Two-Headed Calf Sighted

Now here is something you don't see every day:

1. An article about guns in the MSM by someone who doesn't like them and doesn't know anything about them,
2. ...that's reasonably fair and not a hit piece,
3. ...and published by CNN.

Perhaps you who are more familiar with firearms than I am (a low bar) can see some factual errors, but I didn't notice any. Basically, a CNN journalist from India, now a U.S. citizen, went to the recent NRA convention in Atlanta to investigate America's "love affair" with guns.

When I said the author didn't like guns, perhaps it is more accurate to say that she that doesn't understand them, and has no clue why anyone would want to own them -- which she freely admits up front.

But at the NRA convention, she got schooled:

My eyes open wide inside the vast and cavernous Georgia World Congress Center. I take in countless exhibits by the firearms industry and even check out a few guns. Among them are the Mossberg Blaze .22 semiautomatic Rimfire Rifle and an FN 509 semi-automatic 9mm pistol.

So she went around talking to people. And she didn't appear to be looking for the dumbest pull-quotes she could get from the dumbest people she could find, but rather let a variety of convention attenders speak for themselves.

One guy gave her a bit of a history lesson:

"George Washington's army fought off the British with rifles," he says. "They overthrew an oppressive government."

His statement gives me pause. The gun laws in India stem from colonial rule, when the British aimed to quell their subjects by disarming them. Perhaps my Indian compatriots should consider the right to own guns from this perspective.

Later, she spoke with Brooke Clark, who operates the American Gun Chic YouTube channel, and asked her, "what would you tell my friends in India who say Americans are infatuated with guns?"

"I wouldn't say Americans have an obsession with guns," Clark says. "We have an obsession with being free."

Nice answer. The men who founded this country clearly believed that freedom was worth fighting for. Which I think sets them apart from most humans who have ever lived. Most people don't like to fight. Most people would rather suffer under the most oppressive tyranny because however bad it is, in their minds, fighting for their freedom would be worse.

Further:

I ask what the Second Amendment means to her.

"It means I can live my life without anyone overpowering me," she says. "It makes me equal with everyone else."

The great equalizer. I never thought of the Second Amendment in that way.

That ought to have made her head spin a bit. All the talk the left does about wanting to empower minorities and women? Well, the 2nd amendment does precisely that -- and they're against it!

Why? Because the 2A provides an individual solution, by being a tool for individual freedom. Progressives, being rat bastard commies, do not want individual solutions, but rather rat bastard commie solutions, which always results in the boot of government enforcement being brought down. Happy are they who bring it down and woe to those to whom it is brought down on. Of course, progressives think that they will always be the former, and never the latter.

Also, progressives really don't want women and minorities to be individually empowered. Because if they are, they won't be dependent upon progressives to take care of them, they'll be able to take care of themselves. I don't expect the author of this article to understand this; I think it will take her some time to get there.

I leave the convention trying to reconcile what I've gathered on this day with the philosophy of nonviolence with which I was raised. I am not certain that vast cultural differences can be bridged in a few hours, but I am glad I got a glimpse into the world of guns. I have much to consider.

So she probably still doesn't like firearms much, but I think maybe she at least now understands why ordinary American citizens believe they ought to be able to own them. And hopefully, this means there will be one less MSM reporter blabbering nonsense about them.

Which is a good thing.

posted by OregonMuse at 06:17 PM

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