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Follow-Up: Gun rights, gun slobs and sloppy reporting
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Two columns I did earlier this week appear to have struck some nerves in the shooting community, in a positive way.
There is ample evidence beyond my say-so that shooters have no use at all for slobs in the woods who take their trash onto public land, dump it and shoot it to pieces and then drive off and leave the eyesore for everyone else to share. Accounts on two similar forums, TheHighRoad.org and TheHighRoad.us from gun owners around the country also tell of personal efforts to clean up some of these trashy areas. Equal disdain was expressed on the Hunting Washington forum, demonstrating that hunters are not the beer-swilling ignorant caricatures seen in too many editorial cartoons, but people who do care about the environment. This discussion was initiated by a recreational shooting closure along the I-90 corridor east of North Bend in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
My favorite targets are soda cans and plastic bottles/jugs filled with water! Me and the grandson LOVE to shoot those things! But, we always take a box of large trash bags so we can pick 'em up and haul 'em off. Even shot to hell, they're still recyclable.
Bravo for them. It is largely because of slob shooters, as my column explained, that many public lands are being closed to recreational shooting, and that helps nobody.
Non-hunters and people who don’t own guns and don’t like guns could learn a few things from responsible shooters and hunters.
There is no such thing as a "reasonable regulation" of fire arms, our Second Amendment makes this statement non existent
If slob shooters raise some ire, the subject of gun control and what “reasonable” or “sensible” gun regulations might mean send gun-toters into orbit. That much was certainly clear on TheHighRoad.org, where more than 190 comments and more than 2,200 visits to the chat thread about my Monday, June 29 column had been logged Wednesday morning. That is a lot of attention on a single forum.
Over on TheHighRoad.us, traffic was considerably lighter (there is evidently quite a bit of cross-over between the two websites) but there was no less enthusiasm for rejecting the notion of gun control laws that are pandered as “common sense.”
The far right will always demand total, unrestricted gun ownership and the far left will always go for the most restricted, liciensed, regulated, controlled position they can ram through, including total confiscation. It's the "nature of the beasts" if you will. Somewhere in the middle is the answer. The fight over "reasonable restrictions" will always be one of degree.
What the remarks on these two forums prove is that opinions among gun owners vary as to what might be a “reasonable” gun law, and what is an outright affront to the Second Amendment in the opinions of forum members. Likewise, one might get the impression from the hunters that they understand the Second Amendment is not about hunting.
While one can be delighted, and even proud, of the way gun people handle themselves on these subjects, less satisfaction comes in the wake of reading a story in the Tuesday Houston Chronicle about alleged gun trafficking to Mexico.
The story noted that last year, “Mexican officials…asked federal agents to trace the origins of more than 7,500 firearms,” but did not offer some very important additional details, which were discussed in this space recently. Those omitted details would have put this number in perspective to the overall problem of violence in Northern Mexico, which is wrongly being blamed on gun shops and gun shows on this side of the border by people with an anti-gun agenda.
Those gun traces amounted to less than 25 percent of all the guns reportedly seized by Mexican authorities, and the number of actual traces back to U.S. origin is even less. But including that information would belie claims by the Obama administration and gun prohibitionists that 90 percent of all the guns being used in the Mexican drug wars come from this country. Gun banners need to perpetuate that myth to justify their demands for stricter gun control legislation on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures.
All told, Mexican officials in 2008 asked federal agents to trace the origins of more than 7,500 firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Most of them were traced back to Texas, California and Arizona.
That the press would “overlook” important details relating to this situation, and found in a report from the Government Accountability Office, is at best disappointing, and suggests that the mainstream press is once again taking sides on the gun issue, by telling only half of a story.
These gun prohibition efforts are being spearheaded by veteran anti-gunners, whose long campaign against firearms was detailed in my book These Dogs Don’t Hunt: The Democrats’ War on Guns, with Alan Gottlieb.
He and I have recently teamed up on another book, Assault on Weapons: The Campaign to Eliminate Your Guns, to be published later this summer by Merril Press.
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