Gun Bigots.

I've mentioned before that I occasionally pick up a copy of Tucson's “Alternative” newspaper - the Tucson Weekly – just so I can keep an eye on what the “other side” is up to. I've got to say that they do a pretty fair job of putting the screws to the politicians – on BOTH sides - but the overall bent is intensely Leftist in nature, and that goes for guns and gun control in a big way.

Last week's issue is no exception. Regular opinion columnist Renée Downing has once again exposed her caring, inclusive, understanding Leftist self in a piece entitled God bless the NRA and its efforts to keep us fully armed! Let us fisk:

Guns. How we love 'em.

The National Rifle Association recently called for a nationwide boycott of ConocoPhillips after the oil company joined a lawsuit to block an Oklahoma law that allows employees to leave guns in their vehicles (read: "trucks") in their employers' parking lots. ConocoPhillips contends that it has the right to forbid workers to bring guns onto company property; the NRA naturally sees this as an infringement of every truck's God-given right to be fully armed at all times.

The weaselly old company spokespeople are pretending this is a safety issue, not thinking for one minute about what it would be like to be a roughneck at the mercy of, say, a pack of ravening wolves, should one appear in the parking lot of a ConocoPhillips refinery. Hey, it could happen.

Fortunately for potential ravening victims everywhere, ubiquitous NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre (his real name) has jumped right on it, and is not only organizing a boycott--which has got to hurt, because who ever heard of a manly gun-toter driving anything that gets more than 12 miles to the gallon?--but is also threatening to put up billboards all over Houston identifying the oil company as an enemy of our precious Second Amendment rights.

So, right off the bat, ALL gun owners drive gas-guzzling trucks! I guess I can assume that Ms. Downing eats granola, wears Birkenstocks, and (if she drives) drives a Volvo? (I’d have said ‘drives a hybrid’ but she writes for the Weekly so I doubt seriously she could afford one.)

I think she’s being insensitive.

Yes, just like that Brady woman whining about her brain-damaged husband--a little thing like that, and she goes wacko--and those hundreds of girlie-man police chiefs begging for an extension on the assault-weapons ban, ConocoPhillips has become a tool of a worldwide, New York-based leftist pacifist conspiracy that would like nothing better than to take away our armor-piercing bullets, leaving blameless recreational hunters defenseless against ravening herds of vengeful deer or, even worse, Mexicans.

Whoo! How much anti-gun/anti-gun-owner propaganda can you pack into one sentence?? I'm in awe! (Well, not really awe. Awe doesn't usually make me nauseous.)

Here in Arizona, normally a bastion of redneck rights, things are getting to be just as bad. This year, the Legislature tried valiantly to get a bill through that would have permitted people to carry guns into bars, because, honestly, where would you be more likely to need one? As NRA lobbyist Darren LaSorte (his real name) explained to the Arizona Daily Star, "These places are not immune from violence," and with guns at hand, people would have a chance to defend themselves. How could anyone possibly argue with that? You somehow find yourself in a rowdy bar full of aggressive, drunken jerks and unthinkingly hang out there for a few hours, and what do you want to bet something would happen that would call for your plugging a fellow patron at close range? Especially if you have some half-assed Frenchy name like LaSorte or LaPierre, which has apparently distorted your personality to such an extent that you're the kind of guy who works for the NRA. All you'd have to do is introduce yourself, and bam!, the next thing you know, you'd have to shoot somebody.

Isn't "redneck" a racial epithet? I thought Leftists cared about people, and hated racist insults! How wrong I was! My psyche is bruised!

Can I sue for mental anguish?

Unfortunately, 78 percent of the population of this poor, benighted state thought that the guns in bars thing sounded like a bad idea, and the bill was, so to speak, shot down. Still, there's no rule against guns in bar parking lots, so you can step out and settle your business right outside on the blacktop. That's America.

Yes it is, Ms. Downing. And glad I am of it. If it offends you, more the better.

To many people, the NRA's single-minded drive to have more guns, bigger guns and better guns in more places seems, well, perverse. Why is it so important, these liberals mewl, to have a firearm in your pants at all times? I mean, what's with that? Is it something to do with being middle-aged and fat and badly educated and basically scared and walking around with a huge socio-economic chip on your shoulder?

No, no, no. That's just what it looks like.

Whoa! More stereotyping! Well, let's see: I'm middle aged – check. I'm fat – check. I have a college degree from the U of A – well we can debate that one, but in my opinion she missed. "Basically scared and walking around with a huge socio-economic chip on your shoulder"? Excuse me? What, exactly does that mean? I suppose my bad edumacation don't allow me to grasp them subtle nuances.

The truth is that NRA members, including their various local subsets like the Minutemen and Ranch Rescue (motto: Let's go out and find something to do with our guns!) have grasped a basic truth: Guns and other forms of explosive weaponry make life better. You know, like electricity or aspirin.

Just stop and think about it. Without gunpowder and plastique and napalm and plutonium, what would life on Earth be like? Like some big Berkeley, Calif., that's what. Just imagine the sheer human suffering of a world where trauma surgeons and artificial-limb makers would be marginally employed, where coffin suppliers to the armed forces would go out of business, where florists in the inner cities would be forced to scale back, and patients waiting for young, healthy organs would come to depend completely on motorcycle accidents. A world in which we still associated Baghdad with Aladdin and high-quality carpets.

I don't know about you, but an America in which natural selection ceased to operate among the small children of gun enthusiasts isn't one I'd ever want to see. God bless the NRA.

Let me see...

When we didn’t have plastique and napalm and plutonium we had things like, oh, the Thirty-Years War in which wiped out about 20% of the population of Europe. They had gunpowder, though. Before gunpowder, however, people still killed people, wholesale and retail. I suppose she's never heard of Genghis (that's apparently pronounced "Jenjis") Khan? The Greeks? The Romans? The destruction of Carthage?

The world hardly resembled Berzerkly. Doctors got to watch people die of knife and sword wounds, blunt-force trauma, epidemic disease and starvation, not to mention childbirth. Utopia it was not. Before gunpowder the world was run by large men with bladed weapons, and it was most definitely not free, fair, or democratic. Especially for women. (See Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them for more on this topic.)

Ms. Downing repeats multiple erroneous ideas as fact: that disarming the law-abiding somehow makes us “safer;” that people who are willing to be armed in defense of themselves and others are ignorant, stupid, racist and violent; that we can somehow make all the guns go away and utopia will result; and more, and she does it all with sneering insults as though from a vastly superior intellect.

Joe Huffman had an excellent quote up the other day from Don Kates:

The gun control debate is not really about criminology but rather about bigotry.

Renée Downing illustrates this nicely, doesn't she? God bless the Leftists.

UPDATE: I sent another Letter to the Editor. We'll see if they publish this one.