It always annoys me that the most stupid and most ignorant are frequently the most vocal. Case in point:
It seems that gun control should be a no-brainer. Our city and other communities across this country have recently seen the tragic results of the misuse of guns by ordinary citizens, including by young teens.
When I was a growing up in Baltimore people felt safe. We went out alone at night; I often went to the library alone after dark at age 10. We never heard about shootings. They seemed to be only in cowboy movies.
The availability of guns to any two-legged creature who could talk changed all that. It’s true that human beings can get very angry, perhaps even angry enough to kill. But if guns weren’t so readily available that anger might be expressed in less lethal ways.
I doubt that the Founding Fathers meant for anyone to lawfully carry a gun.
The “availability of guns” has not gotten easier in Baltimore anytime in the last 100 years so I can’t imagine when Jeannette Ollodart Marx grew up and guns were less available than they are now. I have to believe she is ignorant and/or stupid. This conclusions has further support with her speculation about the Founding Fathers not intending for nearly everyone to be able to lawfully carry a firearm.
It would seem that if she is sufficiently self-aware Ms. Marx should be intimately familiar with no-brainers.
I think what she doesn’t realize is that it’s because of the criminal shootings, that we now all have guns.
Her letter is a racist dog whistle, a celebration of segregation enforced by police brutality and lynchings. Ms. Marx didn’t give her age, but I suspect she grew up in a time when blacks knew to stay in ‘their’ sections of town, and illegal immigrants were still to afraid to settle in Maryland.
The biggest difference between the 40s, 50s, 60s and now is that everyone who could, chose to flee the corrupt cities. Educated people commute into the city for work, and then flee home. Note, for instance, that she lives in Towson, not Baltimore.
If the real concern were lowering gun-crimes, they would focus on how to keep single males from mooching on the free/subsidized housing and food stamps meant for children and their moms. They would cap Maryland unemployment benefits at 1 year (right now, unemployment benefits have been extended repeatedly so far that people who lost work under Bush are still getting unemployment benefits).
I thank God daily that after a decade living in Baltimore I finally wised up and moved to Texas. That it took me so long will shame me to the grave.
The writer perfectly captures the sense of those who live there.
“Because I think this way, the world must be the way I think.”
She’s right in the idea that the willingness of Chaka or S’prontah to sell a gun out of the back of his car to any two-legged thug who wore clothes and had the scratch has caused the shootings to increase where she use to live, but her solution is too similar to treating an increase in rapes of women by having a curfew on women. Surely she’d recognize the stupidity in that. It’s a shame she doesn’t recognize she’s advocating the same thing here.
Imagine the uproar if a politician announced that after consulting with the BATF and VPC, the proposed solution to the increase in rapes of women in the city was to have a curfew on women, and mandatory photo registration of every married male resident of the city!
“It’s common sense” or “it’s a no-brainer” is the equivalent of, “I have no factual evidence to support my claim.”