Who … ?
Who … ?
Who makes your heart flutter?
Who makes you sing?
Who gets you out of bed — and back into it?
Who floats your boat?
Who makes you cross that moat when it’s time to storm the ramparts?
Who inspires you to bring home the bacon, even when you’re too tired to do it anymore?
It’s Valentine’s Day. Remember who tickles your fancy today. And don’t forget to tell them why.
A. Yamamoto
Hilo
Guns and crime
The hoplophobic gun-grabbing left are a queer lot: I advocate for Hawaii residents exercising their constitutionally protected right to bear arms so they might not be victimized by predators — a right the U.S. Supreme Court promulgated is both an “individual” right and one Hawaii cannot infringe; a right that wherever prohibited in the U.S. is amok in violent crime — and Ed Comstock (Your Views, Tribune-Herald) calls me illogical and uninformed.
But then he reveals his correlation-does-equal-causation illogic: We should not be allowed to exercise our Second Amendment rights because they have no such rights in Japan, and they have a low crime rate.
Well, in that case, let’s further emulate Japan by truncating Americans’ search and seizure rights, criminal rights and freedoms of religion, speech and intimacy — just for starters.
Heck! Let’s establish a national religion and consecrate war criminals as Gods. After all, those Japanese “un-Americanisms” have as little to do with its low crime rate as does its lack of firearms rights.
So, by Comstock’s illogic — why not?
Were Comstock himself informed he would know the low firearms-related and overall crime rate in Japan has nothing to do with its lack of firearms rights and everything to do with its culture — one of pervasive conformity, social controls on behavior and submission to its paternalistic, authoritarian government.
As proof, he’d observe the explosion in firearms-related and overall violent crime in the U.K. and Australia, following implementation of their “Japanese” gun-control, while contrasting it with Switzerland’s “American” gun-loving militia citizenry and its “curiously” low firearms-related and overall violent crime rate.
Were he not busy regurgitating stale, skewed and on-their-own meaningless statistics from the websites of irrational gun haters — his idea of being informed — he’d appreciate his illogic: fearing armed law-abiding citizens but not the impossible-to-disarm predators who surround him.
Paul Rizzo
Olaa