Every Gun Owner Should Read This!!!!

From Reason Online, and intelligent, thoughtful, grown up look at where we as gun owners are today and what we need to do, coutesy of Abigal Kohn, author of SHOOTERS: MYTHS AND REALITIES OF AMERICA'S GUN CULTURES. I've spoken very highly of Ms. Kohn's book in the past, and these essays certainly establish her position as an important voice in the national debate — which we have pretty much won:

When the Department of Justice issues a public statement that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun, when 35 states pass nondiscretionary carry permit laws, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof declares that “gun control is dead,” you know the gun debate is over.

But somebody forgot to tell the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Pizza Hut. Fresh from championing the rights of gays and lesbians to get married, San Francisco’s supervisors are trying to curb the rights of all city residents to keep handguns in their homes. Meanwhile, major American corporations such as Pizza Hut and AOL forbid employees to bring even legally owned and transported guns onto company property or to carry them on the job. Pizza Hut recently fired an employee for carrying a gun while delivering pizzas; the company learned of the violation when the employee used the gun on the job to defend himself during a robbery attempt.

The thrust of this essay and their point/counterpoint reply essays are that both sides of the debate need to talk to each other with an eye toward promoting actual violence-reducing strategies.

I admit I've been pretty much of a hard-liner on these points. I do not do "debates" with antigunners for the same reason I do not debate black helicopter whackos who want to tell me about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — both groups are promulgating a series of poisonous lies as the basis (and root) of their arguments. One of the most important waypoints in my own development as a progun spokesperson was my Sweetie's simple question of a decade ago: "If gun control demonstrably doesn't work, and given the people who promote gun control are not idiots, what do they want?" Her question caused me to begin a wholesale reexamination of my own thinking about the people who promote gun control and what, indeed, they want.

I came to the same conclusion as the one outliined by criminologist Don B. Kates in his response essay — especially in light of the English experiece with "gun control:"

Sensible though Kohn’s suggestions for compromise are, they miss the point that the anti-gun movement’s concern is only ostensibly with crime. Its actual purpose has been declared over and over again. According to the Brady Campaign’s Sarah Brady, “The only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes.” The Washington Post editorializes that “the need that some homeowners and shopkeepers believe they have for weapons to defend themselves [represents] the worst instincts in the human character.” Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark declares that gun ownership for personal self-defense is “anarchy, not order under law—a jungle where each relies on himself for survival.” A New Republic editorial asserts that the desire to possess arms for family defense “proceeds from premises that are profoundly wrong. In a civilized society, physical security is a collective responsibility, not an individual one.” Historian Garry Wills insists that “every civilized society must disarm its citizens against each other. Those who do not trust their own people become predators upon their own people.”

In other words, the aim is to produce a citizenry deprived of all means of self-defense so as to be abjectly dependent on a supposedly all-wise, and certainly ever more powerful, government for its security. What compromise with this can there be for people who believe in a strong and independent citizenry, as gun owners do?

Anyhow, before we get too long here, read the Reason essays. Later today I'm going answer I question I got by phone — "You're good at analyzing the problems," a friend of mine said a couple of days ago. "But what I don't see are solutions. What do we need tol be doing as gun owners and as sport shooters?"

Okay...I'll give that a shot.