Gun Control: ‘Get It Done’
Dick Gregory said, “Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.” Though still honored by the media, liberals have not thrived lately in the West, particularly in the U.S.
The liberal run amok is seen clearest in the orchestrated response to the Patrick Purdy killings in Stockton. By a precarious margin, a bill was rammed through the California Assembly banning “semiautomatic assault weapons.” Ignored in all the screaming was any realistic definition. Dictated by common sense and protected by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, I keep by my bed the service .45 I brought back from World War II. It’s a semiautomatic weapon. I do not plan to surrender it.
The irrationality of the clamor for anti-gun legislation is best demonstrated by considering the drug problem, which threatens to bring the nation to its knees. Dealing, use, or possession of drugs have long been felony offenses carrying the harshest penalties and condemned at every level of society. Yet all this legislation has hardly rippled the surface of the drug culture. We’re now considering draconian enforcement, including the use of the armed forces.
Conversely, American gun owners have historically been a majority in this country, overwhelmingly law-abiding. Since the failure of British efforts to confiscate the arms of American colonists before and during our Revolution, this right has been embedded in our Constitution. Efforts to dislodge it are unlikely to succeed.
Drug users and dealers are criminals. Very few gun owners are. Purdy was one of them. Before his murderous rampage in Stockton, he’d been arrested seven times on charges ranging from armed robbery, firearms and narcotics violations, to sexual assault. His attorneys and the judicial system plea bargained his felony offenses down to misdemeanors, leaving no felony record. Purdy should’ve been in prison long before he slaughtered five children. It was not the lack of gun laws that kept him free, or killed those kids.
Americans have forgotten the maxim, “If it is ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Fixing things has become a national passion. Out of several billion Chilean grapes, two grapes showed traces of cyanide, and fruit spray on apples seemed to cause cancer in mice . . . or was it the other way around? When the smoke cleared, the harvest of Chilean and American farmers was ruined by “fixing it.”
Edmund Burke, one of the architects of democracy, observed how ready men are to substitute emotion for reason “until past the time when reason can any longer serve.” With Chilean grapes, American apples and American guns, let’s hope reason can still serve.
CHARLTON HESTON
Los Angeles