![[Smith]](../images/smith.gif)
JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE paranoid, it doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you.
This observation is not original with me, but then this unoriginal insight is not original nor sui generis among my musings either. But, to more or less parallel the preceding paragraph, this doesn't make it any less apt.
You can be paranoid, crazy, politically incorrect, and 99 kinds of pariah among the kinder, gentler folk of our nation--indeed you can be wrong nine times out of 10--and still be right as rain about any specific issue at any old time in history.
Such as for instance, you could be the National Rifle Association, reviled and ridiculed by the intellectual elite from the ivy-covered halls of academia to the Tempe chapter of Mensa meeting in the tap room of a bowling alley by way of subtle humor...and still you'd be correct in assessing that Sarah Brady has tugged at the heartstrings of liberal America to the point that an alarming number of nice, misguided people would just as soon repeal the Second Amendment.
And then take away the people's right to keep and bear arms. And then confiscate everybody's guns.
Because an alarming number of nice, misguided people actually believe that our species has evolved into a better (nicer, kinder, gentler, more civilized) animal, and that the world would be a correspondingly better place if we were prohibited by law from owning guns.
Why would a decent, law-abiding citizen ever need a gun? they ask us. I say "us" because I am a gun-owner, a believer in the Second Amendment almost as much as I believe in the First, and therefore, by the definition of most of my political peers, a dangerously crazed gun-loony.
The answer--my answer and God and Plato's own answer--is simple: People aren't any better than they ever were, and in any increasingly crowded and stressful world, where the police have neither the time, the means, nor the legal obligation to preclude one's becoming a target of violent crime, it is the practical, legal and moral responsibility of each of us to defend ourselves and our families from harm. All the way from such commonsense safeguards as eating right, wearing seatbelts and condoms, right up to employing lethal force to keep some no-good son of a bitch from murdering our children.
It simply stuns me when my old left-wing buddies go to rolling their eyes and lecturing me in these patronizing tones about this gun sickness of mine.
Why does anyone but a cop need to own, let alone carry a handgun?
Are these the same folks who used to call cops pigs? Who file class action civil rights suits every time a person of any color but beige is hassled by the law? Do they want the gang of boys in blue who pulled Rodney King over for speeding to be the only class of people allowed by law to go heeled?
Jesus. The thought terrifies me.
And what's this shit about enforcing their Pollyanna worldview by outlawing and then confiscating guns? I thought the liberal view was that morality could not be enforced by law. How does one square the aim of legalizing pot and prostitution, against the politically correct dogma of denying law-abiding citizens the right to own handguns?
One doesn't. The entire litany of anti-Second Amendment hysteria presupposes that the preacher willfully ignore logic, intellectual consistency and, most particularly, any underpinnings of belief in personal liberty, freedom, responsibility and self-determination.
You aren't free when your government tells you that you cannot keep a gun in your house to protect yourself from the armed rapist who stole the gun he is aiming at your daughter's forehead. And you aren't morally superior for not shooting the bastard in the guts, because The Arizona Daily Star told you it's nicer to be nonviolent, and the sheriff came around collecting guns, to give you a headstart at nonconfrontational conflict resolution.
Your daughter and you have just been gang-banged. By a rapist, by your community, by your government.
But hey, we are our community, our government: We can avert this outcome if we wake up.
And we'd better. I read a headline in the Star a week or so ago that screamed, "Ravaging bullets to go on market in face of outcry."
And I thought, Oh shit, here we go again. Some geeky asshole from the South (how convenient for our liberal stereotyping) has invented a plastic-cased bullet that allegedly pierces body armor and creates great big wounds in human flesh. Beneath the lurid headline, the story quoted this redneck scientist in the most outrageous manner, saying stuff like "When Rhino-Ammo hits somebody they're going to die...The wound is horrific...Death is almost instantaneous...."
Shit like that. Sarah Brady and Bill Clinton couldn't have found a better shill if they'd paid this inventor a million bucks. Wow. He's from Alabama, and he talks like a man who eats fetuses with his fried eggs.
Never mind about objective reporting. Never mind about science. The Star and many others are out to rid America of the scourge of the Second Amendment, and they aren't above prostituting the First Amendment to do it. Never mind that death by bullet wound is almost never instantaneous, or that not Rhino-Ammo nor a hundred-megaton nuclear bullet is going to kill somebody who gets shot in the pinkie or the kneecap. Hysteria is what they're employing...and generating.
Of course the Star followed up the next day with one of its familiar editorial bleatings. Somewhat off the subject, but do any of the rest of you have trouble following the syntax of the Star editorials? I swear their writers are not native English speakers. Tom Beal agrees with me.
A few days later and many pages deeper into the minutiae of Afganistanism, the Star mentioned that these new bullets were being withheld from the market pending federal investigation and inevitable legislative prohibition, but the job was done: Another despicable outrage by those homicidal gun lobbyists. Even worse than that awful Black Talon ammunition President Clinton made such a stink about. Winchester took that off the market, rather than take the flak.
Personal defense ammunition ought to be as nasty and lethal as possible. Oh, but my God, they don't even permit such stuff in war. Right. Because in war you've got your son shooting at Vladimir's son, because your president and his cannot settle their differences over the phone. Each combatant is simply a patriotic, unlucky kid, trying to beat the other kid up because the grownups are acting juvenile. In war, despite political differences, you owe your opponent respect and a measure of humanity.
Such does not apply to some sociopathic, savage goblin who invades your home or your person, without provocation, intent for reasons of greed, lust or dementia upon harming innocent victims. That villain has nothing coming to him but the most expeditious repulsion possible, so that his violent intentions are thwarted. And that, unlovely as it is, means incapacitating or killing the son of a bitch as quickly as can be accomplished.
You don't do that with "nice" bullets like they used in The Great War your daddy went to and made the world safe for democracy. You aren't Roy Rogers, either: you don't shoot the gun from his hand and march him, with his hands up, to the Sheriff's office.
Invite Jeff out to the range by calling 574-2203. Or fax him blueprints of the White House at 7922096.
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