12/30/12

I’m not from New York. I do know where it is on the map atlas. I know there is that big city, and then the rest of the state. I’ve driven through parts of the rest of the state, and other than noting that the folks there drive much faster than me, it seemed almost pleasant. And I’ve driven past that big city, nicking one corner just long enough to sense the insanity endemic there, and that was close enough for me. As you no doubt recall, I don’t do big cities.

Because of the entertainment media and the news media I do know a fair amount about the big city. Large portions of the e&n media live and work there. From outside looking in it seems that the people who habituate there pretty much think it is the center of the world and the whole rest of this country is something else, something less, not worthy of attention. This is a view no doubt fostered by the e&n media, for they clearly act this way. And those of us who live elsewhere just kinda throw that whole lot who live in that big city into one big hopper, and we ignore that too.

I wouldn’t know a Bronx from a Queens if presented with one. This makes me something of an idiot to the people who live in their world, but then they might not know how to paddle a kayak down the Snake River. Maybe that makes us even. So when I heard about The Journal News it didn’t register with me. But I’m sure those folks living near the big city are familiar with it.

What little research I’ve done suggests The Journal News is an insignificant wannabe struggling to survive in the suburbs of the big city, in the shadow of the media giants, kinda like the paper I used to write for. They clearly have their point of view, which they endeavor to deliver to their readers. And I’ll venture they wouldn’t print my stuff either, for I stubbornly annoy editors who don’t tolerate the way I think.

Anyway, it was The Journal News that thought it important to print the names and home addresses of every handgun permit holder in some of those counties bordering the big city. Don’t know which counties, but for this discussion it really doesn’t matter. Some have asked of the paper why they might do such a thing, and their response seems to be that they think the folks in the area are interested in knowing who living among them might own a firearm. And since they are rabidly opposed to nice folks owning guns, this is no surprise.

One issue that pops up here is the simple reality that many such permit holders are judges, district attorneys, retired cops and others who might not want to let certain people know where they live, what with the fondness certain people might have for exacting revenge upon the civil servants and their families who did their job by putting said certain people away for a bit after certain people committed their various crimes.

It’s harder than heck to get a handgun permit in that area of the country. Ya practically have to be married to the mayor to get one. You certainly have to prove you might need one because your life is at risk without one. You can bet the permit holders have been vetted thoroughly before such permit was issued. In other words, it’s likely they are not a collective of dangerous criminals.

Maybe, just maybe, these people on the list whose lives have now been put at further risk…they might object to this list being published. 

But the way I see this, it doesn’t seem like The Journal News cares about this part. No, I expect they simply thought they could get some of the locals stirred up, have them mark those homes of their neighbors, maybe picket with signs, throw rocks through their windows, write letters to the editors, and of course nag their politicians for further gun control, for once this Amber’s List of gun owners gets out there, panic will spread through the community as those poor vulnerable people realize that they have been living under the unfathomable risk of a nearby firearm.

You remember Amber’s List. You can go on-line to that list and find out where the rapists, sexual predators, child molesters, and kiddie porn addicts live. You know, all those folks who shouldn’t be out in public but who are because like so many other violent and nasty folks, our system of justice likes to simply let them go to prey upon us at their leisure. Decent people like to know where such vermin live.

What you see happening here in New York is real simple. Law abiding upstanding un-threatening handgun permit people are now cast by the media into the same light as rapists, sexual predators, child molesters, and kiddie porn addicts. The Journal News appears to suggest that they are just as dangerous. So the paper is simply warning their neighbors of this horrible risk.

And…if you are even half as paranoid as me, don’t you wonder if this newspaper would be delighted if some judge or retired cop they outed gets murdered in his home, in his sleep, simply so they could say…”SEE! Keeping a gun in the house didn’t make him any safer!” For of course, like the vast mass of media in this country, this paper fervently believes it must teach the people that guns in the home are inherently evil, so the paper likely has systematically sensationalized criminal misuse of guns and yet has actively hidden any evidence of successful defense of one’s home and life with those nasty handguns kept in the good people’s houses.

That’s how you influence public opinion if you own a newspaper, you know. By manipulating that which you choose to report. And I’m betting that like most of the media, they don’t want the opposition to be able to answer back when attacked about gun ownership. They might paraphrase and then ridicule the opposition point of view, but they rarely allow anything approaching equal time to rebut their attacks.

I’ve told this story before, but it is illustrative. Picture the arid desolation of Nevada. I was with a small group of desert aficionados camped amid the quiet beauty, and the subject of guns came up. That NRA decal on the window of my pickup sometimes does this. It’s kinda the red cloak in front of the liberal bull.

One woman asked if I had brought any firearms along on this trip and I assured her that I had, and that they were securely stored out of harm’s way.  She admonished me, “Keep your guns away from my car, for I don’t want my car to blow up.”

I didn’t want to let on that I didn’t figure my firearms were going to climb out of their cases in my truck and start shooting her car when I wasn’t looking. But I did mention that the only time people firing guns cause cars to blow up in massive fireballs, flying in slow motion through the air, was in the movies. Many things happen in movies that are not real, or even possible. But maybe this lends some insight into the minds of those movie stars who think our benevolent government should confiscate all the guns. It certainly was well ingrained into this woman’s mind by the entertainment media.

Another well programmed woman on another desert trip ran away screaming when she saw the cartridge case from a fifty caliber Browning machine gun that we found in the Mojave Desert in an area where Gen. Patton had exercised his troops before they left to battle the Nazis in North Africa. That sixty year old piece of expended brass was no more dangerous than an empty coffee cup, but it had something to do with guns, and thus it terrified this poor woman. Not sure what level of indoctrination had so modified this woman’s brain, but it certainly worked. No doubt the media had a hand in this too.

And there is no question whatsoever how fervently these two women would want to see our caring politicians clear the country of the menace of citizens owning firearms.

I can remember well the wind up to the last “assault weapons” ban. Every TV network had their input. They’d do a voice over about the horrors of these mythical weapons, and then they’d show a video of a machinegun firing a few hundred rounds on full automatic. I believe this is where the fanciful notion of “assault weapons” spraying bullets came from. Or maybe it was those movies where the guy with an Uzi fires off a few thousand rounds from a thirty round magazine, and he never has to reload. You know, kinda like a garden hose. None of this had the remotest relevance to any discussion of the guns our government eventually “banned”, but it did influence a lot of people to favor the ban.

I’ve yet to discuss the “assault weapon” issue with anyone who didn’t ask me why I thought people needed a machine gun. (Machine guns have been illegal since 1934. None of the firearms these folks now classify as an “assault weapon” are machine guns. That’s just one of those little lies the media, and certain politicians need to resort to in order to sway public opinion.)

The media has also spread false notions about “Saturday Night Specials, Cop Killer Bullets, Sniper Rifles, Plastic Guns, High Powered Military Style Weapons”. Such vacuous titles are designed to demonize firearms, to make them seem far more dangerous, and to single out each class of firearms in turn in the incremental process intended to disarm the nation.

In the wake of the Newtown tragedy, a fresh media attack on the 100 million firearms owners who are not criminals has surfaced. Now, according to the media, the blame for the slaughter of innocent children by a madman belongs to every law-abiding firearm owner in America. It’s time to demonize you and me. We are on the new Amber’s List for gun owners.

The last “assault weapon ban” lasted ten years. It was so cleverly worded that it did not take a single weapon off “the street”. All those “assault weapons” were still out there, not killing anybody. Because of the “ban” a handful of firearms could no longer be sold to supplant those already out there, but they had previously been purchased in such small numbers that this hardly mattered. Many other manufacturers simply changed one or two cosmetic features that did not affect their firearms’ function, and these remade no-longer-assault-weapons continued to flow into the marketplace due to their popularity with the decent law abiding folks. 

Senator Feinstein likes to claim that the former ban lowered murder rates, but her logic is a mite flawed. Hard to imagine how no reduction whatsoever in the number of firearms that she would call “assault weapons” might lower the murder numbers, but I’ll take that as a fail on her part. In reality, the cosmetically legal firearms that continued to be sold by the thousands, to law abiding enthusiasts, didn’t mess at all with the murder rates that had been falling before the “ban” and continued to fall despite the addition of thousands of these guns to the population.

 Oh, and when the “assault weapons” ban expired in 2004, nothing changed. The predicted bloodbath out there in the streets has not happened.

So of course, Senator Feinstein is ready with her new “assault weapons” ban. This one, among other nonsense, will turn my little 22LR target rifle into an assault rifle, because of the way it looks. When I stop laughing, I’ll have to fight her on this one. My rifle hasn’t even been fired on the range yet, but she is out to get it.

Because of the way it looks.

The media will support this. They always do. They support this with distortion and outright lies, and by stifling any notion that firearms in the hands of the decent people do far more to suppress crime and violence than they do to foster it. There is considerable evidence to support this statement, but you won’t see any sign of this evidence in the e&n media. You have to search out this truth on your own.

All this is in the shadow of the horrible tragedy in Connecticut. The media doesn’t care that none of the gun control laws they support to date would have stopped this mad man. The media doesn’t care that this mad man could have used any number of common household tools to kill 6 year old children trapped in a room in the ten to twenty minutes he had to play with before the police could arrive to stop him. The media doesn’t care that had one teacher broken a stupid law and had carried a firearm to work that day, she might have stopped this pathetic loser before he could carry out his heinous task. Such has happened before, but of course most have not heard of this. The media suppresses almost all of these notions. They refuse to report it.

“Whenever there is a shooting, somebody always wants to punish the people who didn’t do it.” I didn’t make this up. Don’t know off hand who did. I merely stole it because it is so very true.

No, the media views its job here to be fanning the fear and loathing of people beyond any reason so that when the politicians try to disarm the citizens of this country, the well indoctrinated sheep will urge them on. Which explains why The Journal News is printing the Angie’s List of the names and addresses of legitimate gun owners. Like the individual classes of firearms, this newspaper is attempting to demonize all of these people.

I’m at a loss for words here. I guess if you want to see lies and distortion drive this country, then you will reap that which you sow. I’ll be arguing the other way if you need to ask. For most every gun control law that has come into being in my lifetime has either done absolutely nothing to inconvenience criminals, or it has actually raised crime numbers. “Reasonable Gun Control” does nothing to deter or render harmless a criminal. It simply punishes the good folks.

Don’t know how you feel about this, but I don’t see it as a good thing. The media, on the other hand, is trying its hardest so you don’t find out about how often they distort reality. If you are interested in the truth, perhaps you should seek out other sources of information that are not as corrupt as our mass media.

By the way…the “journalist” responsible for publishing that list of gun permit owners is a fellow named Dwight R. Worley. Somebody dug up his address and posted it on line. I won’t be doing that, for that would be a despicable thing to do.

Oh, and some have reported that ole Dwight owns a 357 magnum revolver, with a gun permit. Presumably for his own protection. No fool here, but if this is true….

Can you spell hypocrite? 

I’m sending this to The Journal News. Not that they will appreciate it, but because if you are going to take a shot at somebody, they have a right to know. I like to think this involves a degree of integrity. I don’t know what they might consider integrity.