A Cleveland Ohio man is under arrest because he took the "Get off of my lawn" jokes too seriously. When a group of children got on his grass and bumped into his car, he opened fire, hitting one. Thankfully, the little girl is going to be OK, and the moron who allegedly opened fire into a group of LITTLE GIRLS is in police custody. Hopefully he's convicted quickly and has a long timeout to think about what he's done.
I'm absolutely furious with this jerk. First of all, he allegedly shot at a group of pre-teen girls over their presence on his lawn. Now, I don't like it when the neighbor kids use our yard as a playground without permission, but I've never considered opening a can of whoop-ass on them. If he didn't want the kids to be on his lawn or near his car, he should have gone tell them to leave and if they didn't, go talk to their parents.
Second, it's incidents like this that feed the anti-gun crowds. The quickest way for a right to be eroded is for it to be abused and lose support in the general populace. The 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was possible because of all of the inner-city violence that occurred in the 1980's and early 1990's. People stopped seeing AR-15's and AK-47's as tools that responsible people used and saw them as the implements of Mookie and his street corner pharmaceutical enterprise. Same thing goes for the Gun Control Act of 1968. People saw guns as the tools of political assassins, and supported gun control legislation because they were afraid that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were just the tip of the iceberg. In 1934, violent crime was up due to the economic depression, and anti-gun forces were able to get the National Firearms Act of 1934 through at least partly because of John Dillinger and BabyFace Nelson.
My point is that we are all, as gun owners and users, the public face of our sport, hobby, and civil rights movement. It only takes one slip or one dim bulb for us to lose a lot of ground, or possibly to push us off the cliff. I heard someone say recently that all it takes for all of the progress that the SAF has made recently is for one Supreme Court justice to have a heart attack. We need to stop giving the anti-gun people an excuse to attack our rights, and we need to police ourselves.
Those of you who monitor the anti-gun blogs, websites, and Twitter feeds will probably be hearing a lot about this.
3 comments:
That guy seems an awful lot like my neighbors. Why I call them the "Crazy Neighbors."
There's at least one house like that on every street. But normally, they stop at the "Challenge you to a fist fight" stage, as opposed to the indiscriminate shooting phase.
Whenever I hear of some squirrel doing something stupid like what that nut did or have somebody else wave a pistol during a traffic dispute, I cringe. Such crap gives us respectable gun owners a bad name.
Post a Comment