Absurd is as Absurd Does

By Gerard Valentino

(This commentary has also been published at CNSNews.com)

In an attempt to create a positive buzz, the anti-gun Brady Gang’s recent change in leadership is designed to renew interest in a misguided movement based on fear and ignorance. Choosing the former Republican mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana is clearly part of plan to get people to buy the group’s supposed change in focus from complete gun confiscation to getting illegal guns out of the nation’s communities.

Few, except the establishment media, believe that a group created to destroy the Second Amendment has suddenly changed its tune. Instead, pro-gun groups continue to point out that the anti-gun movement began with the promise to pursue “reasonable” gun laws, yet quickly put forth the idea that any gun in the hands of a law abiding citizen is unreasonable.

To that end, the Brady Gang is intent on taking away the presumption of innocence affirmed in the Constitution. Long have they preached that the inability to predict which law-abiding gun owner would commit a crime means they are all guilty – of what we don’t know.

Yet, the establishment media continues to believe that this time the anti-gun movement finally is living up to the promise to only target illegal gun dealers, and criminals, trying to buy guns.

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Of course, in the mind of the Brady Gang, a man buying a gun to protect his family or a single woman who buys a handgun for self-defense has committed an unreasonable act. Regardless of the number of citizens alive today because they had a gun when it was desperately needed, the Brady Gang and its band of misguided followers, see every gun as evil.

What is evil, however, is a movement that chooses to leave innocent people at the whim of hardened criminals without regard for life or property.

Try telling a rape victim who successfully fought off her attacker that violence didn’t solve her problem. The same holds true for a mother defending her children strapped in the back seat of a mini-van when a car-jacker tries to steal the vehicle.

In both cases violence is not only a good option, but it was most likely the only way to effectively solve the problem at hand. Plus, the decision to fight back has a residual benefit for all of society because criminals are forced to wonder if their next target will fight back with such ferocity - possibly making them choose safer non-violent property crimes in the future.

In the eyes of the Brady Gang, society would benefit if the rape victim was left at the whim of her attacker, or if the mother was left to stand helpless while an armed thug drove off with her minivan, and children.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, anti-gun crusaders are often held up by the establishment media as moral guide rods. Yet nothing could be further from the truth because taking away the only means of self-defense from the weak, or law-abiding, is morally abhorrent. Standing idle while a family member, or innocent person, is violently attacked goes against the basis of the reason people became civilized - not the other way around, as the Brady Gang would have people believe. Their promised gun-free, and crime free, nirvana never materialized. But they refused to admit what everyone else easily deduced - that taking guns from the law-abiding won’t reduce violent crime or make us safer.

Only proper enforcement of existing laws can take so-called dangerous guns and criminals off of the street. In an unexplainable act of hypocrisy, the same liberal groups that are anti-gun are also fighting to increase the standard of life in prisons. Somehow believing that making prisons life a less onerous punishment will decrease the recidivism rate.

As we know, the Brady Gang doesn’t believe that people kill, instead blaming the act on the gun, which is an intimate object. Taking their own professed premised to its logical conclusion means leaving criminals free to roam while locking up guns, cars that might be used by drunk drivers, knives, ropes, candlesticks and should finally bring about a violence free America. Their plan would also be fiscally prudent since it is a safe assumption that locking a gun or car in a cell is cheaper than paying to house, cloth and feed an inmate.

If such a premise sounds absurd, so does the premise that a Republican in charge of the nation’s preeminent gun-control group will change their ultimate goal of gun confiscation.