Piers Morgan, The Right to Bear Arms, and The Critical Mom

If only repeat-fire assault weapons didn't stand for liberty, masculinity, and national pride, Piers Morgan would not have had to point out that his first amendment right to free speech meant a right to criticize the NRA's position on the second amendment.  As Scottie Hughes responded to his question about whether the second amendment granted her the right to own a tank by saying that yes, it did, and that she needed one for self-defense, Dana Loesch chortled with rage.
"Of course it did!"  said her grin.  She didn't deign to respond.  Poor Piers was left bleating, "You're not answering the question!"  I sat down with my coffee and wondered.  I just sat in my Stoppersocken and wondered.  And I took a sip of coffee.

In one corner Scottie Hughes put up her dukes.  A modern-day Meanad, bristling with silicone breasts and a helmet of gold ringlets, she looked very sex-change operation.  In another corner,  Dana Loesch,  baring her teeth at Piers every chance she got.  Those teeth looked very UltraBrite.

And the Tea Party said he should "go home!" to England that is, for his unpatriotic attack on the American bill of rights.

And as I sat in my little corner at home, my Stoppersocken sticking to the floor, I wondered how these young women--in their early to mid-thirties--would feel when they are my age.  I'll be fifty-six next week.  They made me remember Anita Bryant.  She was just about their age when she hit the big time singing about the "Florida Sunshine Tree" while campaigning against gay rights. If God had wanted homosexuality, said Anita, he'd have created Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve.  That was back around 1977.  She was divorced a few years later, and admitted to Ladies Home Journal that she now believed in "live and let live."  She'd been through a bad marriage and thought the church should wake up to women's issues.  She's sadder and wiser.  

But these two--Scottie Hughes, whose brother was killed by her nanny's son, Dana Loesch with that ferocious grin--where will they be in a few years?  About where Lance Armstrong is right now?
Or maybe in some alternate universe somewhere Scottie will say to herself:  "Look, you cannot bring back your brother by brandishing your right to bear arms, and the tank you want to sit in does not have walls that can shield you from your pain at losing him ."

So I sat in my Stoppersocken counting my lucky stars and bemoaning my utter lack of power and influence.   Sometimes I hum myself a little song, to the tune of the Beatles's "I've Got a Feeling":

I've got a blog--a blog that no-one reads

Oh yeah!

Oh yeah!

I've got opinions: "Don't like NRA creeds!"

Oh yeah!

Oh yeah!

But I'm as dated as The Beatles, because I still believe that the second amendment grants the right to bear only the kind of "arms" that were manufactured in the eighteenth century.  The America that believes a "well armed militia" means the kind of assault weapon any maniac can now buy on the internet, the America that totes an arsenal in so-called "self-defense," is an America that would make the founding fathers flip in their graves.  Things have spiraled into mass hysteria again.

Before the United States existed, we had the mass hysteria of the Salem witch trials in colonial times, and this hysteria reappears with disturbing regularity--Joe McCarthy, the Japanese-American internment camps in the Second World War, Anti-Arab feeling ever since 9/11--and now this:  guns, guns, guns--the idea that guns are gift from God, who would want us to point them in "self-defense" at our enemies.

So here is my final, dated idea, from before any other reader was born:  "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Thank you, Pogo.  (You young folks can look up Pogo on Wikipedia.) I'll go swallow my Klosterfrau now, the German equivalent of Geritol.

And if there are any readers out there who actually agree, then please do leave me a comment.  Click on the ads while you're reading, too--I might actually make two cents if you do.