More Spinning from Anti-Gunnies

It didn’t take long. Gun-grabbers are figuring out that the school shooting in Minnesota is hard for them to spin. It didn’t involve “assault weapons,” guns bought at gun shows, .50 caliber rifles, and any of the other fiction they so like to write. No, this shooting involved a very troubled young man, Jeff Weise, who killed his police officer grandfather to get his police-issued guns to shoot up his school. A constant refrain among gun-grabbers is that guns should be in police or military hands only—that we civilians can’t be trusted with them.

Minnesota and Atlanta (where a prisoner took a gun off his sole guard) confounds them. Here even guns in police hands can be abused. How to spin these cases, especially Minnesota, into ways of limiting American’s gun rights? Bless their hearts, they found a way.

Here’s a letter to the editor from a gun-grabber, Michael B. Greene, in which he declares that, “…strict and enforceable laws on storing guns…” is a remedy. By inference, the letter’s author believes that had Weise’s grandfather come home at the end of each shift and locked up his guns, or stored them at police headquarters, Weise couldn’t have got the guns.

That may be true, but Greene doesn’t understand police officers or those who believe a gun is actually a self-defense tool. A home burglary can happen without warning. No criminal is going to wait while you go get your self-defense gun out of the safe, load it, and point it at him. Police officers are possibly more at risk than many of us because a criminal may target them specifically for revenge. For many of us, guns are defensive tools, a form of recreation, and even a rite of passage.

Greene doesn’t understand that in many households a 16 year old may have his or her own gun stored in his or her own room. When I was growing up, I had one shotgun and two rifles hanging up on a rack near my bed. They were (and still are) my guns. My parents trusted me with them because I proved trustworthy.

Weise showed many signs he was no longer trustworthy if he ever was. He was depressed, was on Prozac, drew ghoulish cartoons, and talked about using guns to kill people. Someone(s) failed to see these signs until it was too late. He got his grandfather’s weapons and the rest is history.

Now, gun-grabbers will preach harder about “safe” storage laws. They will want to make new laws or new ways to enforce them. Think what Greene’s letter means when he writes of “enforceable” storage laws. That means cops visiting you to ensure you stored your guns “properly,” based on a legislator’s or bureaucrat’s definition of “properly.” They can say, your gun safe is only 14 gauge steel, no guns for you, or perhaps give you deadline to buy a new and always more expensive safe.

We don’t want to go down that road. Nor do we want to follow another Greene recommendation, “…[creating] an atmosphere in which bullying and harassment are viewed as human rights violations.” Bullying needs to be stopped, but human rights violation, c’mon get real.

Still, Greene is not as much a moonbat as a gun-grabber writing in a recent Chicago Sun-Times editorial. She hits it all: the end of the “assault weapons” ban, Sarah and Jim Brady, homicide statistics, “culture of death,” and more. It’s too much of a caricature to even fisk (hat tip to Alphecca).