...or, E.J. Dionne throws a hissy fit in his latest Washington Post column as he once again uses the First Amendment to take a crap all over the Second, seen in this morning's Houston Chronicle...
Who will face down the gun lobby?"Doesn't that make you feel better?" Wow, really, is that the best he can do? The only rebuttal to that that he can come up with? This is what passes for argument at one of the newspapers considered to be the pinnacle of American journalism?
...Earlier this year, when Attorney General Eric Holder called for a renewal of the ban on assault weapons — he was only repeating the commitment Obama made during his presidential campaign — the response from a group of 65 pro-gun House Democrats was: No way.
Their letter to Holder was absurd. “The gun-control community has intentionally misled many Americans into believing that these weapons are fully automatic machine guns. They are not. These firearms fire one shot for every pull of the trigger.” Doesn’t that make you feel better?
Those Democrats should sit down with Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania. “Time and time again, our police are finding themselves outgunned,” Rendell said in Harrisburg last week. “They are finding themselves with less firepower than the criminals they are trying to bring to justice.”
And of course if you read the column you'll see him leading the whole thing off with the "U.S. guns fueling Mexican drug war violence" meme, which shows us all where he's coming from -- namely, using the same half-assed reporting that's gotten that now-debunked meme accepted as gospel truth among too many Americans. Nothing about the Mexican military arming the drug cartels with the full-auto weaponry, grenades and rocket launchers, nothing about the wide-open border, nothing about the obscene profits of the illegal drug market that funds those acquisitions. Nope, it's all the fault of those damned American gun shows and those damned American gun laws. Wow, this is one of the most argument- and fact-bereft columns I've seen from Dionne in a pretty good while...although, granted, I don't read his columns that often. For all I know he lowers the bar with every missive he pens.
As for "the police being outgunned by the criminals"...well, for purposes of this argument we'll stipulate that as the truth. Guess what? Even if it is true, that's not the fault of the eeeevil gun lobby either! Where are the criminals getting the funds to buy these weapons? Or, more to the point, how much of that weaponry was purchased with drug money? And what about all those grants various and sundry police departments are getting all the time to buy equipment to fight that War On Some Drugs? What in the bloody hell do they buy with it? Oh, wait...they buy armored personnel carriers with belt-fed machine guns, that's what they buy with it. Not exactly the right tools for the job, to put it mildly. But I guess if those big-city "journalists" like E.J. Dionne started looking into things like that, it'd make their Two Minutes' Hate aimed at the American gun culture look like the ignorant tripe it is. And you know how those people hate, hate, HATE to have their preconceived notions challenged. Of course, if I built such a narrative around such preconceived notions I'd be upset too, but it's still quite disgusting to see American journalism come to this. And, of course, the question remains. In fact, it's more urgent now than it was six months ago, and we all know the reason for that. What about all those semiautomatic rifles in citizens' hands now? And of course, what about the fact that the last "assault weapons ban" did nothing to reduce crime? Why do they just come right out and admit their goal like Charles Krauthammer did before the passage of the last ban? To wit:
"...The assault weapons ban will have no significant effect either on the crime rate or on personal security. Nonetheless, it is a good idea...Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation."
Which, of course, will no doubt be facilitated as Obama gets himself a sympathetic judge on the Supreme Court and reverses Heller.
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