An Open Letter to Meryl Streep
By L. Neil Smith, Senior Editorial Consultant. January 28th 2014
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. © JPFO. Inc 2014
Dear Meryl,
It says here, in an Emily Miller story in The Washington Times, Wed., Jan. 15, 2014, that you're going to make a movie for producer Harvey Weinstein, chairman of the Weinstein Co., formerly of Miramax, meant to destroy the National Rifle Association. "They're going to wish they weren't alive after I'm done with them," bragged the big doofus.
I will begin this by admitting that I don't care very much about this political-economic goon. He's just another example -- like Bill Gates or Michael Bloomberg, little different from Alfried Krupp or Hermann Schmitz -- of what your fellow "progressive" Theodore Roosevelt once called "malefactors of great wealth", throwing their money around, trying to force people to do their bidding. In fact, when I first heard of this absurd undertaking, I thought the guy was Harvey Fierstein, the silly cable company manager in Independence Day.
I'm a serious novelist (although I can be silly, too); I pay exactly as much attention to what goes on in Hollywood as Hollywood pays to me. But I have recently discovered, to my utter surprise, that I do care about you, probably because of the way you won me over completely in Mamma Mia! (I always was an ABBA fan) and Julie and Julia.
That's why I can't permit you to undermine one of the pillars of American civilization. I'm not speaking of the NRA, here, but of the absolute, unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right of every man, woman, and responsible child to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon, rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything, any time, any place, without asking anyone's permission.
Nor can you be permitted to betray your fellow women and endanger their lives and safety, without my at least attempting to dissuade you.
I would really like to start liking you again.
To begin with, a very badly-needed history lesson: you may not know that the NRA was formed by Union military officers after the War Between the States, to maintain high levels of marksmanship in the civilian population, mostly, I think, as a life-saving deterrent measure. It also created an almost crime-free century, in which lawbreaking was so rare that we remember the names of individual criminals.
From remarks he reportedly made to Howard Stern, your fascistic friend Weinstein appears to believe that weapons grow on bushes, to be plucked in times of trouble and danger, and require no training and practice to be useful preserving lives and cultures. He either needs a hundred hours on a psychiatrist's couch, or a few days at a shooting range.
For what it's worth, these former Union military officers -- all of them Republicans -- are the same guys who pushed the 14th Amendment through, to make damn ed sure that freed slaves in the South were not prevented by local "Jim Crow" laws from owning and carrying firearms. This makes it the only right in the Constitution protected by two Amendments.
And this is the organization you want to destroy? Why not the NAACP, then? Or how about the Antidefamation League? Members of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership see our undertakings as a struggle for civil rights. And we see you, Meryl, as the governor standing in the schoolhouse door, or the fat, corrupt sheriff in khakis and mirror sunglasses, siccing vicious dogs and club-wielding stormtropers on harmless, peaceful demonstrators, blasting them with firehoses.
I deeply and sincerely wish that it could be some other way. But if you're like many other "progressives" we have dealt with, rather than learning the facts and yielding to the undeniable truth of the matter, you prefer to call anybody who disagrees with you a racist or a fascist. But Meryl, you are the one who is advocating and condoning evil.
Let's put this on a moral level: if you help to ram through a law disarming individuals, or making it more difficult to obtain, own, or carry a personal weapon, and somebody dies for the lack of that weapon, that makes you -- morally, if not legally -- an accessory to murder.
Even worse, you're an enabler of genocide.
Each year, millions of people use guns to stop or prevent violent crimes. But for the sake of argument, let's say the number is only a tenth of that: each year, hundreds of thousands of people use firearms to stop or prevent violent crimes. Tell me, Meryl, would you prefer that these self-defenders were injured or killed? Don't deny it; actions speak louder than words. Everything you do in this context is aimed at assuring that these people, hundreds of thousands of them, will be injured or killed. What does that make you? The past fifty years have so thoroughly demonstrated how badly wrong you are about all this, we have to ask ourselves whether you are crazy, stupid, or evil.
More badly-needed facts: those on the left who have demonized the NRA for decades have apparently come to believe your own propaganda. This is always dangerous. I know you like to portray the organization as unbending, intransigent, and reactionary, and its members as ignorant, impoverished, primitives. They are, in fact, Productive Class individuals who are better-educated, more progress oriented, and more affluent than the average gun-hater on your side -- excepting, of course, the megalomaniacal millionaires. NRA members, very largely, are civilized, law-abiding, and exceedingly polite -- way too damned polite.
As a group, the NRA has always been inclined toward a moderation and compromise that has deeply sickened the many of us who stand on principle.
So, if you could destroy the five-million member NRA (an idiotic assumption to begin with), then you'd have us left to deal with. And we learned the proper lesson from the atrocities of World War II and Nazi Germany, from Stalin's mass-starvation of the Kulaks, from Mao's massacre of the "landlords", from the Ottoman Empire's slaughter of Armenians, from Pol Pot's insane murderous hatred of anything Western, and from the Ortega brothers' bizarre genocide against the Miskito Indians.
We understand, with Sinclair Lewis, that it can happen here.
Like the Korean shopkeepers in East Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots, we do not believe you can prevent fires by outlawing fire extinguishers.
That's why we call what you euphemistically refer to as "gun control" by its real name: "victim disarmament". Thanks to our hard-won understanding of history and human nature, we know that the only reason individuals like you and your thug-buddy Weinstein want to take our guns is so you can do things to us you couldn't do if we still had our guns. That's why we still have our guns, and always will. Take it to the bank, Meryl; Americans have obeyed their last gun law.
One final question, Meryl: you most likely have never thought it through, but, exactly like all laws, gun laws are enforced at gun point. Compliance is wrung from unwilling individuals, through deadly violence or the threat of deadly violence which "progressives" like you alays claim to dislike. Harmless individuals are to be violated or murdered, not for what they have done, but for what they possess, or what they might do with what they possess. It's the very essense of fascism.
So my question for you is this: if we stand on principle, and refuse to comply, how many of us are you willing to kill to have your way?
It's a simple question, Meryl.
Answer it.
Remember, I really would like to like you again.
You can reach me at lneil@netzero.com.
Author and lecturer L. Neil Smith is Senior Editorial Consultant for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. A fifty-year veteran of the libertarian movement, he is the Author of 33 books including The Probability Broach, Ceres, Sweeter Than Wine, And Down With Power: libertarian Policy In A Time Of Crisis. He is also the Publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise, now in its 17th year online.
Visit the Neil Smith archive on JPFO.
© Copyright Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership 2014.
