MUGGED BY REALITY

ANTI-GUN LAWMAKER MUGGED BY REALITY

Former Trotskyist and author Irving Kristol once said, “A conservative is a liberal, who has been mugged by reality.”

By de Andrea

That certainly seems to be the case with former anti-gun advocate Michael DeBose, an Ohio state legislator who has supported gun- control in the past.

Michael DeBose’s epiphany was not a result of being mugged by reality, but in reality being mugged by a couple of criminal gun-toting thugs in his own neighborhood.DeBose said that he was taking a walk around his quiet residential neighborhood on the evening of May 1, 2007 when two men accosted him, one of whom was armed with a handgun.

The unarmed DeBose took the only option available to him, and what all good liberals do well, he ran.

He found himself at the door of a neighbor’s home and while at the door, the hoodlums, apparently worried that DeBose’s yelling and pounding would attract witnesses, jumped in their car and drove away.

DeBose, an anti-gun legislator and a long time advocate of stricter gun-control laws, along with his wife and several of his neighbors, have since enrolled in classes to obtain concealed-carry permits.

“If I’d had a weapon I could have defended myself, I don’t ever what to find myself in a helpless situation like that again,” said DeBose who is also an ordained Baptist minister.

DeBose’s apparent conversion has not faired well with his anti-gun colleagues, but as he said, “until someone has had a gun pulled on them and stuck in their face, (you just can’t) put yourself in another’s place. . . . I just hope they’ll understand why I chose to change my mind.”

One would think that an eye opening experience like this would tend to shake up the nuts a bolts of self-preservation just a little, but unfortunately, it usually does not. It has been my experience that even if someone like Michael DeBose has had an experience such as this, as in the case of the Mayor Fenty of Washington D.C. who was robbed at gun point in his own home, it rarely changes ones perception of reality. One would usually have to be shot or at least shot at, in order to be shaken awake. Maybe it is the sound of the explosion that wakes them up; it is hard to know.

It seems that once someone has been programmed with the ability to shed responsibility like water off your freshly waxed Mini Cooper, then one will always look for some object to blame rather than place responsibility squarely where it belongs, in the minds of humanity.

THE BOTTOM LINE: People have the right to defend themselves and their loved ones. In a free society, the government does not have the right to prevent them from doing so. If even the most basic right of life and self-defense can be irresponsibly legislated away, it makes one wonder if we really still have rights, or have our rights just become insecure privileges?

The lesson here could be either THE MAKING OF A COUNTRY or the demise of one.

Think about it…

de Andréa