Favorite Liberal

This week I was honored by a local conservative as his “favorite liberal,’’ after an online debate about guns. 

Here’s the background. 

The NRA posted a tweet that Joe Biden had promised to make Beto O’Rourke his “gun czar’’ if elected. O’Rourke will be knocking on your door with FBI agents to confiscate your deer rifle, or so the NRA wants you to believe. 

My conservative friend Guy Page picked up the thread and I responded asking - “Does anyone I know really believe’’ that Joe Biden is going to take your guns away?

Page seized on this to go back into the files and prove that Biden made this promise. He sorta did - the way you say things on the campaign stump. But mostly he said nice things about the former Texas congressman for his courageous stand on gun control. 

So now we are in a back and forth about what Biden said, when he said it, and if he really said it, and if he really means it. And it is there that the NRA and Guy Page want the debate to be had - on stuff that doesn’t really matter.

For the record, I don’t like guns. They kill people. I don’t think people should have guns, especially men, who have shown a regular inability to NOT murder people. Men under 21, the mentally ill, and men who regularly beat up their spouses shouldn’t have guns either. Add the Neo-Nazi guys in camouflage playing dress-up Army in the streets these days and terrorizing the Michigan Statehouse. 

I believe that to own a gun you should have to pass a test and get a permit - like driving a car. 

I believe the second amendment to the Constitution says that the government cannot abridge your right to own a gun in order to maintain a “well-regulated militia.’’ Note to Judge Amy Coney Barrett: Don’t forget the phrase “well-regulated.’’ So if you are in the Army, you can have a gun. I don’t believe the Proud Boys are either a militia or “well regulated.’’

I also don’t believe you should own an automatic weapon like an AR-15, which is meant to kill people, nothing else. If you really want one, I think you should have to pass a special test and prove that you really need one.

People like Guy Page get lost in fear mongering about government agents coming to your house to take your deer rifle. Why? Because that is the debate that wins elections for Republicans by getting the hunters upset and driving them to the polls. It harkens back to the myth of America. The yeoman farmer and his family making a living off the land, defending their homestead and their women against invaders with a musket. 

This is really the argument at the base of most conservative thought these days. America was built by hard-working men without any help from anyone, especially the government. They did it on their own. Guys like Kit Carson and Davey Crockett and those hard-working plantation owners in 1850.

And little by little, the liberals like me took their freedom away. We made them get a permit to build a home, then a license to buy a car. And now we want to take their gun away so they can’t cut a deer in half with an automatic weapon. 

The problem with this story is that it’s wrong. Kit Carson was a murderer for hire of Native people - a terrorist. The government gave those early settlers the land after stealing it from the Native people. And every step of the way, that freedom that Guy Page talks about was obtained via the blood, oppression and terrorism of women, Native people, and Black people - all subsidized by the federal government. 

We built an entire society on this myth, bragging about it in our parlors while black people picked the crop that went to market to pay our bills. And now the bill is coming due. The oppressed people want to be paid back and they are marching in the street saying so. And Guy Page and his fellow conservatives don’t like it because it threatens the myth they were taught. 

Back to guns. Joe Biden is a Catholic, moderate Democrat born outside Scranton, PA and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. The idea that he will hire Beto O’Rourke to take away people’s guns is laughable. Do we need a debate about guns? I think we do. Especially when those guns always seem to be in the hands of white neo-Nazis carrying an AR-15 walking the streets. They are far more dangerous than any Black Lives Matter protester. But rest easy Guy Page, no one is taking your gun.