A gun in the hands of a Secret Service agent protecting the
President isn’t a bad word. A gun in the hands of a soldier protecting
the United States isn’t a bad word.
And when you hear the glass breaking in your living room at 3 a.m.
and call 911, you won’t be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the
hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you.
So why is the idea of a gun good when it’s used to protect our
President or our country or our police, but bad when it’s used to
protect our children in their schools? ...
Is the press and political class here in Washington so consumed by fear
and hatred of the NRA and America’s gun owners that you’re willing to
accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed
school principal left to surrender her life to shield the children in
her care? No one — regardless of personal political prejudice — has the
right to impose that sacrifice.
from the NRA: Wayne LaPierre’s press conference speech 12-21-12
"Laws are for the little people — and little people need lots of little
laws, ensnaring them at every turn."
Laws Are for Little People - Mark Steyn - National Review Online
Dec. 28, 2012
And not for David Gregory.
A week ago on NBC’s
Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of
Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed
Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.
This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”
So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney inWhite Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.
-go to link-
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