May 07, 2013
By Robert W. Hunnicutt
I don't think there's any method by which guns can be destroyed that's especially acceptable to any of us. Sometimes they are tossed into deep areas of the ocean, as the British did with ordnance up to large gas shells after World War I, leaving a long-lasting pollution problem in the Irish Sea. Sometimes they are cut up for scrap, as was done in Australia.
For some reason, U.S. anti-gunners love making alleged art objects out of confiscated or voluntarily turned in guns. The latest example is in Seattle, where the mayor has announced a plan to melt 716 guns taken in a "buyback" scheme into "peace bricks. "
I have discussed before just how much gun owners hate the term "buyback," which carries the implication that the government is merely retrieving what was always its property. The term "peace brick" is just about as bad; as if somehow peace, generally, but not always, a good condition, can be represented by a steel brick.
Why do the antis so enjoy melting guns into objets d'art? As far as I can recall, it all got started with "St. Francis of the Guns ," a sculpture located, not surprisingly, in San Francisco, made in 1968 of 1,968 melted guns. The sculptor was eccentric Italian-born artist Benny Bufano, who before the St. Francis project was better known for supposedly cutting off his trigger finger and sending it to President Woodrow Wilson to protest World War I.
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Bufano's piece features images of Lincoln, Bobby and John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It will not, to be perfectly frank, make you forget Michelangelo's David , but for some reason has evaded a deserved trip to the scrapyard and now stands in front of the science building at the City College of San Francisco.
There have been many, many other attempts to turn guns into sculpture, and one has to ask why, when that apparently is not the norm in other countries. I think the answer is simple. We have fought our anti-gunners long and successfully. I am sure that the early ones thought they'd have us reduced to bows and the occasional muzzleloader long before now.
Their frustration leads to an infernal hatred of us that makes them want not only to destroy our guns, but to put their remains on display, much the way the Royalists dug up Oliver Cromwell's body and put his head on a pike. It's their way of saying, we conquered you, and we are going to put up a statue to remind you of that every day, so you can know beyond any doubt you are a beaten people.
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Well, they can do that in places like San Francisco and Seattle, where frothy caffeinated drinks and parlor Bolshevism are local staples. Here in flyover country, we are made of sterner stuff, and will be keeping our guns, thank you. In fact, maybe we need our own plan: we pull down statues and turn them into AR-15 barrels. What about it?