Florida columnist declares ‘We’re coming for your guns’
When veteran Tallahassee Democrat columnist Gerald Ensley warned gunowners 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 gunowners 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 US 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 gunowners 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, DC 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.”
Expect more of same in Calif. candidates
When news stories about the potential retirements of California’s two current Democrat senators surfaced, a long-time TGM reader and former journalist in California emailed a reminder of why things don’t change in California’s political history. He cited a paragraph from a 2009 commentary by Los Angeles Times columnist Burt Prelutsky.
Prelutsky’s commentary was inspired at the time by other events but still seems to address the issue of whether a prospective change in the types of candidates likely to be elected in 2016 to replace Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, both long term liberal anti-gunners to federal political offices in the Golden State offers gun rights activists any hope.
Here’s what Prelutsky wrote:
“Frankly, I don’t know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I’m not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we’re Number One. There’s no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on ‘Macbeth’. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don’t know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.”
What major media pay to travel with Obama
Politico.com’s media watchdog Dylan Byers called everyone’s attention to a piece written by another Internet columnist, Philip Bump of TheFix.com for The Washington Post which is all about what it costs the major media for a reporter to travel with President Obama on a trip to the Far East in order to report the doings.
The reporter’s assignment, of course, is relay news of what the president says and does when he’s in a foreign country, especially when he’s meeting with other heads of state, which necessitates the reporter keeping up with every moment of Obama’s itinerary.
Bump’s follow-up story in The Post revealed that the White House sent the newspaper a bill for $89,000, which is how much it cost the newspaper for its reporter, David Nakamura, to get a seat on the Delta-operated 777 that flew the media from DC to China, then on to Burma and Australia before returning back to Washington. “That’s airfare only,” he noted.
If something in the area of $90,000 seems high to us as well as Bump, consider that he investigated all likely other travel choices. Ruling out commercial airline options as too unreliable or quixotic for the assignment, and allowing for the fact that a higher number of reporters than actually went to the Orient might have made an individual’s cost for travel on the Delta 777 flight somewhat more reasonable, the bill actually was closer to the real cost.
So if you are inclined to want to report on the president’s coming and goings abroad, bear in mind that someone pays the bill, not just the taxpayers.
