So, Josh--are you saying you're not out to disarm us? Why do I have trouble buying that?

Josh Sugarmann, Executive Director of the Victim Producing Center, has recently bloviated on the NRA's efforts to spur members into action to counter the many current and impending attacks on the Second Amendment.

Sugarmann is predictably contemptuous of the endeavor, implying, I have to assume, that gun rights are not actually under attack. This, from the author of Every Handgun Is Aimed at You: The Case for Banning Handguns. This, from the executive director of a group that wants to outlaw firearms based on their caliber. This, from the executive director of a group that wants to outlaw thousands of firearms, based on cosmetic features, and which hopes to do so by exploiting much of the public's inability to distinguish so-called "assault weapons" from machine guns.

The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

While the VPC and its ideological allies collect obscene amounts of money from anti-freedom groups like the Joyce Foundation, we are ridiculed for taking the threat to our human right of self-defense (a right that the U.N. denies) seriously. A prominent United States Senator says on "60 Minutes" that if she could have gotten the votes for outright confiscation of all privately owned firearms in the U.S., she would have done so--but we're paranoid to think that our gun rights are at risk. A Washington Post columnist and civilian disarmament advocate (but I guess that's redundant) comes out and admits that a ban on so-called assault weapons is just the first step toward outright confiscation, but encouraging grassroots activism on the part of gun rights advocates is exploiting the gullibility of uneducated, gun loving rubes.

It seems to me that for advocates of the Constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human right to keep and bear arms to believe the above statements, we would have to be even more foolishly gullible than Sugarmann seems to be implying we are.

By the way, does anyone want to look at this and tell me that it's our side that uses fear mongering and overheated rhetoric to stir up the faithful (and their checkbooks)?