Gun issues are fueled by emotion

Emotions can be a dangerous thing and cause an individual or a nation to act irrationally due to misinformation.

Adolf Hitler gained total control because the citizens had no weapons of defense. Hitler, who hated the Jews so badly, had his own people burn the Reichstag building, and used his controlled media to blame the Jews and had most of the people believing the Jews should be exterminated. Of course they had no weapons to defend themselves, and were as helpless as an unborn child in its mother’s birth canal. (Whoa, how did that get in here? Well it seems that most people who want gun control because of the unfortunate mass shootings, are the most outspoken in favor of abortion and are the ones who want to abolish the death penalty for first-degree murderers. I never could figure out the hypocrisy there.)

Recent op-eds and letters to the editors fueled by emotion have shared some incorrect data and untruths. History can be a great learning tool if understood and not rewritten like some of the modern textbooks have been. Easily proven, folks. A new display at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, features a Chinese-born artist named Shaomin Li, who was forced to paint communist propaganda posters under the brutal dictator Mao. Li later escaped to the United States. Lloyd DeWitt, chief curator of the museum, says, “Li’s art shows how a dictatorship happens by destroying the past and plays on fear and emotion …”

Let’s look at some facts. A 1902 Sears catalog lists a revolver as an automatic, because when you open it and pull down on the barrel, the ejector automatically pushes the spent cartridges out of the cylinder. However, the media has turned the term “automatic” into a buzz word that causes fear among the uninformed. As relates to civilian firearms, an automatic means only one shot per trigger pull. Many military weapons have a selector switch so it can be a full automatic, and as long as there is ammo, will keep firing until the trigger is released. I personally see no need for a bump stock.

The civilian AR-15 is no more of an assault weapon than a knife, a rock, a claw hammer, a cast iron skillet, an automobile or a truckload of fertilizer. The A stands for ArmaLite Corporation (the manufacturer) and the R stands for Rifle. Its full auto military counterpart and lookalike was called the M (military) 16 and came into use during the Vietnam War. It was either loved or hated by the GIs. It was light and short, which was helpful in the jungles, but was unforgiving of mud in the action and could jam. Unable to bring these weapons home after the war, many GIs were happy to purchase the semi-automatic, lookalike version which is fun to sport shoot. If you are not a veteran, it might be hard to understand the comradeship of an inanimate object that you slept and ate with during your deployment. The AR-15 has been in civilian hands for almost 50 years and only recently became a whipping boy for the liberal press. To some folks, it is an art form that may have great historical significance and may have saved their lives.

There are many unanswered questions in several of the recent shooting. The same crisis actors have been at several of the scenes to hype the emotion. The Florida sheriff and his staff acted cowardly, and strangely, the sheriff himself is very buddy-buddy with some of America’s worst criminals. It looks suspiciously like the burning of the Reichstag in an effort to turn the people and especially the youth towards believing that the public must have their guns taken away. Remember the Hitler youth organization and the important part the youth played in George Orwell’s “1984.” There have NOT been 18 school shootings this year as someone stated after Parkland, and, discounting gang-related drug and turf wars of about five cities including Chicago and Detroit, America is near the bottom of the list of shootings.

Perhaps we should register parents and cause them to teach their children the difference between right and wrong.

Mangels is a resident of Polson.