RSS
Home
MSNBC joins campaign of anti-gun bigotry
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Any lingering doubts about the political leanings of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews were forever erased when the commentator launched a verbal assault on New Hampshire resident William Kostric, who had protested outside a “town hall meeting” in Portsmouth Tuesday while openly carrying a pistol.
My colleague, David Codrea, writes about this incident here, complete with videos of the Matthews-Kostric on-air exchange, so I’m not going to load up this space with the same videos. CBS blogger Declan McCullagh writes about it here.
This meeting was attended by President Barack Obama, it was a canned event with evidently only Obama supporters in the audience who threw him nothing but softball questions. The only thing missing was a faked fainting spell by a member of Obama’s audience.
Matthews’ mouth needs to be scrubbed with Hoppe’s No. 9 and a phosphor bronze brush. The fact that he claims to have family members who belong to the National Rifle Association doesn’t mean diddly. Like an attack dog, a clearly outraged Matthews demanded to know why Kostric was “carrying a g--damned gun at a presidential event?” Perhaps we’re all lucky that Matthews did not instead choose to drop an “F” bomb into the interrogation.
...you're carrying a g--damned gun at a presidential event
Matthews is an Obama partisan, from the top of his head to his tingling leg. His rant clearly was meant to demonize Kostric, which puts the MSNBC commentator in the same league as the extremists from the Violence Policy Center and Freedom States Alliance. I wrote about their activities here.
Now, so there is no misunderstanding: No American politician, including the president, should have any apprehension about sitting down with a legally-armed citizen, or attending a public meeting attended by citizens who are carrying firearms. Obama would be far safer in a room full of gun-toting Nebraskans, for example, then he would be walking down the street in his South Side Chicago neighborhood after dark. (When he was president, Teddy Roosevelt occasionally carried his own gun. Eleanor Roosevelt carried a gun frequently when she was First Lady.)
After all, American gun owners are not out to hurt anyone, they merely wish to be left alone. This is a philosophy that even the so-called “conservatives” at Fox News don’t always appear to grasp. Perhaps in New York, where Fox is headquartered, it seems “reasonable” to require gun owners to get licenses, register their guns, and be subjected to all sorts of red tape nonsense simply to exercise a civil right. That’s not reasonable at all. Out here in the West, those ideas are anathema to gun owners, as they should be everywhere. One should never need permission from police or government to exercise a fundamental, individual civil right. One should never have to demonstrate a “need” to carry a firearm. It’s a right, and so long as citizens do it responsibly, it’s nobody else’s business, and if that alarms the hoplophobes, that’s just too bad. (Oh, but to sit down with Bill O’Reilly or Fox’s morning guy, Brian Kilmeade at a campfire, and explain this.)
On the other hand, opinions seem mixed about Kostric’s performance in all of this. His choice of holsters – a “tactical” leg holster that is strapped to the thigh and hangs several inches below the belt line – might be considered a provocative and stupid way to carry a firearm at a public event featuring the president. You be the judge. Kostric admitted to Matthews he wore the gun to get attention for the right to keep and bear arms (he certainly got attention, but was it beneficial or detrimental to his cause?), but added that he carries a gun just about everywhere. Yes, he acknowledged, it was loaded.
Why would anyone want to bring a concealed handgun into a community event intended to encourage peaceful and thoughtful discussion?
VPC’s Josh Horwitz was at it again this week on the Huffington Post website, fomenting hysteria about gun rights activists as “insurrectionists” simply because some of them are also concerned about the financial quagmire being marketed by Obama and the Democrats controlling Congress as “health care reform,” when what they’re discussing apparently is not health care at all, and they’re really not “reforming” anything.
Horwitz and others are fuming that some citizens attending “town hall” gatherings across the country to discuss health care legislation and other issues are carrying firearms. So what? Why shouldn’t it be okay for a law-abiding citizen to carry a firearm, even to a public meeting? The Horwitz crowd is paranoid about the prospect of violence, yet in none of these sessions – where tempers have visibly flared – has anybody been shot. Sort of lets the air out of their rhetoric when all of those armed citizens engage in sometimes heated debate without shedding any blood, doesn’t it?
So far, the only thuggery appears to be the work of Obamacare supporters, which columnist Michelle Malking writes about here.
More disturbingly, there have now been confirmed reports of "Tea Partiers" carrying concealed handguns into these events after being encouraged by conservative organizers to do so.
In the midst of this taxpayer revolt, the Second Amendment Foundation has filed lawsuits against two California sheriffs, and the District of Columbia, dealing with the right to carry firearms. At the same time, SAF and the National Rifle Association are pressing separate lawsuits against the City of Chicago to undo its handgun ban
The economy is in deep trouble, the public is raging over health care and looming higher taxes to meet the astronomical debt that this administration and this Congress have already piled up. (There's a popular movie based on a popular book called Twilight, about teen vampires in out in Forks on the Olympic Peninsula. You want to see real bloodsucking vampires, just look at the people in Congress pushing all of these bailout and health care "reform" packages. They're sucking the economic life's blood out of the next several generations, or so say the administration's growing number of critics who are attending these Town Hall meetings.) A few armed citizens exercising their right to carry seem the least of their problems right now.
Visit with other Gun Rights Examiners:
And Don’t forget to visit:
For more info: Second Amendment Foundation. National Rifle Association.
Related Articles:
Comments
For those who missed his appearance on Fox & Friends Monday morning, Willows High School junior Gary Tudesko, with his mother, Susan Parisio at …
Many people will sympathize with an Arlington, WA man who fired a couple of shots at a burglary suspect who later turned up dead with jewelry …
