Loose Cannons and Looser Pens

     A couple of acts perpetrated by evil men have resulted in calls for tighter gun control in the United States. The shooting at the theater in Aurora, Colorado and at the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin are the results of evil minds. Not guns. Those two men, it is to be sure, would have performed similar acts using gasoline, fertilizer or blackpowder bombs. The fact that they used firearms only means that they wished to see close-up and personal the results of the havoc and deaths that they wrought. The guns did not cause them to do what they did. The guns were merely the instruments. They could have caused almost the same number of deaths using swords or axes because most people faced with those weapons find it unbelievable that they are, in a modern age, facing weapons used in the 16th century.
     But, despite the fact that logic shows that an evil man will use whatever means available to carry out his evil intentions, the liberal media has decided that the problem is not evil but is the gun.
     A case in point is an article written by Fareed Zakaria. It doesn't matter exactly what he wrote. It was the same old claptrap about how people are not evil and that guns are evil. Or that the availability of guns makes people evil. The interesting thing is that Zakaria, in his article, plagiarized at least one paragraph from another writer: Zakaria Suspended.
     This shows something interesting to this writer. The liberal is not loathe to call for a change of the Bill of Rights in order to outlaw the personal ownership of firearms, or to restrict the practice of religion as long as that religion is a conservative form of Christianity. But they never call for a restriction of the freedom of speech or freedom of the press despite the fact that, either through intention or mistake, a writer can ruin the reputation of a person, a group or a company by lying, mis-representation or outright slander. Just a few keystrokes made from thousands of miles away by a person who has never met, or even per4sonally seen the subject of an article or opinion piece, can turn the subject from a good citizen to a monster in the public eye despite the fact that the subject has actually done nothing illegal, immoral or even ill-intentioned.
     The Internet is a Wild West in a way that the real Wild West never was. It is full of word-slingers and word-snipers doing what they can to destroy, in whatever way they can, their enemies.
     But despite the many cases, in both print and on the electronic media, it has been proven that ill-intentioned writers have lied or mis-represented people in a way that has destroyed lives, there has been no call for the licensing of the pen, typewriter or computer keyboard. The Press, in its various forms, seems to hold its Constitutional right as more sacrosanct than the other rights guaranteed by the Constitution. And we've put up with it and have never questioned why the guarantee of a free Press is more important than the freedom to bear arms and the freedom of religion. We've allowed ourselves to be terrorized by a bunch of pot-bellied, Audi driving, martini sipping bunch of louts and bullies whose nuclear weapon is the word "racist" instead of calling them out for a little mano a mano.