The Truth About Liberalism: #4 Guns

A lot of people with otherwise no political knowledge seem to "know" that Democrats are all pansies and will take away everybody's' guns. I even saw an add in our local paper last fall saying that John Kerry had voted for a bill that would ban all pump action shotguns. If that were true, it would anger many people who like to hunt, because they probably use a pump action shotgun and aren't doing any harm. I was pretty sure this add wasn't true, though. So, reading the fine print in the add, I saw that they were talking about bill s.123 (I don't remember the real #). One quick google search later, I discovered this bill was in fact, an assault weapons ban, which made illegal pump action shotguns with certain human hunting additions. The name that I still remember being banned was the "Streetsweeper" shotgun. Not a lot of game hides out on a street, and anyways, it's illegal to hunt from a street or road. This leaves us with the conclusion that this gun is meant for combat/killing people use. Try as Dick Cheney might to legalize it, there is not one state where you can buy a license to hunt people. So this add was misleading, taking advantage of the preheld superstition among hillbillies (and some other not so hillbilly people) that Democrats hate guns, and want to take them away.

If you've read any of my previous posts, you'll know that I (like all progressives) am a big fan of the constitution, especially the bill of rights. Included in this bill is the right of the people to keep and bear arms. We don't pick and choose which parts of the constitution are we'll follow(like Republicans do). However, this is one of the few places I'm aware of where conservatives take a liberal approach to this sentence and liberals take a more conservative approach. Republicans interpret it broadly to mean that anybody can carry whatever kind of gun they want, while Democrats see the need to keep such things as assault weapons out of the hands of the general public. When the founding fathers wrote the constitution, assault weapons were muskets, the same guns that people hunted with. Of course there were cannons, but the average person couldn't afford one, a modern equivalent would be the cruise (or maybe even nuclear) missile. The rules for possession of cruise missiles aren't talked about much because nobody's got (or can get) one.

The fact that Democrats feel it wise to keep guns meant for killing people efficiently off of the street is used by their opponents who twist it to mean that Democrats are anti-guns and anti-hunting. The fact that we care about the environment and don't want people shooting everything that moves is also used to strengthen this argument at times. Ironically, I and most Democrats believe that there is nothing wrong with hunting or the guns involved in it. If people want to shoot guns designed to kill people, they can join the army. Or, if they're not willing to take that step and they just like to shoot a big gun, I don't see anything wrong with keeping this assault weapon locked up when it's not being shot at a range. Of course, in that second instance, there would need to be a strict licensing process (I'm not sure if such a system exists or not).

The only major area I've left that Democrats take a beating over is handguns. People will insist that our crime rate is lower than countries with low gun ownership because we carry guns and can protect themselves. This is some flawed logic because there has been no scientific studies to prove that carrying a gun deters criminals, the only studies on this have looked at the rate of crime as it correlates to gun ownership in different countries. Even this logic is flawed, because they're picking and choosing which countries to talk about (like they do with the constitution). Some countries with high gun ownership rates have the highest rates of violent crime in the world. In Iraq, each household is allowed to have an AK47, and look how that stops crime.

I don't carry a handgun, and I've never been mugged. The same thing goes for my whole family. And everybody I know in fact. The fact that there are laws requiring you to be a responsible adult and a law abiding citizen before you can carry a handgun are no reason to bash Democrats. Would you rather felons and gangsters could just legally buy all the guns they wanted?

I'm getting off the topic now (but that stuff really frustrates me). My point is, the constitution gives you the right to keep and bear arms, no liberal is interested in denying you a right provided by the constitution.