PI’s Connelly wrong: Gun owners also victims of ‘acceptable prejudice’

The on-line Seattle P-I.com’s Joel Connelly wondered today if “anti-Catholicism (has) become the country's ‘last acceptable prejudice?’”

Northwest gun rights advocates might ask what Connelly – a liberal and something of a Seattle icon – would say about this remark, perhaps from one of his “progressive” contemporaries: “Gun nuts are the irrational dregs of society.”

That was one of several comments posted by readers of the Seattle Times in reaction to a Wednesday editorial headlined “Lawmakers favor gun lobby over voters on background check bill.”

When it comes to social bigotry, Catholics might have to take a back seat to gun owners as victims of viciousness from the anti-gun Left.

Connelly was discussing how the church is faring these days in a column that is hardly coincidental to the naming of its new Pope Francis, a “man of the cloth” who so far appears to be bringing his rather modest lifestyle as something of a culture shock to the Vatican City. Connelly acknowledges that he recently “returned to the Catholic church” and there is still much with which he disagrees. However, he doesn’t take issue with the church the way anti-gunners take issue with people who own firearms.

“Gun nuts are the vocal minority but are too dillussional (sic) to realize it,” wrote one individual in need of a dictionary, in response to the Times’ background check editorial.

“Americans with guns are a greater threat to American lives than al Qaeda,” said another, who seems to forget that a lot of Americans with guns have sent a lot of al Qaeda to the great hereafter, thus keeping the nation safe for people to spout off about “gun nuts” and “rabid dogs” in the same sentence, as did blogger Jack Kluth recently.

“It fascinates me,” Kluth wrote, “how gun nuts focus like rabid dogs on ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed’ while completely and oh so conveniently glossing over the “well-regulated militia” part. Here’s a radical thought directed at gun nuts: YOU DON’T GET TO PICK AND CHOOSE. You don’t get to latch onto what you feel supports your unhealthy, immoral love of firepower and ignore that which really doesn’t.”

Another Times reader, upset that House Bill 1588 – the background check measure discussed by this column here, here and here – wrote, “I suggest that we pass an initiative to require gun registration and a gun ownership registry. If it is unconstitutional, the courts will determine that; but I suspect it is fully constitutional and will help protect our populace from the gun nuts and their psycho killer allies.”

While some Seattle Times readers engage in vituperation against firearms owners, there is plenty of venom to go around beyond the reaches of the Northwest. Bob Englehart, writing in the Hartford Courant, observed, “I think that's what these extremist gun nuts have done and continue to do. They've made a stone of their heart. To do anything else would demand compromise and they are incapable of compromise. They also seem to be incapable of rational thought, but that's a topic for another day. That topic goes under the heading of mental illness.”

Then there’s Dave Zweifel, editor emeritus of the Capital Times in Madison, Wis. His diatribe against gun owners included this: “Of all the venomous comments coming from the radical gun nuts during this latest debate on what we ought to do about the proliferation of assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, the ones who take the cake are those who insist citizens need the guns to protect themselves from our own ‘tyrannical’ government.”

Zweifel might want to visit with gun owners in Colorado or California to get their perspective on government tyranny.

In his column, Connelly wonders, “Is anti-Catholicism really the anti-Semitism of sophisticates?”

Perhaps no more than the knee-jerk anti-Second Amendment bigotry of social “progressives.”

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