A former Dem beats her own party down on the RKBA…great article!
A former Dem beats her own party down on the RKBA…great article!
My Democratic friends, when you think about this question, ask yourself if snobbery as a political force isn’t part of the reason you stand where you stand.
Gun owners hunt. They keep guns to protect themselves in dangerous places–rural areas where help isn’t always immediately available, for instance. They like and respect firearms and are committed to their right to have them. A lot of gun owners live down South or out West or in the less fashionable sections of the Northern industrial states. They are mostly not coastal and urban in their cultural interests. They are not the media elite, the academic elite, any kind of elite. Do you respect these people?
As long as they’re law abiding, and responsible enough to respect the damage guns can do, conservatives completely support their right to have arms. (Sure they should be registered, but registration should exist to allow the law abiding to have guns, and not be twisted into a way to keep guns out of everyone’s hands.)
Liberals/leftists as a class–and I’m sorry but really, you’ve become a class–don’t usually know people who shoot. They don’t like people who shoot. They look down on them; gun owners are boobs and yahoos out in the sticks killing Bambi. As for living in a rural area where there’s no nearby police force, why don’t you just . . . move?
Let me be, admittedly, mean, but to make a point I can’t figure out how to make any other way. Those who oppose the right to keep and bear arms are not as a rule the kind of people who would, or could, take down a nut waving his gun at the kids in a McDonalds. Those who oppose gun rights are more like the kind of people who when the incident was over would write a sensitive essay about how it felt to come face to face with one’s existential powerlessness when faced with the sudden force of a sick man who alas shot two kids right in front of me. You may mean to be helpful in the abstract, but you are not helpful in the particular.
Conservatives are on the side of the citizen who’d protect the kids and takes down the bad guy with the gun. Aren’t you, really? Shouldn’t you be, “for the good of the children”?
Do you wish Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, and the stewardesses and pilots of the hijacked jets of 9/11 had been armed? I do. “That’s a dramatic, worst-case scenario,” you say. Sure. But life is full of dramatic, worst-case scenarios. Is your life so comfortable and protected that you’ve forgotten this? Did you ever know it? Really, doesn’t mere snobbery have something to do with where you stand?
This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.
Here’s the link to the whole article…it’s a great one.
