Via Instapundit, this is an excellent point about fears of people who own weapons:
Given as stipulated the vast majority of the right is one step away from the cliff of slaughter, might saying: “Next year we’ve coming for your guns” less than two weeks after Andrew Cuomo said “Confiscation could be an option“, be the push to send a bunch of heavily armed Chick-Fil-A eating psychopaths over the edge?
If the left really fears the gun-armed right as a bunch of law-breaking nuts, wouldn't the rational response be to scrape off those Obama-Biden 2012 bumper stickers and sell their Prius cars to avoid being an obvious target?
Or maybe the left really isn't worried about the armed right? Perhaps it is just not letting a crisis (or crime) go to waste, as our president shamefully did when he basically asked the Republicans to go along with his fiscal plans for the sake of the dead children.
Contrast the rush by our left to demonize the NRA and law-abiding gun owners with the rush by these same people to visit mosques immediately after 9/11.
Which is fine as far as it goes. I too argued, in the days after 9/11, that as we prepared to wage war we should not demonize law-abiding Moslems. American Moslems were--and are--the least of our problems.
I didn't go to any mosque. To me, the whole thing had the feel of "we're not all bad, please don't kill us even though we probably deserve it," rather than a statement of resolve to win without betraying our values.
But my question is why aren't those on the left heading out to NRA chapters, shooting ranges, and gun stores around the country to assure law-abiding gun owners that they aren't to blame for what somebody does with a firearm?
Isn't demonizing everyone with a weapon just as wrong as demonizing everyone with an Allah?
And if our left had done something like that outreach--or just refrained from demonization without any positive affirmation of inclusion for the NRA--I'd accept that a call for a "conversation" about reasonable firearm restrictions within our 2nd Amendment was not about a "lecture" from the left with the right just shutting up and taking it.
I guess it is the difference between who you really fear and who you simply loathe.
UPDATE: Instapundit notes a newspaper author who, tired of nobody listening to his columns about the evils of private gun ownership, just wants to ignore the Constitution, declare the NRA a terrorist organization, disarm gun owners by force of arms if necessary, and torture pro-gun politicians into agreeing with the author about gun control issues.
I don't know, how could our forefathers have foreseen the 1st Amendment being abused by wide dissemination over the Internet--the ultimate large-capacity printing press--of violent proposals and threats to deprive people of other Constitutional rights?
In Kaul's world, he just had a "conversation."
