Gun owners face bias in Bay State
“It’s easier in Massachusetts to come out as a lesbian than to come out as a gun owner.”
So says Dee Dee Edmondson, a Boston attorney and member of the LGBT community who consults for the Massachusetts Gun Owner Action League (GOAL). When I emailed her and asked if I could use her quote in print, I got a two-word, all-cap response: “HELL YES.”
Does anyone who knows anything about Massachusetts doubt she’s right? If so, you didn’t watch the angry, anti-gun-rights march on the streets of Boston Saturday. Any rational debate about “common sense gun laws” was drowned out by attacks on gun ownership and the NRA. Between the “How Much Blood?” and “The NRA is a Terrorist Organization” signs, the clear message was that gun-rights supporters are monsters who don’t care about dead kids.
Jim Wallace at GOAL calls it “social bigotry.” He says that on the eve of recent anti-gun protests organized at Massachusetts schools, he was being contacted by parents whose kids were being bullied for not wanting to participate.
“One father told me he had to go pick up his daughter at school, she was being so bullied,” Wallace told me. “People are being ostracized, businesses are separating from organizations (like the NRA) all over what is, fundamentally, a civil right. It’s amazing.”
Or, it’s Massachusetts. With a tiny handful of exceptions (you’re reading one right now), the Massachusetts media is dominated by liberal viewpoints and reporting. On social issues like guns, the assumption of “guilt by nonconformity” is even higher.
When was the last time you heard an even-handed conversation about gun ownership on the taxfunded public radio or TV stations here in Boston? When was the last time you heard any non-liberal content? On liberal-dominated college campuses here in “tolerant” Massachusetts, what would cause more outrage: A lesbian socialist calling for the destruction of the Catholic Church as an institution or an NRA member arguing that the Second Amendment should apply to college campuses?
Actually, we’re unlikely to find out, because there’s a good chance the latter speaker simply wouldn’t be invited to speak. And if he were, there’s also a good chance he would be shouted down or chased off campus — once again, by the openminded, tolerant, PBS liberals of the Bay State.
“I would say we’re viewed as the black sheep of Massachusetts politics, except we don’t get that much respect,” said Erich Thalheimer is a competitive shooter and gun instructor who grew up in Massachusetts. He’s traveled quite a bit competing in shooting competitions and he says people from other parts of the U.S. are surprised the draconian gun laws already in place here.
“We are treated as secondclass citizens in Massachusetts,” Thalheimer says. “We’re targeted as part of a political agenda.”
And so when Patriots owner Bob Kraft offers his plane to fly kids to an antigun-ownership march to oppose the constitutional rights of American citizens, nobody in Massachusetts bats an eye. Now imagine what the front page of the Boston Globe-Democrat, or the first hour of the “Jim & Margery Show” at WGBH would be like if Kraft had done the same for kids going to the March for Life in Washington, D.C. Or, worse — an NRA convention.
Gun owners get it. In Massachusetts, they’re a minority. They must rely on the Constitution to protect their rights, because they can’t count on their fellow citizens.
In a recent WBUR poll, more than 60 percent of Massachusetts residents said they wanted to ban all semi-automatic rifles — which is about 80 percent of the current market. (For my liberal friends, a reminder that “semiautomatic” isn’t a machine gun. It’s just “you pull the trigger, it fires one bullet.” Just like a revolver.)
Perhaps more disturbing, more than a quarter of the state wants to repeal the Second Amendment entirely. And why not? Once you decide that supporting the NRA means supporting “child murderers,” banning gun ownership is the inevitable conclusion.
“It’s amazing how we legal gun owners — the most vetted people in America, people who commit virtually none of the gun crimes — have been branded as the most evil,” Wallace said.