That’s the title of the article. Don’t blame me.
“I grew up in a town where two-thirds of the people who came to school drove trucks and had hunting rifles and hunting shotguns in their gunracks in their trucks,” said Jones, who was born in Deland, Fla., about an hour north of the Braves’ spring training complex, and attended high school in nearby Pierson and then Jacksonville. “But never at any point did anyone ever pull one out and say, ‘I’m going to kill somebody.’ Whenever there was a disagreement, we threw knuckles. We’d meet after school and fight. That’s just the way it was.”
[ … ]
“I believe in our Constitutional right to bear arms and protect ourselves,” Jones said. “But I do not believe there is any need for civilians to own assault rifles. I just don’t.
“I would like to see something (new legislation) happen. I liken it to drugs – you’re not going to get rid of all the guns. But AR-15s and AK-47s and all this kind of stuff – they belong in the hands of soldiers. Those belong in the hands of people who know how to operate them, and whose lives depend on them operating them. Not with civilians. I have no problem with hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols and what-not. But I’m totally against civilians having those kinds of automatic and semi-automatic weapons.”
So the write apparently thinks it helps his case that Chipper Jones is a baseball hero or an “avid hunter.” Chipper decries “assault weapons,” AR-15s, AK-47s, semi-automatic weapons, and anything that’s not “what-not.”
It apparently didn’t occur to the author that Chipper Jones is an idiot. He began explaining that guns were ubiquitous when he was growing up and that no one would have even thought about a school shooting. Good. He is on to something there. He could have explained what has changed and why this kind of thing occurs today when it didn’t not so long ago.
But he didn’t. His setup was badly off script and pointed to something other than the ubiquitous availability of guns and into morals, culture, and [heaven forbid] perhaps even whether the nation worships at the foot of Baal or God. So he would have been better off just to shut up about what happened when he was a kid. Too many people remember that the same way, and are able to see that it has nothing to do with guns.
Or what-not. Idiot. Go back to school and learn English composition. Oh, and by the way, Charles Whitman says hello, Chipper.
