Barry Snell, a senior at the Iowa State University, has penned a magnificent piece published at ISU student newspaper. The quality and content of the piece eclipses that of most national mainstream media opinion writers.
In the piece, he suggests that continued media and political hyperbole and name-calling will solve nothing but creating further animosity leading to violence between gun owners and those who would disarm gun owners to recreate past tyrannies.
Word to the wise, Snell writes: knock it off. Or else.
In short, he literally says, gun owners will not plow for those who don’t beat their swords into plowshares.
Here’s a couple of snips from the piece.
Along with bombs and bombers, guns seem to be all the media wants to talk about these days. Death is sexy to our miscreant media, especially when people are killed on purpose. And when that happens, it’s all the newspapers and news stations will print and broadcast, in turn making these events appear worse than they are in reality.
…Recent studies have shown that people who consume large amounts of mass media often feel more insecure, are less informed, or can’t distinguish between news and what passes as news, what with all the opinion you’ll find in news today.
…
Sleeping dragons and terrible resolve
I do not want to live through a war in my own backyard. I do not want our children to grow up in such an America, either. So anti-gunners: Please stop, I beg you. See the writing on the wall before it’s too late.
Yes, there is a terrible crime problem, and yes, that problem sometimes involves guns — but it is the perpetrator that is the problem, not the instrument. Yes, there is a great divide between liberals and conservatives on the issue of guns. And while I will be the very first person to criticize the Republican Party on its many and frequent mistakes, and even stand with my democratic friends in my disfavor of those things, on the gun issue it is not the conservatives who are mostly in the wrong this time.
We want the crime and killings to stop as much as you do, so to my fellow citizens who are anti-gun I say: So long as you deny our humanity, so long as you malign our dignity, intelligence and wisdom, so long as you seek to shade us under a cloud of evil that we do not partake in or support, so long as you tell us that because we own guns we are terrible people, you will prove yourselves absolutely right in that we won’t come to the table to talk with you.
And there will be no hope for resolution but through victory by force initiated by one side or the other, God help us, for we will not plow for those who didn’t beat their swords into plowshares.