“A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.” —William Shenstone
The Keene Sentinel , last Thursday, featured an editorial, positing the question, “Could an armed citizen have stopped the shooter? But they never really answer the question and instead make an argument that we should move toward more gun control.
The opening paragraph states,
Anyone who has ever aimed and discharged a firearm knows that accuracy depends on a number of things — the eye of the shooter, the weapon in use, levels of training and experience. There’s also the matter of setting. Hitting a target at a shooting range, with pulse steady and trigger squeezed, is not the same as, say, taking down a gunman in a darkened theater that’s filled with tear gas and screaming, panic-stricken movie-goers.
Oversimplifying. Reasonable people know that firearm use in self defense never presents any good or optimal circumstance. In fact it is the law-abiding firearm owner who is at the greatest disadvantage because he has to be concerned about shot placement and not hitting innocent bystanders…People willing to do others harm never give warning and will always choose a setting most ideal for them. And they never care much about who they injure or kill.
So now the liberal crows are picking at Joe Zamudio…a guy who had a firearm in his possession and supposedly “intervened” in the Gabriel Giffords shooting case. Zamudio, an armed citizen with no military experience or formal training, admits,
“I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky.
Throughout the conversation, and all that was written, the focus on what Zamudio “almost” did overshadows what he “actually did.” And it is telling that he never analyzed the scenario.
And Zamudio…not the smartest guy ever interviewed. Perhaps he was a bit star-struck in his quest for that 15 minutes of fame; Zamudio says,
“I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends.
“I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” (Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun.)
“And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ “
But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio allowed himself to be a willing dupe for the media to focus on the “almost” versus “what actually” happened. Without realizing it, Zamudio effectively assessed the situation and reacted accordingly. That is why the individual who had wrestled the gun from Jared Lee Loughner was not shot. Most reasonable people are capable of making such assessments under such tense situations.
The anti-gun agenda thesis finally emerges in this paragraph of the Sentinel Editorial:
“The mantra of gun lobby supporters is that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. Precisely. That’s why it’s appropriate for society to not merely wonder about how a person in Aurora came into possession of his remarkable arsenal, but also to actually do something about access to firearms. Likewise, it’s appropriate for society to take note of the possible dangers of armed vigilantism.”
So there you have it; Advocacy for gun control, propped up by a huge leap to vigilantism.
Vigilantism. A very descriptive word. Words mean things. So it is appropriate to effectively define vigilantism. The legal dictionary defines vigilantism as,
“Taking the law into one’s own hands and attempting to effect justice according to one’s own understanding of right and wrong;(my emphasis) action taken by a voluntary association of persons who organize themselves for the purpose of protecting a common interest, such as liberty, property, or personal security; action taken by an individual or group to protest existing law; action taken by an individual or group to enforce a higher law than that enacted by society’s designated lawmaking institutions; private enforcement of legal norms in the absence of an established, reliable, and effective law enforcement body.“
So according to the Keene Sentinel Editors, if a person attacks me or another person with deadly force and I meet that threat with equal force sufficient to terminate the actions of the attacker, I am a vigilante. That is little more than a smear…
I think we can sum this all up quite easily. The Lame stream media focuses on the fact that Holmes purchased his guns legally, but glosses over the fact that he was allegedly under the care of Psychiatrist Dr. Lynne Fenton, mental health services director at the University of Colorado. It is also alleged that Holmes had articulated his thoughts of harming others in a notebook, e-mails, and in sessions prior to the attack.
I am not clear if Colorado has such a law, but in this state, shrinks are mandated by law to make a report to law enforcement where there exists any kind of threat to ones’ self or others….be it violence or otherwise. Where is the lame stream media holding the shrink accountable? [insert crickets chirping]
The right of self defense is a “natural” right and the lame stream media seeks to culturally recondition us to believe that meeting force with force is mere armed “vigilatism.” After all, “Only the Police should have guns.”
Finally, the lame stream media continues in its’ quest to reshape the cultural bias against the fallacious descriptor “assault weapon” merely because of a firearm’s materials of construction, appearance, and form. Under their description, an assault weapon is virtually anything they say it is.
Liberals will likely continue to advance the thesis that even if an armed citizen was present, action would have been ineffective. Liberals are willing to hang their hat on this thesis, but squelch and ignore all accounts where handgun-use has saved lives.
NRA President David A. Keene, writes in the American Rifleman, August 2012,
“In a very real sense (the anti-gun leftists) hostility to firearms and the Second Amendment isn’t about guns or violence or crime; it’s about values.”
The Keene Sentinel is just one in the sea of progressive anti-gun liberal media mouthpieces chipping away at the second amendment rights of citizens.
