Prevent Hate Crimes — Carry a Gun

Here's a fiercely intelligent article on national concealed carry from...the Huffington Post
. Certainly not where I'd expect to read such an article, since their usual gun missives are penned by the sad pandas at Brady. This one's from Christopher Barron, from GOProud, a gay conservative group: 

This summer, the Senate will consider the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Hate Crimes Prevention Act, more commonly know as Hate Crimes legislation. Unfortunately, the bill, as currently written, will do little to actually prevent violent hate crimes from occurring. There is, however, a way to stop hate crimes before they happen: help law-abiding Americans at risk of hate crimes defend themselves from predators.

While GOProud, the only national gay conservative group, doesn't take a position on the current hate crimes legislation, we do strongly support empowering individuals to protect themselves - which is why GOProud urges the Senate to amend the current hate crimes legislation to include a provision dealing with concealed carry reciprocity.

A bill in the Senate, S. 845, co-sponsored by Senator John Thune (R-SD) and Senator David Vitter (R-LA), allows for reciprocity among all the states that currently allow citizens to lawfully carry a concealed firearm.

This common sense legislation would allow an individual who is lawfully licensed to carry a concealed weapon in his home state, to also carry a concealed weapon in another state - as long as that state permits conceal carry and as long as the individual complies with the concealed carry law of that state. An individual's constitutional right to defend himself or herself should not arbitrarily stop at a state line. This is particularly the case when traveling to a state that also permits concealed carry.

That's common sense gun legislation I can get behind! Of course, this should have been done when Republicans had the White House, the House and the Senate, but the people we put in office were too busy contemplating their navels and figuring out how to get hell-rich.

I was in Florida when the concealed carry revolution started, and I worked on the first state-approved concealed carry course in that state. I have always believed in concealed carry and have carried a gun much of my adult life (and a pretty big chunk of my wasted youth as well), but I became a positive evangelist for concealed carry after the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming...no matter what one's sexual orientation is, no one should end his or her life crucified on a fencepost in Wyoming by a bunch of thugs. 

Despite what kids are learning these days, nothing much as changed since the late Middle Ages when a motley peasant army with long pikes and the new hand cannones wiped out the cream of the so-called Age of Chivalry, the French Mounted Horse, and began bringing that brutal age to an end.

Referencing yesterday's pod rant about the Denver POST's oh-so-casual spitting on gun owners in this editorial column on guns in national parks by staffer Joanne Ditmer: 

National parks are rare treasures. They offer havens of solitude and sanctuary. They're not meant to be places for the next shootout at the OK Corral.

Wildlife can be shot, petroglyphs damaged, people injured. Talk about "responsible sportsmen" all you want, but the reality to many of us is that if someone has a gun, inevitably he will want to shoot at something.

My response was to point out that no responsible journalistic outlet in these politically correct times would ever slur a large group of people...unless that group was gun owners. I was slightly wrong...it's also okay to slur conservative women, of course for the same reasons. This is from Don Surber at the Daily Mail blog,m re: David Letterman's "rape" fantasies for Sarah Palin's duaghter:

Letterman will get away with it because liberal misogyny is OK in America. It has the Seal of Approval of the National Organization For Women.

Hey, support abortion and NOW and its pseudo feminists will let you get away with murder.

It is crude and it is wrong. But then, so were American newspaper editors for making Tina Fey their “entertainer of the year” for cruelly mocking Palin last year.

Small wonder Fey gets along so well with co-star Alec Baldwin, whose crude voice-mail to his 13-year-old daughter should have made him unemployable for life. But he supports abortion, so OK. The girl had it coming.

Perez Hilton calling Carrie Prejean the C-word and the B-word. Liberals said nothing.

Then there is the Playboy online article on 10 conservative women the author would like to rape. To its credit, Playboy deleted the online article. But if you want to see a perverted liberal mind, read it here.

This is what happens when you do not look at people as individuals, but rather as members of a group. Many liberals think all women must act a certain way, otherwise they are deviants and therefore, targets. The same with black people. This is why Clarence Thomas and Michael Steele face racism that is not visited upon the president.

The huge advantage of looking at people as a group rather than as individuals is that it sets up governmental campaigns to strip those groups of first their rights, then their goods and ultimately — and in far too many cases — their lives. Hey, history doesn't lie — especially about this topic. Whether it's the vicious Hun or the Godless infidel or the scheming Zionist, it always ends up the same way. 

We objectify groups for our own ends, oblivious to the greater danger of objectification that lurks just beyond the sane boundaries of our own logic. As a Memphian of a certain age, I remember the signs from Dr. Martin Luther King's last march, "I Am a Man." In other words, look beyond the group, and deal with me as an individual.

I'm as guilty as the next person in this failure of thought...I very casually say I despise liberals when I don't mean that at all. I despise any person of any political stripe who seeks to circumvent the freedoms we all hold by right, the preexisting rights that should belong to all human beings.

Not that complicated, really...