No End to Right Wing Gun Idiocy

Or the nearly unbelievable stupidity of the majority of people who live in the center of the country:

"Iowa Debates Permitting Blind People To Carry Guns In Public...As lawmakers across the country debate gun safety laws, law enforcement officials in Iowa are split on whether the state should continue issuing guns to blind people."

A note:  Iowa is not issuing guns to blind people, just permits to carry them in public where, if there is, say, a shooting at a mall or a school, they will be easily able to zoom in on the bad guys and shoot them without hitting any innocent bystanders.  Because, freedom!  This article is illustrated with a picture which has the following caption:

"Michael Barber of Altoona, Iowa, examining a gun with his hands. Barber is blind and doesn’t believe eyesight is necessary to fire a weapon effectively."

Unless, of course, you mean by firing a weapon effectively, hitting an appropriate target.  If all you mean is shooting your gun into who knows where or what, to prove what a big man you are, well, then, go ahead and issue those permits to blind people, as well as three year olds, people with severe brain damage and anyone else who thinks owning a two pound piece of metal makes him a real man.  Of course, here's the expected right wing claim:

 "...unlike driving, which is considered a privilege, gun ownership is generally understood to be a constitutional right, making it difficult to impose limitations on it."

I'm not even going to get into a discussion about whether a blind person running around in public with a loaded gun can be considered a "well-regulated militia."  I might as well try to disabuse someone of the notion that a donkey is a kind of duck.  But what I would like to suggest is this:  When we find the freedoms that we do have in this country threatened, it is more often than not a result of misuse of those freedoms than of some nefarious plot to enslave us all.  I think a perfect example is the freedom of religion, which is threatened in this country by its misuse by Scientologists, con men like Pat Robertson and Aryan supremacist groups disguised as religions.  Eventually this sort of thing will have to be stopped, and if we cannot find a way by that time to distinguish between real religions and phony ones, we are going to be in a great deal of trouble.  The same is true of the second amendment.  If we cannot look at what the people who wrote that amendment really meant (and they left clear comments on that subject) we are going to inevitably end up in nonsense like the question of giving blind people concealed carry permits.  And once these bizarre issues make their way into the court system, packed as it is with right wing judges, far more damage to the second amendment is likely to be done than anti-gun people ever thought of.

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