Several other bloggers have commented on this already, and I wasn't going to say anything, but now I think I just have to...
The gun army, made up almost exclusively of white men from suburban and rural areas, is loaded for bear.
It's been said before, but it bears repeating: When you talk out of your fourth point of contact, a lot of crap is bound to come out. Call it yet more verbal diarrhea, but I find this little bit particularly offensive, not to mention stunningly ignorant of history. Unless my memory fails me (on what I've read about what's gone on in the last 40 years or so), the folks beating the drum for yet more gun control back in the late 1960s were -- wait for it! -- almost exclusively white men! And gun control as a tool to marginalize disfavored classes of people goes back a lot further than that, back even to the days before the Civil War! Yet here this so-called "journalist" is, trying to cast less stringent gun laws as a seemingly racist proposition, when in fact the opposite is true, as shown by history. Beyond that, though, I'd say this whole "gun people are racist white men" angle is just another indicator of just how intellectually and morally bankrupt the gun controllers are. It's comforting to know, though, that all they have to fall back on are emotion-driven arguments and ad hominem attacks. But wait! There's more!
Through organizing, the Internet, and plunking down plenty of cold hard cash, the gun lobby has proven it is ready for primetime. Meanwhile, its opponents are languishing in the wee-hours of late-night local cable.Languishing on late-night local cable? For a journalist -- and someone who teaches the craft, to boot! -- Washington does a piss-poor job of paying attention to various media. The TV networks and the various print media have been serving as a platform for various gun-grabbing organizations to spout their lies and brazen deceptions for YEARS now. Not only that, but the antis' bias comes through in other ways also. Just for one example, you hear the figure bandied about every day that some 15,000 homicides are committed with guns each year -- but how many times do you hear that countered with the Lott and Kleck studies that have shown that the number of defensive gun uses each year surpasses that by hundreds of thousands, at the very least, and it might well be into the millions (anywhere from 700,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year)? Those of us on the pro-liberty side do have money, but there's no question the media has been in the gun-grabbers' back pocket for a good while now -- and as for the gun-grabbers having no money, just what the hell are they doing with all that cash they get from George Soros and the Joyce Foundation? Hmm, come to think of it, they're probably just pissing it all away on half-hearted publicity stunts like the gunguys, licensetomurder and 50caliberterror web sites. Still, though, to cast this as some sort of David vs. Goliath battle is just so off-base that it almost defies verbal reaction.
The NRA has built a juggernaut of a website that networks gun advocates from hither to yon.How odd. I don't think I've ever once been on the NRA's official website, even though I do get their e-mail updates. I just never really saw any reason for it, even though I am a member. And I know I am not the only one.
Women and the African-American church—get them behind the keyboard, and you’ll unleash a thunderous counterpunch to the gun lovers’ old one-two.
What a beautiful example of the glittering generality. Sounds gooood, but there just doesn't seem to be much behind it. My question to Ms. Washington would be, what exactly would this "thunderous counterpunch" entail? To what end would it be? Yet more gun control laws that don't work? Or are we talking about something more sinister like door-to-door confiscation? She doesn't say, but of course she says nothing of the 80 million gun owners who didn't commit a crime yesterday, so I am guessing she thinks women and blacks should agitate for just that, consequences be damned -- and it would seem that with the title of this piece, "Let's Pry Open Those Cold, Dead Hands," she does indeed think forced disarmament is the way to go.
African Americans have plenty of motivation. According to a recent report by the U.S. Justice Department, nearly half the people murdered in the United States in 2005 were black. Most lived in cities and were felled by guns. While blacks make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, they comprised 49 percent of all murder victims.Oh, and here's another of the tried-and-true gun-haters' tactics -- anthropomorphizing the inaminate object, the firearm. "Felled by guns"?! I had to cast another look at my nightstand just now to make sure that .45 wasn't sneaking up on me...
Really now...once again, the words of Macbeth come to mind:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Would that the idiots like Laura Washington only strutted for an hour....
|