By Alan Gottlieb and Joe Waldron
Finally, some honesty has surfaced from the socially-bigoted Million Mom March, an organization that-while obviously numerically-challenged-seems to have members who were unusually candid in their remarks to the National Review.
In a remarkably revealing series of comments reported by National Review’s Daniel J. Flynn in the wake of the MMM’s Mother’s Day Dud in Washington, DC, a handful of die-hard extremists admitted they aren’t out to simply keep guns out of the wrong hands. They want to rid the nation of guns, evidently with no concern that they would trash a constitutionally-guaranteed civil right in the process.
Lisa Toomey, a resident of Washington State, offered this: “I’d be happy with stricter gun laws,” but admitted, “I would just say no guns. That’s where I’m at.”
Where she’s at is right up there with Joan Davis from Manhattan, who declared, “I don’t think guns should be legal. I don’t think the average person should have a gun.”
And Bonnie Rock, who suggested she might consider moving to Canada if President Bush is re-elected, admitted, “Ideally, I guess I would like to see a total ban on guns.” She called President Bush a “whore of the NRA.” Is that what she’s teaching her children to say?
All of these women have lowered the façade behind which the extremist gun control movement has hidden for years. While spouting platitudes about “supporting the Second Amendment right of people to have guns for hunting,” and insisting that they do believe in gun ownership, the leaders of the radical anti-gun community have been trumped by the honesty of their foot-soldiers.
For starters, Toomey needs to read her own state’s constitution, which specifically recognizes the “right of the individual citizen to keep and bear arms in defense of himself and the state.” Davis should study up on history because she might discover that this nation was created, and has been defended for more than 200 years, by “average persons” with guns. Rock, of course, can join all of those celebrities, such as Alec Baldwin, who vowed to move out of the United States if Bush were elected in 2000. We’re all still waiting to help load up the moving vans.
As spiteful against Constitutionally-protected gun ownership as these women are, none of them seem nearly so separated from reality as Rockville, Maryland resident Dick Berman, quoted by Flynn as stating, “If we had our druthers, (America) would be like England or Australia or other civilized countries.”
Berman must live in a cave, else he would know that since strict gun controls have been enacted in England and Australia, citizens in those so-called “civilized” nations have suffered skyrocketing violent crime waves. Since handguns were banned in Great Britain, handgun crime has soared and violent home-invasion robberies have become almost commonplace. In the few instances when crime victims have defended themselves, they have typically been prosecuted. One man, Tony Martin, was imprisoned for shooting at two thugs who broke into his home while he was there.
In Australia, crime rates are also up, and in that country, also, you can be prosecuted for defending your life and property with a firearm. Same goes in Canada, where a national gun registration scheme has cost taxpayers a billion dollars, hasn’t stopped a single crime, and is now in such disarray that even some police want it scrapped. None of these nations consider self-defense as a good enough reason to own a firearm.
If that’s Berman’s definition of “civilized,” we’ll stick to life on the wild frontier, thank you all the same.
With such thinking at its core, it is small wonder that so many call the MMM the “Million Misguided Moms.” Their hatred of firearms, and of the people who own them, is matched only by their obvious disregard for the truth about what gun control has done to people in other countries they want to emulate.
But at least some of them are finally honest about it.