When deer hunting season opens this weekend, Wisconsin’s poor deer hunters are going to be at even more of a disadvantage in their annual attempt to match wits with highly intelligent animals. This year, deer hunters are going to be burdened by carrying heaping armloads of guns into the woods with them. Since Nov. 4, deer hunters and other gun lovers have been absolutely terrified that President-elect Barack Obama is going to swoop down on their homes and confiscate all their guns. In a panic, thousands of gun owners have raced to their nearest gun dealers to stock up on handguns, semiautomatic assault weapons and enough ammo to level the entire state of Wisconsin.
One gun dealer called Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden “the most anti-gun people ever to be in the White House.” Golly, you’d think the late President Lincoln would have been pretty anti-gun.
Certainly, his widow sitting next to him at the theater wasn’t a real big fan. In the first two weeks of November, Wisconsin gun sales and background checks nearly doubled compared to the same period a year earlier, when scary Democrats weren’t being elected. One hysterical gun owner ran out to stockpile 20 cases of ammunition in the belief that bullets and guns “are probably going to be made illegal.”
What comes through from these stories is just the opposite of the image gun owners want to project: that they are tough guys ready to shoot it out with any wild thing man or beastwho crosses their paths.
Instead, it turns out gun owners are big scaredy-cats.
Heart-Pounding Terror
A majority of us were dancing in the streets celebrating a historic new direction for our country after pointless war abroad and economic disaster at home. But, for gun owners, their first thought was heartpounding terror that they might not have enough guns and ammo to fend off all the demons that keep them awake at night.
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If you require a gun to provide you with the courage to face the world, how many guns are enough? Most hunters and other gun owners are already armed to the teeth. But it has long been an article of faith of the National Rifle Association and other gun advocates that the more guns you have the safer you are. And if the federal government is suddenly going to start going door-to-door confiscating weapons, you’d better have plenty of backup.
It sort of proves the point Obama once made in an offhand remark when he said that small-town people who feel powerless in our country “cling” to their guns. The NRA itself was the first to celebrate the clinging phenomenon in a famous bumper sticker about prying guns from “cold, dead fingers.”
If you live in constant fear that someone is going to take all of your guns away, you aren’t going to be foolish enough to leave any of them at home when you go up north to hunt deer this year, are you? After all, that’s just what Barack Obama and Joe Biden want you to do. While your wives are out getting drunk and tucking dollar bills into the G-strings of Chippendales, the Democrats are going to sneak in and clean out your entire arsenals.
Really, that’s what it’s like to live with the overwhelming fear that requires a warm gun to assure your personal safety. Gun owners still wake up trembling with fear, remembering the 10 years after 1994 when semiautomatic assault weapons were banned in this country.
Not only were assault weapons banned, but so were pistol grips, flash suppressors and bayonet mounts that could be used to convert hunting rifles into military assault weapons.
For 10 long years, gun owners lived in constant fear that godless hordes would attack their homes and get in close enough for hand-to-hand combat at a time when law-biding citizens were forbidden to buy bayonet mounts.
The law, passed under President Bill Clinton, had a 10-year sunset provision. President George Bush allowed the ban to expire in 2004 so Vice President Dick Cheney and other hunters in America would once again have the freedom to use any weapons they wanted to shoot their friends.
Actually, President-elect Obama, like most other Democrats, has always proclaimed his support for the Second Amendment and the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to buy, own and use guns. But the gun lobby considers any politician an enemy unless he supports arming every American, drunk or sober, sane or insane. Let the chipsand the bodiesfall where they may. That’s why really cautious deer hunters are going to be lugging every weapon they can carry into the woods with them. We hope no one drops one on his foot. We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt by a gun.
What’s your take? Write: editor@shepex.com or comment on this story online at www. expressmilwaukee.com.
