{"id":21957,"date":"2018-03-06T15:08:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T22:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=21957"},"modified":"2018-03-06T15:09:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T22:09:05","slug":"cold-dead-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=21957","title":{"rendered":"Cold Dead Hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

From a New York Times op-ed titled “I Wanted to Be a Good Mom. So I Got a Gun<\/a>“:<\/p>\n

A few months after my father left our family home for good, my mother heard me screaming in the middle of the night. It was the kind of scream that made her grab her rifle in one hand and some ammo in another.<\/p>\n

It was a spring night and I was sleeping with my window open, which was right above my bed; I loved breathing in the fresh air. That night, in that open window, I heard the banging of a ladder, and by the time my mother made it into the room and began loading her gun, a man was about to climb in.<\/p>\n

She said something along the lines of: \u201cBethany, come over here. I don\u2019t want you to get his brain matter on your face.\u201d I backed up behind her and my mother raised her gun. The would-be intruder slowly backed down the ladder. As he climbed down, my mother approached. The barrel of her rifle was inches away from his face and she told him, \u201cNext time you come here, I won\u2019t hesitate.\u201d She had her gun pointed at him through the window on his way down, and as he went down the ladder she grabbed the top and shook it, just to put the fear of God into him one last time before he fled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The op-ed\u00a0was written by a conservative activist who says her\u00a0outspoken hostility to Trump has led to\u00a0death threats from the alt-right. After the Daily Stormer published her home address, she decided to arm herself in order to protect her children, as her mother did before her.<\/p>\n

As with almost every pro-gun argument I see, this one is based on a “good guy with a gun” anecdote that beggars belief.\u00a0But I’m willing to overlook that, because the author has a valid point to make, that point being that while she recognizes the dangers of owning guns, and (along with most Americans) wants stricter gun controls, she and people like her are going to continue to buy and own guns. They’ll do it for a reason that’s\u00a0impervious to data\u00a0and argument: to\u00a0protect families and homes. And to that I’ll add that they’ll do it because they can: owning guns is a choice available to Americans.<\/p>\n

I have guns, and for the same reason.\u00a0I know it’s dumb, that my guns are more likely to be used against me than against home invaders, but I’m not going to give them up. At the same time, I want to see far stricter controls on\u00a0their ownership, to include criminal background checks at all points of sale, plus mandatory training, licensing, and registration. Moreover, I want to see a nationwide ban on military-style weapons (a broad category that includes AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles), including the confiscation of such weapons already in the hands of gun owners. I don’t see any conflict there: not with the 2nd Amendment, not with internal logic.<\/p>\n

If I were your king, I’d send jack-booted agents out into the land to round them all up.\u00a0In my benevolence, though, I’d allow you\u00a0to keep\u00a0your pistols, shotguns, and hunting rifles, more than enough to defend hearth and home.<\/p>\n

In real life, I’ll have\u00a0to settle for whatever small steps toward sanity our society is capable of. The kids, bless them, are contributing to a groundswell of opinion and activism, putting heat on the NRA and politicians, and I hope we can keep up the pressure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a New York Times op-ed titled “I Wanted to Be a Good Mom. So I Got a Gun“: A few months after my father left our family home for good, my mother heard me screaming in the middle of the night. It was the kind of scream that made her grab her rifle in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,250,8],"tags":[1091,802],"class_list":["post-21957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-culture-wars","category-politics","tag-gun-control","tag-guns"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21957"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21960,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21957\/revisions\/21960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}