A 1995 C-Span video of Attorney General Eric Holder talking about gun control has been unearthed by Breitbart.com. What Holder said then is fascinating in light of the new wave of anti-gun hysteria.
In a piece headlined “Holder vs. the Great Unwashed” in today’s Wall Street Journal, James Taranto quotes the NewsBusters description of the tape:
"What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes. You know, when I was growing up, people smoked all the time. Both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way that people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it."Laughter followed.
At the end of this clip, Holder says anti-gun ads should run every day, and we need to “really brainwash people to think about guns in a vastly different way.”
Of course, this is exactly what is happening. The left is attempting to make guns a class issue—only really tacky people own guns.
Well, my father kept a pistol in the glove compartment of his car. He’d have been a fool not to. He owned a pulpwood company and often went into pulpwood camps that were miles from civilization. If he’d gotten in trouble, the cops were too far away. His gun, I hasten to add, was legal. I also hasten to add that he never shot anybody, though he did kill birds.
Most of the men I grew up with still hunt and own guns. They are sportsmen who take pride in observing rules—and sometimes impose their own rules. They refuse, for example, to shoot birds “on the line” (alighted on telephone wires, that is) because that is unsportsmanlike. They scrupulously obey the restrictions on how many birds or deer one can kill in a season and tend to be dedicated conservationists.
Although I grew up amid guns, I don’t remember any gun violence. I do remember some tragic hunting accidents, but the decision as to whether to hunt isn’t one government should make for us: you know the risks and you decide.
Those of us who believe that guns should be wisely regulated instead of being stigmatized need to be able to make a case for freedom, personal responsibility, and safety. What if it hadn't been widely known that my father had a gun?
A good place to start is by reading Steve McCann’s fine piece headlined “I Will Not Be Intimidated” over at the American Thinker. McCann was shot as a young man when he interrupted the rape of a woman by throwing rocks at the rapist. He can still remember the excruciating pain and finding a place to hide before passing out from shock and loss of blood. So McCann saw reason and hates guns, right? No, he owns guns.
According to the current incarnation of the American left, who traffic constantly in victimhood and noble intentions, I should be in the vanguard of the mandatory gun control and confiscation movement. That somehow it was the inanimate object this soldier was holding and not him that was responsible for the attempt on my life or to ignore the fact that his mindset was such he would have used any weapon at hand to accomplish the same goal.
On the contrary, I own a handgun today because of the experience of coming face to face with the evil that permeates some men's souls. I and the girl I rescued were defenseless. There were no police or armed citizens around and the death of another homeless and unknown boy and girl, buried in an unmarked mass grave, would have been just another easily ignored casualty of the post-War period. I was determined that I would never again face a similar circumstance. I have had in my possession firearms for virtually my entire life, as I have been fortunate to live in the one nation on earth that has embedded in its founding document the right to bear arms.
Today, I am, along with a vast majority of my fellow citizens, being made the scapegoat for the failed policies of the so-called progressives — whether it is the inability of society to deal with extreme psychopaths or the mentally deranged, because the left insists they are entitled to the same rights as other citizens, or the never-ending attempt to rehabilitate criminals incapable of rehabilitation.