Views: What Do Guns Mean to Americans? The NRA vs. the Brady Campaign
Americans revere their Constitution but they can vehemently disagree on how to interpret specific passages. The 2nd Amendment is a prime example of how individual rights, self-defense, violence and American culture can produce such passion and divisiveness. The non-partisan Web site Opposing Views asked the NRA and the Brady Campaign what guns mean to Americans.
FOXNews.com
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Click here to read more debates on gun rights and gun control.
The Freedom to Protect Yourself, Your Family, and Your Community
By Chris W. Cox, NRA-ILA executive director
America's 80 million gun owners could give 80 million answers to this question. To hunters, guns mean a day with family and friends, enjoying the beauty of the outdoors. To gun collectors, they provide a connection to the inventors, craftsmen, warriors and pioneers of days gone by. To competitive shooters, they provide an opportunity for self-mastery, through the discipline of training and the forge of competition.
Most important, though, is that guns provide an effective means of exercising the God-given, individual right of self-defense. To America's founders, that right was a hallmark of individual freedom in our new nation. Thomas Jefferson -- an avid gun collector and hunter -- said, "No free man shall be debarred the use of arms," and Thomas Paine said, "[A]rms discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe."
While the founders were mainly concerned with "invaders and plunderers" of the political kind, the right is equally important in protecting individuals from the violent "invaders and plunderers" on our streets. In the recent case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court recognized this, declaring that the Second Amendment protects "the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation."
Indeed, the most comprehensive study of gun use to date, by award-winning criminologist Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, found that Americans use guns for self-defense against crime more than two million times per year. Certainly today, with 40 states having adopted laws that allow honest citizens to carry handguns for protection outside the home, guns mean much of what they meant to our founders: the freedom to protect yourself, your family, and your community.
We Must Make it Harder for Dangerous People to Get Dangerous Weapons
By Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
When I was 12, I earned an NRA Marksmanship badge at YMCA Camp. I enjoyed learning how to fire a gun at a target and worked at becoming better with practice. But I also took away a deep respect for how dangerous guns were.
Americans have a long history with guns. We used them to tame the frontier, and many Americans consider them important for hunting wildlife or managing pests. But Americans' views on guns often differ depending on where they live.
If you're in the bayous of Louisiana, or the plains of Montana, a gun can be your defense against predators. When the police are far away, you may feel strongly about needing a gun for self-defense. And if someone says we should restrict guns, you worry.
But in urban areas like Philadelphia or South Central Los Angeles or even my home town in Indiana, guns may be best known for injuring young people as a result of gang violence, or police officers at a traffic stop or domestic quarrel. But when you say "we need to controls the weapons available on the streets," other Americans misinterpret you as wanting to limit their rights.
This is why we've had a passionate debate about guns. Finding common ground may have been aided by the Supreme Court decision in June that Americans have a right to have a firearm in their home but that reasonable restrictions on gun access are also lawful.
Guns are always going to be available to law-abiding citizens. But we can take steps to make it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons.
To read about other issues on Opposing Views, click here
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Monday, October 13, 2008
HOW TRUE!
Intellectual Flyover Country
By Doug Patton
October 13, 2008
Columnist David Brooks is the sort of writer who passes for a conservative at The New York Times. In reality, he is an urbane, pseudo-erudite hack, as evidenced by his latest column.
Brooks contends that the reason conservatives are no longer winning elections is because we have eschewed intellectualism and promoted social class warfare, thereby "driving away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts." In the last two decades, according to Brooks, conservative politicians and "talk-radio jocks" have "divided the nation between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts."
Brooks also asserts that "George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party." That argument is absurd. It is precisely because of Bush's excesses, not the GOP's, that he has a 29 percent approval rating: excesses in spending, a nearly trillion-dollar bailout bill, and lax border security. Bush deserves credit for three accomplishments in eight years: modest tax relief, a pair of solid Supreme Court appointments and especially for seven years of terror-free life for the American people. After that, the list of his accomplishments goes downhill quickly.
Yet Brooks lists "anti-immigration fervor" and "isolationism" as the "excesses" from which Bush supposedly saved his party. Question: In what world does David Brooks live that he believes such things? Answer: The solipsistic echo-chamber of New York City.
Brooks criticizes John McCain for choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, as if that is the source of McCain's current problems. He seems to believe that Palin adds to the GOP's exclusion of the groups he thinks have been driven from the party. "Nobody," Brooks writes, "so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite."
But the most astounding part of Brooks' analysis is his statement that Republicans are guilty of alienating whole professions - lawyers, doctors, tech executives, even bankers - all of whom now donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.
As a lifelong resident of flyover country, I hardly know where to begin to refute Brooks' snobbery. So let's stop dancing around the subject. The reason these groups feel alienated from the Republican Party is that they are embarrassed by those of us who want to defend innocent human life and traditional marriage. They simply cannot believe that these issues are more important to us than a temporary drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
But their embarrassment goes much deeper than that. The gulf is primarily a spiritual one. Those of us who believe in fighting for the defense of life and - dare I say it? - for the preservation of normal, traditional, monogamous human sexual relationships do so out of a belief that someone much greater and wiser than we are, namely the Creator of the Universe, has said this is how we should live. This is not an arbitrary position we have taken in order to deny "reproductive rights" to women or "equal rights" to homosexuals. These are strongly held views given to believers by God, universal truths, if you will. No religious tradition in the world believes in killing babies or in homosexual marriage.
So let's be totally honest. George W. Bush has failed the Republican Party and, more importantly, the American people, in almost every regard. He has spent our money in a manner that would make a drunken sailor ashamed, grown the federal government at a faster rate than any president since FDR, colluded with Ted Kennedy and his ilk on education policy, and given us stimulus checks with the caveat to spend them on plasma TVs and IPhones, rather than existing debt (or the terrorists win). And he has spent eight years asleep at the wheel on illegal immigration.
The Republican Party has not rejected intellectualism. The definition of the word has been hijacked by the William Ayer' and the Ward Churchill's of the world, with their pithy rejoinders that 9/11 victims were "little Eichmanns." One need only read Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn or Christopher Buckley to know that conservative intellectualism is alive and well.
What sets conservatives, and by extension the GOP, apart is that we have always encouraged vigorous debate and the civil discourse necessary for the continuation of this American experiment. It is the foundation of our republic and the catalyst to our best ideas. But we succeed in our intellectual pursuits only because they stand firmly on the solid rock of our morality, our spirituality and our admission of and submission to the God that grants our souls the right to breathe. The sinking sand of liberal dogma will never be a suitable substitute.
---
Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and public policy advisor. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online, TheConservativeVoice.com and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net.
--------------------
Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
By Doug Patton
October 13, 2008
Columnist David Brooks is the sort of writer who passes for a conservative at The New York Times. In reality, he is an urbane, pseudo-erudite hack, as evidenced by his latest column.
Brooks contends that the reason conservatives are no longer winning elections is because we have eschewed intellectualism and promoted social class warfare, thereby "driving away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts." In the last two decades, according to Brooks, conservative politicians and "talk-radio jocks" have "divided the nation between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts."
Brooks also asserts that "George W. Bush restrained some of the populist excesses of his party." That argument is absurd. It is precisely because of Bush's excesses, not the GOP's, that he has a 29 percent approval rating: excesses in spending, a nearly trillion-dollar bailout bill, and lax border security. Bush deserves credit for three accomplishments in eight years: modest tax relief, a pair of solid Supreme Court appointments and especially for seven years of terror-free life for the American people. After that, the list of his accomplishments goes downhill quickly.
Yet Brooks lists "anti-immigration fervor" and "isolationism" as the "excesses" from which Bush supposedly saved his party. Question: In what world does David Brooks live that he believes such things? Answer: The solipsistic echo-chamber of New York City.
Brooks criticizes John McCain for choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate, as if that is the source of McCain's current problems. He seems to believe that Palin adds to the GOP's exclusion of the groups he thinks have been driven from the party. "Nobody," Brooks writes, "so relentlessly divides the world between the 'normal Joe Sixpack American' and the coastal elite."
But the most astounding part of Brooks' analysis is his statement that Republicans are guilty of alienating whole professions - lawyers, doctors, tech executives, even bankers - all of whom now donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.
As a lifelong resident of flyover country, I hardly know where to begin to refute Brooks' snobbery. So let's stop dancing around the subject. The reason these groups feel alienated from the Republican Party is that they are embarrassed by those of us who want to defend innocent human life and traditional marriage. They simply cannot believe that these issues are more important to us than a temporary drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
But their embarrassment goes much deeper than that. The gulf is primarily a spiritual one. Those of us who believe in fighting for the defense of life and - dare I say it? - for the preservation of normal, traditional, monogamous human sexual relationships do so out of a belief that someone much greater and wiser than we are, namely the Creator of the Universe, has said this is how we should live. This is not an arbitrary position we have taken in order to deny "reproductive rights" to women or "equal rights" to homosexuals. These are strongly held views given to believers by God, universal truths, if you will. No religious tradition in the world believes in killing babies or in homosexual marriage.
So let's be totally honest. George W. Bush has failed the Republican Party and, more importantly, the American people, in almost every regard. He has spent our money in a manner that would make a drunken sailor ashamed, grown the federal government at a faster rate than any president since FDR, colluded with Ted Kennedy and his ilk on education policy, and given us stimulus checks with the caveat to spend them on plasma TVs and IPhones, rather than existing debt (or the terrorists win). And he has spent eight years asleep at the wheel on illegal immigration.
The Republican Party has not rejected intellectualism. The definition of the word has been hijacked by the William Ayer' and the Ward Churchill's of the world, with their pithy rejoinders that 9/11 victims were "little Eichmanns." One need only read Jonah Goldberg, Mark Steyn or Christopher Buckley to know that conservative intellectualism is alive and well.
What sets conservatives, and by extension the GOP, apart is that we have always encouraged vigorous debate and the civil discourse necessary for the continuation of this American experiment. It is the foundation of our republic and the catalyst to our best ideas. But we succeed in our intellectual pursuits only because they stand firmly on the solid rock of our morality, our spirituality and our admission of and submission to the God that grants our souls the right to breathe. The sinking sand of liberal dogma will never be a suitable substitute.
---
Doug Patton is a freelance columnist who has served as a political speechwriter and public policy advisor. His weekly columns are published in newspapers across the country and on selected Internet web sites, including Human Events Online, TheConservativeVoice.com and GOPUSA.com, where he is a senior writer and state editor. Readers may e-mail him at dougpatton@cox.net.
--------------------
Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
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