According to Casey Jones of The Salt Lake Tribune Guns don’t shoot people
The other side of the issue, As always your comments are very welcome!
I’ve lived in West Virginia, home of the Hatfields and McCoys, where gunliness is next to godliness.
And I’ve lived in South Carolina, the Itchy-Trigger-Finger State, which fired the first shots in the War of Northern Aggression.
And I grew up in the part of Pennsylvania where gun racks are standard equipment in F-150s, where deer are what’s for dinner, and where anything less than a head shot is considered a miss.
But if you love firearms, you gotta love Utahns, you weapon-worshiping, pistol-packing son-of-a-guns. I’ve never seen the like. There are so many firearms outlets in Utah that all of the good names are gone, hence, Fuzzy Bunny Movie Guns in Draper.
Utahns take gun rights, and ownership, seriously. Afraid that the obama administration would restrict their right to purchase firearms, they launched a frontal assault on the gun shops, purchasing 20,908 weapons last November alone, nearly twice as many as in November 2007.
Some shops sold out of assault rifles. Ammo was in short supply. And there wasn’t a “Beware of Owner” sign left to be had.
But even here, there are people who believe there should be limits on our constitutional right to be a one-man army; who deny the simple fact that if you ban public ownership of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, only the bad guys will have rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
For the love of Charlton Heston, what is wrong with these people? And what will they do the day state Rep. Carl Wimmer, R-Herriman, the founder of the pro-gun Patrick Henry Caucus, mounts his steed and rides through the valley crying “The Koreans are coming. The Koreans are coming”?
The true gun nuts are the ones who refuse to recognize the important role that guns play in society — primarily deterrence, but if that fails, second-strike capability.
Guns are part of our history, and our heritage. We Americans have been shooting ourselves and others for more than 200 years. It’s our God-given and constitutionally driven right to go around locked and loaded, or even half-cocked.
But many among us are unclear about the right to bear arms. Some think it entitles them to wear sleeveless shirts. Others think it limits ownership to guns sufficient for shooting “bars” — not the watering holes the state Legislature loathes; rather, the kind Davey Crockett kilt when he was only 3. But gun-rights advocates know what the founders had in mind.
The Second Amendment entitles you to own weapons of all shapes and sizes, from pistols, shotguns, carbines and assault rifles to M1A2 tanks and F-16 Falcons.
And I’ve exercised that right. I’ve got a shotgun and a rifle, which I take for the occasional walk in the woods.
But unlike my grandfather, who hunted the gophers that raided his garden with a heart-felt hatred, I have never fired a gun in anger, or, as he would have described it, in self-defense. And I never will.
I’m not at all interested in having a gun pried from my cold, dead fingers after finishing second in a shootout. In my opinion, the best way to protect yourself from harm is to hand over your wallet and run like hell, or hide under the covers and let the burglars take what they want.
But I do want to keep my hunting rifle. That’s why I always tell the liberals: “Remember, guns don’t shoot people. Dick Cheney does.”
