right on top of one another, playing with guns feels as out of place as wearing prairie dresses and engaging in plural marriage.

Let's hope that Kaminer's piece wasn't read by any of New York City's sexual predators, burglars, or homicidal maniacs. They might have gotten the strange idea she would be an easy target and want to look her up. Something tells me that any criminal who takes a fancy to her wouldn't be deterred by her moral superiority or her fellow sophisticates at the New York Times.

“Holding a top-of-the-line gun” - not quite, MS Presstitute.

The store wisely allowed you to hold one of their cheapest guns. One can hardly blame them.

One simply doesn’t allow ill bred, Liberal trash to hold fine firearms.

Neither does one allow such trash to sit at ones dinner table when crystal and china are being used.

On, one also does not serve any food or drink to such people when they are seated on ones furniture.

Lastly, one makes very certain such trash wipes its feet properly before allowing them inside.

All in all, the Presstitute was fortunate, in that they even admitted her in the first place. I would not have so done.

“I’m from the NY Slimes and I’m writing about guns.”

“How precious - talk to Skippy at Walmart. Good bye.”

;-)

What a snobbish, elite ass####.

Because many of us live rural we are WEARING PRAIRIE DRESSES & ENGAGING IN PLURAL MARRIAGES?????

I have never done either & I don’t anyone who has.

What a bunch of crap she is.

There are many strong women living rural in the USA & running ranches & businesses, including a woman just voted into the House from one of the Dakotas.

This nasty Bi### owes an apology to alot of women out here in “fly-over” country.

First, Id like to know how she knows a ‘robber’ is only going to take tangible things. What about the intangible? Would she fight back then? Perhaps she’d allow herself to be raped. It seems as tho she could rationalize that. What if her life was required? What if she were kidnapped and sold into slavery? To me is sounds as though Kaminer either hasn’t thought it out or made the facts fit her ideology. I strongly suspect though, rhetoric aside, she’d fight like a wild animal. In the end, like most people, she hasn’t measured herself well. Its strange how some people don’t know who/what they are. Perhaps they do know and are repulsed by what they see preferring to believe a lie.

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