Brett Bellmore
New member
Check out his point #1; No matter how often I see it, I never cease to be amazed at just how causally these people lie; I'd like to send him a few choice quotes from the founding fathers, if anyone has his email address.
Outrider
by Garry Wills
GUN SICKNESS
Gun cultists try to have it both ways with entirely contradictory arguments. Half of the time, they say gun control laws will do nothing -- whenever they are not saying that gun controls will do everything. Too little or too much, it does not matter to these people, just so long as one or the other argument blocks any attempt to bring our runaway gun culture under some measure of control.
In their minimizing mode, the gunnies say that all gun controls are ineffectual. There are too many guns out there already; criminals can always get to them; controls will be evaded; black markets will thrive. Guns will still be everywhere. So why do anything as feckless as passing gun laws?
But they can switch in a nanosecond to their maximizing mode: Pass a gun law, any gun law, and the citizen will have his or her gun snatched away by a despotic government. We will be naked to tyranny. Once the essential protection of the citizenry is removed, oppression is inevitable. So, with a flicker of the eyelid, laws that are as dull as dishwater become, suddenly, doomsday legislation.
The gun advocates do not, of course, find any contradiction in these two views so ardently professed. The ho-hum attitude comes from a fear that diabolical criminals are everywhere and will always, by black arts and magic, have guns. The heaven-is-falling attitude comes from the fear that any disenchantment with guns will free us from the controlling myth of the gun.
This myth has been very carefully built up -- it had to be carefully made, since its parts are all so insubstantial. The rickety construction is confected from bad scholarship on the Second Amendment (a militia ordinance), bad history of the nation's founding (the almighty minuteman), and dime-novel nonsense about the West (which pioneered gun control laws). Take the components one at a time:
(1) The Second Amendment: In all the ratifying debates on the Constitution and on the Second Amendment, in all the ratifying states, the right of the individual to possess guns was not once discussed. It was mentioned only once, in Pennsylvania, in a dissident's late omnium-gatherum of objections, which was not even considered worthy of discussion.
2) The minuteman: Bad history has taught us that American colonists all had guns and were ready to use them for instant military action. Actually, the minutemen were small and elite bodies, specially chosen for their being armed (among other things), which was not the general condition. When the Revolutionary War reached its full scale, the minutemen were of no use.
In peacetime, muskets and long rifles (slow to reload and hard to use with accuracy) were not efficient hunting instruments for the ordinary 18th-century farmer -- i.e., for most of the colonial population in the 18th century. They were hard to maintain in good repair, and most males did not own either one of them. The British were astounded, during the French and Indian wars, at how unused the British colonists were to using guns. Michael Bellesiles, in The Journal of American History for September 1996, proved from probate records of property that guns were not widely possessed in the period from 1763 to 1790.
(3) Taming the West: The historian Robert Dykstra has demonstrated from newspapers that the famous cattle towns of the cowboy days (Tombstone and Dodge City) had low homicide rates, principally because guns were confiscated when drovers came to town. Gun expert Joseph Rosa demonstrated, in his book "Taming of the West," that when guns did have some impact in the hands of individuals, they were not usually handguns (also inefficient -- they threw up a thick black smoke that made second shots difficult if not impossible), but shotguns. Insofar as any guns can be said to have tamed the West, they were not six-shooters in the hands of cowboys but the rifles of the trained and regular cavalry (the hated government of gun fantasies), rifles used by teams of four or five men, one to hold the others' horses when they dismounted as a prerequisite of accurate firing. It was not "individualism" but official discipline that prevailed.
It is this fragile structure of myth that the gunnies are trying to preserve. They should be fearful for its survival. It crumbles at a touch of real learning or research (not the hired kind they have paid hacks to produce). I have my own test for hysteria on public issues: the number of intemperate letters I get on any subject. And for real frothing-at-the-mouth missives, the gunnies are up there with the anti-Semites and the Hillary-haters in their mailing habits. (They will prove this again by sending me more of the stuff for this column -- like most fanatics,
they do not see that their tactics backfire.) The gun cult is a pathology. It is mental sickness.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
Outrider
by Garry Wills
GUN SICKNESS
Gun cultists try to have it both ways with entirely contradictory arguments. Half of the time, they say gun control laws will do nothing -- whenever they are not saying that gun controls will do everything. Too little or too much, it does not matter to these people, just so long as one or the other argument blocks any attempt to bring our runaway gun culture under some measure of control.
In their minimizing mode, the gunnies say that all gun controls are ineffectual. There are too many guns out there already; criminals can always get to them; controls will be evaded; black markets will thrive. Guns will still be everywhere. So why do anything as feckless as passing gun laws?
But they can switch in a nanosecond to their maximizing mode: Pass a gun law, any gun law, and the citizen will have his or her gun snatched away by a despotic government. We will be naked to tyranny. Once the essential protection of the citizenry is removed, oppression is inevitable. So, with a flicker of the eyelid, laws that are as dull as dishwater become, suddenly, doomsday legislation.
The gun advocates do not, of course, find any contradiction in these two views so ardently professed. The ho-hum attitude comes from a fear that diabolical criminals are everywhere and will always, by black arts and magic, have guns. The heaven-is-falling attitude comes from the fear that any disenchantment with guns will free us from the controlling myth of the gun.
This myth has been very carefully built up -- it had to be carefully made, since its parts are all so insubstantial. The rickety construction is confected from bad scholarship on the Second Amendment (a militia ordinance), bad history of the nation's founding (the almighty minuteman), and dime-novel nonsense about the West (which pioneered gun control laws). Take the components one at a time:
(1) The Second Amendment: In all the ratifying debates on the Constitution and on the Second Amendment, in all the ratifying states, the right of the individual to possess guns was not once discussed. It was mentioned only once, in Pennsylvania, in a dissident's late omnium-gatherum of objections, which was not even considered worthy of discussion.
2) The minuteman: Bad history has taught us that American colonists all had guns and were ready to use them for instant military action. Actually, the minutemen were small and elite bodies, specially chosen for their being armed (among other things), which was not the general condition. When the Revolutionary War reached its full scale, the minutemen were of no use.
In peacetime, muskets and long rifles (slow to reload and hard to use with accuracy) were not efficient hunting instruments for the ordinary 18th-century farmer -- i.e., for most of the colonial population in the 18th century. They were hard to maintain in good repair, and most males did not own either one of them. The British were astounded, during the French and Indian wars, at how unused the British colonists were to using guns. Michael Bellesiles, in The Journal of American History for September 1996, proved from probate records of property that guns were not widely possessed in the period from 1763 to 1790.
(3) Taming the West: The historian Robert Dykstra has demonstrated from newspapers that the famous cattle towns of the cowboy days (Tombstone and Dodge City) had low homicide rates, principally because guns were confiscated when drovers came to town. Gun expert Joseph Rosa demonstrated, in his book "Taming of the West," that when guns did have some impact in the hands of individuals, they were not usually handguns (also inefficient -- they threw up a thick black smoke that made second shots difficult if not impossible), but shotguns. Insofar as any guns can be said to have tamed the West, they were not six-shooters in the hands of cowboys but the rifles of the trained and regular cavalry (the hated government of gun fantasies), rifles used by teams of four or five men, one to hold the others' horses when they dismounted as a prerequisite of accurate firing. It was not "individualism" but official discipline that prevailed.
It is this fragile structure of myth that the gunnies are trying to preserve. They should be fearful for its survival. It crumbles at a touch of real learning or research (not the hired kind they have paid hacks to produce). I have my own test for hysteria on public issues: the number of intemperate letters I get on any subject. And for real frothing-at-the-mouth missives, the gunnies are up there with the anti-Semites and the Hillary-haters in their mailing habits. (They will prove this again by sending me more of the stuff for this column -- like most fanatics,
they do not see that their tactics backfire.) The gun cult is a pathology. It is mental sickness.
COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE