Fred Pohl gets it wrong

At The Way the Future Blogs :

The Way the Future Blogs

Frederik Pohl
« Chip Delany, Part 2: The Miracle of Dhalgren
Mass Murder Courtesy of the NRA

Every newspaper in America, if not the world, gave the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of half a dozen other people by a creep named Jared Loughner page 1 coverage. However. the specific tool that Loughner used for his work of killing. was less widely reported.

He got them all — and wounded a dozen more — with his 9-millimeter Glock.

What is a Glock, and what is it designed to be used for? It’s a rapid-fire weapon that can accommodate a 30-bullet clip, and it has only one real use. It’s of very little value for hunting or for Grandma to keep under her pillow to repel burglars. What it is good for is the killing of groups of human beings by a single shooter, and for nothing else.

For that reason, it was outlawed by federal statute until 2004, when that law expired and our Congress, cowardly as it always is when it comes to offending the National Rifle Association, failed to renew it.

Since no conventional rifle or pistol could have murdered so many so fast, it is entirely due to the work of the National Rifle Association that most of this current crop of victims are dead.

I think it is self-evident that Jared Loughner did not particularly wish to kill, for example, Christina Taylor Green. After all, she was only nine years old and could have done little to offend him. The only reason she was in the group that Loughner fired into was that she had just been elected to her third-grade student council. She wanted to see how politicians operated.

I don’t know how many readers of this blog belong to the NRA, but if any are present now I’d like to ask a question:

Are you proud of yourself today?.

This entry was posted on January 13, 2011 at 2:00 pm under Miscellaneous. Tagged Christina Taylor Green, Gabrielle Giffords, Jared Loughner, Media, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

++++++++++++++++++++

I love Fred's writing, but it looks like he's gone over the wall on this subject.

Yes, I'm proud of myself, and I like to think I would be able to do something heroic like Joe Zamudio did, if I ever was in that situation.

Read the comments. Here's mine, in case it gets sent to the memory hole:

++++++++++++++++++++

Fred, I've read many of your works and enjoyed them immensely. It saddens me to have to say this.

I am an NRA Life Member and a gun dealer. I sell tools like this
to people who pass the federal and state background checks. In Wisconsin, I also have to pay the state $13 to call into their "Handgun Hotline" that duplicates the FBI's E-Check system, and make my customer wait 48 hours before picking up his tool of freedom.

In your first paragraph, you make the mistake of blaming an inanimate object for the actions of a madman.

A gun is a tool. If this creep, who has been named quite too often, used a ball-peen hammer for his massacre, would you be calling for "hammer control". Of course not.

The Glock is a dependable tool for self-defense. The Second Amendment is not about hunting - someone as intelligent as you are ought to be able to figure that out.

I own two Glocks, a 10mm Model 20 and a 9mm Model 19. When Wisconsin joins the other states that do not illegally prohibit their citizens from carrying concealed, the 9mm will be my gun of choice. The 10mm sits next to my pillow, ready for the unlikely event that my home is invaded.

Neither gun has ever invited me to go on a killing spree.

Do you really want to live in a world where you need to prove your sanity in order to protect yourself?

You really ought to check your facts before making statements like these about a subject you obviously have not researched.

Any good hunting rifle could have murdered people as quickly and as finally, as could any magazine-fed handgun ever produced. Glock is a bogeyman because some ill-informed Congressperson back in the 1980's decided it was a "plastic gun" that "could not be found by metal detectors" - both wrong statements that got snatched by the liberal media as sound bites to be repeated ad-infinitum. This size of pistol was designed to enable people to conform to the new concealed carry laws then being enacted across the sane part of America.

Freedom has a price - part of that price is to accept that the world has evil people in it that can never be protected against without destroying that freedom. If you want to live in a state that prohibits all danger, I recommend that you try Great Britain - they've gone as far as to prohibit self defense, lest the criminal gets hurt.