Does the NRA, and Charlton Heston, know what their lusty cohorts in the White House are doing in Iraq?
The NRA argues that every man, woman, and child in America should be armed. That's the best way to ensure democracy and freedom. If the government starts regulating the possession of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and Uzi submachine guns, it will soon be able to take away our precious freedoms and liberties.
The U.S. government under George Bush is trying to do precisely that to Iraq. It is bursting into their "homes" and searching for weapons and it plans to take them away if it finds them.
The NRA says that just because guns are dangerous and are often used to commit felonies doesn't mean that any citizen should have the slightest difficulty obtaining them. In other words, you can't assume someone is going to do something illegal with a gun, the way you can assume someone is going to do something illegal with a blank CD or a minidisc.
But here you have George Bush acting as if Saddam Hussein doesn't have the natural right as a citizen of the world to own a few nukes or chemical bombs.
My question is-- what if Saddam, or somebody, persuaded the U.N. to send a weapons inspection team to the U.S., to see if they have anything that could hurt people around the world? Like mines, chemical weapons, nukes, artillery, and guns.
Ah-- but we're the good guys. Well, we are. But we're not perfect. And who knows what kind of idiot might end up in the White House some day?
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that in a society that controlled access to guns, the police would still have access to them. That's the special nature of their jobs. They have special authority. They're supposed to keep us from hurting ourselves and each other.
So the U.S., it could be supposed, has to have nukes to make sure that the Saddam Husseins-- and Charlton Hestons -- of the world don't go around bullying other people.
The trouble is that the U.S. sells mines and helicopters and bombers to other countries. Sometimes, through happenstance, we end up facing the barrels of our own guns.
Why doesn't the NRA step up and put an end to this nonsense? Where is Charlton Heston when you really need him? He should be railing against the Bush administration! Chemical weapons don't kill people-- despots do! And when you criminalize the possession of nukes, only the tyrants will have nukes! Saddam Hussein should show up at the next NRA party-- usually held in a nearby town after a mass shooting-- and hold a nuclear bomb in his arms above his head and proclaim, "...from my cold dead fingers!"
I can't even begin to explain North Korea or Iran in this context. Except that Iraq, of course, has the oil.
And that reminds me of what a famous outlaw, Willie Sutton, said when someone asked him why he robbed banks.
Because that's where they keep the money.
