"The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers. There are hunters and home security advocates, and then there are the gun collectors."
--Reuters news story
Reuters published a story today about gun ownership in the USA. In the course of their meticulous research, they made an amazing discovery.
American gun owners are not all drug dealers and urban criminals.
Reuters then ran the story, YahooNews picked it up and the world NOW knows that there are a few gun-owning Americans who are not criminals--they're just gun nuts.
(Reuters) - An odd contraption in retired firefighter Alex Black's cluttered garage looks a bit like the hand winch at the top of a well. In fact, it is a machinegun.
Turning the shiny brass handle spat out a withering hail of bullets that transformed modern warfare.
"You march in to battle in straight lines against this, and nobody comes back," said Black, standing beside the hefty, carriage-mounted Colt Gatling Gun, which he restored over the course of a decade.
Reuters then reveals to the world that in a country of 300 million, there are 200 million firearms.
What's wrong with that?
Some Americans would maintain that that's not enough.
Black, who lives in this sleepy ranching town on the Arizona-Mexico border, is one of millions of gun collectors in the United States, where authorities estimate that there are more than 200 million firearms held in private hands in a country of 300 million people.
The American affinity for guns may puzzle foreigners who link high ownership rates and liberal gun ownership laws to the 84 gun deaths and 34 gun homicides that occur in the United States each day and wonder why gun control is not an issue in the U.S. presidential election.
It isn't an issue--yet.
But the next paragraph in the Reuters story is where the wire service unveils either its ignorance, political view or, most likely, both.
The owners are not just urban criminals and drug dealers. There are hunters and home security advocates, and then there are the gun collectors.
And, of course, if you own many guns you are a gun nut.
Reuters can't believe, apparently, that anyone would describe themselves that way.
Black's friend Lynn Kartchner is another self-described "gun nut" who lives in Douglas. He has a private arsenal of around 100 handguns, shotguns and rifles of all sorts which he uses for everything from hunting prairie dogs and rabbits to target shooting.
Europeans--Reuters is based in Europe--have a hard time understanding the American Second Amendment and why gun ownership is so important to many Americans.
Of course, Europeans who did understand the concept immigrated to the U.S. in years past.
The individual right to bear arms to protect home, family and neighbors and the notion of self-defense will get tested in the Supreme Court case set for next Monday, Heller v DC.
Reuters ends up the article with a quote from gun-owner Kartchner that they probably thought would chill the blood of most European readers.
But it likely elicited nodding of heads and smiles in most of the USA.
Kartchner has meticulously prepared the defense of his home.
He keeps a semi-automatic shotgun loaded with buck shot and heavy lead slugs behind the bedroom door, and a high-powered AR-15 assault rifle loaded in the next room.
"Guns are for projecting force," he says matter of factly, distinguishing firearms from other collectibles.
"Mao Zedong said 'power grows from the barrel of a gun,' and indeed it does."
The temptation is to file this story under "Dumbass".
Europeans are beginning to have to deal with a wide variety of problems on the continent that the political elites have been ignoring.
Criminal lawlessness, murders, honor killings, riots and other threats to the safety of individuals make a lot of Europeans wish, no doubt, that they had a right to bear arms.
The prediction is that the situation will get worse before it gets any better.
Perhaps then, Reuters will make an amazing discovery that there are some Europeans who own guns that are not criminals or drug dealers.
by Mondoreb
image: jerseynut
Source: For some in the US, Guns are a hobby, like any other
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