Number one

Updated I haven’t written anything for several days now. Part of the reason was that things I would have said about the things I would have most intended to address were, I thought, already being said by others with far bigger audiences - and as a general rule I don’t like to spend energy doing little more than echoing others. That is, when I contribute something to the conversation, I like to think it goes somewhat beyond “Me, too.”

Another part of the reason, though, was that it seemed to be one of those very frustrating times, very tiring times, where significant voices in the lefty side of the blogosphere were saying things that just made me want to tear my hair out but more usually just made me slump in my chair.

Again by my general rule, in what follows I won’t link to the sources even where I use direct quotes because this isn’t a matter of slamming some particular blogger or even some particular post but of discussing a broader attitude. That is, if I'd seen it in just one place it wouldn't have gotten to me; the reason I found it distressing is that I saw it in at least two reasonably prominent places.

The first thing that got me was the eagerness in some quarters to insist that oh no no no, the massacre at Virginia Tech was in no way related to gun control - absolutely not! Now, on Wednesday I addressed the blather that VT and gun control were unrelated because Cho Seung-hui bought the guns legally.

Excuse me, dipwads, but isn’t that the exact argument about gun control - that it’s too goddam easy to get guns legally?

I addressed that to the pundits and the “guns make me macho” crowd - and then discovered to my dismay that there were liberal blogs making essentially the same arguments that they were. For example, one parroted the NRA argument that if he couldn’t have bought the guns he would have stolen them instead so gun control laws didn't matter and one even referred to “the extremists on both sides” of the debate, that wonderfully weaselly way of declaring oneself the “reasonable” person in the discussion - and tarring gun control advocates with the brush more properly reserved for the upper echelons of the NRA.

Well, if thinking that arguing that rather than forcing someone to steal a gun in order to commit mass murder we should make it easy on them to get their weapon of choice is flat-out idiotic, damn me as an extremist.

If thinking someone who was supposed to be undergoing Court-ordered counseling after being hospitalized should not be able to buy guns, if thinking that someone in Virginia should not be able to go on eBay and buy ammo clips from a store in Idaho, makes me an extremist, then damn me as an extremist.

If thinking that allowing people to carry concealed weapons is stupid and that the image of someone “dropping” Cho is a blood-soaked Die Hard II fantasy, if daring to mention that the claim “more guns equals less crime” is utter crap (including noting that tough-on-guns Massachusetts had 171 murders in 2005 as compared to 459 in easy-on-guns Virginia, despite similar populations), makes me an extremist, then damn me as an extremist.

And most of all, if being convinced that this eagerness to dismiss, to dance and dodge away from, to double-talk a way out of, dealing with the entire neglected issue of gun control has a good deal less to do with facts and logic and a good deal more to do with cowardly political calculations about the effect in “red” states of appearing to be “anti-gun” makes me an extremist, then by all means please do damn me as an extremist.

Better an extremist than a fearful know-nothing.

(Thanks to Clif at The American Street for the link to the Brady Campaign info.)

Updated with a correction: This post originally said "undergoing Court-ordered counseling after being forcibly hospitalized." That was a misunderstanding on my part; Cho's hospitalization was apparently voluntary, not forcible. The word "forcibly" has been removed.