I would like to respond to you by first explaining how I became a “paranoid gun nut.”
As a child of Holocaust survivors, my earliest memories are sitting in the living room of my father’s apartment in the late ‘50s and watching documentaries about Nazi death camps with bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies in to mass graves.
My parents made it clear that there are still many who would love to finish the job (They both had degrees in the psychology of early childhood – just a joke).
At some point, I made a decision, contrary to what our family and the community believed and still does today, that there is no virtue in being a victim. I came to love America (when it was still America), (real) Americans and their gun culture, our constitution, and our second amendment.
I loved the concept of individual freedom above all else. The country has changed, and I despise what it has become.
If a society is to remain free, individuals who abuse their freedoms must be held accountable. Freedom cannot survive a process where any abuse of any freedom triggers a debate to further restrict or abolish that freedom.
“Progressives” claim that it is a humane society that attacks problems, and not people. Apparently, what they see as the problem is the second amendment to our constitution.
As a matter of fact, it appears that given any issue at all, “progressives” see the problem as personal freedom. Gun control is a folly.
The Second Amendment was not about hunting. It was not even about self defense. It was clearly a need that the founding fathers envisioned for the people to comprise an armed militia as a final safeguard against tyranny. An AR15/M4 with a high-cap magazine is the minimum piece of equipment that can fulfill this constitutional requirement.
Registration will empower a despot to immediately seize all privately owned weapons upon seizing power, so it is also contrary to the intent of the second amendment. Is tyranny in a modern civilized nation not a preposterous concern?
I am sure that all my grand parents and their contemporaries would have said yes, just a year before they perished in Auschwitz. Whether you believe that tyranny in America is a possibility or not, that is what our Second Amendment is, and it is still in force as the law of our land, even in New York. As far as the vast majority of crime, “assault rifles” comprise such a small fraction of a percentage of crime as to make it statistically insignificant.
The largest death toll in any mass shooting was Virginia Tech where the madman used two plain old Glocks like the ones carried by most cops. Cuomo has not outlawed those. Not because he does not want to, but I believe he and his minion know that they will have a much tougher time trying to doing that. Rest assured they intend to try.
While I cried along with every other sane person on the day of the Newtown tragedy, we, here in America, are, or at least were, the freest people ever, and this comes at a price. More people are murdered with hammers than with “assault” rifles.
A substantial number of children die every year in swimming pool accidents, but you just don’t hear the left media pushing that agenda every night i.e. “Three more children die in swimming pool accidents today …. When will the government do something?….”.
There are tragedies in life and they all suck.
Schimel, who is obviously is a great expert in firearms, (after some 50 years of studying firearms I did not know that magazines must have capacities in multiples of 1-) will never utter a bad word about career criminals. These mass shootings, as horrible as they are, account for a tiny fraction of a percent of violence, and you are probably more likely to be struck by lightning then to be shot in the mall, or attending classes.
The real violence problem is career criminals being released from prison. But Albany will never attack them. Many of the people passing these laws in Albany, who don’t want you to have a gun, are criminals themselves. What a joke! Another couple of corrections to your piece are in order here. The NRA does not get the majority of its funding from manufacturers, but rather from its 4 million grass roots members like me. Do the math.
By the way, if there could be a bombastic idiocy contest between Wayne and Cuomo, my money is on Cuomo. For a large number of reasons that I do not address here, the “progressives” are winning, and will one day succeed in abolishing the legal ownership of most firearms.
Paranoia? Look at England. That is what happened. You cannot legally own a handgun.
Beyond that, you are not even allowed to use force to defend yourself, and you can be arrested for speech! This will happen here just as soon as the “progressives” get just one more of their political hack frauds on to the Supreme Court, or manage to intimidate one of the present justices sufficiently.
If, beyond that, criminals could be prevented from obtaining a firearm (of course that will never happen, this is hypothesis only.
I recently saw a video of an inmate, in jail, in his jail jump suit displaying an HK USP LOADED IN JAIL!) the carnage would certainly continue with knives, bats, etc.
Cuomo, Schimel, and the “progressive” cabal in Albany will never hold perpetrators of violent crime accountable.
When it is no longer possible to legally obtain a firearm, it will still be everything and everybody else’s fault. The government did not steal enough money from productive people for the government programs that would have given them “a fair shot”, even after there is not enough money in existence to steal, which is right now.
Please let me make a promise to all of you colossal intellects of the left. We will never accept your Amerika and we will fight you fang and claw, every single step of the way. We will teach our children to do this, despite your UFT indoctrinations, and hope that this fight for freedom will go on forever.
Stephen Rose
Manhasset
