“If you can swim in six feet of water, honey, you can swim in 600.” — my mom
My mom taught me to grow gills when I was three. That was a good thing, and there are a lot of great moms out there who do things the same way. So it got me thinking about the ways in which those who teach and really care about us have used language to effectively dispel things like unfounded fears and false impressions. That was when I realized that mom’s old “six feet or 600” adage could easily be adapted for describing firearms ownership. And it’s only fair that we laud the good guys with guns before you hear Mr. Schneller’s Opus in a future post on how to take the guns out of bad guys with guns.
Simply put, the folks out there who are truly responsible enough to own firearms pose no more of a danger to society whether they are handling a muzzleloader (six feet of water) or a belt-fed machine gun (600 feet of water). They should be allowed to own either and everything in between. Moreover, they are incapable of using firearms to hurt innocent people. There are many, many Americans who fit this description, and I don’t hesitate to consider myself among them. But society in general will never embrace this truth as long as liberals manually spin their broken record of “gun-violence, gun-violence, gun-violence” faster than the turntable and incongruity ever were meant to go. Personification works great in cartoons that feature talking tea kettles. In the real world, however, where playing around with words has the dire consequence of not solving real problems, continuing to label human-violence as gun-violence is going to waste a lot of valuable time.
And in our disjointed new world of anyone or anything being able to identify as anything or anyone, why don’t we just settle for the concept of trans-violence? You know, violence itself being allowed to identify as the product of manufactured goods and not of human wickedness. Interestingly, I think I know why liberals do not use their approach broadly. Even they know how ridiculous it would sound to start pushing terms such as “car-violence,” “hand & foot violence,” “knife-violence,” “hardware-violence”; and the list goes on. When Kennedy clan member Michael Skakel used a golf club to bludgeon Martha Moxley to death, was it referred to as “sporting goods-violence?”
Back to the good guys with guns. With a pistol or rifle at close range I can stitch patterns as elaborate as any computerized Singer sewing machine – ambidextrously, from any contorted position, and I can do it really, really fast. At long range with a rifle, I can make stationary and moving targets go down that you’ll need a very good pair of binocs to see. I am familiar with the usage, disassembly, and capabilities of virtually every firearm designed from the mid-nineteenth century to present day; and I have fired thousands of rounds from dozens of types of fully automatic weapons. Am I saying all of this for the purpose of showing off? Nope. I’m just trying to highlight a valuable skill set that has been acquired in varying degrees, from competent to highly advanced, and by members of the military and law enforcement, of the intelligence community, by competition shooters, and by anyone whose parents raised them right. In other words, by many Americans. And that brings me to my next, and more polemical point.
The shooting skills of good, family-loving Americans and the skills of medical professionals can, to a great degree, be overlaid. Unfortunately, liberals pressure society to take a hard-edged and very opposite viewpoint. This puts us a bit in Jerry Seinfeld’s oft cited “Bizarro World.” For instance, despite medical malpractice resulting in roughly 400,000 deaths annually and being the third leading cause of death in the U.S., would you question why people seek to acquire medical skills, or encourage others to, or pass them along to their children? I know I wouldn’t. That would require radicalism – that is, proposing a solution that is worse than the actual problem. Malpractice is the price we pay for having a vastly effective system that saves a vastly larger number of lives than it loses. So why are people questioned and scoffed at by liberals when they seek to undergo firearms training, or to encourage others to, or to pass those skills along to their children? Homicides involving firearms average 12,000 deaths each year – a lot less than malpractice. And that statistic ranks pretty far down the list of leading causes of death. Yet, liberals still refuse to admit that this is the price we pay for the enormous benefits afforded our nation because of the 2nd Amendment. They might want to reconsider that. On average, there are 65,000 occurrences each year of civilians using their firearms to save lives (including but not limited to women preventing their own rape). Furthermore, since 1815 our great nation has enjoyed over 200 years of foreign powers not attempting to invade us because of the queasy feeling they get when imagining all of those gun barrels they’d be staring down. Ooh, ooh, and the incalculable number of cowardly criminal assaults that do not even occur in jurisdictions that allow concealed carry because the criminals are too afraid to try – priceless!
Coming soon: How to Take Guns Away from Criminals and Still Give the Good Guys All They Could Ever Want or Need.
