Actor Morgan Freeman allegedly made a dramatic plea for sanity with respect to the illogical murder of twenty-seven innocent people on Friday, December 14, 2012.
In this widely distributed piece, Freeman squarely blames the media’s relentless pursuit of ratings and the glorification of violence as the key factors in inciting the mentally ill to take out their assault rifles and amble down to the local school, or theater, shopping mall, or other public gathering place to claim their fifteen minutes of infamy.
When I first read the piece, I thought it odd that the piece seemed to be inarticulate as it rambled on toward its conclusion that mental health is the real reason we have these grotesque events in our national fabric. The piece is absolutely silent on the part that the pervasiveness of guns, particularly semi-automatic assault type rifles, might play in these tragedies.
One can conclude that the Morgan Freeman hoax is yet another disingenuous attempt by gun control opponents to deflect the dialogue from the fact that our love of weapons, big powerful weapons, has become a national disgrace.
To listen to gun advocates, it is never about the guns.
If you do nothing else to remember those twenty first-graders in the coming months, try to give some thought to why it is so important for you to own a semi-automatic assault rifle and hundreds, if not thousands, of rounds of ammunition. Are there that many well-armed and dangerous deer in your neighborhood?
The writer of the piece is familiar with and has used firearms.
In high school, I actually rose to the rank of sharpshooter in our military cadet corps. The last time that I went to a firing range, after probably thirty years of not picking up a fiream, I score something like 2-3 bulls-eyes out of five shots.
I do not sit in the dark afraid of guns, I just think that we need to control the obscene distribution of assault rifles.
Philip Chen - Author/Cartoonist 