Ever notice how liberals trot out pseudo-profundities when talking about guns?
Latest example -- MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on her show Friday night, hanging out with Meghan McCain at the NRA convention in Pittsburgh.
NRA member McCain said that as a young woman and daughter of a prominent politician, she owns a gun to protect herself from those seeking harm (video linked here) --
MCCAIN: I like the idea that a gun equalizes things for women if I'm attacked. You know, my father's a well-known politician, it makes me feel safer. So ...
MADDOW: Do you think there's a risk to having a gun in your home though?
MCCAIN: Not if you take courses and you educate yourself and you train yourself. I'm a complete proponent for taking the right safety course as well.
MADDOW: Just introducing a gun into a dangerous situation doesn't guarantee it's going to be pointed at the right person.
Right -- just ask bin Laden.
In other words, guns are useless when it comes to protecting yourself, so why should anybody have one? Why arm police for that matter? That's what's actually being said here by Maddow, but typical of liberals, she eschews straightforward language in favor of embroidery.
Maddow is entitled to her grandiose opinions, but this line of thought can have deadly consequences, and I'll cite a specific example when this occurred. As with bin Laden's demise, it involved the sudden violent death of another person known around the world -- former Beatle John Lennon.
I remember reading an article in which Yoko Ono was asked why the couple did not have a bodguard, at a time when crime in New York City was much worse than today. As I recall, Ono said she suggested this to her husband, who rejected the idea and cited the death of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. Red Brigade terrorists killed all five of Moro's bodyguards, kidnapped him, and murdered Moro two months later. What's the point of bodyguards, Lennon reportedly told Ono, if we all end up dead? Which certainly sounds like him.
Whether that was the couple's rationale for not hiring a bodyguard, one thing is beyond dispute -- they were not accompanied by one when they returned home on the night of Dec. 8, 1980. And while there are few guarantees when it comes to guns, or anything else in life (though Maddow glossed over that part of the equation), any bodyguard worth his or her salt would have immediately sensed trouble from Mark David Chapman. Lennon signed an autograph for the young man earlier in the evening -- yet here he still was, several hours later, hanging out with nothing better to do.
Yes, there aren't many certainties beyond death and taxes, but I can guarantee this -- introducing a second gun that night, wielded by a bodyguard, would have meant that more than just a predator was armed outside the Dakota. And Lennon may well have been spared being gunned down from behind, while his wife watched in horror, and the couple's 5-year-old son awakened to learn his daddy was gone.
Imagine -- John Lennon living decades longer and singing "In My Life" with a briefly reunited Beatles at his son's wedding.
To tweak the title of another Lennon song, happiness is a bodyguard with a warm gun. Then again, happiness isn't quite the situation you'd expect in this situation. More like immense relief -- guaranteed.
