Advocates of gun control all too often have an obsession with sex. That isn’t a healthy interest or even a harmless fetish. I mean the kind of Victorian combination of a public demand for censorship and punishment with a private desire to participate. Their favorite name for members of the gun community, ammosexuals, illustrates this.
One example of this attitude is to be found in a Huffington Post article, titled, “Goats, Guns and Georgia,” by Charlie Allenson. He starts out trying to characterize the State of Georgia—peaches, pecans, and perverts, in his summation.
The first two anyone knows who has been navigating through Atlanta. But perverts? Allenson’s initial piece of evidence for this is one Freddie Wadsworth, a sixty-five year old man with a harem, excuse me, herd of goats. Wadsworth was spotted by neighbors having inappropriate relations with one of his animals in his yard.
The less that has to be said about this, the better. Allenson’s real interest, though, is in three men who used what he calls “assault weapons” in crimes in the state over the last several years. Now if he wanted to argue that their behavior was perverted, I’d be willing to allow him that rhetorical flourish. The type of killer who is driven by sexual paraphilias—one type of stranger killer or serial murderer—is rare among total homicides. But in a figurative sense, the distortion of conscience that allows someone to harm innocents is certainly perverse.
But the criminals that he cites aren’t his real object of attention. According to Allenson, “the real perverts in Georgia are the legislators who willingly allow these weapons of war to freely roam the highways, byways, and yes, even the airports of Georgia.” In other words, the people who protected basic rights in that state’s government.
What in his view is especially perverse is the legal status of “assault weapons.” He attempts to counter the factual point that genuine assault rifles are heavily regulated and expensive by saying that such definitional niceties don’t matter to the person being shot. What he’s really doing here is carrying on the gun control tradition of blurring language in the hopes of getting more and more categories of guns banned.
Yes, the 5.56 caliber round commonly used in an AR-15 causes significant damage to anyone hit. So does any other centerfire rifle round. By shoving the misconception that “assault weapon” is a meaningful classification, Allenson is working here to divide and conquer—to separate the gun owners that he’ll tolerate for the moment from the ones whose choices he finds icky. Of course, that latter group is probably all gun owners, but that’s an admission that supporters of gun control are leery to make.
According to his LinkedIn page, “Charlie Allenson lives in New York City where every day is unscripted and improv is a way of life.” The problem here is that his argument is straight out of the gun control playbook, the usual clichés, falsehoods, and demands that we’ve seen time and again.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the position of Guns.com.
The post HuffPo oped shows off gun controls obsession with sex and misinformation appeared first on Guns.com.