Debating the GunLoons (Part Tres)
Slogans.
If the GunLoons have nothing else, they have slogans.
Here’s a favorite found on bumperstickers:
“If guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns.”
It sounds like common sense but such bromides are not always as they appear. If one thinks (an antithetical concept to gunloons) about it–both the criminal and the “law-abiding citizen” got their guns from the same place.
The Ethical Spectacle has an excellent article on this subject:
The more you look into it, though, the more it appears that the intruder and the homeowner have both bought their gun from the same person. An illegal gun in the United States, unlike an illegal drug, is not one smuggled into the country or made in a basement laboratory; it is always a gun that began its odyssey with a legal sale by a gunshop to somebody, somewhere. The gun used to kill President Kennedy was purchased by mail through an ad in the Rifleman, the NRA magazine; the gun used to assassinate the Mexican presidential candidate last year was originally purchased in a California gunshop. Colin Ferguson purchased the semiautomatic he used to kill the Long Island Railroad Riders in a California gunshop too. Patrick Purdy, the killer of five Cambodian schoolchildren in a schoolyard, also bought his weapon legally in California, and Wayne Lo, who killed a professor and a student at his Berkshire, Mass. college, bought his semiautomatic at the same sporting goods shop where I buy my lures and bait when I am in that part of the country.
This gunloon slogan is meant to mask the fact the gun lobby is complicit in allowing criminals easy access to guns.
