I found this posted on www.wethearmed.com yesterday, and because it is from a local University paper, I couldn’t resist a good fisking. Italics are from the original article. I’m not sure if this was a staff editorial, or just somebody who wrote in. If the former, that was pathetic, save your parent’s money and drop out of school. If it was the later, I’m guessing it was written in crayon on the back of a placemat from Denny’s.
Guns shouldn’t be recreational
Emily Rodriguez-Vargas
We all have our own views on gun control and the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms.”
I like how “right to bear arms” is in quotes. That’s to clarify that pesky Second Amendment from its alternate titles, like… um… well, you know… those other titles. I usually use quotes in an editorial to point out absurdities. Like calling Emily Rodriguez-Vargas “truthful”.
Many people exercise this right and believe that because of it, they are able to do whatever they want, even if it means storing deadly weapons in a house of curious, naïve children.
My kids are rather intelligent, and I’ve taught them to use guns safely. If your kids are naïve, you might want to take a real hard look at who’s teaching them about life. And Mrs. Rodriguez-Vargas, you might want to also study the extremely long list of other household products that you possess that are far more deadly to your kids, like 5-gallon buckets and bathtubs.
Although we have the right to own a gun, it can invite tragic consequences.
Yes, and it usually involves stupidity, like just about every other thing in life with tragic consequences. Not having a gun never causes any problems, because a little thing like getting raped repeatedly and then bludgeoned until the responding paramedics openly weep when they see the victim’s crushed face. Heaven forbid that something tragic happens, like the victim shoots the rapist or something…
Shooting is the most popular seasonal sport in the United States
. Utah’s recreational shooting numbers lie at 14.9 percent, with Idaho’s average at 18.9 percent, according to a June 2007 press release by the National Shooting Sports Foundation. These results are more than twice the national average. In addition, a 2006 NSSF survey found approximately 50 million Americans said they had been shooting with a rifle within the past two years.
Totally unacceptable… Idaho is beating us by 4%.
If shooting is what keeps us entertained, then guns are needed less for self-protection and to provide food than just for fun.
That’s kind of idiotic if you think about it. Just because something has one use, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have any other uses. Sex just isn’t for making babies either.
Besides, if my gun is to be useful for self-defense, that means I need to actually practice with it. You can take a karate class, but unless you train, you’re less than useless. Just don’t have fun doing it, because you might offend Emily Rodriguez-Vargas.
This type of hobby is an excuse to feed our aggressive side and to train our mind to accept this use of weapons not out of necessity, but for the thrill it provides.
And I drive my car to work around 75 miles an hour. For some odd reason, even if I watched Nascar, I don’t do 200 miles an hour on I-15. (well, at least very often).
Let me digress for a moment. A lot of people in our society today have a very negative attitude about aggression. Aggression can be a very positive trait in some circumstances. Don’t believe me? When somebody decides to victimize you, and the cops aren’t anywhere around, try giving them a hug and understanding their childhood. When he gets done strangling you with your own pantyhose, let me know how that turned out for you.
If you are being assaulted you had better reach deep down inside and find your aggressive inner-caveman, or you’re going to scream and run and get eaten. I see this all the time when I’m teaching self-defense. Some people have no aggressive bone in their body, and their verbal challenge to an attacker is some variation of “please Mr. Rapist, don’t make me hurt you,” in a very meek tone of voice. Oh, that’s gonna work awesome.
Aggression is a positive trait in soldiers, athletes, marketing people, business leaders, and your lawyer. (not the other guy’s though, then it’s bad) Like all personality traits, it has its place and is just another handy tool when used in moderation.
Violent video games are prevalent.
Wow, that was out of left field. It is like she’s got this big article about nuclear physics, and then puts in a single line like “I like squirrels.”
Now I have multiple reasons to laugh at Emily Rodriguez-Vargas. I’ve got a house full of guns, friends with houses full of guns, and the training to go on a rampage that would make the Mumbai shooters look like the Girl Scouts selling Thin Mints. I also play violent video games, like just about every other U.S.
male in my generation. (and for the record, Call Of Duty 5 is a LOUSY trainer for actual fighting, though I’ll rock your world with an FG42 and my pack of vicious Nazi Assault-Hounds)
Even children are given fake guns as toys.
I’m taking it that Ms. Rodriguez-Vargas doesn’t have any boys. You can give a 2 year old boy a Barbie doll, and he’ll bend it in half to make a gun. Before guns were invented, little boys took sticks and made guns. Medieval parents were all like “What’s little Skwisgar doing with that stick?” “I don’t know, Helmut, now quit yapping and help throw these plague bodies on the cart.”
Little boys that don’t make fake guns, clubs, or swords get beat up and have their lunch money taken. That is Darwinian evolution. Later on in life these kids get jobs as “journalists” or “Democrat Congressmen”.
Guns, loaded and empty, are kept in homes everywhere. According to a Sept. 23 report by the National Rifle Association, more than 250 million privately-owned firearms exist in the United States, with the number increasing by 4.5 million each year.
Man! Got that one beat this year! I can’t wait to see the Obamathon 2008 National Gun Sales results. I personally sold 4.5 million AR-15s on Thursday… Approximately.
That is almost one gun for every person in the United States.
I can cover for my cul-de-sac if any of my neighbors are slacking.
This doesn’t bode well for other statistics. The Canadian Coalition for Gun Control, for example, reports that in 2007, Canada had 188 firearm homicides while the United States
had 10,086.
If we want to compare Apples to Apples, let’s take the states that are most like Canada with roughly the same population and compare. Take the justified homicides, suicides, shootings of criminals by police, and illegal aliens out of the equation, and I’d still take Idaho over Alberta.
Plus, like all socialist paradises, Canada loves to cook the books. Let us pull out our cesspools of Democrat controlled major cities, and the comparison is a whole lot closer. Only my health care isn’t crap. Suck on that, Quebec.
The unbelievable number of weapons available isn’t exactly reassuring. No matter what the reason for owning a gun, it’s more of a danger than an actual protection. The National Center for Victims of Crime provides a study that found the likelihood is 40 times greater that a gun will be used against a member of one’s own family than to prevent a crime if it is kept in the home, whether it is committed out of rage or by mistake. The study also found that once every six hours, an individual between the ages of 10 and 19 will commit suicide by way of a gun.
That 40 times number has been dismissed as statistically false on a bunch of web gun forums or by anybody with the ability to do basic math. It has become something of a running joke in the gun community. No matter how many times I repeat something that is wrong, it doesn’t make it a fact… Pay attention, Al Gore!
Now to prevent mistakes, people who buy guns should come take classes from people like me. But that might be fun, and Ms. Rodriguez-Vargas already pointed out how bad that might be!
And for suicide, this may sound heartless, but somebody else’s inability to deal with life shouldn’t cause a penalty on anybody else’s freedom. I’m sure the disarmed residents of Chicago take pride in the fact that the guns they aren’t allowed to own aren’t being used for suicides when they’re being robbed and having their faces kicked in by the local hooliganry and the police are too busy collecting bribe money for their governor’s office or sodomizing prisoners with broom handles to respond. (wait, was that CPD or NYPD? I get my giant dystopian liberal city-states mixed up)
And it isn’t like somebody can’t off themselves with a knife, drugs, alcohol, tall buildings, rope, traffic, water, fire, or my personal favorite, taping 200 Twinkies to your body and walking onto the set of the Biggest Loser. Guns are just more efficient. Which is why they’re also the #1 choice for shooting bad people. Twinkies on the other hand… not so much, but they’re so very delicious.
On the one hand, very few people are actually planning a shooting.
Except for the bad people that are planning shootings right this minute. And when it inevitably goes down, people like you become awfully glad when people like me are around. Otherwise you just like to bitch and whine about us.
We haven’t had any problems with this at the U, and one hopes we won’t in the future.
You can hope. I’ll be “aggressive”. I’ve taught $20,000 worth of free Utah Concealed Carry classes to college students and faculty for when a problem does occur. So I’ve evened the odds for you a bit. I’ll be eagerly awaiting your thank-you card.
The offer still stands. I’ll teach the Utah CCW class for FREE to any student, faculty, or staff of any Utah college or university.
Life is a one-chance game without start-over buttons or multiple lives. People who aren’t responsible enough to have someone else’s life in their hands should be as far away from lethal weapons as possible.
Well, we agree with something. Except I think we should extend that idea to things like voting.
When shooting clay pigeons, deer in the hunting season or anything else, not only does a potential deadly threat exist if something goes wrong, but embracing shooting as enjoyment can be harmful and destructive behavior as well.
You had a giant essay to explain the destructive part, but I must have missed it. But then again, I’m not a trained “journalist”. I’d rather get a case of Twinkies and a roll of duct tape and end it all than be a journalist.
Although a stricter control of guns in Utah would be ideal,
Says who?
what is even more important is the education of students and citizens on gun responsibility and an awareness
I’ve pretty much devoted thousands of hours of my life to that. Check. I’m sure you’ll show up to volunteer your time at the range to help me. The stuff I teach saves lives. The stuff you “teach” is just rebranded hoplophobic claptrap.
that even recreational use of weapons train their minds to love this type of violence.
That was obviously spoken by somebody who’s never seen real violence. Shooting a clay pigeon out of the air or knocking a pop can off a fence with a .22 isn’t violence.
Real violence is hiding under your desk at Virginia Tech while a lunatic slaughters everyone around you, but you can’t do a thing about it because people like YOU, Ms. Rodriguez-Vargas, were made “uncomfortable” by the very notion that people be allowed to have firearms.
Real violence is what evil men are prepared to inflict on you and your family at the drop of the hat because of convenience, or bad luck, or just because the voices in his head told him to swallow your soul. He doesn’t give a shit how you feel about violence, because he’s really damn good at it.
If we accept shooting objects for pleasure, and don’t realize it has consequences, we might have an even larger problem in the near future.
Yeah, and since we’ve been shooting stuff for pleasure for about 500 years, I’ll be waiting for the larger problem… Hey, wait a second. I lived in one of the most crime-ridden inner-cities in America. Ironically enough, none of the gang banger scumbags ever went to the range for a round of sporting clays. Gee whiz, maybe we should check and see what percentage of those 10,000 some odd shootings were committed by people like me, or members of the gun culture that engage in recreational shooting…
Which brings us to the ugly little secret of the Canada vs. US comparison above that no liberal likes to talk about. Pull the homicides out of the mix from the inner-city and poor minority on minority violence, and we’re far SAFER than Canada. So explain to me, Ms. Rodriguez-Vargas, why you’re so fixated on taking guns from people in flyover country, but you won’t address the violence in Democrat controlled/high gun-control areas?
Does that not fit your agenda?
Instead of using mechanized forms of destruction for recreational purposes, more peaceful hobbies can be found.
Like yoga. Or pilates. Or yogalates. (tip of the hat to Jack Brooks)
As President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
I call shenanigans. Quote out of context. Flag on the play. Five yard penalty. If you’re trying to make a point on the badness of violence, you might not want to use the Supreme Allied Commander of the European Theater. Eisenhower was talking about the military-industrial complex, having just come out of the largest war in history, when our entire nation was devoted to building the weapons of war and then using them to kill a mess of Germans.
You want to start quoting presidents? How about I bust out every single one of the founding fathers, and all of them up until that sack of crap, Wilson
? I see your Eisenhower and raise you Thomas Jefferson:
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walk.
— Thomas Jefferson, Foley, ed., Encyclopedia of Thomas Jefferson, p. 318.
That sound you hear is me laughing at your pathetic letter.
The once-high values of America are found in the gun-loving hands of individuals seeking not to combat real problems such as war, crime and poverty, but to exercise their freedom to the fullest extent for recreation.
Damn, I’m surprised you didn’t tack global warming on there too. Guns also don’t cure cancer, one more reason to ban them. You try combating war and crime with good feelings and let me know how that works out for you. In the meantime, I’ll be having “recreation” with my guns, which also teach me how to use them as effective tools for self-defense and survival. Ironically, when war and crime show up, people like you always call people like me.
It is no surprise that although we preach peace in our own neighborhoods, we rank among the most homicide-prone nations.
Lady, you need to travel more. How many regular people engage in recreational shooting in Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Sudan, or the slums of Durban, Rio, or Mexico City? Unless you count the various warlords, slavers, and drug runners executing villagers as “recreation”, the percentage isn’t that high.
letters@chronicle.utah.edu (note, they do accept submissions in Crayon)
That letter was even more painful to fisk than most of the nonsense that I run into. What is it with gun haters and their inability to make a point? They jump around, throwing lots of crap on the screen, hoping something sticks.
I think her point was that if you use guns for fun, you don’t have the right to use them for anything else. Shooting clay pigeons leads to violence, which leads to playing World Of Warcraft, which leads to more violence, which leads to the Demon Rum, which leads to Reefer Madness, or something. That is so patently retarded that I’m embarrassed for the newspaper that printed it.
