Take Aim

What’s important to grasp here is that this madness has nothing to do with hunting, which the politicians always claim to be defending, and everything to do with the use of firearms to resist policies and lawful government actions that some gun owners don’t like.

A new book by Dennis Henigan, a vice president at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, goes into detail on this point. In “Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths That Paralyze American Gun Policy,” Mr. Henigan refers to a Harvard Law Journal article written by an N.R.A. lawyer titled, “The Second Amendment Ain’t About Hunting.” In the article, the lawyer makes it clear that for the N.R.A., the right to bear arms is “directed at maintaining an armed citizenry. ... to protect against the tyranny of our own government.”

I love it when liberals make this point as if they have single-handedly uncovered this deep, dark secret that gun owners have been trying to keep under wraps. But here, let me say it:

YES, GUN OWNERSHIP IS LESS ABOUT HUNTING AND MORE ABOUT PROTECTION.

And since many gun owners - that is, the responsible ones - are also students of history, we have seen numerous examples in the past where fascist or oppressive regimes start their grasp of power by removing guns and the acces to firearms from private citizens.

And we are not so stupid to think it cannot happen here. In fact, your editorial scares me when you say:

Gun craziness of all kinds, including the passage of local laws making it easier to own and conceal weapons, is on the rise. Hate-filled Web sites are calling attention to the fact that the U.S. has a black president and that his chief of staff is Jewish.

It might be wise to pay closer attention than we’ve been paying. The first step should be to bring additional gun control back into the policy mix.

Because that tells me that the liberals are incapable of distinguishing between nut jobs that David Koresh and people like myself who wish to carry a concealed weapon because I do not live in a tony enclave in Georgetown and I cannot rely on a quick response to 9-1-1 because of cutbacks in services. And furthermore, these same liberals immediately suspect the person like myself who owns a gun and doesn't agree with the policies of the current adminsitration.

That's really the issue, isn't it? It is not about "gun craziness" or a fear of hate crimes. Hate crimes? Go into the ghetto if you want to see racial homicide that the gangs perpetuate against their own kind. That is just the old canard of the liberals that anyone wanting a concealed weapon permit must be up to no good. This is really a fear of people who do not wish to abdicate their constitutional rights to a federal power. And that is precisely the point the founding fathers were making with the Second Amendment. Did I say the Second Amendment? It's more than that - the purpose of the Constitution was to limit the power of centralized government so as to maintain a republic.

And they realized private ownership of guns was a necessary part of that.