Growing up through high school my family had 50 acres of land and we had horses and rode often on our property - except during hunting season when hunters ignored the "No Trespass" and "Posted" signs that we diligently placed around the perimeter of the property. During that portion of the year it was not safe to be on one's own property and we kept the horses in the front pastures in order to minimize the chances that they would be shot. And on the few occasions when I challenged hunters trespassing on our property I was greeted by arrogance and surliness. It was obvious that these men did not give a damn about the rights of others. Perhaps those experiences forever colored my view of gun owners. But I believe it is symptomatic of the mind set of those who want unfettered access to guns regardless of the danger poised to others. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the misplaced views of the pro-gun crowd which in my view boils down to extreme selfishness - a pervasive trait it seems among conservatives. Their perceived rights always trump the rights of other citizens. Here are excerpts:
How many children have to die, how many innocents have to be lost in a mall or a theater or on a neighborhood street, how many presidents or political leaders or prophets like Dr. King have to be shot down in a fusillade that wounds history itself, before America protects the first of our founding inalienable rights—to “life”—which surely comes before the “liberty” of carrying a cache of weapons. And that demands gun control—and I’m not using a politically convenient phrase like “gun safety legislation.” Some guns are outright unsafe—assault weapons—and all guns are unsafe in the hands of some people.
Republicans who claim to defend the “right to life” profit politically by defending the moral wrong of a wholesale arsenal of death inflicted on the already living. The religious right that has allied itself with the gun lobby defies Christ’s warning that those who harm the children would be better off thrown into the sea with a millstone around their necks. Shouldn’t the protection of life begin not with a fertilized egg, but with human beings who are truly and fully alive?
[W]e should have the courage to do something for our country, too. We should look into the anguished faces of parents outside that Connecticut elementary school—faces now tragically incised on our national consciousness. We should recall events from that darkness at noon in Dallas nearly 60 years ago to the carnage at Columbine and Aurora. Those faces and events matter more than the scorecard of the National Rampage Association.
Let us stand against the odds so that countless others who otherwise would never even know the cause of their slaying or the name of their executioner may instead live, laugh, and find love and not hate.
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