"Gunner" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 07:53:59 -0500, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


Its not the NRA, Ed..its your ilk that is the problem.

No, you're the problem, Gunner. And I mean that sincerely. You, and
people
like you, are the reason there is gun control. And that's because a lot
of
the people in this country just don't trust you. And *that's* because you
posture about guns as if they have no relation to the levels of violent
crime, as if they are irrelevant.

You play a game of "pretend," confusing transparent denial with the
principle of rights. Almost everyone knows you're full of it in that
regard;
some of them are as wacky as you, and go along with your wackiness
because
it supports what they want, too; but a substantial number of people
refuse
to buy into your wackiness. And then they consider the fact that you, and
your wacky ideas, are in possession of guns.

That's the whole genesis of it. The people who are most adamantly for and
against gun control tend to be a little nutty -- clowns to the left,
jokers
to the right. Not that it's nutty to oppose gun control. It's just that
the
nuttiest ones tend to be most adamantly against it.

And thus, you've convinced a significant part of the population that
somebody had better keep some reigns on you and your ilk, and, while
they're
at it, the rest of us gun owners. Thanks a lot.

Ed Huntress


Sorry Ed..your denial is pathetic in its substance. Its not pro-gun
groups attempting to force everyone to own a firearm. Its the anti-gun
groups who are attempting to take them all away, one increment at a
time. Its not the pro-gun groups who cry that tools are evil, spawn of
the devil, and twist and spin the actions of a bad individual into a
condemnation of inanimate objects. Its writers and the media who spew
the "if it bleeds, it leads" propaganda.

Gunner, here's the bottom line. You've fought this battle like a blind man
with a brain hemorrhage. For half of my life I've been on the defending end
of gun rights, and for a couple of years I did it damned near full-time, in
it up to my elbows, working just enough to pay the bills while I met, wrote,
lobbied, and damned near wrecked my life over it.

Having seen these legislative gun battles from the inside, I finally got
close enough to see what the real dynamic is: They set you up, and you play
right into their hands, time after time. You took a situation in which
support for gun rights was *overwhelming* in this country, and you let it
get chiselled away, one piece at a time, until it's now a divisive issue on
which you have to rally your base and fight like hell over every piece of
legislation. You've gone from being mainstream to becoming what looks more
and more like a faction -- a large one, to be sure, but every political
conflict now requires an outright battle. You've squandered more political
capital than Bill Clinton ever did.

The reason, without going into detail, is that your posturing has been
toward *dividing* yourself from the public interest. Of course, you won't
see it that way. That's your blindness. But look at the words and the
positioning used in this battle: It's none of your business. It's my right.
You have no right to question me unless I break the law. I have a right to
arm myself against the government.

You don't hear yourself the way the general public, and the press, and your
antagonists hear you. So you have some people who are on your side, and some
from whom you divide yourself ever more sharply with time. It's you, and
them. Now you need to keep your numbers up or you'll lose the battle. By
catering ever more to the fringes -- the people who want to carry Tec-9s on
city streets and who see nothing wrong with 20-round magazines in the deer
woods -- you push the division further. You're going to wind up completely
on one side of a great divide, with everyone either identifying completely
with you or completely against you.

It didn't used to be that way. Every cause has a fringe of antagonists, but
not every cause so foolishly lets them gain so much ground. Given public
opinion 40 years ago, you should have been able to keep them on the fringes
forever, like the people who want to eliminate cars and replace them all
with public transportation. That cause has a huge general interest keeping
the fringes on the fringe. Your cause did, too...until you squandered it.

So your arguments all sound silly, and worse. And they're all beside the
point. Now you have to keep cultivating the pure vision, keeping yourselves
ideologically pure and absolute, because you'll lose your identity as a
cause if you don't keep the dividing lines clear and sharp. You wind up
defending nutty things like 20-round magazines, for little purpose, and with
the consequence of convincing large numbers of people in this country that
you really have no sense, and that you're losing more of it all the time.

The NRA chose to fight the battle on those terms some time ago. It's one way
to fight a battle. It's the divisive way. The question is, whether they'll
find themselves on the smaller side of the divide one day. It hasn't
happened yet, and it wavers back and forth. But neither winning the day, nor
losing it, is going to justify the fact that you, and they, squandered
widespread public support for the sake of building a cadre of True
Believers.

Ed Huntress