* Crossposted from: FREEDOM'S_VOICE
Ernie gets national ink.
Gregg
    FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED AUG. 14, 1996
    THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
    But you don't mean the unalienable right is, well, unalienable? Do you?
    Ernie Hancock and the boys at The Second Amendment Is For Everyone
(SAFE) down in Phoenix maintain what the computer adept call a "web page"
these days, presenting information about the right to bear arms under the
slogan: "No compromise; the only way to remain armed & SAFE!"
  A fellow we'll call R.B., a self-described hunter from Northern
California, seems to have stumbled on the site the other day, and responded
with the kind of spontaneous outpouring of spleen which netsters call a
"flame."
  With a few expletives deleted, here's a representative excerpt:
  "This site is appalling. You think that some sick person with a criminal
record should be able to obtain a submachine gun with NO permits, NO
nothing and not even a waiting period to check their record, take it into a
park and blast the S - - - out of innocent little children. You think that
anyone should be able to obtain a sniper rifle, hide a mile away from a
populated urban area and pick off people who never did anything to them,
totally undetected. You think people should be able to carry a shotgun
through a populated park. What the hell are you going to do with it? There
is no way law enforcement will let you shoot anything in an area FILLED
with little children, and anyone with ANY sense (which you apparently
aren't) wouldn't anyway!"
  The gentleman goes on at some length, but you get the idea.
  Mr. Hancock forwarded the post to me for comment. I responded:
  "I, for one, have had my mind changed. Let's go to Lexington and Concord
in Massachusetts and pull down those bronze statues to the Minutemen. Do
you realize they took their highly-inaccurate rifles and muskets to the
town green in broad daylight, while frightened little children cowered
behind the paper-thin walls of the houses which COMPLETELY SURROUNDED that
little town park, and discharged their weapons at government officials
doing their assigned duty, in blatant violation of the law, putting every
one of those tiny tots at risk?
  Any why? Because those officials wanted to collect a perfectly legal,
modest little tax of only 1 or 2 percent - less than one twentieth of what
we now know to be normal and reasonable - for use in enforcing perfectly
sensible gun control and anti-smuggling ordinances that were favored by a
MAJORITY OF THE POPULACE.
  Heck, let's posthumously try, convict and execute those wacko gun nuts in
effigy. The perverts! Had a single one of them even submitted himself to a
BACKGROUND CHECK to test his mental stability?
  Look at the facts: These people were home-schoolers. They DIDN'T TRUST
THE GOVERNMENT, and they were teaching their children the same dangerous
doctrines. They frequented practitioners who prescribed opium and marijuana
without any government license. No urine tests for them! They'd piled up
huge arsenals of military-style weapons which were not needed for hunting,
and which could serve no possible purpose but crime and mayhem. By every
known definition, they were a sexist anti-government tax-resisting white
supremacist drug-addled street gang militia, sporting their colors.
  Now on the other hand, with today's current reasonable and sensible gun
controls, sophisticated computer background checks, six-month waits to
receive a federal license for a modern military weapon like an M-16, after
the modern citizen is fingerprinted and so on, what has happened in terms
of mass murders of schoolchildren?
  Whereas the crime was completely unheard of prior to 1934, today, it
happens with an approximate frequency of ... um, no, wait a minute. That
can't be right. ..."
  "The whole world should be like Canada," R.B. concludes. "You can only
buy a  hunting rifle, with thorough checking of your records. ... Only
private detectives, police officers, licensed private security officers,
and people known to be in danger can purchase a handgun of ANY kind."
  Well, bless our mostly-peaceful neighbors to the north. But doesn't that
sound a lot like the "final status quo" that the gun-grabbers said they'd
settle for in Australia ... right up to the time the current massive gun
confiscations began?
  And doesn't it also describe the balance between armed government agents
and disarmed civilians that prevailed in Mao's China, in Stalin's USSR, in
Hitler's Germany, and in Pol Pot's Cambodia?
  Why doesn't the gentleman mention how well victim disarmament worked out
in those far more prominent recent experiments?
  I'm sure they'll let you have a handgun in Canada if you certify you feel
you're in danger ... from your own government. Don't you think?
  The SAFE web page is at http://www.indirect.com/www/safe.htm. More
traditional inquiries can be addressed to SAFE Headquarters, 10412 N. 8th
Ave. No. 3, Phoenix, Ariz. 85021.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@intermind.net.
The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at
http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United
States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas
Nev. 89127.
***
Vin Suprynowicz          vin@intermind.net
"Next year in Galt's Gulch!"
--- FMail 1.02
---------------