The First Amendment does not guarantee rights to printing presses as machines; it guarantees the rights of people to use printing presses, radios, televisions and the Internet without restriction.

The Second Amendment guarantees no rights to guns themselves — they are mere machines. It does, however, guarantee the right of The People to keep and bear them.

Guns have no more rights than a toaster! Citizens of the United States, however, have Constitutionally guaranteed rights concerning them. There are no parentheses or footnotes connected to “shall make no law” or “shall not be infringed.”

The psychology behind what may appear as a minor ‘grammatical nit’ should be clear.

It is relatively easy for most people to hate an object. You can make up lies about an object, demonize an object and attempt to regulate and control objects. You can do so without fear of insulting the object, hurting its feelings, being sued by the object or facing any repercussions, it’s just a defenseless, soulless object. As I said, objects have no rights.

When we replace gun rights with gun-owner rights, however, the issue becomes personal. Where many people and politicians [as opposed to people] find it easy and guilt-free to demonize guns as objects, it is far more difficult to for them to demonize a large segment of the population, gun-owners, as people.

Laws can not control inanimate objects, only what law-abiding persons do with those objects. Therefore, it’s technically not gun control, or a war against guns, it’s gun owner control, and a war against gun owners.

Join me in the effort to end this futile battle for so-called, non-existent gun rights and gun laws, and renew the charge in support of the very real and very important rights of the people who own defensive and recreational firearms.

I’ve received a lot of feedback indicating that I should ‘forget these nits’ and stick to the very real subject of Constitutional Freedom.

These may seem like grammatical nits, but ask any ad agency — impressions really are everything.

If you think mere semantics is a ‘nit,’ then consider the arsenal of such nits deployed by the other side to demonize law-abiding gun owners.

It’s impossible, for instance, for a family to have a peaceful night out if one of the parents should accept additional responsibility for their safety and that of their family, by choosing to be legally armed.

When the ‘other side’ describes such a situation it is generally more like … “the wife and children huddled as their father swaggered into Toys-be-Them with a military style automatic pistol, packed full of death-dealing hollow-point bullets strapped to his hip.”

You see, to the anti-gun-owner crowd, you can’t walk while legally carrying a concealed, defensive sidearm in a Two Hundred dollar hand-made holster. You can, however, “swagger into the room with a hidden gun strapped to your hip.”

Just one way the media distorts their reporting for ‘shock’ value.

• A private citizen legally carrying a sidearm is “packing heat.”
• A criminal illegally carrying a stolen sidearm is “packing heat.”
• It’s not a concealed firearm it’s a “hidden gun.”
• Guns that are ugly, or look like they are ‘extra deadly’ are “military style assault weapons.”
• More than one gun is a “cache.”
• More than Two guns is an “arsenal.”
• If one of those guns is Black, or just looks evil, regardless of its function, then it’s an “arsenal of military style assault weapons.”
• If they were locked in a safe, it’s a “hidden arsenal.”

I don’t care (too much) if you say clip’ when it should be ‘magazine.’ When the media and others, however, use semantics and twists of phrases to equate law-abiding citizens with unstable criminals, I do care, and I care deeply.

Freedom of the press sounds noble. Freedom to be secure sounds desirable. To guarantee all of our freedoms, however, we need “freedom of the gun,” and unfortunately, that sounds like a bad movie or Michael Moore documentary. (Same difference?)

Egg