If you’re a private citizen, I want you to take the bullets out of the Bushmaster Carbine M4A3 rifle you purchased at Wal-Mart and then I want you to incinerate the gun, melt it down to nothing, take a hacksaw to it, flatten it with a steamroller. I don’t really care how you do it, just destroy it.
I want you to take any and all semiautomatic and fully automatic rifles and handguns you may have, especially the ones that can fire multiple high-velocity rounds, and bury them in the ground. You don’t need them.
If it’s for sport that you own these types of guns, then you know nothing about sport, hunting, target-shooting or otherwise. The use of a high-powered semiautomatic gun for sport is equivalent to using performance-enhancing drugs in, say, baseball, which is banned, not to mention disgraceful and pathetic. Ripping a grouse or a white-tailed deer to shreds doesn’t seem like much sport to me.
If it’s for protection that you own these types of guns, then you need to seek help to cope with your acute paranoia. As important as you may think you are, mass militias are not gunning for you. I know your Xbox 360 may tell you otherwise, but many a man has protected home and family with merely a musket or two fists and an iron will. I think you’ll be fine. If you’re still fretting without your AK-47, then buy a dog.
If you own these types of guns to maintain your own individual freedoms as an American, then you need to realize that your ignorance isn’t worth the risk. There are freedoms to preserve and there are freedoms that through a great many decades have been distorted and embellished to the point of obscurity. The right to bear arms is yours; so says the Second Amendment. The right to bear arms that can cause mass destruction is not yours. There’s an elected government in place, police and military to protect you and your fellow citizens from foreign and domestic enemies. You are safer than you think.
You need a gun that holds 30 bullets like I need a gut that holds 30 Hostess cupcakes. Grip it and feel powerful, do you? That’s simply you trying to conceal your lack of self-confidence. Compensating with a deadly weapon is not advised. Buy a big monster truck or a cigarette boat to compensate for your inadequacies.
There’s nothing you can do or say to convince me that these weapons in the hands of private citizens constitutes a sensible way of life. I realize that the guns didn’t kill the children at Sandy Hook Elementary; a human being did. But we’ve seen the kind of evil our own species is capable of, and it’s terrifying.
If you want to own a semiautomatic rifle for no reason, then that’s your cross to bear.
Contact: bspencer@oakpark.com
Twitter: @oakparksports