In trying to excuse the latest spate of firearm violence across the country, the gun community is at it again, making its pathetic, inaccurate attempt to equate "accidental" automobile deaths with those of "deliberate" deaths by firearm.
It's brutally simple, gun people: The automobile was not designed and manufactured with the primary, specific function to kill or maim, as was the firearm.
Precisely, just what part of that don't they get?
The percentage of deaths caused by somebody deliberately aiming their automobile at another human being, with the intent to kill or maim, is probably far less than 5 percent. The remaining 95 percent would represent the number of human beings "deliberately" killed, annually, by somebody using a firearm.
One of the gun people's spiritual leaders -- Rush Limbaugh aside -- the president of their revered National Rifle Association, bragged at a recent national meeting of conservatives that in the face of an economy that has affected retail sales in every sector of American life, gun sales have "skyrocketed."
Of course, we've heard nothing from him regarding the unfortunate corollary of that happy news.
Due, in no small part, to the gun community's insistence that every U.S. citizen is allowed the inalienable "right to bear arms" under Second Amendment provisions -- provisions that take absolutely no account of a very active "fringe" element -- that every U.S. citizen should have the right to own, and operate assault weapons, and due to its absolutely unfounded paranoia that President Barack Obama is going to eventually confiscate all private citizens' firearms, in the past month we've seen 26 high-profile, violent firearm deaths, fully a third of them involving the people we all rely on for our safety: police personnel.
How the gun community can continue to ignore responsibility for the carnage its weapons cause, while attempting to place equal blame on the automobile, makes "mixing apples and oranges" look sane, in comparison.
-- Bob Jackson, Simi Valley