This guy's so full of BS his eyeballs are brown....
Rambo nation
By Peter Coster, April 18, 2007
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21575144-5000117,00.html
WHEN I walked into Pachmayer's gun shop in Los Angeles it was 1982,
the year Rambo opened. Sylvester Stallone was pulling them in at the movie
houses.
He was also the poster boy for the Beverly Hills Gun Club and was
pulling them
in for the basic handgun course. Stallone mumbled through Rambo as his
assault rifle chattered. The Beverley Hills matrons loved Sly and must
have seen
him in their dreams as they went to sleep with handguns tucked under
their pillows.
I was interested in American gun culture and joined the throng at the
Beverly
Hills Gun Club. An audience of mostly women sat listening to a handsome
police commander. His day job was as the weapons instructor for the LAPD.
"To protect and serve" was the LAPD motto. "To protect ourselves" might
have
been the motto of the Beverly Hills matrons. The women were interested in
home defence. Presumably, most of them lived alone. One large blonde woman
startled the rest of us by asking in a high-pitched voice, probably
because she
was nervous:
"What should you do if you shoot someone trying to break into your house?"
The police commander's answer was deep-voiced and serious:
"Drag him inside."
This was based on the legal likelihood of being able to avoid jail
because the
woman would have been in fear of her life. It also meant she would probably
be allowed to keep her gun in case of another intrusion. This answer seemed
to satisfy all present. Some, who might have been wary of gunning down
someone they saw lurking in the garden, were obviously relieved.
I write this in no way to trivialise what happened in Virginia
yesterday. The
death of 33 people in the university massacre is a loss of life on an
appalling
scale. It should convince Americans it is more than time to review a consti-
tutional amendment that is out of time and place. The need to have guns
under
the pillow is in frightened anticipation of a similarly armed person
breaking in
to kill you.
It is American culture. The Second Amendment to the United States Cons-
titution upholds the right to "keep and bear arms".
There are different gun laws in different states of the US. In
California, for
instance, not everyone has the right to carry a handgun. This includes
movie stars. Dean Martin was arrested in his Cadillac in downtown Los
Angeles for having a handgun under the front seat. He was also drunk.
Next door to me, where I lived with my family in Manhattan Beach, my next-
door neighbour, a friendly, boozy little man named Hank, also kept a gun
and drove a Cadillac. One morning, I stepped outside to hear Hank laying
down the law to a black police officer. This police officer was one of
the few
black people I had seen in Manhattan Beach.
This beachside had its own police force, members of which I sometimes
saw escorting lost black citizens from the sidewalks to the city limits.
Hank
was telling the black officer that "four black guys ran off after I
found them
trying to jack open the door of my Caddy last night.
"If I'd 'a had my little .357 Magnum with me, I'd 'a shot their asses."
I don't think he carried the gun with him when he left the house, but I did
worry that if he let loose inside his stucco-walled house, the bullets
would
have penetrated the equally thin walls of our house. The beach houses
were built within a metre of each other, and our daughter slept on that
side.
Hank drank a lot of Jack Daniel's, judging from his overflowing garbage bin,
and was always inviting us in for a barbecue.
He wanted to discuss Australian harness racing, of which I knew nothing
and Hank knew a lot. I never went. Maybe I didn't want to disagree with him
about the relative merits of Australian and American horseflesh.
Guns can have that effect on you when you know they are around.
These are real stories about American gun culture and they form an
argument against a spread of weapons that were restricted in Australia
after the Port Arthur massacre and the Monash University shootings.
I will be criticised by some gun owners for fanning what they think will be
a surge of anti-gun hysteria. But that would be an over-reaction in the
light
of what has been achieved here.
In the United States, the lobby for the continued observance of the right
to keep and bear arms is pervasive. I knew the actor Charlton Heston
vaguely, having met him on Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign.
The old charioteer was also the president of America's politically
influential
National Rifle Association. Apart from decrying what he called the
proliferation
of the Left-wing media, he didn't mention guns to me. But there was little
need to. I had gone to bed on election night several floors up in the
Century
Plaza Hotel when there was a loud hammering at my door.
I looked through the peephole and saw two men, one holding up a Secret
Service or FBI badge. I wasn't sure which.
I opened the door and they stormed through the room, handguns drawn.
One of them disappeared after swinging up to the next room from my
balcony. The other explained that a man had been seen climbing the outside
wall towards the President's penthouse suite. I saw the agent out the door
and went back to bed. The next morning, I read a small paragraph in the
newspaper saying someone had been arrested.
Had he been shot, it probably wouldn't have taken up much more news space.
President Reagan had been shot a few years earlier. "Honey, I forgot to
duck,"
quipped the old actor when the First Lady, Nancy, visited him in hospital.
Remembering how his press secretary, James Brady, took a bullet that day
that ruined his life, I phoned the James Brady Campaign in the United
States.
They have been tireless in trying to have US gun laws reformed. But while
34 students, including the shooter, were dead in the Virginia university
massacre, there was only an answering service to take calls on this tragedy.
But it won't. The Brady Campaign answering service said they didn't know
what had happened and they would not be passing on any messages until
"tomorrow."