The following blog link was forwarded to me. I was very impressed.
I quote the entire article below, but visit the URL, as there's hyperlinks I didn't recreate here.
I post this as furtherance to my ongoing claims that "Liberals" are "getting it" at least when it comes to guns.
Yesterday morning Redskins football player Sean Taylor was shot by a burglar trying to break into his Miami home in the early morning hours.
All day yesterday, Taylor was in critical condition and the situation was the talk of the town here in Washington, D.C. where guns are already an ongoing topic of conversation thanks to the U.S. Supreme Courts decision to review the 31-year old D.C. handgun ban.
We are going to hear a lot about guns in the next few months and most of it will be "sound and fury signifying nothing."
The simple truth is that guns are here to stay, like it or not.
And, as shocking a piece of news as this is to some people, guns are not all about hunting; self-defense is (on very rare occasions) an acceptable reason to draw and fire a gun.
The odd thing about guns in the debate about Presidential candidates is that there is not much any presidential candidate can do (or should do) about them.
After all, Congress makes the laws, and the Courts interpret them. A President has no role in changing or interpreting the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We are not a monarchy, and no one is electing Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney king.
That said, the gun debate will be fought, so as we enter the debate season, lets review the numbers and the history.
First the numbers.
More than 70 million responsible tax-paying citizens own more than 200 million guns in this country.
That's 70 million gun owners, as compared to only 41 million voters.
In short, guns are more popular than democracy.
Let me make these numbers a little more meaningful: If you stand in front of your house and look at the house to the immediate left and right, there's an almost 100% chance that one of these three abodes has at least one gun inside.
And yet, for all that, I am willing to bet that no one was shot on your block this week, this year, or in your lifetime.
The biggest caucus on Capitol Hill is the Congressional Sportsmen's Caucus with 300 members in 46 states. These folks represent the interests of Americas hunters and anglers, and this is the most important environmental caucus on Capitol Hill. And, for the record, they are almost all strong supporters of the Second Amendment
More than a few members of the U.S. Supreme Court are hunters and gun owners, as are a tremendous number of lower-court judges. In fact, it's estimated in judicial newsletters that up to 25 percent of all judges in some states have a concealed weapons permit.
Judges may look down their nose at crime, but a lot of them also look down the barrel of a gun once in a while, and self-protection arguments for gun ownership do not necessarily fall on deaf ears in court.
While guns are intrinsically dangerous, people know that and, for the most part, act accordingly.
Over the last four decades, while the stock of civilian firearms rose 262 percent (largely due to population growth), fatal gun accidents dropped by nearly 70 percent.
In short, contrary to popular belief, there is not an "epidemic" of gun violence in America; there is merely an epidemic of political grandstanding, saturation media, and direct mail.
Which is not to say the gun violence does not exist. It does. People are shot everyday in this country, as Sean Taylor and his family can confirm.
But people die of bee stings every day as well. The simple fact of the matter is that more people drown in backyard swimming pools than are killed by accidental gun deaths in this country. Yet we do not have a full-court press to ban backyard pools, do we?
So many Americans have been conditioned to see guns as something more than the inanimate objects that they are.
People do not see cars as evil, even though cars kill far more people than guns.
Swimming pools are not seen evil, but more kids drown in swimming pools than are killed by guns.
Tobacco is seen as a vice, but it is still sold in grocery and convenience stores despite the fact that it kills more than 500,000 people a year.
Alcohol is involved in more crime than guns, and it directly kills more than 100,000 Americans a year, but we still serve it on airplanes and at baseball games.
Guns -- and guns alone -- are considered inherently evil and sinister.
Each to his own, of course. If people want to demonize guns, there's not much you can do about it. Some people demonize wolves, bears and snakes as well. Others demonize religious or racial groups.
And yet, are we not Americans? The Ku Klux Klansman, the ACLU-card holder, the communist, the Gay Pride activist, the militant feminist, the vegan, the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, the black Baptist minister, the union-card boiler maker, and the retired Colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps all may differ from each other in terms of race, religion, and politics, but they all believe in the First Amendment.
You do not need to be Mormon to respect the concept of separation of Church and State, nor do you have to be a hate-spewing Klansman to value free speech.
By the same token, you do not have to own guns or even like guns to respect the Second Amendment.
What were our Founding Fathers thinking when they wrote the Second Amendment?
Well, they were not engaged in narrow partisan politics. They were not posturing for Fox News or trying to make nice to soccer moms.
These were serious men who came fresh from the white-hot forge of revolution. A war had just been fought to overthrow the yoke of an oppressive and unresponsive Government that invaded homes without warrant and which exposed the populace to "dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within."
In short, while it was a bit hotter back then, the issues we face today are not so completely different.
http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2007/11/liberal-case-for-gun-ownership.html
