Scalia says don’t link guns only to crime
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia fondly remembers carrying a rifle around New York as a boy and says outdoorsmen should attack the idea that guns are used only for crimes.
An avid outdoorsmen who has hunted with Vice President Dick Cheney, Scalia spoke Saturday at the National Wild Turkey Federation’s annual convention.
“The attitude of people associating guns with nothing but crime, that is what has to be changed,” Scalia told the audience of about 2,000.
“I grew up at a time when people were not afraid of people with firearms,” said Scalia, noting that as a youth in New York he was part of a rifle team at the military school he attended.
“I used to travel on the subway from Queens to Manhattan with a rifle,” he said. “Could you imagine doing that today in New York City?”
No sir, I cannot imagine that ever happening today. At least not without NYPD SWAT going into ‘full battle rattle’.
On a somewhat related note, a new museum opened in Seattle this week.
Why do I mention this? Because the proprietors of this new museum are using exactly the opposite strategy towards firearms that Scalia mentioned.
They are part of a small collection of African-American memorabilia that Delbert Richardson has kept in safe-deposit boxes or on display in his Central Area home in Seattle. Recently, the 51–year-old began putting his collection on exhibit as a way, he said, to help people — particularly children and young adults — understand a sometimes overlooked part of American history.
They are crude reminders of a painful past: A runaway slave collar — circa 1800. Branding irons. Shackles. A shotgun.
Hmm. So a shotgun is now considered “Memorabilia of Slavery”?
How much do you want to bet that the ‘shotgun’ is a Winchester Model 1897 or some such?
The guy plans on taking this collection of stuff on the road as a sort of travelling museum. One of the places he would like to take it is to schools. I’ll bet money that the namby-pamby school offficials have no problem letting the shotgun onto school grounds so that they can present them in a bad light.
Never mind that it was the militant wing of the Democratic Party, the KKK, who were the originators of modern gun control tactics that did its best to keep weapons of self defense out of the hands of former slaves.
They never will get until they get over it.