“How many gun rights activists does it take to change a light bulb? 301. 100 to blame the burned out bulb on a gun-free zone; 100 to call the replacement a threat to their constitutional rights, 100 to post prepper remarks about Hitler and the ATF and 1 to change a light bulb.” And there you have it. Martha Rosenberg’s opening salvo in opednews.com‘s Gun “Carry” Extremists Causing Accidents. Clearly, Ms. Rosenberg has nothing but contempt for those who work to defend and extend Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. What’s up with that? For one thing it’s good for her career . . .
Google tells us that the self-proclaimed “health reporter” has found favor as an anti-gun propagandist. The huffingtonpost.com has publisher her rants. The equally anti-gun Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New Orleans Times-Picayune, Los Angeles Times, Providence Journal and Newsday have disseminated Rosenberg’s anti-pistol polemics.
That said, some of Rosenberg’s gun control editorials are too vitriolic for the mainstream media. Her anti-NRA rants and repeated calls for a national boycott of any “gun-friendly” business (via the National Gun Victims Action Council’s “Tell and Compel” campaign) are only found in the more obscure corners of the Progressive media machine.
Truth be told, Rosenberg is a anti-gun extremist. Ironic, no?
Anyone who covers the gun debate gets a volume of threatening and repetitive emails that seem like they are written by one person with 12,000 different signatures. Passionate and inchoate, the writer is both a “tough guy” not to be messed with and a victim whose “rights” are being violated. Make up your mind!
Rosenberg is stuck in an anti-gun animosity loop. The more aggressive her stance on gun control, the more aggressive the pushback, the more she becomes convinced that gun rights advocates are extremists, the more aggressive her stance.
This leads her to lump all her antagonists into one, dismissing their arguments as “half-formed” and illogical. Rosenberg pays them no heed—even as she rattles their cage. Switching metaphors, she loves the heat but avoids the light.
[The gun rights advocate] is terrified of gun grabbers and the government who want to disarm him. (Psychology books have a lot to say about that.) He is terrified of “bad guys” even though he is in a rural or suburban setting that is virtually crime-free. He is a classic bully with a high fear level that only subsides when he acts fierce and makes others scared. He only feels safe if he can “carry” everywhere and becomes enraged at places that ban guns. He has a huge amount of time on his hands to “defend” gun rights and seems to lack a day job.
Speaking of Psych 101, file Rosenberg’s splenetic splendor under “projection.” Drilling down, there’s a theme running through her kvetch: fear. She believes gun rights advocates are motivated by fear. Just as she is. But there’s a difference between gun grabbers’ and gun rights advocates’ fear.
Gun owners manage their fear of criminal violence or tyrannical government by, wait for it, owning a gun. By taking personal responsibility for their own protection, they gain a sense of control. Contrary to Rosenberg’s thesis, gun ownership has a calming, civilizing effect.
Contrast that with gun grabbers’ fears. They’re oblivious to government tyranny—the single greatest cause of homicide the world has ever seen. They’re also blind to the possibility of firearms-related violence in their safe suburban or highly policed urban enclaves. And yet they’re deathly afraid of guns. Specifically, citizens exercising their firearms freedom.
For gun grabbers, firearms represent chaos. Disorder. Moral disintegration. Firearms are the literal embodiment of their fear that society won’t make progress towards, well, anything. How could it when individuals hold the power of life or death? Power over intellectually superior members of society like, gulp, them? People who chart the course of socio-political evolution over a skinny latte at Starbucks.
Starbucks! Where firearms accidents happen! Now that’s scary.
How do women carrying guns in their purses like cell phones “protect” themselves? How does such universal “protection” not cause accidents? Why does Starbucks allow armed people to stride in its stores with carry permits or without, as the case with the two women?
Starbucks has ignored pleas from customers and gun safety advocates to ban lethal weapons in its stores which is the right of property owners. And, in the height of hypocrisy, it issued a statement following the Florida shooting which said, “At Tyrone Square Mall, our primary concern is always for the safety of our customers and store employees, and we are thankful that the injuries sustained are reported to be non-life threatening.” What?
Would a business whose “primary concern is always for the safety of our customers and store employees” allow lethal weapons on its premises.
Note: Rosenberg’s editorial ends without a question mark. For her, there is no question: Starbucks has allied itself with “them.” Ordinary people who cherish their gun rights. The fact that a Florida Starbucks was the scene of an armed robbery last year, with four perps, doesn’t figure. In fact, it makes her point.
Rosenberg believes civilian disarmament is the one and only answer to “gun violence” and firearms-related stupidity. If that means creating a police state, well, as long as it’s her police state, that’s OK.
In truth, the world can never be the utopian gun-free paradise that Rosenberg envisions. Neither man’s nature nor the nature of government will allow it. An inherently precarious balance of power is as good as it gets. Maybe that lightbulb will go off over Rosenberg’s head someday. Probably not. When it comes right down to it, haters gotta hate.