In my last post, I wondered if Ezra Klein of Vox was retarded.
I can assure you that Francis Clines of the New York Time is.
Francis visited the NRA Museum in Fairfax Virginia. It is a beautiful museum, go if you have the chance.
It is full of guns (obviously), with various levels of significance. Some are historic for the role they played in shaping our history – guns of various wars. Some are significant milestones in firearms technology. Some are unique, like the revolver that was the only remains of NYPD Officer Walter Wheeler and found below the rubble of the twin towers. Some are significant for the role they play in shaping our popular culture.
Is that how Francis sees the role of the NRA Museum? Nope.
The film star [John Wayne] stands tall at the National Rifle Association’s National Firearms Museum — true, only as a cardboard cutout of himself. But the cardboard fantasy of the good guy gunning down the bad guy is what makes the museum work as an enjoyable escape from the life-and-death reality of American gun carnage.
Really? As, a firearms enthusiast, I enjoy seeing important guns from history. Much the same way that as a space enthusiast, I enjoy going to the Smithsonian Air and Space museum.
Francis feels that the NRA Museum should be a guilt trip reminding you about all the criminals and gang members who are killing each other.
There are thousands of ingenious, gleaming rifles and handguns in displays about America’s gun-rich history of colonialism, immigration, expansionism and vigilante justice. But it is the gallery devoted to Hollywood and its guns and good-guy shooters that best illustrates the power of fantasy now driving the modern gun rights debate.
Being a rational adult, my belief in gun rights isn’t shaped by John Wayne or even John McClane. It’s shaped by my reading of the works of our founding fathers.
Maybe this fixation on Hollywood as real life if why Liberal politicians love celebrity endorsements.
“Go ahead, make my day,” Clint Eastwood growled famously to a movie bad guy before dispatching him — kaboom! The museum narrative identifies the actual movie guns, not the actors, as having the “starring” roles in assorted western and terrorist-fantasy shootouts. The gallery includes some of the blank rounds actually fired in movies, as opposed to the live rounds bedeviling real life beyond the film screen.
I’d argue that ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan’s S&W 29 was a star in Dirty Harry and Magnum Force. I would disagree that gang members in Chicago, shooting each other over drug territory, are committing almost 1,000 homicides a year because they watched too many Clint Eastwood movies. One has nothing to do with the other.
During a visit, the difference between “acting” and “acting out” necessarily comes to mind. Why is there no stream of gripping films about the thousands of troubled Americans with easy access to guns who can lethally act out their darkest grievances on family and society day after day?
There are. They are the bad guys. The one Harry Callahan shot was called Scorpio. Generally the good guy shoots the bad guy. Or throws him off the top of Nakatomi Plaza.
The N.R.A.’s latest priority is rooted in its ultimate fantasy that society will be safer if ordinary Americans are allowed to routinely pack a pistol.
It’s not a fantasy. We just saw a gang of teens terrorize a train full of people on BART. We’ve seen Antifa engage in random beatings. Reginald Denny. Trust me, a gun for me is a like an AMEX card, I don’t leave home without it.
This is part of the campaign to make gun possession ubiquitous among ordinary citizens. All states permit some concealed carry, but under vastly different safety controls. That is why opponents wisely fear that national reciprocity is a ploy to sell more guns and undermine stronger local and state gun controls.
Oh dear God no. Not “ordinary citizens” being allowed to exercise their Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms and defend themselves beyond their doorsteps. That’s something only those blessed by goverment can do. That and illegals and criminals in sanctuary cities.
Gun safety researchers count more than 900 people killed by concealed-carry gun owners in the past decade, with only a tiny fraction of shootings ruled self-defense. Many of the deaths were suicides, and 31 were in mass shootings by concealed-carry owners.
Deep blue Chicago does in year or an angry Muslim does in a day what 14 million people with CCW permits take decades to do. Nobody is perfect, but it seems that the CCW track record is way above average for good behavior.
The N.R.A. headquarters here keeps up a fresh drumbeat for the reciprocity legislation underway in Congress, 30 minutes away from the gun museum, with more than 160 co-sponsors signed up. President Trump, who supports the idea, is scheduled to address the association’s annual leadership forum on Friday in Atlanta. Both sides in the gun debate are keyed up for something John Wayne-like from the president.
And here is where Francis ties two disjointed thoughts together into one retarded conclusion.
John Wayne isn’t why there is a push for national CCW. It is the lawlessness that Liberals like the NYT editorial board allow when they defend sanctuary cities, rioting in Baltimore and Ferguson, and condone Antifa. We are tired of being told that the police are there to defend us by the same people that undermine the ability of the police to defend us because “the police are racist.”
We can’t trust you to protect us so we are going to protect ourselves. Not because we saw somebody do that in a movie, but because that’s what our Founding Fathers said.
When the NYT is relying on “they watch too many John Wayne movies and think they are all cowboys looking for a gun fight” as the penultimate argument against national CCW, they’ve gone full retard.
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