Do Something, Or The Gun Grabbers Will Do It For Us
by Greg Camp
Ammoland.com
September 7, 2019
Fayetteville, AR -(AmmoLand.com)- The siren call for gun control has once again lured The Washington Post onto the rocks.
In an opinion piece published on-line on the 3rd of September, the Editorial Board calls on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to end his “inertia on gun safety” and do something about what they believe to be daily mass shootings.
Admitting that “no single law would end gun violence,” they nevertheless insist on a “ban on the sale of military-grade assault weapons. Unneeded by civilians, they are a blight on the nation, their ready availability a national disgrace. Eliminating them would slow the growth of this list [of mass shootings]. It would save lives.”
Enough of us have corrected the bogus label of “assault weapon” to make yet another explanation of why it’s a disingenuous term tedious. I am seeing more and more advocates of gun control tell me that I do not need an AR-15, the firearms that these days are the most common example offered for what a “military-grade” gun is supposed to be. When I ask them what their qualifications are for making that assertion, I’m told that it’s common sense—the fallacies of bandwagon appeal and begging the question—and then asked why I’m such a lousy shot. These are dodges to avoid admitting that the people making the argument are not experts in weapons, tactics, or history. There are many answers as to why I or others need—require, want, employ, possess—semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines, but the fact that some politicians and voters want to take them away is the bottom line when the person asking isn’t willing to hear any other responses.
Their claim that civilians don’t need “military-grade assault weapons” deserves attention, especially as it illustrates how little qualified they are to tell me what any of us need. “Civilian” originally meant a resident of a city—from the Latin word, civis —as opposed to a member of the nobility (military order) or clergy, and its contemporary meaning continues that contrast with soldiers. “Police” comes from the Greek word, polis, which also means city. They function as members of the “civil administration,” not as an occupying military force. As such, according to the editors of The Washington Post should insist that cops have their icky guns taken away. But one point of the Second Amendment is to guarantee that ordinary Americans have some measure of parity with armed agents of the government, and that’s, even more, the case as the police are increasingly turned into paramilitary forces.
And then there is the claim about daily mass shootings. The Editorial Board needs reminding that a mass shooting is a single incident in which four or more are killed, not including the terrorist. A Reddit user by the handle of Billy Speed “decided, all by myself, to change the United States’ [sic] definition of a mass shooting.” This was a deliberate attempt to inflate numbers to create the impression that we have many more terrorist attacks when, in fact many incidents that get swept up into the count are ordinary criminal violence.
This is not meant to dismiss the latter or to deny the damage done by any murder or assault. But basing a policy (another word derived from polis) proposal on poor arguments and dishonest presentations will not lead to good ends. We who value gun rights, however, cannot be satisfied to accept a win on the technical points while demands to “do something” grows louder.
The Rest…HERE
