The following I received from my daughter, a recent convert to the gun culture and now the owner of several guns. We had a conversation about guns which prompted her to send me a rant from a talk show host that begins a few paragraphs below.
I've now read this three times and with each reading, I become more incensed. Not because the author misses the point, or that much is inaccurate both as to fact and conclusion, or that the assumptions seem to be straight from the N.R.A., but that such a strong point of view is so common. This simple belief driven diatribe, so very uniquely American, is thoroughly drenched in the common paranoid delusion of the great conspiracy of gun confiscation. The shooting of children is not the tragedy; it is the President's words reflecting the tragedy. Because, reading between the lines, these words only mean that the President is saying he wants to take all away all guns. Be scared. Be vary scared. Be petrified, because the government is coming.
I consider myself a moderate on the gun issue, believing that guns and background checks should be required for all transactions and that large capacity clips should be illegal or highly regulated. I'm ambivalent regarding assault weapons.
The following is this frightening view of our world. The first line is from my daughter.
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This is from a soapbox written by Rob from the Rob, Arnie and Dawn show.
For many people, it is hard to define exactly what was the most disgusting part of Friday’s elementary school shooting in Connecticut:
o The act itself, resulting in the cold blooded murder of 28 people total, 20 of them children under the age of 10.
o The horrendous news coverage of the event, which ranged from being devastatingly underreported in the beginning, to stunningly exploitive in the end. For the first two hours of the story, there was barely a blip of information and only “one person, the gunman,” reported dead. Once the truth emerged, sickening parents couldn’t run to the news networks fast enough to offer up their 6 and 8 year old children to be interviewed on the specifics of the death and blood they had just witnessed.
o The media pulling a “Richard Jewel,” (Google it), by mis-identifying the shooter’s brother, as the shooter, for about 4 hours, including plastering the brother’s picture all over the nation. Well done.
o The predictably pathetic way parents across the nation reacted to the news by scaring the living hell out of their children. While no one can begrudge someone the empathy they felt imaging such a horror happening to their family, the myriad of stories from across America of parents rushing to their children’s elementary schools (in states nowhere near Connecticut) to pull them out for the day were pathetic beyond words. What a fine message to send to the future of the nation: When tragedy strikes (nowhere near you), panic!
While those are all wonderful candidates for the “most disgusting part of the story,” they are not the winner.
At 3:15 Eastern time, president Obama addressed the nation. To be fair, he seemed genuinely devastated by the weight of the totality of the news. While cynics might claim he was “acting,” I will not. I believe the man was truly affected emotionally by this event and it showed, and there’s nothing wrong with that. His style may not be my first choice when it comes to how a man leads, but to criticize him merely for the purpose of criticizing him is both small and unnecessary, for it wasn’t his demeanor or tone that mattered. It was his words. His subtle, yet disgusting and ominous words.
"As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it is an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago, these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods and these children are our children. And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics."
There it is, folks. Shots fired. No pun intended.
Obama is right in the sense that his presidency has seen its’ share of mass shootings. He didn’t even mention some of the others (Tucson, Fort Hood, to name a few) and he also didn’t mention the screams out outcry from the large (and growing louder) anti-gun crowd in America who have been clamoring for him to use these tragedies as springboards for advanced gun control in America. He has refused, until now. (http://thinkprogress.org/...)
Obama may be an idiot, (and I have always believed that he is, for there is a vast difference between being educated and being intelligent), but he is also a cold, calculating political opportunist who knows when to lie in the weeds and when to pounce. Just ask Hillary Clinton about that. Obama knew that of all the controversies he took on in his first term, none would be as dangerous and galvanizing as gun control. Politically, an attempt to outlaw most assault weapons is what destroyed the Democratic Party’s rule of congress in 1994, and socially, we are still and have been, a mostly gun-friendly, gun supporting nation. (http://www.infoplease.com/...)
But now the tide has turned. Obama never has to run for anything ever again. Additionally, the anti-gun crowd has done a masterful job over the last decade of sneaking in the phrase “semi-automatic,” to every conversation about guns, making the public at large envision massive killing machines that no one would ever “need,” in order to hunt or protect themselves. And now, most chillingly, we have dead children; lots and lots of dead, young, innocent children who were doing the most basic of American things, going to kindergarten.
The latter is the most persuasive, of course. Plenty of people who were on the fence previously about gun control have now already swung the other way under the hysterical umbrella of “save the children.” It is an understandable, yet inexcusable reaction to the horror that most of us can’t even comprehend, but it is not, of course, the answer. No matter, since it is powerful. The funerals of these children will be paraded before us all week, each one a reminder that they were killed by guns.
That narrative, combined with the phony-baloney sales job you’ve been handed for the past ten years about “semi-automatic weapons,” will culminate with a massive push to control or even ban handguns in America. Semi-automatic weapons, you are supposed to believe, are these massive rifles with 30 round ammunition cartridges that the Expendables use. When in fact, every one of us who owns, favors, or uses a nine millimeter (think Bruce Willis’ weapon of choice in the Die Hard movies), is packing a semi-automatic weapon. The gun allows us the ability to stand before a home invasion of four masked rapists and with nine continuous compressions of the trigger defuse the situation and save our family, something that happens thousands of time per year in America, yet is never widely reported. The gun crowd, however, would like us all to believe that a hunting rifle will somehow magically accomplish the same thing.
Logic and reason will have no place in this argument, however for it is all emotions-based, and that brings us to the final piece of this losing puzzle; those on the side of gun rights have no effective messenger. President Obama is, in and of himself, a master salesman. He will come armed with dead children and scary stories and statistics; and the other side will offer asinine arguments like “if we all carried guns, there would have been someone armed at the school to stop the gunman.”
Wild West arguments don’t work. The American public will not eat that argument up, they will run from it, and you will lose and you will lose badly. More common sense arguments about protecting your home and pointing out that criminals will always get and have guns, leaving law abiding citizens unarmed, are the only way to win the day. And that argument has no effective speaker ready, willing, and able to stand before the nation and persuade the stupid.
Your guns aren’t going away today, tomorrow or early next year. But the playing field has been set, the battle lines drawn, and the games are about to begin. States with already asinine gun control laws (California) and the ability politically to push through tougher restrictions will do so almost immediately as a show of support and will, and the argument will get louder and louder nationally every time a gun is used for anything other than law abiding purposes.
Meaningful action is on the way. For the first time in twenty years, this nation is going to have a loud, impactful argument about the second amendment and our right to protect our families. The gun lobby is a powerful one, and will bring all they have to bear. But the separatist “us against them” quality of the nation is strong. It’s the Unions against the fat cats, the middle class against the one percent, the tolerant versus the bigots, and now the gun owners against the gun controlists. No longer will people be able to take a position that says “I don’t really have a position on guns.” Dead children are at stake. Everyone must take a side. Oh, and you may want to stock up on ammo and firearms while you can. Just sayin’…
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