Political Comment

I thought I would pass along a link to an article written by Hal Crowther, who I consider to be one of the best (if not the best) essayist working in journalism today. His latest is on our national infatuation with guns, something that continues to mystify and sadden me as much as it does Crowther. I don't have any problem with guns being available for hunting or target shooting; that is, I can appreciate that there are some legitimate and safe reasons why someone might want to own a gun. But I don't believe that adhering to the Constitutional right to bear arms means a mandate to accept that any and all such weapons should be available to everyone all the time. In other words, reasonable regulation is not only warranted, but perfectly consistent with the concept of responsibility that underpins all of the the protections laid out in the Bill of Rights. The NRA's knee jerk rejection of all attempts to monitor and control access to firearms is, to me, blatantly destructive to everyone except the arms manufacturers who presumably fund most of their efforts. I think this quote from Crowther pretty much sums up my position:

"It's not our people who are hopelessly insane. It's our laws. While they were carrying out the corpses in Binghamton, I turned confidently to Fox News for the best writhing and rationalizing. "What can we do?" asked one reporter, with a properly tortured expression. He didn't try to answer—this is called hand-wringing with one hand—because the only obvious, sane answer is "Try to pry some of this terrifying firepower out of the hands of private citizens."