Tag: guns

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ideological culture national politics & policies Second Amendment rights

Terrorized?

This week, a major-party politician said that “we cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority.”

How can simply having a viewpoint — a very American thing to possess, by the way — terrorize anyone?

But of course, this person wasn’t talking about real terrorism. This person — a Democratic Party politician of high standing — was using the T-word to smear defenders of the Second Amendment.

Yes, it was Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, and former U.S. Secretary of State (an office she has now taken “full responsibility” for holding), who trotted out those words, allegedly to encourage “a more thoughtful” debate about gun control.

Demonizing her opponents as “terrorizing” her comrades is hardly a way to produce the stated result.

Them’s fightin’ words.

I know of no one who defends the Second Amendment and opposes the gun control agenda of the Democratic Party who also supports the terroristic activities of spree murderers. Not one.

We have more complicated reasons to oppose gun control than merely focusing on such violence.

But understanding those reasons would require a “more thoughtful” attitude than besmirching opponents with the word “terror.”

And as for terrorizing, there are few words more frightening coming from an American politician than “we cannot let a minority” exercise their rights — whether to arms or . . . holding “a viewpoint.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment Second Amendment rights

Gun Control of the Very Best Kind

The headline: “Husband and wife shoot gunmen who try to enter their St. Louis home, killing 1, police say.”

They acted when two thugs tried to force their way into their home by using the St. Louis couple’s 17-year-old daughter as a shield. She had been outside fetching something from her car when the men grabbed her.

Inside, the father happened to see what was happening and pulled out his gun. His wife also retrieved a gun. Home invader Terrell Johnson entered first and received the first bullets. He didn’t survive. His partner Cortez McClinton — arrested in 2010 on a murder charge, but eventually released because of uncooperative witnesses — managed to escape, if only briefly. His brother took him to a hospital for chest and thigh wounds. The police picked him up there.

Mom had also gotten off a shot but did not hit either intruder, leading one blogger to opine that although her heart is in the right place, she needs practice. A reader replied, rightly, that when your own daughter is directly in harm’s way, your shooting skill is hardly the only variable.

Besides, the goal in brandishing a weapon isn’t necessarily to wound bad guys, but better yet to scare them off. There’s a deterrent effect in owning guns.

I am surprised that advocates of gun control and their compatriots in the national MainStream Media are not all over this story. For here is yet another dramatic proof of the need for effective gun control on which they constantly insist.

The gun used to thwart the invaders was very effectively controlled indeed.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
responsibility Second Amendment rights

Point Those Fangs Elsewhere

The death of Pentecostal minister Jaimie Coots, from a rattlesnake bite to the back of his hand, sure rattled William Saletan, at Slate, who took the occasion to make a point about how dangerous . . . guns are.

In “A Nation of Snake Handlers,” Saletan cleverly regaled us with stories of youngsters and others who died playing with snakes. But he had deliberately swapped “gun” with “snake” and “discharge” with “bite,” taking accidental gun deaths and turning them into snakebite deaths, to get our attention: “We are a nation of gun handlers, as reckless as anyone who handles serpents.”

In one year, he reports, there were over 12,000 gunshot fatalities. Americans own over 300 million guns. What to do?

I’m not going to tell you that the solution to this madness is to pass another gun law. . . . We need more than laws. We need to change our culture. We must ask ourselves whether the comforts and pleasures of owning a firearm are worth the risks. Having a gun in your home is far more dangerous than having a snake.

No one wants gun accidents. But “[h]aving a gun in your home is far more dangerous than having a snake”? Really? Hardly anyone owns poisonous snakes. But Americans own millions of guns, with comparatively few accidental deaths.

Sadly, Saletan played switcheroo with the stat on those 12,000+ gun deaths. Only a few were accidental (in 2010, the number was 606). Most were homicides.

The rule for handling snakes and guns is: peaceful people don’t point them at others. (Better not to point them at yourself, either.)

Respect danger. Respect the rights of others.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Second Amendment rights video

Video: Fifty-four Colorado Sheriffs File Suit Against Anti-Gun Bills

Big news from Colorado:

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Common Sense nannyism responsibility Second Amendment rights

Unhappiness Is a Drawn Gun

Dear Reader: This “BEST of Common Sense” comment originally aired on September 20, 2007. The growing use of zero-tolerance policies — especially having anything to do with guns — is the opposite of common sense. Mass insanity may be more popular these days, but I still prefer common sense. —PJ

There’s the real world, and there are representations of it.

I draw a picture of, say, a gun. That picture is of a gun; it is not itself an actual gun. It’s just, well, a doodle.

This being the case — that doodles differ from real threats — then why was a 13-year-old boy near Mesa, Arizona, suspended from school?

He drew a gun . . . on a piece of paper. He didn’t point it at anybody. He made no hit list. He didn’t say “Bang.” No one even got a paper cut.

But school officials treated it as a threat, lectured his poor father on the shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School, and suspended the lad.

The district spokesman insisted that the doodle was “absolutely considered a threat.” But somehow, knowing that this student was suspended, I’m not feeling any safer.

If our teachers and administrators can’t distinguish real threats from doodles — doodles most boys do, doodles I drew when I was a boy — then what are they teaching the kids? To overreact to everything? To not be able to distinguish small problems from big ones? To treat every symbol or representation as the real thing?

It’s elementary: The map is not the actual territory; the representation is not the thing represented.

You’d think, then, that teachers would be trying to impart (not erase) that notion from the minds of students.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.