"Joe E. Dees" wrote:
> Howzabout THIS for not only pejorative, but irretrievably true?
> The cruel and cynical actions of the NRA,
namely?
> as distinguished from their
> Madison Avenue bullshit spindoctor-manufactured Hollywood (Prez
> Charleton Heston? Yagottabekidding!)
Why? You reckon Heston doesn't really know how to shoot, or something?
> image, would lead one to
> necessarily believe that the voting majority of their members are
> soulless ghouls who have perpetual hard-ons for and wear their
> emotionally overwrought and bleeding hearts on their sleeves for
> lifeless and engineered-for-the-express-purpose-of-death-dealing
> hunks of metal,
To pick a nit - the *purpose* of most guns is not to kill but to
threaten, as in "Let go of that nice lady before I do something
permanent." The threat, to be effective, requires the *ability* to deal
death; but the ability and the purpose are not the same thing. "The
most effective weapon is the one that need never be used."
> but cannot muster a shred of sympathy for dead little girls.
For every dead little girl who makes headlines, there's another (and
another and another) who is alive because a gun was available. You
would condemn them, and feel good about it because they were bludgeoned
or strangled rather than shot.
Forgive me if I don't see what's so damned superior about you because
you can't appreciate the value of a reliable defense.
> They DO sociopathically, and quite obviously, care
> more for killing machines than they do for their fellow human
> beings, although to call the rest of the race their "fellows"
> slurs the rest of humanity by association with pond scum.
(I'm reminded of Huxley's retort to Wilberforce.)
> It might be
> impolite to call sick, twisted, demented and bloodthirsty
> ("PLEASE, Lord, lemme meet a mugger today and legally kill 'im!)
> psychopaths what they are, but the truth, by definition, can
> NEVER be an insult!
When I bought my first gun four years ago, my then housemate (a life NRA
member who taught me to shoot) said, "Congratulations. May you never
need it."
He goes to the range every Sunday; he is quite fond of his Dirty Harry
piece, and has had more than one occasion to show it to a mugger. (His
former place of business, a bookshop, was in a seedy neighborhood.)
They fled at the sight, so he didn't need to fire it.
Across this great land, similar encounters happen about a million times
a year, by every credible estimate. (Low end about 0.6 million, high
end about three, if memory serves.) What would you prefer?
Okay, I confess, every time I take public transport and have a gun with
me, I imagine what I might do if that creep from the Long Island
Railroad were to appear. And sometimes I fantasize about getting the
drop on Gianluigi Ferri, who shot eight people in the building where I
now work (a year before I started there). Guess that makes me one sick
fuck, eh?
-- Anton Sherwood *\\* br0nt0@p0b0x.com *\\* http://www.jps.net/antons/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:05:07 MDT