A Response to an Editorial

I saw a link on Say Uncle today that led to an article that so infuriated me I have to blog about it. Bill and I proudly use the term “gun nuts” to describe ourselves. The article (registration required) basically says that he once thought “gun nut” was an ad hominen attack, but now he feels gun nuts are insane.

This attack piece is in the Daily Campus the University of Connecticut student newspaper and was written by Robert Schiering. I searched his last name in the paper’s search engine and found six articles probably written by the same person (in some the first name is given as “Rob”). He is given to broad and insulting pronouncements. For instance, this article on people he calls “Christian Extremists” states,

Fundamentalists are by nature irritating, but the fact that the American breed has the gall to claim persecution makes them doubly so.

Hmmm…..

So let’s take a look at what set me off. The last sentence of the first paragraph reads,

Gun nuts are called as such because they are incontrovertibly insane.

I have never been called insane, let alone incontrovertibly so, but I am a gun nut.

He states that gun nuts have their minds made up, something he calls “deliberate stupidity.” Now, I have seen a lot of gun-banners ignore facts and figures and invent classes of guns that don’t exist such as “assault weapons,” but never mind.

He includes statistics on gun deaths, but none newer than 1994. Couldn’t he have found anything newer, or did he simply want to raise the statistics bar? Gun crime and even suicides have plummeted since the mid-1990s. He talks about guns not preventing crime, and about the Constitution and the Second Amendment. You know something; I am not going to argue with his statistics or his interpretations although I think they are distorted. We’ve all read too many dueling statistics that settle nothing and it would be a waste of my time.

What I am going to shout about is this statement,

Owning an arsenal is not a "way of life," it is a mental disorder. It is an unjustifiable paranoia that leads to thousands of unjustified deaths every year.

It just screams for clarification. What constitutes an arsenal? How many murderers buy an arsenal before they killed their victim(s)? How many guns does it take to kill one person? Who is doing the killing he decries? It is not those of us who call ourselves gun nuts.

Finally, he has the gall to say we should approach gun ownership with a “safer, more reasonable route”. What does this mean? He doesn’t deign to answer. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but could he mean we should surrender concealable handguns, ensure all guns are locked up preferably in a central facility, use muzzleloaders instead of semi-auto rifles, etc.? If so, here is my safer and more reasonable response: Kiss my gun loving butt!