By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
When veteran Tallahassee Democrat columnist Gerald Ensley warned gun owners that, “We’re coming for your guns. And someday, we’ll take them,” he ignited a bristling debate across the Internet, and drew hundreds of angry comments from gun owners in several states.
The column, headlined “Stop the insanity. Ban guns,” was loaded with verbal swipes at gun rights activists, whom Ensley referred to repeatedly as “gun freaks.”
Dan Cannon, writing at Guns Save Lives, called it the “worst anti-gun editorial in the history of anti-gun editorials.” Ensley told TGM in a telephone interview that he had received more than 200 e-mails and more than 50 telephone calls, including a few threats. More than 700 responses were posted on the newspaper’s website within 48 hours.
This is not the first time in his 34-year career at the Democrat that Ensley has written about gun control. At age 63, he’s managed to raise more hackles than a lot of people. He acknowledged that when he wrote the column, he expected some blowback.
“I’m not talking about gun control,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about waiting periods and background checks. I’m talking about flat-out banning the possession of handguns and assault rifles by individual citizens. I’m talking about repealing or amending the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
Ensley said the chance that only outlaws would have guns if guns were outlawed is “a chance worth taking.” He reasoned that, “Because if we ban guns, eventually the tide will turn.”
He asserted, “Every legal opinion for 200 years denied individual gun ownership was a right — until the steady lobbying of the National Rifle Association created a climate that allowed a conservative U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 to strike down a handgun ban in the District of Columbia, and fuel the sense of entitlement of gun owners.”
Many of the messages he got from infuriated gun owners included “lots of “F-bombs,” and he said reactions came from 10 to 15 different states. Ensley credited that wide ranging reaction to social media, which sent his column across the Internet.
Ensley was unapologetic about what he wrote, which included the assertion that the Second Amendment has been misinterpreted. He referred to the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger’s claim in 1990 that the Second Amendment protected an individual civil right was “a fraud on the American public.” Burger died in 1995, more than a decade before the Roberts Court affirmed on a narrow 5-4 ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual civil right, and therefore the handgun ban in Washington, D.C. was unconstitutional.
Two years later, in the 2010 ruling called McDonald v. City of Chicago, the high court incorporated the Second Amendment to the states through the 14th Amendment.
Ensley told TGM that he was upset that some had called him a “traitor.”
“The thing I resent most,” Ensley said, “is that somehow I am a traitor to America. You can have a different opinion about America and still love it.”
