Logic seems to have escaped a few of our resident gun aficionados of late.
Last week, one of our esteemed gun promoters dropped this gem in one of David's regular "Gun Fail" posts:
Poor people buy a gun and may never shoot it until they accidentally discharge it because they really have only the vaguest idea of how it works
See? All of the idiots who shoot themselves (or others) accidentally as noted in David's Gun Fail diaries
must be poor, because, of course, poor people are stupid and they don't know how to properly handle a gun like
Responsible Gun Owners© do.
Well, there's always George Zimmerman. Now there's a Responsible Gun Owner©! He musn't be a poor person. He aimed his gun and shot his target!
That line of peerless gun lover reasoning was confirmed today in a series of (now hidden) comments posted by another one of our resident gun fans in this diary: A Letter From Marissa Alexander - The Battered Woman Serving 20 Years For Firing A Warning Shot
The gun-hugging poster wrote (bold his, not mine):
Marissa deserved her conviction.
Her problem was that it was a warning shot.
I just got done writing this comment, which went into more explanation than I feel like repeating, so I'll just repeat the bit from the heart here:
The rules are simple - there is a possible reaper riding on every bullet you throw so you had better only be sending those things at the source of your danger. Modern medicine is really fucking awesome at keeping people alive who would have died just a couple decades ago. In a less medically-great world, trying to minimize the actual damage to an attacker by rolling the dice on hitting a bystander was an acceptable gamble. But emergency room docs have generally achieved a level of capability that gambling on a random bystander is no longer an acceptable thing to do.
Marissa Alexander gambled on missing a bystander, and that is not kosher. By the merest luck she didn't drill another 7 year old Brandon Mackey in the head.
She maybe didn't deserve two decades, but she definitely deserved to serve some time for putting the random public in danger.
The lesson is simple - you shoot, you aim for the person causing your harm. There is NO OTHER TARGET, and don't expect mercy from the responsible gun owners because you make the rest of us look bad.
(By the way, I should sue for the unauthorized use of my copyrighted phrase in that last sentence.)
See, again, Responsible Gun Owners© don't fire warning shots! They make sure they hit their intended targets! (Hurray for George Zimmerman!)
But all of this infallible gun-lover logic is making an obvious point:
It's just way too easy to get a gun in this country! Any asshole can get one, from those stupid poor people in David's Gun Fail series to the woman who fired a warning shot to fend off her abuser.
These idiots are ruining it for Responsible Gun Owners©!
Maybe I'm wrong about the logic lapse. Maybe some of our resident gun lovers are now coming full circle and are beginning to see that it's just way too easy for any idiot to get a gun in this country. Insanely easy.
But, god forbid, we should legislate any rules or regulations that would make it much harder to get a gun.
"Second Amendment! Second Amendment!"
The "Second Amendment!" Henny-Pennyism is a propagandistic smoke screen.
When it comes to guns in this country, availability is really the #1 issue.
The NRA and its deep pockets, the gun makers, don't give a damn who has a gun or who gets a gun as long as more guns are in circulation. The whole Second Amendment argument is primarily a red herring to protect the gun makers' interest in selling more guns.
Many of our "liberal gun owners" here scream and carry on about the Second Amendment and "our liberties" while ignoring the facts that getting a gun is insanely easy in this country.
The issue is availability. It should be much harder to get a gun. Period.
Then maybe all the idiots will find it much, much harder to get their hands on one, and we can restrict gun ownership to Responsible Gun Owners©.
Like George Zimmerman.
By the way, shouldn't Trayvon Martin have been able to "Stand His Ground" against some unknown guy in jeans and a t-shirt who was stalking him in the dark? I may have punched George Zimmerman, too, if he was following me in the dark while I was coming home from the store.
Let's stop the stupid people from getting guns.