David,
Thanks for the dialog. I'm writing about snowballs and such today, but I generally write an anti-gun column every year or two. Please look for them. I stuck my other gun column from 2006 at the end of this note. Thanks.
Sincerely,
Burt Constable
I guess I've been dismissed. Not that he had a snowball's chance in hell of defending his inane assumptions, but we've already established that self-defense ain't Burt's long suit.
The column he attached is hardly worth reproducing here--basically, some NRA members were very nice to him and hosted a day at the range to help him see that gun owners are good and responsible human beings, but it was a waste of their time and effort.
Burt's attitude reminds me of a story I once heard involving Galileo, who on inventing the telescope discovered there were mountains on the Moon. He tried to convince the "authorities" of this, but they refused to look through the telescope because Aristotle taught that celestial bodies were perfect spheres.
It's kind of a paradox, really, but one that shouldn't surprise us any more. Our "leaders" in whatever field--politics, journalism, education, religion--are basically superstitious primitives. I'll take a good, honest heretic over the entire lot of these shamans any day.