Gun banners 'threatened' by emails

Two smalltime local politicians in Tennessee, Knox County Commissioner Amy Broyles and Knoxville City Councilwoman Barbara Pelot publicly supported a weapons ban in county and city parks.

To the surprise of no one, except, apparently, Broyles and Pelot, the pair's computer inboxes have reaped a whirlwind of protest from their fellow citizens who believe in the right to arm themselves for self-protection.

A sample message received by Broyles: "Who do you think you are anyway? The next rape, the next robbery, the next murder on a bike trail is going to hang around your pretty little neck, my dear. Trust me."

Like micromanaging politicos everywhere whose dictatorial decisions run afoul of folks who believe in freedom, they quickly played the victim card by branding the mostly anonymous emails as "ugly" and "threatening."

Libertarians might wonder how exactly a person simply observing that the blame for future violent crimes against unarmed park users should fall on the heads of the people who disarmed them could possibly be construed as "threatening," but The Knoxville News Sentinel swallowed the bait and headlined their article, "Guns in parks ban evokes threats."

Soccer Mom with a handgun hung on her hip in a
Pennsylvania park. What's your problem, Knoxville?
(Jim Zengerle, Lebanon PA Daily News via AP)

Pelot then took the next step beyond victim-playing by turning the victims of her gun-banning into the victimizers. "I received some very mean-spirited, very threatening comments, who said they are permit holders."

Once her "victimizers" had been successfully identified she proceeded to pour it on:

"...what kind of training do these permit holders have?"

"These people don't have psychological testing."

"...very bad choices could be made by these people who have permits."

The permit holders she is referring to, like people all over the country, are her fellow citizens who must jump through hoops, stand on their heads, do back flips and summersaults and cartwheels just to get a piece of paper from some local governing authority for a right to carry a firearm that is already guaranteed to them by the US Constitution in spite of all the parsing and interpreting and construing and re-reading performed by the anti-gun gangs.

What remains obvious by its omission is the lack of any similar concern expressed by Pelot for gun-toting thugs not typically identified as "permit holders." At least the article didn't quote her questioning the training or psychological testing or bad choices of the kinds of people who shoot unarmed people.

Which seems to have been the point of an email to Broyles that read, in part, "Do you really think that this law will slow down the criminals? You might want to ask the Christian and Newsom families what they think about your ridiculous way of thinking."

The two people mentioned in the email were Knoxville citizens who were carjacked, raped and killed in January 2007.

Maybe the unarmed recipients of actual physical criminal violence would like to compare their bloodied limbs and fractured ribs and cracked heads and raped bodies with the ugly and threatening and mean-spirited cyber messages that appear in the inboxes of Pelot and Broyles as nothing more than mere pixels on a monitor screen and see who the real victims are.

Until then, one email to Broyles remains unanswered: "Who do you think you are anyway?"

(Read the Reed interview at The US Report)