A ‘Lynch’-pin of the Gun Lobby
Despite the massacre of 33 lives on the Virginia Tech campus last week, the gun nuts went ahead with their "we love gun violence" rally on the steps of the state capitol on Tuesday and managed, somehow, to go beyond the usual standard of nutball embarrassment to the kind of wet, sticky embarrassment one can only find after attending a Neo-Nazi march or a "Mothers For Britney Spears" meeting.
A couple of brain surgeons held up a sign suggesting State Rep. Angel Cruz should be "lynched from the tree of liberty" for daring to introduce a gun registration bill.
My own take of the racial biases of the pro-gun types can be found here, but the short form is this: the people who support gun rights, particularly in Pennsylvania babble about freedom, but in fact support genocide. The fact is this: if you are black, you are more likely to be shot and killed in Pennsylvania than any other state. C’mon, folks, Mississippi is appalled about how racist we are here in the Keystone state.
But for the sake of this piece, on this site, let’s skip over the minor genocide thing.
Let’s talk about freedom, shall we?
The hypocrites in the state legislature who are pandering on this issue, Bill DeWeese, I am so looking at you, want to protect the freedom of gun owners by keeping them anonymous. However, they won’t protect the freedom of a 16-year-old girl, who was merely walking down the street last night when she was shot to death. They won’t protect the freedom of Philadelphia to pass its own gun laws. Someone else, odds are, will die today in Philadelphia, from a gun. Their right to life, it seems, is inferior to that of gun owners.
That’s some form of freedom we have here. I have the right to run down to my local merchant of death, Targetmasters, and buy a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol. A family in West Philadelphia gets the freedom to mourn the loss of an innocent teenage girl.
Some deal.