Aiming and Firing

PEOPLE WHO FAVOR gun control often times don't hate guns or gun ownership. Sometimes they do, but not always. Comparably,  women's rights advocates do not hate babies, usually.

 However, second amendment enthusiasts, whose defense of gun rights is entirely appropiate but much overstated, like to pretend that people such as president obama, who favor gun control, are motivated by hatred, and a desire to control and limit people's freedom.

And nothing could be further from the truth, as they well know.Always try to make your political opponent look bad, even at the cost of truth and integrity. Accepting presiden obama as a partner in a common quest would be utterly out of the queston for the NRA. Too friendly, too fair.

Its a cheap tactic, and beneath them, though they seem not to know it. Recent example is the photo that the white house released the other day of obama firing a rifle at, presumably, a non human target. The white house is a precocious edifice, and the president, a powerful man.

Just another cheap political stunt by an american president, but so what? People have the right to shoot guns, to say they do, to have pictures made of themeselves doing it, and to show those pictures to perfect strangers.

The National Rifle Association, america's gun club, said right off the bat that the photo is a staged fake, which is true, that obama isn't really a shootist, that, well, if he is, where have all the photos and  talk about it been up until now, and, even if he is, he's obviously a beginner, you can just tell by looking at the way he is holding the rifle in the photo. Oh, whatever. Attack from all possible angles, NRA!

Would it ever dawn on the gunners to just take obama at his word, that he really does like guns, he enjoys firing them, is not against owning them, and only wants to have some reasonable controls on them? No, of course not. That would be too easy, too sensible, too friendly. Gotta be aggressive, after all, we're talking about guns here, and obama.

Banning assault weapons and huge ammo clips seems like a reasonable proposal, and if not a good one, at least one worth discussing, without vitriole. The NRA's solution is to arm everyone, rather than disarming no one, and this is worth considering too; intelligently, if only marginally..

The argument that we don't need new guns laws because we don't even enforce the ones we already have is equally bogus. The soultion is to go ahead and enact good new laws, like the assault rifle ban, and then look at all the existing ones, and either start enforcing them, or get rid of them.

By doing this we might even up with fewer, but more effective and fair laws, than before.