Editors at The Weekly Standard this week threw down the gauntlet and challenged the gun prohibition movement to a discussion on guns, and so far, nobody has stepped up to accept.
“If progressives insist on engaging in the joyless ritual of arguing about guns after every inscrutable act of mass murder,” The Weekly Standard double-dog dared, “we would prefer that they drop the pretense and advocate the repeal of the Second Amendment and the confiscation of our guns.”
But that seems to be the hurdle anti-gunners will not attempt to cross because to publicly admit their ultimate goal is to erase the Second Amendment would be tantamount to voluntarily drinking battery acid on live television.
The Weekly Standard piece included some realities that gun prohibition lobbying groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety and the Alliance for Gun Responsibility – groups that substitute two moderate words, safety and responsibility, for “control” – carefully ignore.
“The case for increased gun regulation isn’t helped, either, by the fact that what laws have been passed and rigorously enforced all over the nation have had little or no measurable result. A comprehensive study published in 2013 by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council could find no clear correlation between the implementation of gun-control laws and reductions in gun-related violence.”–The Weekly Standard
The 2013 study was done during the Obama administration, which apparently expected much different results. It was quickly swept under the Oval Office rug.
Several days ago, Seattle’s KVI-AM early morning drive time host John Carlson wondered in “Crosscut” whether a rational discussion about guns could ever take place. The answer is painfully obvious: No, or at least not until anti-gunners openly acknowledge their true goal. The Weekly Standard explained this dilemma bluntly:
“But what makes the gun debate so unbearably stale isn’t any disagreement over the interpretation of data. Nor is it a dispute over the value of firearms in a free society. If only it were about these questions. What makes the debate so stale, rather, is the disingenuousness of those who claim to want ‘sensible’ and ‘reasonable’ gun regulations but who in fact want an outright ban.”
In the classic 1953 western “Shane,” actress Jean Arthur told Alan Ladd’s title character that “We’d all be better off if there were no guns left in the valley, including yours.”
Almost from the opening scene, the audience realized Shane was a gunfighter trying to get away from his past. Circumstances in the form of a land-hungry rancher and his psychotic hired killer – a role played to menacing perfection by Jack Palance – would not allow that.
So in the end, it was Shane and his lightning-fast sixgun, rather than pioneer perseverance, that allowed Arthur and her family to live in peace by eliminating the threat against them.
And Shane had to remind her that “a gun is a tool, no better or worse than any other tool…it’s only as good or as bad as the man using it.”
What Shane explained is something anti-gunners seem incapable of acknowledging, and The Weekly Standard editors obviously know this. Thus the silence from Everytown and its gun-hating allies, who would rather use their bulging bank accounts to bully and browbeat gun owners rather than sit down for a discussion about doing away with a constitutionally delineated fundamental right that almost certainly would not have the outcome they desire.
