“The Gun Did It!”

We are pretty sure that when LC Hilljohnny said this in a comments thread:

I am waiting for someone on the left to point out that jared was the victim of the evil gun that forced him to shoot those people and therefor we need more laws restricting law abideing citizens.

…he was demonstrating the proper use of a rhetorical question as he can’t possibly have doubted that it would be coming. And boy, has it ever come. The Brady Bunchers have managed to pile on to the corpses from Tucson too now, grabbing for whatever body parts they can still rip off and wave around in the air like meaty, bloody banners. As, for instance, the terminally demented dorkweasel, Richard Cohen, of the Washington Compost:

I had a teacher in college who used to ask, Who discovered America?

Of course, back when Dickie went to college, that question belonged in the “current events” category.

He would offer some choices. They were Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus or the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. The answer he wanted was the three ships with which eventually someone would have discovered the New World and without which everyone would have remained in Spain.

Because, as we all know, if those three ships hadn’t existed, nobody else would have bothered to ever set sail and go west in search of new land and/or sea routes. Similarly, if Isaac Newton had never been born, we still wouldn’t know about gravity.

All three answers are wrong, of course. The first European to discover America (mainland America and not some rum-soaked sand bank in the Carribean) was Leif Eriksson, some five hundred years before Cristobal Colon shat his first set of tights. And Leif’s ship wasn’t called Nina, Pinta or Santa Maria, we’re fair certain.

It is no different with the tragedy in Tucson.

You know what? He has a point. Without the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, everybody would’ve stayed in Spain, America would have never been discovered and there would have been no Tucson.

Quick! Ban Christopher Columbus!

Hate speech and madness were part of the mix,

Try “madness” for $1,000 and you’ve almost got it.

but it was the gun and our insane gun laws that resulted in six deaths.

“Gun Law Murders Six, Film at Eleven!”

We need to get those crazy gun laws off the streets, wandering around waving their sections, clauses and sub-clauses menacingly at innocent citizens!

Until we come to grips with that, as a nation, we remain armed and dangerous.

Until Dickie gets back on his meds he’ll remain dumb and incoherent.

The American culture, the American gun culture, insists on a constitutional right to bear arms

Actually, the Constitution insists on a Constitutional right to bear arms. Hence the word “Constitutional”, Dickie. How are your “English as a Second Language” classes working out for you? Obviously not too well.

– even concealed weapons such as a Glock 19 semiautomatic handgun capable of doing immense damage.

We didn’t know that the Glock 19 comes in both a concealed and un-concealed version. Amazing what you can learn from reading a Dickie Cohen column!

A 22-year-old man, already hallucinating on the Internet, making no sense in his classes and booted from school for his strange ways, can buy such a killing device almost on the spot.

Well, he can IF he happens to live in a city where law enforcement is run by a senile old fart like Clarence Nudnik, who apparently has a policy of ignoring death threats and numerous other complaints. If Tucson had been better served by not having Old Man Moses in charge of the Sheriff’s Dept., then Loughney would’ve set off enough alarm bells on his NICS check to burst eardrums five counties away.

If he is crazy, then so are we.

Quit using the royal “we”, Dickie.

we should turn our attention to the one element in this tragedy that can be controlled: easy access to guns.

I was born and raised in a country with some of the most insanely restrictive gun laws known to mankind. Average time to acquire a gun anyway if you wanted one? Between 30 minutes and an hour. Yes, I tried and yes, it worked. So best of luck with that “restricting access” scheme of yours.

After all, enough ought to be enough. Rifles can kill (John F. Kennedy, for instance), but most homicides committed using firearms – more than 70 percent – are the work of handguns

Let’s not wake Dickie up from his nap and start explaining the prevalence of handguns vs long guns and how that might have something to do with those statistics of his.

But hey, using that “logic” of his, considering how vanishingly small a percentage of homicides are committed with howitzers, RPGs and vintage German MGs, can I have my MG42 now, please? Put it over there, right next to my 155mm howitzer.

The handgun is wonderfully effective. It’s little and it’s lethal.

So is Andrew Sullivan’s cock. And your point?

Gun statistics are nothing less than astonishing. According to the Brady Campaign, an advocacy group, “more Americans were killed with guns in the 18-year period between 1979 and 1997 (651,697) than were killed in battle in all wars since 1775 (650,858).” Even recognizing that some of those deaths were suicides or accidents, the gun is what did it. Had it not been handy, a death might have been avoided.

Operative word “might.” Oh, and you need to subtract the number of deaths that represent a would-be murderer killed by his intended victim because the latter did have a gun. You see, Dickie, without those guns your “astonishing number” would have been at least as high and quite likely more than a little bit higher. See “Virginia Tech, What if the Innocent Students Had Been Armed?”

Little in life is easy or open-and-shut. There is probably no getting rid of all guns,

So let’s restrict access to them to violent criminals? Brilliant, Dickie, just brilliant.

there is no denying their appeal,

Particularly not if you’re a little old lady facing two grown burglars in the middle of the night. G-d made man, Sam Colt made men equal.

and there is no use ignoring the Second Amendment.

Why not? You liberals have been doing just that for decades. Why stop the insanity now?

But amendments can be repealed and then reworded (long guns only?) and somehow made to conform to the 21st century.

Best of luck with that. But hey, we’ll give you points for being the first liberal we’ve ever heard suggest using the Constitutionally provided method instead of activist judges and penumbras, emanations and brain farts.

I have in the past admitted a sometime yen to have a handgun for protection – I have twice been burglarized, once while I was in the house – but my own moderate paranoia cannot make me duck the obvious.

Twice burglarized and you still consider yourself “moderately paranoid” for worrying about protection? Really now? You know, Dickie, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

Six people are dead and 14 wounded in Arizona not just because a man went crazy or political rhetoric has gotten too raw, but because they were shot. It’s the gun that did it.

So absent Loughner, it would have still happened?

Damn, that’s some powerful shit they serve you at the nursing home, Dickie. Would you mind sharing?

But first, let me go lock up all of my firearms before they sneak up and shoot me.

Asshat.

Thatisall.