Tom Ricks writing at Foreign Policy:
I’ve been reading a lot of early American history lately. The more I read, the more I think that the gun is central to our history. So yes, controlling guns is literally “un-American,” in that it runs against the grain of our past.
Even so, I think we need to do something about guns, especially in the hands of the insane. Part of the problem is that everyone is partly nuts sometime. And some people are bigtime nuts much of the time. Other countries have crazy people too, but they don’t make it so easy for them to get weapons in their crazed hands.
Tom is a former journalist with the Washington Post, and long time military writer who has corresponded with me only once, and then just briefly. Like everyone else at Washington Post (and Foreign Policy), he is a progressive.
So there you have it, the progressive mind on gun control. “Everyone is partly nuts sometime.” Never mind that Tom doesn’t give a clinical definition of nuts, and never mind that he hasn’t demonstrated that anything related to what the mental health professionals consider to be mental dysfunction has anything whatsoever to do with violent behavior. It does not, as we’ve seen again, and again, and again.
He goes even farther, saying that some people are “bigtime nuts,” and we are left to wonder again what is the clinical definition of bigtime nuts. Then he self-identifies as a rube and a dimwit. The recent attacks in Paris demonstrate how easy it is to perpetrate evil if the perpetrator is motivated. No country can compete with France for onerous gun control. But more to the point, Tom may not be saying it, but he knows that the real problem with gun crime in America is crime in the black community, gun or not. He is willing to make it tougher to get those awful guns for everyone in order to solve a problem that is primarily associated with the inner city black community.
I wonder if Tom is concerned enough about the black community to cause an American civil war over gun confiscations, or to see a government that has lost any semblance of control because no one observes its laws? Does he really think we’re going to go along with more gun control? Finally, I am left wondering if Tom wrote this piece when he was partly nuts or bigtime nuts? For the record, I’m not nuts.
