Josh Sugarmann on Slain, Gun Toting Mother

TPaine7

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Sun Oct-11-09 03:36 AM
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Josh Sugarmann on Slain, Gun Toting Mother

In a post ironically entitled "Beyond the Easy Irony of Murdered Gun Advocate Meleanie Hain", Josh Sugarman shares his perspective on the domestic killing of an unarmed woman by her law enforcement officer husband:

From news reports, Hain... was a true believer: guns don't kill, people do. A corollary to this well-worn mantra is that gun ownership guarantees personal safety. The shooting in Pennsylvania belies both these pro-gun tenets.

...

In essence, Hain, like many of her fellow pro-gun advocates, lacked an ability to think in the abstract: Her gun experience was positive and whatever negative effects others felt from firearms, the gun, and gun owners like herself, were never to blame. Is it too bold to think that if she had survived her husband's attack by shooting him to death she would have offered his killing as proof of the effectiveness of the self-defense handgun? Based on 25 years in the gun control debate I don't think so.

...

Instead, she will become one of the statistics that she so readily dismissed. One of the 30,000 who die from guns each year. One of the hundreds of women shot to death by their husbands or intimate acquaintances each year. One of the hundreds of murder-suicides that occur each year. One of the tens of thousands of families destroyed by gun violence each year. Each death standing as proof that the absolute she tried to personify -- that owning a handgun will guarantee your safety -- is false.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-sugarmann/beyond-the-easy-irony-of_b_315731.html

Irony indeed, but not easy irony. Josh goes for the gold.

First, after laying out a few undisputed facts he creates a blatant straw man--the supposed pro gun tenet "that gun ownership guarantees personal safety." This is a caricature, a farce, a fabrication, a bald-faced lie. No gun advocate of any repute claims this. You will not read it on the web. You will not hear it in debate. It isn't a tenet of the pro gun position. Period.

I do not mean to imply that no gun rights advocate has ever uttered this pathetic nonsense. It may be that Sugarman has actually heard someone say this, maybe even someone not in protective psychiatric custody. But that does not make it a pro-gun tenet. If I heard a lone nut or two explain that banning guns would cure cancer, that would not make it an anti-gun tenet either.

After solidly establishing his intellectual dishonesty, Sugarmann moves on to some serious sophistry. According to him, Hain lacked the ability to think abstractly. The poor woman actually thought that "the gun, and gun owners like herself, were never to blame"! The clear implication is that she was to blame. It was only because she carried a gun that her husband--who was issued a firearm by the government due to his law enforcement duties--shot her with a state issued weapon. (I guess that lie was too blatant even for Sugarmann to state clearly.)

Next Sugarman counters an outrageous hypothetical. Is it possible that Hain might have thought her self-defense handgun effective had she survived the attack by using it? Based on 25 years of debate, he thinks she may have. Obviously, she should be condemned for that hypothetical as well.

Josh ends in style. She died. She carried a gun, yet she died. Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!

Others died too! Thirty thousand of them die each year. And all those deaths--even the deaths of the ones who don't own guns--prove that that owning a handgun will not guarantee your safety, at least by gun control logic.

So there!!

People say that Americans are stupid--and we did elect Bush at least once. (I say we because I'm an American, not because I voted for him.) But there are limits. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Josh Sugarmann's article is a sick joke, an embarrassment to lunatics everywhere. Lies this bald and illogic this transparent can only work on willing victims--people who want to be fooled. Americans no longer want to be fooled on gun control. Josh didn't get the memo, apparently.

Triumphing in the death of an innocent victim of domestic abuse is contemptible. It's low even in coarse, 21st century society. Even by Republican standards. (And for the moral midgets among us, it is worlds apart from rejoicing in the triumph of a victim over a predator.)

It is telling that this is the intellectual level of a champion of gun control--that this is the caliber of argument that can be marshaled for the anti-gun position. The ignorance, bias, illogic, obliviousness, and sheer stupidity of modern gun control is shocking.

Democrats stand a much better chance of navigating the political seas and attaining real and lasting power without this albatross.

Last but certainly not least, my heart goes out to the poor children. I shudder to think of their suffering:

Neighbor Aileen Fortna, 51, said that her husband noticed the two older Hain children running past their house and crying. She said the children told another neighbor that "daddy shot mommy."

Source:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33245133/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

I hope they get all the love, attention, and therapy they need.