{"id":831,"date":"2007-05-18T05:34:58","date_gmt":"2007-05-18T11:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/05\/18\/a-conservative-is-a-liberal-thats-been-mugged\/"},"modified":"2007-05-18T09:20:28","modified_gmt":"2007-05-18T15:20:28","slug":"a-conservative-is-a-liberal-thats-been-mugged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=831","title":{"rendered":"A Conservative Is A Liberal That’s Been Mugged"},"content":{"rendered":"

About twenty years ago I was playing in a band. The drummer was the second-youngest of about eight kids from a very left-leaning family. All eight of the kids were very politically aware, and some of them – not the drummer – were quite active. And it was fun; I’d get into long <\/em>political discussions over all of the issues of the day; the siblings were all pretty sharp, passionately motivated, and had strong opinions.<\/p>\n

Including about gun control. They all favored it. I, being at the time a conservative talk show host (who hoped <\/em>to be right between jobs, any ol’ day now), opposed ’em. Older brother sneered “a real <\/em>man doesn’t need a gun to protect himself”; he got a good yuck, until I asked if his sexagenarian father would be “not a real man” if set upon by a gang of young toughs.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

One evening, not a week after a long argument about guns, the drummer called me. “We gotta go gun shopping”. He’d been mugged while walking down Pleasant Avenue just off Lake Street.<\/p>\n

We went to the gun shop. I talked him out of buying a chinese-made AK-47 knockoff, and into a revolver (a Charter .44 Special). We then went to the range and busted off a couple of boxes of ammo – I brought my whole arsenal (a .45 Colt Auto, an 8mm Hakim battle rifle, and a .22 rifle and .22 automatic pistol) along with to get him seriously oriented. He ended up turning into quite the gunny; the last we talked he had the Charter, a .44 Magnum, an SKS, a .303 Enfield Mark IV, a .45 Auto and a Walther P38 his father had brought back from the war.<\/p>\n

Proving, as the old saying goes, that “a conservative is a liberal that’s been mugged (and a libertarian is a conservative that’s been audited”).<\/p>\n

It happened in Cleveland (from the Cleveland Plain Dealer<\/a>, via TvM<\/a>), where State Rep. Michael DeBose, a previously anti-gun Democrat lawmaker, had nearly the identical epiphany while walking around his “transitional” neighborhood:<\/p>\n

The loud muffler on a car that slowly passed as he was finishing the walk caught his attention, though. When the car stopped directly in front of his house – three houses from where he stood – he knew there was going to be a problem.<\/p>\n

“There was a tall one and a short one,” DeBose said, sipping on a McDonald’s milkshake and recounting the experience Friday.<\/p>\n

“The tall one reached in his pocket and pulled out a silver gun. And they both started running towards me.”<\/p>\n

“At first I just backed up, but then I turned around and started running and screaming.”<\/p>\n

“When I started running, the short boy stopped chasing and went back to the car. But the tall boy with the gun kept following me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was a “road to Damascus” moment for Debose:<\/p>\n

DeBose twice voted against a measure to allow Ohioans to carry concealed weapons. It became law in 2004.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He who votes last votes loudest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About twenty years ago I was playing in a band. The drummer was the second-youngest of about eight kids from a very left-leaning family. All eight of the kids were very politically aware, and some of them – not the drummer – were quite active. And it was fun; I’d get into long political discussions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}