-Caveat Lector-
[An attempt at trying to explain liberal intolerance...MS]
What's gun control got to do with it?
Source: Salon.com
Published: July 6, 1999 Author: David Horowitz
The 20,000 laws already on the books couldn't stop the Columbine
massacre, and one more won't either, but liberals just don't get
that.
The other day I picked up a phone message from a woman concerning
a charity event for homeless youngsters that I was helping
organize in Hollywood. The woman is a liberal, and she said she
had found a friend who was willing to volunteer her home for an
event we had planned for the children -- then she paused -- "but
not if Charlton Heston comes."
Then she paused again. "In fact," she said, "none of my friends'
homes will be available if Charlton Heston comes." It was
unnecessary for her to say, as she also did under her breath,
"They murdered those kids," to alert me to the fact that this was
about the Columbine tragedy in Colorado, where two sociopathic
teenagers had barged into a high school and ambushed their
classmates before turning their weapons on themselves.
Nor did she have to connect the dots and say that the passions
that Heston provoked as head of the National Rifle Association,
which had thwarted the passage of gun control legislation in the
aftermath of these events, was the cause of her friends'
determination to shun Charlton Heston and make him a social
pariah.
Accustomed as I am to such intolerant reflexes in people who
otherwise think of themselves as "liberal," this one caused me to
stop and reflect for a moment on what it had revealed. Consider,
dear reader, the people you know and call your friends. How many
individuals could you name whom these friends would want to bar
from a social gathering whose sole purpose was to raise money for
homeless kids? O.J. Simpson? Slobodan Milosevic? David Duke?
For myself, I don't have a single conservative friend or
acquaintance who would say, "If Barbra Streisand wants to help us
raise money for poor kids, I don't want her in my house." (OK,
maybe one or two.)
Charlton Heston is no conservative troglodyte. He is a New Deal
Democrat, the former chairman of the Hollywood committee for the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington, a lifelong
champion of civil rights and artists' rights (he was a staunch
defender of the National Endowment for the Arts) and generally a
decent, humane and ecumenical soul.
Of course, such data is irrelevant in this matter, because the
ideological hatred liberals bear toward Heston has no real-world
referrent in terms of who the man actually is. Even Heston's role
as spokesman for the NRA doesn't make their passion any more
intelligible to someone outside their ideological bubble. Do the
3 million mainly lower-middle-class and working-class members of
the NRA want to see children die? Would the legislation they
defeated have indisputably saved those children or others to
come?
The fact is that there are 20,000 gun laws already on the books,
17 of which were violated by the Columbine killers. What would
one more law accomplish that the other 20,000 could not?
Especially one that would merely mandate background checks on
buyers at gun shows? Is there any evidence that these shows are
the sites of a significant number of criminal purchases or that
such legislation would have any effect on armed crimes?
The Brady Bill has been violated on 250,000 occasions, according
to police records, but not a single violator has been punished.
Is there any correlation at all between stringent registration
laws and low gun deaths? Apparently not. A social scientist named
John Lott has just published a study that claims that communities
in which citizens are armed have lower incidences of gun violence
than communities where guns are relatively absent.
In places where gun violence has actually been reduced, like New
York, where the murder rate has been cut by a phenomenal 60
percent, the reason appears to be aggressive police methods,
which have come under fire from many of these same liberals who
think gun control is the answer. Do the people who hate Chuck
Heston adore Rudy Giuliani? Hardly.
I do not intend this as an argument for or against the gun
legislation that was proposed and that failed in the wake of
Columbine. It is merely a case for sobriety in assessing the
issues that make up the dispute. The gun legislation in question
may have been worthy or not. The point is that any difference it
might make is so insignificant that it could not justify the
foam-at-the-mouth response of its proponents or the stigma they
have attached to people, like Heston, who disagree with them
about it.
Why are liberals so hypocritically bigoted? It's not a question
that can be casually dismissed. After all, the conservatives who
would shun a Barbra Streisand make no fetish out of "diversity"
the way liberals do, nor do they wave the bloody flag of past
witch-hunts whenever they come under attack, as liberals are
known to do as well.
Moreover, the little auto-da-fé over the possibility that Chuck
Heston would materialize at a charity event is no aberrant case.
George Stephanopoulos' recent memoir captures a parallel moment
at the very center of the political process. Before impeachment
irretrievably embittered the atmosphere of the Clinton White
House, Stephanopoulos and the president were discussing an open
congressional seat and the prospect of an upcoming special
election. "It's Nazi time," Clinton remarked to Stephanopoulos,
meaning time to get back to campaigning against Republicans.
Two years later, at the outset of another campaign, Clinton told
Dick Morris, "You have to understand, Bob Dole is evil, what he
wants is evil." This of a war hero who had played the role of
consensus builder in his years as Senate majority leader.
Nor is Clinton alone in his rabid hatred of the Republican
opposition. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., publicly referred to House
Republicans as "Nazis" merely for proposing to keep the expansion
of Medicare within the rate of inflation lest the whole system go
bankrupt, as a presidential commission indicated it would.
Other Democrats, like Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., referred to
Republicans as racist for similar disagreements on budgetary
allocations. As in the case of gun control legislation, there is
no perceivable connection between the offenses and the
demonization of the offenders by liberals.
Outside the KKK-Farrakhan hate fringe (which embraces bigots on
the left and right), there is no conservative analog to this
liberal paranoia. Perhaps there is a Republican officeholder who
every now and then enters the electoral cycle with the war cry
"It's commie time," but I certainly haven't met him. The current
Clinton security leaks are grave enough to have generated a
hundred Joe McCarthys, but not one has yet appeared.
There is simply no analog to the liberal passion of conservative
bashing that has unfairly stained the reputations of figures as
disparate as Bork, Thomas, Gingrich, Barr, Connerly and now
DeLay. Conservatives have not even laid a glove on such obvious
targets as Barney Frank and Maxine Waters. They tend to think of
their opponents as irresponsible or simply misguided. But they do
not treat them as agents of the devil.
But then Republicans are political amateurs. They typically leave
a business in the business sector to go fight City Hall over
practical matters. They want to restrain the leviathan that is
suffocating enterprise. Or, less nobly, they want to harness it
to some self-interested goal.
Liberals have a grander design. Their interest in politics is
missionary. They see government as a means to social redemption,
to change the world. They're not there to tinker with gun control
laws. They're there, as Hillary Rodham Clinton put it, "to define
what it means to be human in the 21st century." In the nightmares
of NRA supporters, this means to do whatever it takes and to
trample over any rights necessary to remove all 240 million guns
from public possession in the quest for a utopia where violence
no longer exists.
The reason liberals are so bigoted lies in a vision that has
ancestral roots in the Puritan origins of the American new world.
They see themselves as soldiers in the army of the saints -- a
vision incomplete without the counter-army of Satan, the dark
adversary corrupting the innocent and blocking their progress.
People like Charlton Heston stand in the way of their impossible
dream. In the fantasies of these liberal Lenins, all the little
dead children killed in drive-bys across America could be walking
the safe streets of the 'hood if only the Chuck Hestons of this
world would disappear.
=================================================================
Kaddish, Kaddish, Kaddish, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
*Mike Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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