Don's Tuesday column (sorry, 2 days late, enjoy)

      THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   5/07/2013

The good, bad, truly ugly in gun battle

As the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Houston closed, with attendance exceeding 70,000 (average attendance prior to President Obama’s election was around 50,000; since 2009, up to 80,000), conservatives, gun owners and all citizens who care deeply about the supremacy and inviolability of our 2^nd Amendment—take heart. The motto of the gathering was “Stand and Fight”; the organizational attitude is to give not one iota on our God-given rights and freedoms; and the new president, James Porter, is “a hard-line culture warrior who has worked for decades to make the NRA a more aggressive political force. The election of James Porter … is one of many defiant signals to come out of the [meeting, together with a vow] to continue to fight any compromise on gun-control legislation …” (USA TODAY, 5/06)

 “Porter said, ‘Revenge is what’s motivating the president’s unrelenting attacks on gun owners today. Millions of Americans are becoming first-time gun owners. The media calls it fear. That’s not it. It’s a sense of natural outrage that’s been building for quite some time.’ Porter, a lawyer from Birmingham, Ala., who defends gun manufacturers, has been building that outrage his whole life.” NRA membership has grown to a record 5 million, which includes my personal, and proud, extended membership. By the way, one of the multiple prongs the left has doggedly pursued against guns has been to wage “law-fare” against gun manufacturers; Porter’s fight on the judicial battleground makes him a hero in my book.

It has little to do with reasonable-sounding universal background checks, which serve zero purpose while the existing National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) continues to lack referrals of the mentally unstable and dangerous among us. Even the ACLU, no pro-gun shill, has concerns; look up “ACLU says Reid’s gun legislation could threaten privacy rights, civil liberties” (DailyCaller.com, 4/04/2013).

This is a personal grudge match for Obama, infuriated that an ideological opponent won’t be beaten into submission. The (Saul) Alinsky-ite in him compels a Captain Ahab-like obsession over, in this case, the great white whale of resolute gun owners and their unintimidated organizations. He knows darn well that nothing in proposed legislation or executive actions will solve the core causes of violence, let alone gun violence—that being cultural decline and degradation found in entertainment, public education and single-parent households resulting from licentious moral relativism.

I condemn no single mother doing her best while lacking a father that’s abandoned her and her child; he is equally responsible for a child’s moral direction. It’s a fact that the worst gun/gang violence plagues urban cesspools with fatherless, welfare-dependant homes and abysmal schools. The late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan raised warnings in the 1960s over 30 percent illegitimacy in minority communities; it’s now over 70 percent.

With Obama, a nation full of leftist Democrats, and the branches of state and federal government under their sway, it is all about grinding down their political enemies with just one compromise to slowly break their will. When that or another measure inevitably fails to prevent the next atrocity, just repeat the cycle until the ultimate goal is achieved: disarming Americans. These political thugs are nothing if not patient; they kept coming back for more of their redistributionist, collectivist master plan, including nationalized health care, for a century.

The ugliest side of the debate was clinched on April 25 by Dave Perry, Aurora (CO) Sentinel editor, in a column, “We Can Only Save Ourselves From Kidnappers at the NRA—I’m talking about the real terrorist threat here in America: the National Rifle Association.” He cited editorial opinions in Dallas, Orlando and Kansas City condemning the defeat of any “anti-gun” (Harry Reid’s words) bills or amendments in the U.S. Senate. Perry then mounted the greatest moral horse he could find, exuded the highest dudgeon imaginable and provided his readers with his erudite prognosis for dealing with those pesky gun nuts (cue the diatribe, not the debate):

“[It’s] fruitless to give the benefit of the doubt to people who are so obviously corrupt, so clearly malevolent, so bent on hurting innocent people for their own sick gain. No more due process in the clear-cut case of insidious terrorism. When the facts are so clearly before all Americans … why bother with this country’s odious and cumbersome system of justice? Send the guilty monsters directly to Guantanamo Bay for all eternity and let them rot in their own mental squalor. No, no, no. Not the wannabe sick kid who blew up the Boston marathon … I’m talking about the real terrorist threat here in America: the National Rifle Association.”

Readers, this is not a parody by some phony Internet blogger; nor is it a right wing talk host engaged in a sick caricature of leftist journalism. An editor of a major urban newspaper is so far into virtual-foaming-mouth, wild-gesticulating, Occupy-crowd-cheering over his unfiltered desire for his fellow citizens to be involuntarily consigned to punishment and reeducation camps—it’s simply abhorrent and unimaginably violates all journalistic principles and tenets. If the object of his ire were, say, urban gang members, Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers, shariah law proponents, or homosexual men that have sex with boys, somebody else would pack his box and leave it at the curb. Perry, however, is probably getting emailed, texted or tweeted “Attaboys” from other so-called journalists.