Letters

Scag-Scarfing Needle Monkeys

I have a lot of free time on my hands, which is why I have decided to the rhetorical question posed in your comic, "Horace Pleak! & Chester A. Jackson III." Keeping in mind that I am not a nut, please take me seriously when I tell you that there is: a) a word that rhymes with vagina, and b) a word that rhymes with orange (door hinge is not a word, it is two words). The answer to the first is angina and the second, syringe.

Angina is a condition, such as a severe sore throat, in which spasmodic attacks of suffocating pain occur, and I believe all of you scag-scarfing needle-monkeys know what a syringe is.

While I'm at this whole letter-to-the-editor thing, I feel like I should say that I really like your publication. I am a freshman, a Democrat and I'm from somewhere in the neighborhood of San Francisco, but the level of seriousness to which these wacky hippies take their liberal beliefs up here is crazy. Why, I remember in my Writing 122 class last term when I said "Who cares if Columbus murdered a couple of million Indians? If they were sill around today, they'd just be getting drunk and killing themselves over who owns some casino." Naturally I was just joking, but in no time at all I had the entire class practically screaming down my throat.

This raw nerve of Political Correctness must continue to be stomped on until that good old "left-wing orthodoxy" you guys talk about can learn to take a joke.

--Eric Basart

Half-Assed Mountain Yokels with Shotguns

So I'm reading the May 5th issue and chuckling to myself while trying to make sure no one can see what I'm reading (and myself a good liberal). Then I stop chuckling because you waste a good three pages regurgitating an NRA argument. What irritates me isn't the flaw in the argument; no Mrs. [sic] Delf sums up the argument quite nicely. But no one cares, or more correctly no one should.

The point of the 2nd [Amendment] was to ensure the government couldn't behave tyrannically against its constituents, right? Well it may come as a shock but a bunch of half-assed mountain yokels with shotguns aren't going to be more than a speed bump if/when the government turns sour. The simple truth is that wards aren't fought that way anymore, not by "advanced" countries.

War is now a matter of ECM vs. ECCM, of stealth vs. sensors. Iraq ring a bell? If there's one thing you can say for Iraq it's that it has a whole hell of a lot of guns. Didn't help them, won't help us. In open warfare a civilian militia would not have the technology, skills, intelligence (in the military sense of the world), or logistical support to stand up to any modern army in the world, and that includes France! On the flip side a militia is well equipped to conduct a covert or guerilla [action,] but in this case the last thing you want is heavy weaponry because it makes you stand out from the populous [sic] which is the guerilla fighter's only defense. In either case modern assault weapons serve no purpose in defense against the government.

They are too low tech for modern open warfare and too conspicuous for modern covert warfare. If you really want to bear arms against the government forget the guns, buy a computer and learn to hack.

--Jason Lee Fahrion

Our dear Mr. Fahrion appears to have missed the point of the article to which he objects. The point, fair reader, was that weaponry bans have historically been imposed as a means of oppressing the populace, have generally been aimed at the underclass and minority groups, and are in general a bad thing. A basic analysis of the Second Amendment (not a regurgitation of an NRA government, simply good sense and straightforward historical/linguistic analysis) was given for the benefit of those readers who are unfamiliar with the text and meaning of that Amendment to our Constitution, and a list and description of various major gun bans followed for those who are ignorant of this history. Certainly, this might seem to be basic material to you and I, but as a gun rights advocate and activist, I consider one of my major goals to be the education of the public regarding an issue about which the vast majority of liberal Eugenians are abysmally ignorant.

Whether an armed citizenry continues to play a role in defending the people of a nation from tyrannical government is a topic for another column (I would argue that it does, but I'll leave you waiting in breathless suspense for my reasons for so believing). And just to make you happy, Mr. Fahrion, I'll try to picture myself as a half-assed, shotgun-toting, mountain yokel speed bump (it's quite a stretch, but I'll give it a shot) while I'm writing it.

--Ms. Kerry Delf, Mountain Yokel