Every once in awhile I like to reprint this
article, just to remind folks how long the battle to protect the Second
Amendment has been going on. I clipped the original from an old
NRA American Rifleman magazine. Note that the
evil protagonists were Nation Magazine, and the WaPost's lefty
cartoonist, Comrade Herblock. Commies both, and commies never
give up.
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The Uplifters
Try It Again
By H.L. Mencken
The eminent Nation
announces with
relish ''the organization of a national
committee of 100 to induce Congress
to prohibit the interstate traffic in
revolvers''
and offers the pious judgement that
it is
''a step forward." ''Crime
statistics,'' it
appears, ''show that 90 percent
of the murders that take place are committed
by the
use of a pistol; and every year
there are
hundreds of cases of accidental
homicide
because somebody did not know that
his
revolver was loaded.''
The
new law - or
is it to be a constitutional amendment?
- will do away with all that.
''It will not be
easy,'' of course, ''to draw a law
that will
permit exceptions for public officers
and
bank guards'' to say nothing
of
Prohibition agents and other such
legal
ized murderers. ''But soon
even these offi
cials may get on without revolvers.''
The real victim
of moral legislation is
always the honest, lawabiding,
well
meaning citizen what the late
William
Graham Summer called the Forgotten
Man. Prohibition makes it
impossible for
him to take a harmless drink, cheaply
and
in a decent manner. In the
same way, the
Harrison Act puts heavy burdens
upon the
physician who has need of proscribing
narcotic drugs for a patient honestly
and
for good ends. But the drunkard
still gets
all the alcohol that he can hold,
and the
drug addict is still full of morphine
and
cocaine. By precisely the
same route, the
Nation's new law would deprive the
rep
utable and hand them over to the
rogues
that he needs protection against.
[March 1926]
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