Let me thank Michael Miner for injecting into the gun debate at least a little common sense, historical perspective, and even truth–things so rarely seen in the mainstream press coverage (Hot Type, May 7).
Johann von Goethe observed that “there is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action.” The antigun movement thrives on ignorance: that of the yuppies and cultural elite–especially journalists–who inhabit places like New York, Washington, LA, and yes, Chicago. By and large, they are ignorant of history (thanks to the government school system and the Marxist reeducation camps advertised as “universities”) and they don’t know the first thing about guns except what they see in action movies and TV news, where “if it bleeds, it leads.”
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It is augmented by a cultural snobbery and bigotry against small-town and rural America, the major strongholds of (gasp–white male!) gun owners, who are scorned by the cosmopolitan elite as intellectually, culturally, and morally backward. But for all the contempt directed at them, they’re not responsible for our crime problem.
Syndicated columnist Charles Reese pointed out on May 18 that “for the majority of America’s history, guns were as common in an American household as a broom or cooking pot….I received my Daisy BB gun at age five, and I shot it unsupervised. I received a .22 caliber rifle for my eighth birthday, and I already possessed my own pistol, a .380 semiautomatic, which had been given to me by my brother-in-law, who had fought at Normandy. It was among a duffel bag full of pistols he brought back from the war. American soldiers brought home all kinds of enemy weapons–pistols, rifles, true-assault rifles, submachine guns.”
Denmark, Norway, and Sweden also have a form of the militia or “home guard” system, which may help explain their enviably low crime rates in comparison to ours.
I also was disturbed by Mr. Miner’s claim that the Constitution is a “sacred text…full of meanings that need to be divined.” To put it politely, that is one of the biggest cow pies that the socialists have ever dumped on us. It’s essentially a pretext for twisting the Constitution to their own agenda.
I don’t know where to start–the whole sentence, from beginning to end, is founded on outrageously flawed and dangerous assumptions:
