Learning to Share

Sanka shares a drink with her new best friend, Ginger.

O-Town Thanksgiving 2006

Sanka loves to clean up Aunt Roni's messes while she tries to help prepare dinner.

I'm here for you, Mom.

The whole family and the obligatory in-front-of-the-fireplace pic with Santa/Grandpa.

Full. Sleepy. (Stinky.)

Constitutionally Ignorant NY Times Blasts Right to Bear Arms, Rails Against Self-Protection

(From Chris, originally on the Right Angle.)

As if they were actually trying to be wrong, the New York Times editorial writers put together a nonsensical, anti-2nd Amendment editorial that appears in today’s paper.

In their editorial titled “A Parting Shot From George Allen,” the Times’ lefty writers blast a bill presented by Virginia Republican Sen. George Allen “that would allow the carrying of concealed weapons in national parks.” The bill, now in the hands of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Committee, is one the Times hopes “will die the miserable death it deserves.”

The Times then goes into their repeated mantra that the 2nd Amendment is not really understood by the American public. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. American Citizen, you’re too dumb to understand the meaning of the 2nd Amendment. Says the Times:

America’s confusion about the Second Amendment is now nearly total. An amendment that ensures a collective right to bear arms has been misread in one legislature after another -- often in the face of strong public disapproval -- as a law guaranteeing an individual’s right to carry a weapon in public. And, in a perversion of monumental proportions, the battle to extend that right has largely succeeded in co-opting the language of the Civil Rights movement, so that depriving an American of the right to carry a gun in public sounds, to some, as offensive as stripping him of the right to vote.

Of course, we’re dealing with a liberal paper whose understanding of the 1st Amendment should call into question their understanding of all things constitutional.

The Times believes that the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms” actually should be infringed.

This is the same liberal group who reads the 1st Amendment’s “free speech” clause to include porn, flag-burning, strip-tease, and obscenities, but not political “speech” such as campaign spending. They believe the 1st Amendment’s protection of “the free exercise” of religion from Congress means that Congress should create laws barring religious exercises. They believe that that 1st Amendment’s protection of the press should include the press’s revealing national security secrets.

The editorial goes on to blast those of us who believe we actually would be safer by being armed:

Senator Allen’s bill is, of course, being cheered by the gun lobby, which sees it not as an assault on public safety but as a way of nationalizing the armed paranoia that the National Rifle Association and its cohorts stand for.

As someone who was mugged at gunpoint out in the open at 8pm near the fountain in the park just outside the Capitol Building and the Russell Senate Office Building, I can tell you that the Times editorial team hasn’t the foggiest idea of what they’re talking about. I can tell you that I would have felt (and would have been) much safer if I had been allowed to actually carry a gun.

First, the criminals, who probably saw me as a law-abiding citizen who would not be carrying a sidearm in the anti-gun District of Columbia and, therefore, an easy mark, would have had to think twice about pulling their stunt.

Second, as John Lott and others have shown, simply brandishing a gun often deters crime.

But the Times anti-gun team doesn’t leave Americans without hope. They have an idea of how we can be safer in our national parks: more spending. Get a load of this nonsense:

If Americans want to feel safer in their national parks, the proper solution is to increase park funding, which has decayed steadily since the Bush administration took office.

And in case you didn’t understand that the Times doesn’t like you if you believe the 2nd Amendment is just as legitimate as the rest of the Constitution, here’s how they close out their ridiculous editorial:

To zealots who believe that the Second Amendment trumps all others, the parks are merely another badland, like schools and church parking lots, that could be cleaned up if the carrying of private weapons were allowed. The concealed-weapon advocates are doing an excellent job of sounding terrified by “lonely wilderness trails.” But make no mistake. Senator Allen’s bill would make no one safer. It can only endanger the public.

Happy freakin’ Thanksgiving to you conservative rubes who just don’t get it.

Don't Ask...

Sanka, as everyone who has ever met her knows, is one's of God's strangest creatures. Here's how we found her bones laid out when we came home one night.