Paper's call for mutual tolerance
ignores its own attacks on gun owners
By David Codrea, April 10th 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
"As we saw again on Saturday, it is very difficult for (some) gun rights and gun safety advocates to see eye to eye," The Hartford Courant proclaimed in a "Can't we all get along?" editorial that falsely tried to claim the high ground while ignoring the paper's own culpability for widening a gulf they insincerely bemoan.
"What hurts their position are things like equating gun ownership with patriotism and using posters with swastikas, implying that Connecticut's gun law is somehow akin to what happened in Nazi Germany," The Courant editorial insists, as if saying so makes it so. "That is not only delusional and inaccurate, it is an insult to the people who lived that horror and to the people who liberated them from it."
What's delusional is the paper's total avoidance of groundbreaking research that is at the core of the very existence of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, brilliantly documented in "'Gun Control': Gateway to Tyranny," which compares "the German language original of the Nazi Weapons Law of March 18, 1938, a page-by-page translation, and then a page-by-page comparison with the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968." 
What's delusional is the denial of the central premise of "Innocents Betrayed," which shows viewers "the laws and ... proclamations," giving them a window to "witness just enough horror to understand how easy it is for armed killers to slaughter the disarmed, the powerless, the innocents." What's delusional is ignoring the outstanding scholarship provided by Professor Stephen P. Halbrook in "Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and 'Enemies of the State,'" which "carefully documents how Nazi Germany went down the exact same path America is going down, with never-seen-before top-secret WW II documents."
What's insulting is that the paper dismisses not just the patriotism of Americans who understand an armed citizenry is "necessary to the security of a free State," but also the intentional diminishing of the people who did live -- and die -- through the horror, and who needed to be "liberated." What's insulting is the paper acting like the worst sin committed by the antis is misnamed "gun safety advocates" who use "terminology such as 'gun nuts' or the like," as if the divide is all about being called childish names. Perhaps the sheltered and privileged editors of The Courant would like to tell Dachau survivor Theodore Haas how insulting they find his beliefs.
"Both sides must acknowledge the law, as stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008," the paper admonishes, masking the fact that up until the Heller decision they called an appeals court ruling "that the Second Amendment 'protects an individual right to keep and bear arms' ... a distortion of the Second Amendment ... that ... reflects the twisted interpretation of the Constitution popularized by the gun lobby...
"Individual ownership of guns for personal use is allowed by the Second Amendment, subject to reasonable regulation," they now declare, ignoring the reality that the Bill of Rights does not "allow" or "grant" or bestow" a right to keep and bear arms, it declares that right "shall not be infringed." That arrogance also presupposes the solons at The Courant are the arbiters of what is "reasonable," which to them includes government edicts to disarm citizens and expand predator empowerment zones.
"If we can get that far, and then talk within the legislative process about what reasonable regulation should be, we will have made progress," they conclude, using that most Orwellian and contradictory of terms, "progress."
Shall we see what they consider reasonable and progressive?
For starters, they demand "scofflaws" of the Constitution State's new gun edicts be prosecuted and punished.
"[T]he state must try to enforce the law," they assert."Authorities should use the background check database as a way to find assault weapon purchasers who might not have registered those guns in compliance with the new law.
"A Class D felony calls for a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine," they warn. "Even much lesser penalties or probation would mar a heretofore clean record and could adversely affect, say, the ability to have a pistol permit.
"If you want to disobey the law, you should be prepared to face the consequences," they advocate.
These are the people complaining about lack of common ground?
And as long as we're looking at widening the divide, look no further than Courant editorial cartoonist Bob Englehart, himself a serial user of the pejorative "gun nut" his masters now condemn as so divisive.
"Repeal the Second Amendment and if not repeal it, re-write it until there's no ambiguity about what the majority of we the peeps want," Englehart declares in a piece perversely titled "Unintended Consequences," bringing to mind nothing so much as a line by Inigo Montoya. "Personally, I say repeal it and the gun problem will be solved, not overnight, mind you. It would take generations for the current supply to diminish, but it would eventually."
Aside from being historically ignorant of what happens when the state enjoys an unchallenged monopoly of violence, Englehart is legally incompetent as well, as are his employers who fraudulently instruct their readers about what the Second Amendment "allows."
As long as The Courant is going to nominally cite the Heller case to make their point, we should examine what the High Court noted about the relationship of the right to keep and bear arms with what is written in the Bill of Rights:
"[I]t has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right," the opinion explained. "The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it 'shall not be infringed.' As we said in United States v. Cruikshank ... '[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.'"
To "progressives," liberties are privileges bestowed by the state, rather than unalienable rights endowed by our Creator. That which rulers can grant can be denied. Or repealed.
And a manipulated majority can overturn and revoke any freedoms they please, and likewise impose any tyranny against the minority they see fit.
That these ivory tower infants presume to teach, yet display such appalling disregard for fundamental principles of liberty, makes their advocacy journalistic malpractice of the lowest order. That they influence public opinion, at least among the ignorant to the benefit of the opportunistic, demonstrates common ground and agreement are impossible to attain.
By demanding that we obey disarmament edicts or be rounded up, and by waging a relentless and ongoing campaign of denial, disinformation and disparagement, they've demonstrated they will not accept anything less than complete surrender and disarmament.
Noting how they and those like them have conducted themselves, historically and currently, who thinks that's a good idea?
David Codrea is a field editor at GUNS Magazine, penning their monthly "Rights Watch" column. He provides regular reporting and commentary at Gun Rights Examiner and blogs at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance.
