and it sounds like someone you see in the mirror:

Liberals/leftists as a class--and I'm sorry but really, you've become a class--don't usually know people who shoot. They don't like people who shoot. They look down on them; gun owners are boobs and yahoos out in the sticks killing Bambi. As for living in a rural area where there's no nearby police force, why don't you just . . . move?



Let me be, admittedly, mean, but to make a point I can't figure out how to make any other way. Those who oppose the right to keep and bear arms are not as a rule the kind of people who would, or could, take down a nut waving his gun at the kids in a McDonalds. Those who oppose gun rights are more like the kind of people who when the incident was over would write a sensitive essay about how it felt to come face to face with one's existential powerlessness when faced with the sudden force of a sick man who alas shot two kids right in front of me. You may mean to be helpful in the abstract, but you are not helpful in the particular.

Conservatives are on the side of the citizen who'd protect the kids and takes down the bad guy with the gun. Aren't you, really? Shouldn't you be, "for the good of the children"?

Do you wish Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, and the stewardesses and pilots of the hijacked jets of 9/11 had been armed? I do. "That's a dramatic, worst-case scenario," you say. Sure. But life is full of dramatic, worst-case scenarios. Is your life so comfortable and protected that you've forgotten this? Did you ever know it? Really, doesn't mere snobbery have something to do with where you stand?

This is the Democratic paradox: You want so much to run America and yet you seem not so fond of Americans.