Shooting blanks

Las Vegas shooting

I started this column as a Facebook post. I intended to debunk the myths, lies and fetishistic fantasies liberals have developed about guns and gun rights. A few thousand words into it, it occurred to me that doing so would end up burning more bandwidth than live streaming the next Big Sandy Shoot. What has passed for coverage of Stephen Paddock’s terrorist attack in Las Vegas is so fraught with errors, attempting to correct them all is a bigger fool’s errand than looking for a real journalist at MSNBC.

In the days since Paddock launched his still largely unexplained assault, TV talking hairdos and their iPad-abusing print accomplices have managed to not only ignore basic facts about firearm capabilities and their various accessories, but they’ve managed to invent all new versions of both. Not only did the Founding Fathers intend their words only apply to concepts and items contemporary to the 18th century, they would never have assented to what failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, her backup dancer Senator Tim Kaine and her close friend, Senator Dianne Feinstein have described as “killing machines,” with “gun silencers, high-capacity ‘clips’ and bump-fire stocks,” capable of firing “between 400 and 800 rounds per minute.”
Those science-fiction-level delusions have become an impenetrable wall of ignorance; the one behind which the left retreats every time their attempts to exploit tragedy are exposed. They’ve willingly buried themselves under an avalanche of buffalo chips. They simply don’t care about  the bizarrely opaque history of the perpetrator, nor the fact that — much like Sandy Hook — every anti-firearm law they have managed to conjure up would have failed to prevent Las Vegas.  They’re actively ignoring those very salient issues for pure nonsense, shouted at top volume by media flacks, Hollywood stars who regularly perform in movies filled with more gunfire than a mid-sized war and the sort of perpetually-inflamed liberals who learned everything they know about firearms from the former’s “reports” and latter’s films.
The people who blame the actions of monsters like Stephen Paddock on the guns they used don’t understand anything about the topic, refuse to learn about it and will simply continue regurgitating memorized talking points if you attempt to enlighten them. I’ve had better conversations with the cable company’s helpline menu. I’ve got better things to do with my time than try and climb this mountain. Instead, I can simply prove my point about the pointlessness of leftists’ anti-liberty dogma. I own an AR-15. I have had it about 10 years; in which time I have used it to fire hundreds, if not thousands, of rounds. In all that time, it has never been so much as aimed at another human in jest. Forcing me to give it up would have as much effect on deterring an animal like Paddock as allowing me to keep it.
Our Democrat friends are fond of demanding we “do something” about America’s so-called “gun  violence” problem. But if they don’t actually understand the problem, any solutions they devise won’t be worth much.
— Ben Crystal