By Jim Ostrowski;
The left is getting more brazen and zanier by the minute.
It was predictable that after the Parkland school shooting, they would, in the face of a massive and multifaceted government failure, seek to blame a non-governmental scapegoat. They fastened upon the NRA, as a symbol of private gun owners.
Alas, leftism, not mere progressivism, is driving the bus these days. Leftists only speak with other leftists and suppress and punish any and all dissent from the hardline. The result is that the output of leftism gets crazier by the hour. Thus, we have them calling the banal and rather timid pro-gun group, the NRA, a “terrorist organization.”
The bounds of language never did restrain the left.
Indeed, their whole program amounts to little more than the burlesque distortion of language to force stubborn reality into their insane ideological straitjackets. Thus, far from inducing guilt, an emotion unknown to leftists, this rank calumny thrills the leftist soul to the core. It’s left to those committed to facts and logic to clean up the conceptual mess.
First, it’s important to note that there is no universally agreed upon definition of terrorism and the meaning of the term is the subject of frequent debate. Second, the same term can mean different things in different contexts. The ordinary meaning of terrorism could and probably does, have a different meaning from the legal definition of the term. So, let’s start with the ordinary, common or popular meaning of the term, that is the term as used in everyday life. A common understanding of the meaning of “terrorism” would be something like “the use of aggressive violence against civilians for political purposes.” That is my own formulation but vocablulary.com’s definition is virtually identical: “Terrorism is violence, or the threat of violence directed against civilians for the purpose of creating intense fear, which the terrorist hopes to exploit to attain political or ideological goals.”
With those definitions in mind, we can evaluate the claim that the NRA, apparently due to their opposition to an “assault” weapons ban, is a terrorist organization. In a word, no.
Of course, “assault rifle” is a propaganda term meant to disguise the true intent of the gun prohibitionists. They really mean ultimately to ban all semiautomatic rifles and weapons and move us back about 150 years to the days of muskets and perhaps bolt-action rifles. They begin with a fuzzy concept of assault rifles defined by cosmetics as a prelude to a complete ban later. The left is never done.
In any event, the NRA’s opposition to banning some arbitrarily defined rifles is not terroristic but the exact opposite. They seek to prevent the government from using aggressive violence against peaceful civilians. It is the gun banners themselves who are arguably guilty of terrorism here as they wish to use violence and the threat of violence against civilians to advance their ideological agenda, in this case, the progressive delusion that government guns aimed at the innocent will solve all human problems.
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