A rights movement I can really get behind,
You see this all around us. You can see it in the hordes of hoplophobic suburban soccer moms who won’t let their kids come over to your house to play with your kids if they know that you have a firearm of any sort in the house (even if it’s unloaded, broken down, and stored in a maglocked safe!) You can see it with the people who call the cops if kids in the neighborhood are running around playing with obviously fake pink and green water guns. In many districts, public school officials are trained to drop hints to the kids that only “bad people” own guns. Pediatricians ask parents if they have firearms in the house — presumably so that the local Child Services can be notified about potential “hazards” — and children are encouraged to divulge this information without parents being present. The whole point is to plant in the minds of the next generation the idea that guns are bad, bad guys have guns (except for government officials, of course), and that no good citizen would ever need to own one.
At the same time, hoplophobes seek to suppress any expression of gun ownership or approval of the practice among adults. Many corporations include websites about firearms or firearm accessories in their list of sites to block — right up there with porn and the stuff about making bombs. The media routinely lies about the motivations and intentions of people who choose to carry firearms on their person — as CBS and MSNBC recently did when it peddled false stories about those who were open carrying at some of the townhall protests and other gatherings. In polite society, guns shouldn’t be mentioned, and you shouldn’t let on that you own any — that’s a good way not to get invited to any more cocktail parties or afternoon coffee klatches. Popular culture — the movies, television, and so forth — present a dual picture on guns. Police and military types should have them and do great, heroic things with them, but anyone else who has one is a bucktoothed rube who is likely to either shoot himself with it, or else is some sort of racist moron who intends to do harm to a Person of Color. Again, the idea is to plant the meme in the minds of the people that there’s just something unacceptable — something fishy, if you will — about somebody who does or wants to own a gun. Eventually they’ll probably set up an email address at the White House so you can snitch on people like that.
It’s time that we stand together for the civil rights of ALL Americans and tell the haters that hoplophobia is NOT an acceptable bigotry anymore!
Tags: civil rights, Guns, Politics, Second Amendment
