I was going to place this in the Weekly Gun News, but reviewing it, I couldn’t waste a perfectly good yellow journalism post. Thom Anderson of the South Carolina Morning News doesn’t understand all this icky gun stuff. That’s OK, not everyone does. But a wiser person would leave it at that. Not Mr. Anderson, however:
Really? Can you imagine that guy wading into a crowd and killing nine people with a knife? He quickly would have found the knife shoved exactly where it belonged. A gun is the only thing that would have enabled him to commit this act or enable a weak, cowardly person to do such killing.
I don’t have to imagine it, because it happened with a death toll as high as Virginia Tech, the worst mass shooting in the this country. In fact, knife attacks are not uncommon in China, and the death tolls are higher than you would think, often with far more horrific woundings.
Terrible acts with guns seldom happen in other countries. In the United States, they are frequent because an overly influential right-wing minority sincerely fears that gun confiscation is just around the corner, and many politicians profit from that fear.
Were you asleep or unconscious on 22 July 2011? Worst mass shooting in history, and happened outside the United States. This claim, echoed by our President, was too much even for the biased folks at Politifact to abide by. Seems other Democrats have been on a roll with this one too. Dave Hardy has even more on this topic. The idea that this seldom happens in other countries is indefensible. He goes on to conclude, “[I]t would be even nicer to see our near-worship of guns decline and the 2nd Amendment brought back to the use The Founders intended.” Oh, what pray tell might that be, Mr. Constitutional scholar? At least with this claim, he managed to follow this sage advice.
Once again we see the Newspeak term Blackwhite in action.
Since Anderson simutanously mocks the ideas of gun confiscation while also fantasizing about how great confiscation would be.
(How else does he think the “near worship” would decline?)
And his multiple examples of historical and contemporary ignorance (does he not know the president has both lobbied for extensive gun bans and praised other nation’s confiscation schemes?) show another Orewllian phrase in action: Ignorance is Strength.
If not for his complete lack of knowledge (willful or no) his argument would have no support.
The original intent of the Second Amendment? Ask Mr scholar if he knows what a “letter of marque” is. It appears in the Constitution in Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power To …grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal…”
A letter of marque is a letter from a government that allows the owner of an armed vessel to engage in what is essentially piracy. The letter names the captain of the vessel, and then describes the vessel in terms of what weapons it carries: For example, the USS ENterprise from 1799 was described as “a fourteen gun topsail schooner.”
In other words, it was common for private citizens to own ships armed with cannons. This practice was so widespread that Washington once had difficulty in finding men for the Army of the Potomac, because the men were all off raiding British ships for profit.
See the books “Patriot Pirates” or “George Washington’s Secret Navy” for more history on the subject.
The contemporary equivalent of private use of a cannon armed ship, would be private use of a missile armed B-52 bomber!