Not gun shy, to say the least

“[Ryan] Girard said he tried to go to the show Saturday but the out-the-door line was more than four hours long. He opted to come back about 6 a.m Sunday, three hours before the event opened. He said about 500 people already had staked out spots by the time he arrived.


“‘I’ll tell you right now, Obama is the No. 1 gun salesman in the nation,’ Girard said. ‘The NRA should give him an award.’”

- - - From an January 7 Los Angeles Times article about the Crossroads of the West gun show, held (on the last days of the Christmas season, when the Three Kings offered their gifts, by the way) at the Ontario Convention Center not far from here, and the enormous crowds there, similar to those at gun shops, shooting ranges and other such events, spurred on by the desire for protection after the Newtown school shootings and fear of stronger gun control measures favored by President Obama and other officials.

“Public Defender Matthew Hardy argued that the boy’s sense of right and wrong was corrupted from growing up in a household filled with violence and hate. Neo-Nazis frequently gathered at the family home in Riverside, family trips to the shooting range were common and loaded guns stashed around the house.”

- - - From an article in the Times on the same day about a 12-year-old boy on trial for (and since convicted of) fatally shooting his father, Jeffrey Hall, a Neo-Nazi leader, while he slept on a couch in the living room. The boy, who was 10 at the time of the shooting and who was no longer allowed to live with his drug-addicted mother, allegedly feared that Hall planned to leave the boy’s stepmother and shatter the family and was also allegedly beaten and berated by Hall, an unemployed plumber, during drunken rages.

“Guns are not for hunting. When will you people figure that out? Guns are for hunting down politicians when they steal your rights away through tyranny. Hello! Any call for gun control is treason... You can’t protect your freedom when the government has more guns than the people.”

- - - A phone message left for Times columnist George Skelton a few years ago, as quoted in his column on Monday.

Wow! Hello! As my friend Chris would say - and although there is plenty more I can mention, like the shooting yesterday at Lone Star University in Texas (yee-haw!) and gun show advocates referring to the shows as “family affairs” - ‘nuff said.