Librado Romero/The New York Times
Randi Rodgers, 15, a champion shooter
dressed for her sport, demonstrated
her technique at the Wooster
Mountain Gun Club in Danbury, Conn.
Posted on 07/14/2002 4:58:17 AM PDT by Pharmboy
DANBURY, Conn., July 12. Karen Ali covers the courts for The News-Times in Danbury, but when it came to guns, she didn't know a flintlock from a firing pin.
"I was covering a murder trial," she said, "and I didn't know what a magazine was until I asked another reporter."
That's why Ms. Ali was at the Wooster Mountain Gun Club today, popping away with assorted revolvers, automatics and rifles, as a guest of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun manufacturers group. She was shown how the things she calls bullets which are actually called rounds are loaded in the magazine, and how the magazine goes into the receiver, which is inside the handle, called the grip, of an automatic, or in this case, a semiautomatic. And so on.
Librado Romero/The New York Times
Randi Rodgers, 15, a champion shooter
dressed for her sport, demonstrated
her technique at the Wooster
Mountain Gun Club in Danbury, Conn.
America's gun culture was not born on the wild frontier or in Hollywood fantasies but here in the river valley towns of Connecticut, where some of the great names in firepower Colt, Winchester, Smith & Wesson got their start and where many are still located.
Yet to expect the members of the Eastern news media to be able to compare, say, the advantages of open sights versus closed sights as readily as they can discuss the relative merits of arugula versus endive is to ask the impossible, to hear the gun makers tell it.
To them, the problem is far from academic. While gun sales have been increasing, especially after the attacks of Sept. 11, the gun manufacturers are under severe threat from a series of lawsuits that seek to hold them and their distributors responsible for abetting criminal gun violence. And the gun industry believes it sees a lack of basic understanding about its main product in the news stories about the gun control debate.
So in a breathtaking act of faith, manufacturers figured that putting guns in the hands of reporters for a day might help win, if not sympathy, at least understanding.
"We just thought we ought to be talking to you guys," said Michael Bane, a Colorado writer and publicist who has organized a dozen or so shooting sessions for the news media around the country. To be invited, it helps to have written an article the industry deemed negative.
"And when you have a question about shooting, maybe you'll call us," Mr. Bane continued. "Lots of reporters, when they have a question about guns, they call the Brady people, which is like calling the Klan for information on the N.A.A.C.P."
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, as it happens, is one of the groups that is suing the gun makers, and Dennis Henigan, its legal director in Washington, did not like Mr. Bane's quip at all. "I find the quote just outrageous and insulting," he said. "To compare us in any way to the Ku Klux Klan, to me, it just suggests an increasing desperation on the part of the gun industry."
Yet Mr. Henigan did not dispute the gun makers' sense that the news media is not always gun savvy.
"That is probably the case, but no more than journalists are conversant on other dangerous products," he said. "The mistake, though, would be to turn to the gun industry for that information rather than other sources, because they have their own profit-motivated bias."
With the news media out to lunch and the courts bearing down on them, the gun people are looking for friends wherever they can find them. They have one in David Rostcheck, a representative of the Pink Pistols, a gay shooters group whose symbol is an inverted pink triangle with a shooter inside, and whose motto is, "Pick on someone your own caliber."
"Gun owners face many of the same biases the gay community has faced," said Mr. Rostcheck, who was at the range that day. "They don't always get a fair shake in the media, and they don't know how to get their point of view across."
Mr. Bane said all types find a warm welcome in the gun world. "The way we see it is, if you shoot, we're cool," he said.
He said he didn't expect that every scribbler would be won over by the kick of a gun and a whiff of gun smoke. But it appeared to have had the desired effect on Ms. Ali, from The News-Times. She still doesn't get the fascination with guns ≈ "I think they're ugly, and in the movies they look so cool, you know?" ≈ but she liked a cute little number from Smith & Wesson called the LadySmith.
"I got a kick out of shooting, and I'm thinking of getting one," she said. "I want to get one. I really do."
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Sarah Brady is hopeless, as are Feinswein and Schemer. If ignorance is bliss, they are the happiest folks on earth.
America's gun culture was not born on the wild frontier or in Hollywood fantasies but here in the river valley towns of Connecticut, where some of the great names in firepower Colt, Winchester, Smith & Wesson got their start and where many are still located.
America has loved its guns since colonial times, unlike the lying Michael Bellesiles would have us believe.
You forgot to insert "knuckle-dragging" between "drooling" and "idjyots"--LOL!
Poorly worded and perhaps a veiled reference to Bellesiles' fabrication. But, it's unlikely that most people reading this sentence would recognize it.
I thought the intention was to point out that the Colt, et al, did all their manufacturing in the middle of what is now supposed to be a gun-free utopia -- supplying the firearms that were ubiquitous in the West.
However, it would be an interesting question: how much of production was shipped westward? I'm sure that some of it was sold to the residents of the Northeast.
The quote from the gun owners was correct. The Brady campaign continues to disarm law-abiding minorities in the crime filled cities in order to push their agenda. The Brady's would rather see a Black with a noose around his neck than see his family armed. Jim Crow Laws were the start of gun control.
Actually, the Ku Klux Klan was notorious for its support of gun control - for blacks. Michigan's highly restrictive CCW law, which was replaced by "shall-issue" last year, was lobbied for by the Ku Klux Klan.
I'll note something else:
The gun control laws are strongest on the big city Liberal Planatations, where blacks are concentrated.
Maybe we should be investigating the ties between Dennis Henigan's Brady Center and the Ku Klux Klan after all... ;-)
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In 1925 a white mob in Detroit attacked the home of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black physician who had just moved into an all-white neighborhood.1 The situation got out of hand, even though a dozen police officers were present who cordoned off the area. Shots were fired, both from the mob and from the house, and one member of the mob was killed. The police stormed the house and arrested everyone in the house, including Dr. Sweet's brother Henry. Judge Frank Murphy released Mrs. Sweet on bail but everyone else was put on trial for murder. Clarence Darrow came to town to assume responsibility for the defense. After a seven-week trial, Judge Murphy ruled that a verdict could not be reached and declared a mistrial.
The prosecutor decided to re-try Henry Sweet, who had freely admitted that he had fired a gun. Darrow took the view that this was justifiable self defense, and the second all-white jury, after only three hours of deliberation, declared Henry Sweet not guilty.
The Ku Klux Klan subsequently lobbied the Legislature and in 1927 won the passage of PA 372, which gave local county gun boards discretionary authority to grant concealed carry licenses only to those who in their opinion had a need to defend themselves. The gun boards were comprised of the county prosecutor, the sheriff, and a representative from the Michigan State Police. This "may issue" law gave wide latitude to the gun boards, and resulted in practices varying from issuance only to police officers and friends and political supporters of the board to a few counties where every honest person could obtain a concealed carry license. Thus the origin of the 1927 "carry concealed weapons (CCW)" law was pure racism.
www.mcrgo.org/pdf/MCPP_essay_on_MCRGO.doc
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What an interesting connection. Thanks for posting.
You may just be onto something: it is, after all, July in NYC.
Clayton Cramer's wonderful piece "The Racist Roots of Gun Control". (Clayton Cramer is the amateur historian credited with first, and most thoroughly, exposing the lies of "Arming America".)
"The Ku Klux Klan: 'We're Handgun Control International'" from Bill Levinson's site The Stentorian.
"Kweisi Mfume's NAACP: "We're Handgun Control International"", also from The Stentorian.
the JPFO's pamphlet: "Gun Control is Racist"
Smith and Wessons, Colts, Kimbers, Rugers, Para Ordnance, Eastern Bloc made guns, Nazi made guns, and Chinese made guns
What took the place of the Smith?
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