Jay Bookman Don’t Know from Depravity

Jay Bookman of The (rather anti-gun) Atlanta Journal-Constitution has an interesting take on depravity. He believes that a web-commercial on the USAAmmo site is “The most depraved commercial (I hope) you’ll ever see”. What’s absent from his piece, however, is any sort of argument or debate about the facts presented in the video.

And there are several points he very easily could have made, starting with the fact that the “Gun control = Genocide” examples in the video are a bit weak. Yes, the Third Reich, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia etc., did have gun control and certainly did commit genocide. It is, however, questionable whether Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. established gun control in order to commit democide (the term I prefer as it is specific to a government killing its own citizens). I believe those killings were more a case of despots taking advantage of disarmament which had already occurred.

Then there’s the fact that both the George Washington quotes presented are false. The statement “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference; they deserve a place with all that’s good. When firearms, go all goes; we need them every hour” seems to have been made up out of whole cloth.

And “A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government” is a distorted version of “A free people ought not only to be armed but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well digested plan is requisite: And their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories, as tend to render them independent on others, for essential, particularly for military supplies.”

But Jay’s anti-gun and, like so many of his fellow grabbers, appears to eschew facts and reasoning in favor of emotion and demagoguery. He starts out with, “It’s no secret that the gun and ammo industry uses the fear of gun control to goose sales to a frightened customer base.” Hmm, I guess Jay believes that the only reason people purchase guns and ammunition is because they are afraid the government is going to try to take them away.

He doesn’t think people can calmly and soberly look at the collapse of the housing market, the bailouts, the stock market crash, rising unemployment, the recession and ballooning federal debt and decide that they should take steps to defend themselves and their loved ones. Perhaps he wasn’t paying attention to recent events across the pond. Or thinks the violent protests, the riots, the looting and the arson will stay on the TV screen and not wind up Occupying city centers across the country.

In his very next sentence Jay writes, “As Barack Obama prepared to take office, for example, rumors began spreading that he was about to issue an executive order banning handgun sales and even banning sale of ammunition, which then led to shortages of ammunition on the shelves, which was then cited as evidence that the ammunition ban was coming true.” Now I have been working for KeepAndBearArms.com and the Second Amendment Foundation collecting news stories for years. If you Google my name (in quotes, “Bruce W. Krafft”) you will get something in excess of a half-million hits, and yes most of them are going to really be me.

The point is, I’ve been around and I pay attention to civil rights issues, especially gun rights issues, and I’ve never heard a single (serious) claim that President Obama was going to try to ban handguns (or ammo) via Executive Order as soon as he got into office. There was concern that his campaign, transition and White House websites all talked about renewing the AWB, mandating childproof guns and getting rid of private gun sales (a.k.a. the eeeee-vil gun-show loophole™), but nothing about outright handgun or ammunition bans.

The shortages of ammunition Jay refers to were due mainly to huge increases in law enforcement consumption post 9/11 and actually started becoming acute for the first time around August of 2007, not 15 to 18 months later. There actually was another shortage during the period of Obama’s election through his inauguration but again, that was mainly caused by increased law enforcement demand and was exacerbated by people who had been through the 2007 shortage and so were cleaning stores out any time they saw ammunition in stock.

Adding to the problem, the DoD announced that they’d begin shredding once-fired brass for scrap instead of selling it for reloading. Admittedly, that decision was quickly reversed, but the news sent shock-waves through the industry and was taken by some as evidence that Obama was indeed trying to choke off the ammunition supply. These, however, are all demonstrable facts, not the runaway paranoid speculation that Jay claims.

Then Jay charges that USAAmmo “appropriates genocide as just another tool to sell more guns and ammo to the already paranoid.” Is he perhaps saying that these populations were not disarmed? No, Jay is just taking the opportunity to malign a company he doesn’t like and call gun-owners names. I don’t think anyone with a working brain (or even Jay for that matter) actually believes that Obama is preparing for democide. Jay’s just setting us up for the next sentence: “I doubt that you have ever witnessed a more twisted, sick commercial advertisement than this one.” Again with the name-calling, and again with the complete avoidance of any sort of facts or reality-based objections to the content of the commercial.

I should thank Jay for providing us with a brilliant example of the anti-gun mentality: hyperbole and emotionalism secure in its rectitude and completely untainted by reasoning, logic or evidence.