Misfire, notes

I had a feeling Al was stepping into a trap from the first lines of his column. Opening with a straw man when the radical impulse behind the decision to take down the "no guns allowed" sign in the library would be self-righteously asserted as common sense despite its ridiculous premise was an unfortunately poor start. Al's prose is in quotation marks, Owen's responses are in red.

"Are we really going to allow firearms in the library where our children go for Story Time, to study and do projects?"

Yes.

"Do guns in the library align with our conservative values?"

Yes.

"Hunting with friends or older children might be a family value,

Might? It is.

but morphing that into guns in the library doesn’t make any more sense than guns at work, guns in the hospital or guns in church."

Since the premise of gun rights being based in hunting is false, the conclusions aren’t valid.

Instead of demolishing the straw man, Al not only abandoned it but legitimized the absurd premise of his first statement. Owen, shameless fascist that he is, endorsed the absurd part and then was freed from what should have been a stigmatizing statement to dilute a shocking mix of guns and children. "Our conservative values?" Whose? By drawing the unacceptable into the acceptable, Al has already lost. The first rule when debating sociopaths must be "do not expect a rattlesnake to stop being a rattlesnake." I am sure Al was making his case to the large number of self-described conservatives in West Bend who actually respect tradition and are skeptical of change, but it only takes one fascist in conservative's clothing to blunt this case.

The problem here is one of definition. What does conservatism mean? Now I am not a conservative but I have studied the ideology going back to Edmund Burke. Fancy book learning, not fly by my gut and accept what those in authority spoon-feed me. It is probable that back when Al was on the rifle team "conservative" meant what he thinks it means, but today's conservative movement of which Owen is openly a part of really shares little of those assumptions. The audience he was trying to reach probably feels the same way, but buy into the redefinition of conservatism that was painstakingly engineered over many decades. Conservative today no longer means, respect for tradition and not wanting things to change, accepting authority of government and that society is made up of many groups, not simply a collection of separate individuals that owe nothing to each other. In other words, a conservative would question why this change to library policy is necessary and would be skeptical of simple assertions that guns around kids is something parents should desire. A real conservative would ask why, when there is no problem with violent crime in the library, do we all of a sudden need the right to carry concealed weapons in the library or anywhere else the individual who owes nothing to his fellow citizens desires.

Unfortunately, Al began with a rhetorical question real conservatives could follow, skepticism about consequences, but dropped it to focus on bigger social issues.

Owen's rejection of hunting as the base of gun "rights" speaks volumes about his conception of these rights. He can blather on about the constitutionality of the right to bear arms, but really it is about his right to feel secure at your expense. For years, the central argument of gun "rights" people was the reasonable proposition that they wanted to hunt, Owen just evicerated that reasonable idea. Let's get down to the lowest common denominator here, a gun is a tool of violence, it is nothing else. I will repeat Homer's aphorism that "the blade itself incites to violence," a truism of the ancient world that has not lost its validity today. The current "mania," that Al rightly identifies but Owen waves away with a snooty retort about the constitution while wishing away the first and more poignant part of the 2nd Amendment, is about power and domination, not defence or security.