Coalition to Stop Gun Violence: self-defense is a 'shimmering mirage'

Mike Beard, president of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, is so unwilling to accept the idea of private citizens exercising their right of armed self-defense that he claims that those who do, are chasing a "mirage."

This Sunday, the New York Times Magazine ran an article by Bathsheba Monk titled “My New Gun.” Ms. Monk, a writer and resident of Allentown, Pennsylvania, described how—due to “the worsening financial news”—she has purchased a gun for “protection.” “You might as well get used to a .38 [caliber handgun]” a friend and gun enthusiast told her. “You want it to make a nice big hole.”

Ms. Monk wrote that a clerk at the gun store where she made her purchase told her that many handguns were out of stock. Background check records indicate that arms sales around the country have been increasing “in inverse proportion to the collapsing economy and in response to the unsubstantiated buzz that the new administration is going to tighten gun control.”

I am glad that Ms. Monk is taking steps to take responsibility for her own security, but I am puzzled as to why she thinks the threat of more federal citizen disarmament tyranny is an "unsubstantiated buzz." The Obama administration has been . . . substantiating the "buzz" from the very beginning.

I digress, though--Beard calls her account a "chilling story," and then quotes some poem about a traveler lost in the desert, lured on by a "shimmering mirage."

Tell me, Mike, do you think it was a "shimmering mirage" that saved the lives of Heath and Mirelle Miller? Was it a "shimmering mirage" that prevented Bridget DiCosmo from being raped a second time? Was it a "shimmering mirage" that protected any of these people?

Keep talking, Mike--more and more Americans are getting wise to your citizen disarmament efforts.