He Spies With His Beady Black Eyes. Pt. 3. Hunters Can’t Be Killers

Keep this in mind for a minute:

NEWTOWN, Conn.–Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the medical examiner investigating Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, said autopsies completed on 20 children and six adults on Saturday showed they were killed with multiple bullets fired by a rifle at close range.

Wardynski’s guest editorial for al.com (Tips are what help protect our students: guest opinion) is what I call a headbanger. Good thing I didn’t read it at a desk.

Let’s examine this remarkable statement:

“As recently as September 15th, this investment allowed us to intercept and place into police custody a student who came to school with a loaded gun, a knife, gang paraphernalia, and an expressed willingness to use his weapons in the event of an altercation with certain individuals. He was not outfitted to hunt ducks or deer and our security team suffered no confusion in drawing a distinction between the student as a sportsman and as a threat.”

The implications I draw:

1. If the student had come to school dressed for duck hunting, whatever tip the school had received would have been disregarded.

2. If people hunt, they are not of any interest, regardless of how many guns they have and use.

How very preposterous.

Now before we go any further, I don’t have a problem with people who hunt for food (millionaires who hop over to Africa to collect a lion’s head for one of their living rooms are another story — I’m cheering for the lion). As a meat eater, how can I? I recognize that hunting is part of American culture; the movie Winter’s Bone has a powerful scene in which the character played by Jennifer Lawrence has to teach her little brother how to kill and skin squirrels so the family will have meat to eat while she is away. I will go as far as to say those who universally condemn meat-eaters as murderers don’t realize that if they had their way, Inuit and /Eskimos would face genocide. That said, I favor strong gun control laws. Very strong.

But back to Wardynski’s drawing a line between good guns/good people/hunters and all others. I’m not saying that students who post pictures of themselves smiling over a dead deer should be added to the “W”atchlist.

But I am saying that it is in-credible to say that these kids necessarily pose no threat to anyone. If the criteria for being a person of interest in W’s world is possession of a firearm, then there should be equal opportunity for all who pose with firearms to be answerable to the Colonel. All or none. None makes best sense to me.

So why does W harbor this notion that hunters can’t be killers?

1. Could be because he doesn’t want to offend his NRA buddies by coming out against guns altogether.

2. Or it could be because, according to a study done in 2008 for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, 

The large majority of hunters (86%) identify themselves as white/Caucasian (Phase III—RM 2007a).

 

Bingo.

I can’t imagine the workings of W’s mind. 

I’ll just leave you with two thoughts for the day:

. . . studies reveal that most school shooters are White males, with 97 percent being male and 79 percent White. Over the last three decades, 90 percent of high school or elementary school shootings were the result of White, often-upper middle class, perpetrators.

And

With an average of 300 shootings every day, it should be no surprise that a few of them occur in or near schools. According to FBI crime statistics, most homicides, including most multi-victim homicides, occur in homes, not schools. There are more mass shootings in restaurants than in schools, but no one has called for waitpersons to carry guns. Children are almost 100 times more likely to be murdered outside of school than at school, which makes massive expenditures for school building security seem like a misallocation of tax dollars.