The straw man cometh…

I happened upon a letter to the editor of one of the local papers here recently and got a chuckle from a writer who described how shrill, hysterical and alarmist “gun nuts” can be.  In his humble opinion, anyone who doesn’t quite see it his way, that we don’t need weapons for self-defense, are obstinate and our failure to give up our second amendment rights shows just how paranoid we are.  He describes us this way; “On the other side, gun advocates are screaming at the top of their lungs: “They’re trying to take all our guns away! Don’t take all our guns away!” He goes on, “This, of course, is a straw man, a completely irrelevant assertion meant to distract from the real issue and muddy the water. No one is ever going to try and take everyone’s guns away..”  and then finishes with a flourish saying that gun owners “seem to be living in some dystopian, paranoid fantasy world, where jackbooted (sic) government thugs are poised to break down their doors and confiscate everything, including rubber bands and slingshots. I imagine them crouching in their fortified bunkers, cradling their assault rifles and high-capacity clips to their chests and whispering, like Gollem (sic)  in Lord of the Rings, “Precious! My precious!””

he’s on his way…

Of course his position is sane and measured.  Our response is insane.  His words.  Unfortunately, pattern recognition is hard to ignore.  We’ve seen this before.  However, any reference to past regimes that have disarmed their populace only to take away the rest of their rights before butchering them deems one to be insane and hysterical.  How dare you compare our benevolent dictator to Mao, Hitler or Stalin?  Who the hell do we think we are?

Indeed.  Our government would never take away our guns.  No, because they actually expect us to line up and turn them in.  Don’t think this will happen?  Gun owners in Missouri would be wise to keep an eye on house democrats there since this is just what they intend to do.  And they’re not alone, as there is another bill similar to this one in Minnesota.  The Missouri bill would make it a felony to fail to turn in their currently legal “assault” styled weapons and large capacity magazines within 90 days of passage of the bill.  In effect, legal law-abiding gun owners would become criminals at the drop of a hat, without firing a single shot.

I doubt that the bill will pass, but that’s not the point.  They know it won’t pass, but don’t feel warm and fuzzy that this is just a trial balloon.  No, this is part of the incrementalism that liberalism has employed for decades.   Once this bill fails, or even while it’s being debated in chambers, the democrats will offer the more reasonable legislation of registration of all guns in Missouri, their actual end game.  And like our New Hampshire letter writer, they’ll say that total registration is reasoned and sane and any disagreement is “hysterical” and “paranoid” and those opposed must be insane.

In the long run registering guns is a useless exercise, as an un-registered gun kills as effectively as a registered gun.  You’d accomplish what exactly?  Of course, only those inclined to follow the law would do so.  Surely democrats aren’t stupid enough to believe that criminals holding stolen weapons are going to race to their nearest police station to register them, let alone turn them in.  I could be wrong, and I don’t mean about the criminals turning them in.

No, this is carpet bombing, as it were, softening up the target for the real assault that follows.  They’ve already proven that they’ll force you to give them up.  If they can get you to turn them in, so much the better.  But if not, once they know where they are, they eventually come after them themselves.

Our letter writer from New Hampshire would say I’m building a straw man.  Actually it’s a jack-booted straw man and it’s being built by democrats in Missouri.

No easy prey…

You can’t make this stuff up.  Several weeks ago I was reading through a small town newspaper, can’t remember from what state and at the time I didn’t think much about the article so didn’t save it.  It was about criminals who were targeting homes where a family member had recently died.  The perps were using the obits and the publicized funeral times to break into homes while the family was graveside.  When I first read the article I thought, jeez, what a creative twist on robbing from the dead.  It bothered me about a week later so I did a little searching and found it happens more frequently than I thought.  Maybe this is a common concept to a warped and twisted mind; since the rest of us have  a hard time understanding the criminal mind to begin with, this just illuminates how disturbed one can really be.

Sara McKinley almost became one of those statistics.  On the day of her husband’s funeral, Justin Martin dropped by Sarah’s home claiming to be her neighbor.  Not likely.  She obviously didn’t know him, certainly not as a neighbor.  More likely than not, he was either scoping the residence out for another time, or may have been hoping to break in on that day not realizing that the grieving young widow would still be there.  He would leave, only to return on New Year’s eve with fellow knuckle-dragger Dustin Stewart, with the intent to break in and…do what?  We obviously can’t ask him, as the young mother did us all a favor by ending his short, but probably illustrious criminal career and his miserable existence to boot.

it was worth it....

In the span of three months, Sara went from having a baby to watching her husband die of cancer on Christmas only to be “victimized” by these two cretins a week after she buried him.  Of course, victimized is not the operative word here.  She, as it turned out, was no easy prey.

I’m not sure if everyone hasn’t thought about it at least once, could I kill if I had to?  Not something one likes to dwell on.  And what happens after?  Is it something one can put aside?  Unfortunately for Sara, Justin Martin gave her no choice.  He made her decide and she took the only option available to her.  He had already concluded that her life, her child’s and even his, were less valuable than his desire to do whatever it was he was willing to break in, armed, to do.  She disagreed vehemently, as it were.

As they say, when seconds count, the police are only moments away.  She was armed, trained and willing.  And she took one shot.  Hit what you aim for.  That’s gun control right there.  However, I don’t want to see Sara used by either side of the gun control debate.  She has enough crap to deal with at this time in her life, including the fact that they let Dustin Stewart out on bail.  But just remember; you can make it as difficult as you want to legally own a gun, but you’ll never stop the armed Martins and Stewarts of the world from breaking down the doors of young vulnerable citizens like Sara.

I’d much rather be perusing their obituaries than hers.