My letter to the author:
Do you think they'll stop banning guns when they've banned everything except your ancient open-bore 12-gague shotgun? I'd lay odds that they will do the same thing they've done with .50 caliber rifles - "that gun is tooooo biiiiig," and they'll ban everything except 20-gague single-shots with birdshot.
About 25 years ago, they weren't particularly shy about saying this. An accquaintance wrote this about a speech by Josh Sugarman that he covered as a journalist, back in the days when the name of Handgun Control Inc. was The National Coalition to Ban Handguns:
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"First, we ban cheap handguns, because everybody is afraid of street crime.
"Next, we ban military-type automatic rifles, because nobody needs a machine gun for hunting.
"Then, since nobody can buy cheap handguns, they won't want to move up to more expensive handguns, so we can ban ALL handguns except for those used by military and police. And we make the soldiers and cops turn theirs in to an armory when they go off duty." (You must remember, this guy and this audience hated American soldiers and policemen almost as much as they hated the NRA.)
"Then, because a true sportsman only needs one shot, we ban everything except single-shot rifles and shotguns.
"And if we do this, then in about five years, all the deer hunters and duck hunters will get fed up and quit, and there will be so few gun owners left that we can go ahead and finish the job, and ban all privately owned guns in America!"
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Your attitude that the gun rights debate is solely about your "right to hunt" (as if that appears anywhere in the Constitution) and your repetition of the mantra, "in no way affects my right," is chillingly remeniscent of the poem by Pastor Martin Niemoller, written during WW-II:
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First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
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Other people have rights besides you and your fellow hunters, including the most fundamental of all rights, the right to self-defense against violent attackers that you would see stripped away with a handgun ban. Washington DC already did that, and its crime rate leads the nation, while the 33 states that have passed right-to-carry laws have seen their crime rates fall.
Consider the content of
http://www.a-human-right.com/
You are woefully uninformed about the central issues in the gun control debate, and I urge you to educate yourself before you again attempt to address them in print. And I also urge you to abandon the term "gun nut" - because in the eyes of pacifist vegetarians, you too are a "gun nut." That term is full of hate and denigration, just like "nigger" and "kike," and warrants no place in the vocabulary of anyone who owns a firearm.
-Michael Pelletier.
