KNOW THY ENEMY
Keep friends close and enemies closer
and all that.
The link in opening post above is to Kyle Wintersteen, "8 Ways the Media Doesn’t Understand Gun Owners", Guns and Ammo, 26 Apr 2012, "fisking" Jill Lepore's New Yorker article and the talking points used by Lepore and other anti-gunners.
Unfortunately fer you'all, I am up early this morning, the paper has not arrived and my wife is asleep, so I got a lot of free time for idle fingers.
I remember reading the comments on James D. Wright's article on "The Demographics of Gun Control", The Nation, Nov. 1975, in which self-identified liberal sociologist Wright tried to explain to a liberal readership that gun owners were more diverse than urban liberal gun control advocates realized. Some of the responses were written with contempt, with pens dipped in venom. Wright was later selected by the Carter Administration to do a study on Guns, Crime and Violence in America, that later became the 1983 book
Under the Gun in which he and co-authors Rossi and Daly ended up questioning the conventional liberal wisdom on gun control on just about every talking point.
More recently a self-identified liberal magazine editor visited my hometown and stayed at the convention center hotel during a gun show weekend. John R. MacArthur, "My compromise in the gun debate", The Providence Journal, July 5, 2000.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-63162862.html When it was reprinted locally it was entitled "A Northerner's fear and loathing in Kingsport" and is reprinted elsewhere as "GUN CULTURE NEEDS TO COMPROMISE". I thought it offered good insight into the opposition mind set.
But back to Wintersteen, "8 Ways the Media Doesn’t Understand Gun Owners"
"Shootings are caused by guns"
Yes, the antigunners are right! And the Happyland Arson--87 people murdered, was caused by gasoline and matches, and the oil lobby and the match makers still vend these instruments of death and make a profit, which is more important to them than lives lost to arson. Crime is always caused by a thing that can be scapegoated and banned--can't we comprehend that? Demon Rum, Reefer Madness, the Seduction of the Innocent by vile comic books, juvenile delinquency caused by 3 Stooges re-runs on TV. It's obvious. How have I resisted these decades of indoctrination? There is always a symbolic thing that can be banned to attain Utopia, but for the resistence of evil nay sayers who profit from trafficking the symbol.
"This is not an AK47"
"They are all AK47s" in the media sense that "We are all Tawana Brawleys".
When we point out that the TV talking heads in discussing the Cheney hunting accident showed #00 buckshot as an example of shotgun shot, while Cheney & Co. were bird hunting with #8 birdshot, that just shows how superior they are by being ignorant of guns and how we can't see the Big Picture. Besides how can we know anything until we have enlightened by our superiors in the media?
There is No 'Gun Show Loophole'
"To require a background check between such individuals would essentially end all private transactions" No. It would end private transactions at gun shows (often individuals selling or trading their used guns with collectors or licensed dealers), and put private transactions back on the streets--flea market, swap meet, corner bar, parking lot, yard sale--where they were taking place before gun shows were popularized.
The Collective Rights Argument Is Over
The Individual rights argument is over. 2A is an individual right. Case closed. What is not settled is the collective rights argument. In a "friend of the court brief" a number of military officers argued that the Second Amendment protects an individual "right of the people" to keep and bear arms and also supports the existence of voluntary military service (the collective militia right). Or the collective right is protected by protecting the individual right. In this view, 2A is two rights covered in one Amendment. Look at the First Amendment: freedom of speech, press, religion, etc. in one Amendment.
We're Winning Because Shooting Is Fun
Fun? Shooting four events in the military matches (modern and vintage each with rifle and pistol) I have two or maybe three guns fired with corrosive military surplus ammo that need a preliminary cleaning between set up for the next event, and by the end of the day, I have had so much fun, it takes this sixty-plus year-old body a day or two to recuperate.
Gun Ownership Is Not Declining
(No No No. Let them believe their own propaganda that gun ownership is declining: then the nati-gunners will declare victory and walk away.) Now, in spite of booming NICS BG checks for processing gun sales and carry permits, why does a smaller percentage of households admit to owning guns to official-sounding surveys? Waco? Dept. Homeland Security warnings? Media hatred for "gun nuts"?
Guns Save Lives
Not just
a (one) study by Kleck. The study by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz details their National Self-Defense Survey, and in Table One they summarize ten other national surveys, and three state surveys, which project 764,000 to 3,600,000 defensive gun uses per year, with the vast majority non-shooting chase-offs.
The Brady Campaign Is Full of Lies
The gun control campaigners going back to the 1920s "up lifters" promoting a national version of the NY Sullivan Act of 1911 have used lies (or more kindly "hypotheticals" and exaggerations) to promote their vision. (See
http://www.thegunzone.com/rkba/rkba-25.html H. L. Mencken, "The Uplifters Try It Again", Baltimore Sun, 30 Nov 1925. There is nothing new under the sun.)
Many urban anti-gunners, their parents and their grand parents have been steeped in this propaganda and have known nothing else. Kinda like a cult. Kinda like what they accuse us of being.