-By Warner Todd Huston
The Sun-Times is Chicago’s left-wing, left-wing paper while the Chicago Tribune is but the city’s left-wing paper and pursuant to its agenda, the Sun-Times recently made to shore up support for Mayor “King” Daley’s attempt to eliminate the Second Amendment for his Chicago subjects with its headlined “More guns in city not a good thing.” Naturally most of what is contained in the piece is incorrect and deserves a good fisking.
So, here goes…
This won’t make the NRA happy. Twelve guns a year? How dare Chicago restrict a citizen’s right to buy 12 million guns a year.
My response here won’t make the Sun-Times happy: Newspapers? They have a constitutional right to be free of government interference, too. We call it the First Amendment. But here’s an idea for you, Sun-Times… how about we limit the public to one newspaper a month? After all, ideas are very, very dangerous, aren’t they? If, Sun-Times, you have no problem with our Second Amendment rights being restricted by the federal, the state or local governments, why should you be all upset that your First Amendment rights are restricted? Where is the intellectual honesty in agreeing to restrict the Second Amendment but not the First?
Five hours of training? How about five minutes?
Perhaps we should force newspaper writers and publishers to undergo “training” in order to observe their First Amendment rights? Why not?
For many of the rest of us, Chicago’s new restrictions on guns, pushed through the City Council on Friday, don’t go far enough. But it might be all the city can do, given the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week that effectively tossed out Chicago’s broad handgun ban.
Ah, so The Supreme Court be damned, eh Sun-Times? The SCOTUS have ruled your stringent gun banning ideas to be unconstitutional, remember? Are you such a lawless, un-American institution to so casually dismiss the law of the land? Say, I guess this means that you are OK with Tim McVeigh, or abortion doctor killers? After all, they scoff at the law just like you do.
Our hope now is that Ald. Ed Burke (14th) got it right. Burke said Friday that the original 1982 ban, though he favored it then, might have gone too far, keeping handguns out of the hands of law-abiding Chicagoans who truly needed them for defense in tough neighborhoods.
Your “hope”? Plainly Burke was wrong to vote as he did in 1982.
And we certainly hope not to see more suicides with guns, more fights between husbands and wives that end with guns and more children accidentally killed by guns.
Nice strawman argument, Sun-Times. In fact, these crimes and conflagrations are not wildly higher after parts of the country that had stricter gun laws loosened those restrictions. You are merely scaremongering here, not reporting truth. Scoundrels like the Sun-Times always invoke their supposed concern about “the children” to justify their rampant fascism and general hatred of the United States Constitution.
And who knows — maybe all those new legal guns won’t eventually find their way into the hands of criminals. Sure.
Even logically this is a scaemonger’s sentence. “All” the guns ending up in the hands of criminals? Even logically we all understand that there is no way “all those guns” could possibly end up in the hands of criminals. The Sun-Times should be ashamed of this childish hyperbole
But in the long run, we fear, Ald. Freddrenna Lyle (8th) will be proved right.
“If people bothered to read as opposed to getting their news from the ‘Tea Party Times,'” Lyle said Friday, “they would understand and see that there is more harm done by the proliferation of handguns than there is benefit.”
Alderman Lyle is a partisan liar and the Sun-Times assists him in his lies. Statistics show that the proliferation of handguns does not increase crime. Author Don B. Kates, a fellow that makes both sides of the gun control issue mad, even states that more guns does not increase gun crimes. While saying that more guns seems to leave crime stats unchanged, he refutes many of the claims that leftist, anti-Second Amendment supporters make.
More guns do not, for instance, cause “regular people” to increase murder rates. Many anti-gunners say that more guns end up causing murders in homes of “regular people” as if the gun is some magical draw to insanity. He also shows definitive evidence that increased gun ownership in England and the U.S. both did not increase crime. Between 1973 and 1997, for instance, gun ownership in America increased 163% but homicide rates declined 27.7%.
So, what Alderman Lyle and the Chicago Sun-Times claim are provable falsehoods. But their goal is not truth. It is a political agenda of population control, destruction of the Constitution, and big government.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.