Pot And Kettle Projection
By L. Neil Smith, lneil@netzero.com.
The Libertarian Enterprise. January 6th 2014
Prepared for Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. © JPFO. Inc 2014
A long time ago, on May 14, 2000, Mother's Day, the fraudulently named "Million Mom March" against the 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, made its debut in my home town.
The city's protectors-and-servers were out in force, resplendent in their nylon armor, fiberglass hats, and lucite face-shields, thanks no doubt to our comic-relief city council's vision of angry white middle-aged male gun owners taking their right-wing frustration out on the paragons of maternal and civic virtue parading past them in the street.
But the simple, if embarrassing truth is that it was the "marching mothers" who were frustrated and angry. The harpies had already been trounced, humiliated, and discredited at a town meeting in which Lenda Jackson, a brilliant, indomitable high school teacher and NRA pistol intructor, had led the charge, and I had introduced the term "victim disarmament".
Those two words had reduced the other side's leader -- an old-time professional leftist who clearly recognized the power-meme, originally extracted from an academic study in Texas on "gun control", as a death-knell for his side -- to a wobbling pile of Jell-O, barely able to stumble out to his car in the middle of the meeting, and drive away.
On the day of the actual march, the only violence that occurred was on the part of the hysterically shrieking biddies in the street, when one of their number, an angry white middle-aged female, taking her left-wing frustration out on anyone with the temerity to disagree with her (or to suggest she was funny), attacked an onlooker with a clip-board.
Thirteen years later (proving that time flies whether you're having fun or not) Matt Drudge heads a story with two tiny images, one red, one blue, standing at lecterns, having a political debate. The red, presumably Republican figure just stands there as the blue Democrat points a pistol at his head. It is a picture worth a thousand words.
It is occasioned by the fact -- only recently discovered by the "lamestream media", that the overwhelming majority of spectacularly telegenic violence carried out in this country, and traditionally blamed on right-wing extremists, racists, Tea Partiers (for which read ordinary American gun owners), is, in fact, really committed by the left.
It's amazing how many left-wing sites you'll find, thanks mostly to Google, whose proprietors vociferously deny this simple fact of the matter. It must really sting to watch the movement of peace, love, and flowers-in-your-hair reveal itself as the homicidal aggregation it is and always has been. From the second Presidential assassin, Charles Guiteau, to the last we know of, Lee Harvey Oswald (and you can throw in wannabe killers like Lynette "Squeaky" Fromm, Sarah Jane Moore, and John Hinckley), all have been advocates of one kind of socialism or another. (There are some historians who will argue that John Wilkes Booth was some kind of a leftist, but squint as I will, I can't see it.)
Look them up: Charles Guiteau; Leon Czolgosz; Lee Harvey Oswald; Sirhan Bishara Sirhan; Charles Manson and his little friends Squeaky Fromm and Sarah Jane Moore; Barack Obama's intellectual parents Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Kathleen Boudin; Arthur Bremer; John Hinckley; Theodore Kaczynski; Jim Jones (whose name should always be brought up in Nancy Pelosi's presence the way Mary Jo Kopechne's was in the presence of Teddy Kennedy); James Oliver Huberty; George "Jo Jo" Pierre Hennard; James Daniel Simpson; Larry Gene Ashbrook; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; Robert W. Pickett; Bruce Edward Ivins; John Allen Williams and Lee Boyd Malvo; Douglas Williams; Seung-Hui Cho; Nidal Malik Hasan; Carlos Bledsoe; James Holmes; Christopher Dorner; Ali Syed; Paul Kevin Curtis; Dzhorak Tsarnaev; and Aaron Alexis, Marxists, reverse-racists, redistributionists, collectivists one and all.
Our basic rights have been gradually, systematically ripped away from each of us over the past half century, employing this gaggle of leftist loons and religious fanatics as an excuse, in a display of collective punishment unrivaled even by those we may have suffered in those havens of anthill socialism, the public school system and the military.
This may not make sense to you and me. Even when the pattern of liberal or "progressive" violence was not apparent, it still didn't make sense. I wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald; I hadn't shot the President. Why should I be subject to reams of new, patently unconstitutional legislation? I wasn't Sirhan Sirhan; I hadn't shot the President's brother.
I wasn't Arthur Bremer and I hadn't shot George Wallace. And I certainly wasn't whoever it was who actually shot Martin Luther King.
But it makes perfect sense to liberals and "progressives", to whom "logic is a little tweeting bird ... a wreath for pretty flowers that smell bad".
These are individuals notoriously directed by their feelings, rather than by the operation of their minds. They write songs about it. They make whole movies about it. They live in a universe where it makes perfect sense for a ghost to command a young fighter pilot to abandon the instruments it no doubt took centuries and bilions of dollars or kwatloos or pengoes or whatever to develop, and to "use the Force" -- fly by the seat of his pants -- instead. It is a world where it makes perfect sense for that young fighter pilot to listen to a ghost.
Somehow, deep down inside, they know that people guided by their hearts, their guts, their gonads -- any organ but their brains -- may do anything, any time, on a whim. They don't trust themselves because they know themselves. And because they have taught their children the same poisonous ideas, they don't trust them, either. And through a well-known psychological phenomenon known as "projection", in which they impute the same motivations to others, they don't trust you and me.
They know they can't be trusted with a loaded gun in their hands. Who knows what they might do -- they certainly don't. They might just feel a whim to touch it off if you make them mad -- or happen to be Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or especially Michael Savage. And because they can't trust themselves, you can't be trusted, either.
Projection.
If we were like them, anything like them, we would push through legislation that strictly forbids any of those who call themselves liberals,"progressives", socialists, communists, or who are registered as Democrats or anything else on the left of life, to obtain, or carry firearms.
And perhaps even to vote.
It would be a cleaner, safer world.
If it only saved one life.
For the children.
But we are not like them. We believe that the Founders wrote the Bill of Rights for everyone, that it is "true for all men in all times", and that those who hammered out the Common Law, painfully, and at unimaginable cost to life, liberty, and property, knew what they were doing when they said "Innocent until proven guilty by a court of law".
Consequently, the best ethical decency allows us is to recommend that our poor liberal, "progressive", socialist, leftist, Marxist, Leninist, communist, Maoist neighbors get some serious couch-time, soon.
Before they shoot somebody.
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.
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