Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser continues his ascendancy in the mainstream media. Last week, The New York Times paid him for a dose of anti-gun animus. Today, it’s The Huffington Post, headlining his disarmament diatribe ‘Good Guys With Guns’ Didn’t Stop Dallas Attack. Which is kind of true. Good guys with C4 explosive strapped to a robot stopped the Dallas attack. And how.
Anyway, Mr. Weisser begins by taking readers down memory lane, recounting the firearm used in the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Oswald, a former Marine Corps member, used a surplus military rifle called a Mannlicher-Carcano 91/38, which he bought from a mail-order sporting goods wholesaler in Chicago for twenty bucks. There’s been no confirmation yet out of Dallas, but I’ll bet you that the murder weapon used in Thursday’s attacks was an AR-15 assault rifle, or some variation on the theme, like the Sig-Sauer rifle that mowed down over 100 people inside Orlando’s Pulse nightclub.
The SIG-SAUER rifle mowed down 100 people all on its own? Of course not. The gun would have been inert if an Islamic terrorist hadn’t pulled the trigger. A lot. [Note: never attribute to sloppy writing that which is adequately explained by paid propaganda.]
Wait a minute! Nobody’s going to quarrel with the idea that President Kennedy was shot with a military gun; Oswald, after all, was a trained Marine Corps marksman, which meant he probably learned to shoot with a Springfield, bolt-action 1903 rifle, a gun that was similar in design and function to the gun he took into the Book Depository in order to carry out his assault.
But the AR-15 is a ‘sporting’ rifle, according to the NRA and the NSSF. It doesn’t have any military application at all. Those unfortunate Dallas cops weren’t shot with a military weapon, they were shot with a gun that is no more dangerous than any other rifle that you can find for sale in in any gun shop and can be purchased by anyone whose ownership of a gun is approved by a call to FBI-NICS.
Straw man much?
Mr. Weisser says the NRA and NSSF claim that modern sporting rifles “don’t have any military application at all.” No, they claim that the MSRs are not the same guns used by U.S. troops. All guns have “military applications.” They are, after all, guns. Mr. Weisser knows this.
As for Mr. Weisser’s sarcastic assertion that the NRA and NSSF would say the Dallas murder weapon was “no more dangerous than any other rifle that you can find for sale in in any gun shop,” well, they didn’t say it.
Why would they? All guns are dangerous. Depending on the “application,” a shotgun or long-range rifle would be far more “dangerous” than an AR-style rifle.
Mr. Weisser knows this, too. And chose to ignore it in that “ends justify the means” way of his fellow Progressives.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Gun-nut Nation gets past this one, if only because it’s one thing if a ‘street thug’ shoots another ‘street thug,’ it’s another thing if five police officers were killed and seven others, cops and civilians, were wounded by a guy walking around with a ‘sporting’ gun. And remember that Texas is an open-carry state; in fact, there was one guy walking in the parade who had an AR-15 slung over his back; fat lot of good he did when the shooting broke out.
“Gun-nut Nation”? That’s not very nice from a guy who calls himself “The Gun Guy.” But it must make his HuffPo editors smile, conforming as it does with their view of American gun owners as Bible-clinging mental defectives.
As a proud member of GNN, I can “get past” killer Micah X. Johnson’s use of a “sporting” gun to slaughter five police officers easily enough. I simply refer to President Obama’s comment: “We cannot let the actions of a few define all of us.”
Adam Gopnick had a piece in The New Yorker in which he pointed out that the Dallas assault represented “the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.” The parade route was lined with good guys who had guns, and the result was that five of them ended up dead.
Question: how many more people would have died if the “good guys with guns” hadn’t been on scene? Also, where’s evidence that an assault weapons ban would have prevented the slaughter in Dallas, or anywhere else?
If nothing else, the gruesome twosome should remember the Boston Marathon bombing that left three dead and 264 injured, many grievously.
Clearly, Mr. Weisser and Mr. Gopnik are arguing that only the cops should have guns. As the son of a Jewish Holocaust survivor whose relatives were murdered by their own government, how many people would die if that was the America we lived in?
In fact, preventing that inevitable — yes I said inevitable — outcome of government tyranny is why we have a Constitutional republic, complete with a Second Amendment prohibition on government infringement of Americans’ right to keep and bear arms.
I honestly hope we never have to rely on the “military application” of modern sporting rifles to defend it. But if we do, we do. Props to our “Gun-nut Nation.”