5 June 23
“What is ‘Freedom of Expression?’
Without the ‘freedom to offend,’ it ceases to exist.”
Salman Rushdie
Both Bowie knifes and stilettos (the term, “stiletto,” has never enjoyed a universally-accepted definition) were subject to legislative bans in the 1800s, particularly in places like New Orleans, where hand-wringing politicians at the time babbled incessantly about “knife-violence.”
Of course, such naive “bans” were mostly unenforceable, and thus unenforced (or more often, “selectively enforced,” always upon political opponents), much as they are today.
NY’s “Sullivan Law,” bullied through the legislature by Big Tim Sullivan and his fellow Irish gangsters in 1911 (all notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall Democrats) was designed specifically to prevent newly-arriving Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants (whom Sullivan feared/despised) from acquiring guns.
Similar (and for the same reasons) efforts in the 1970s to ban “Saturday-night specials” were proposed by the same paranoid autocrats. And once again, the term “Saturday-night special” was never given a precise definition, by design.
However, one trait of the SNS that was universally agreed-upon was that they were “cheap.”
Poor citizens, who couldn’t afford expensive pistols, but who still needed some form of legitimate personal protection, provided an active market for inexpensive handguns. They still do, but leftist politicians (who are anything but poor) are ever made nervous by this degree of personal freedom.
Today, “assault weapon” is the left’s latest bogeyman and catch-phrase. Not surprisingly, we never hear from their lips any species of precise definition, again by design!
How leftists simultaneously fear and detest strong, independent, armed citizens, especially when such citizens aren’t members of the “in-crowd” of the era!
That is to say: We’re the wrong ethnicity; we attend the wrong church; we’re not dependent on their handouts; we believe in individual freedom and liberty and maintain various other “extremist” notions.
“What good does it do to ban ‘some’ guns?”
Howard Metzenbaum, Ohio Democrat (died in 2008)
/John
