At Least They're Honest

Say what you want about Leftists in places like Seattle. At least they come out and tell you they want to infringe your liberty. It's got to be all the caffeine. Cathy Sorbo laments a series of rambling problems, from recent foiled potential school shootings to what life was like when she was a kid. Because she never really makes a point, she never really has a case, but I like to review such rants as they appear and dissect them like the curious little organisms they are. Take the following for example.

Gun violence and gun control issues can quickly divide communities. Gun advocates everywhere will tout their right to bear arms while others would prefer the right to live in a society without people packing weapons down the backs of their pants.

Although it's difficult to isolate her arguments, this paragraph gives you a clue of the typical thought of the large segment of the Left that, despite not wanting to bring it up to the general public, still strongly believes in dismantling Second Amendment rights. As I noted, at least Ms. Sorbo is a bit more direct. the last sentence about packing weapons in our pants shows she views this as one of the fundamental reasons that society has broken down. Where does she think society's breaking down? Well, that sort of falls later in her piece.

It's quite clear that kids are becoming increasingly more fragile over time.

They must be heavily conflicted and frightened by the never-ending wars, bombs, famine, deceit and mistrust in world leaders, expanding poverty and the WASL test.

Mustn't forget to mention deadly influenzas, AIDS, cancers galore and flesh-eating disease: Stub a toe, lose a leg and then die anyway. Who wants to continue in that world?
"Is bird flu in your backyard? Find out at 11."

Throw a dysfunctional home life and a couple of firearms into the mix and you have a kid on the edge.

Of course, from this you're led to believe that kids these days have so much more pressure on them than any previous generation. Having grown up hearing the same things about our generation and the ones before us, I can say fairly definitively that she isn't much of a historian. Kids have always had to worry about a lot in their lives. Kids a couple hundred years ago had to worry about dieing from all sorts of illnesses and societal failures. They still do. It didn't cause them to take paw's rifle and go shoot up the town school. That's immaterial to an argument like Ms. Sorbo's, though. If you start injecting reality into the debate, then it might hurt her argument. Kids were also around firearms when, not too many decades ago, they were carrying them to school to shoot in a rifle club or down the street to go plinking in a nearby woods. If guns were banned tomorrow, as she fantasizes (in addition to being Jude Law's nanny), there would still be disease, stress, social pressure, violent video games and TV, drugs and broken families.

It sort of makes bringing up all these issues around the issues of "boy I wish guns were banned" a little useless in terms of a real argument, and Ms. Sorbo mostly ends up wasting valuable column space. But just when you think all is lost, she brings up the "when I was a kid" argument about why guns are bad, at least I think that's what she's saying.

When I lived in the University District circa 1998-99, there was quite the upsurge of drug dealing. The escalation of such activity was a deciding factor in our move out of the neighborhood. On the very day we moved out there was a dealer sitting on a retaining wall while customers actually lined up while waiting to purchase their tiny plastic baggy of goods. I wouldn't be surprised if those bold and enterprising drug dealers later ended up with their own table at the farmers market.

There were never any incidents with gunfire, but it seemed imminent, just a matter of time. We got the heck out of there.

So, guns never really were a factor in her growing up, although drugs seem to be a big factor, but it's the guns that need banning. That will stop the drug dealers, right? I wonder if she honestly believes this. How could anyone with a lick of common sense? Or does she just think that banning guns will make drug dealers give up guns? She should check with England. They tried that and their gun crime is at an all time high, as is their drug crime. Not much of a current events person either, is she?

Perhaps, if she hadn't in such a roundabout way tried to connect all these horrible things to the availability of guns, she might have had a decent piece on trying to improve the environment kids are growing up in, but that effort is lost in her slightly overriding hatred for firearms.

Public school students do not have that option. Instead they have school dress and behavior codes prohibiting open-toed shoes as well as assault rifles.

I hope these kids can enjoy a relatively violence-free end to their school year, and hope they can find Kevlar prom wear.

Well, assault rifles are THE accessory to have at prom this year, I hear. Where's she getting her information from, bad '80's movies? She managed to cover most of the major boogeymen kids have to deal with these days, with a few ommissions.

Kids have to deal with drugs, peer pressure, poor or no family environments, social indoctrination at public school, violence on TV and in video games and the simple fact of hormones turning every teenager into their own individual soap star. But why have a discussion about that? Why focus on how to fix or even how to address these problems, when all you have to do is ban guns? Ms. Sorbo, your story is Pulitzer Prize material if I ever saw it.