By Cyndy Slovak-Barton.
Let’s face it. We live in Texas and there are guns – in our homes, in our cars, in purses, trucks and bags.
Firearms seem to be a part of life in the United States, and no one knows that better than Dick Metcalf, who has talked about firearms all his adult life – in Guns & Ammo magazine, on the TV show “Modern Rifle Adventure”. He is an Airborne Army veteran.
And he just got fired – for talking compromise and musing that 16 hours of training to carry a concealed weapon might not be enough.
Huh?
Zealots – and, yes, there are zealots on both sides of the issue – demanded his removal as a columnist for the magazine. The 67-year-old who has devoted his life to firearms made a major “mistake” in the eyes of zealots. He wrote that the Second Amendment doesn’t mean no regulations at all on firearms.
To paraphrase his column – regulations regarding classes and registration for a concealed weapon is not an infringement on rights; you can’t claim freedom of speech and yell “fire” in a crowded theater; churches cannot practice human sacrifice; you can’t drive a car without some training and getting a license; people can’t gather on your lawn and protest against, well, you.
All amendments have some kind of regulation – and that includes the Second Amendment.
You know the Second Amendment, right?
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
As Metcalf said, note the last four words – and the first three: shall not be infringed and a well regulated.
Yep, our pesky forefathers seem to understand that rights are fine, and that some times, regulations just make those rights safe for all.
The problem in this entire situation is that Metcalf was fired for using his first amendment to explain something about his second. His column, “Let’s Talk Limits,” ran in the October edition of Guns & Ammo.
Then the zealot dam burst.
Readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions, advertisers threatened to no longer advertise if his column continued, and gun companies no longer sent him the latest weapons to review. Metcalf was no longer being flown around the world to show off guns.
Two days after the column hit the pages, he was fired.
This is not the first time that someone in the gun industry has been taken down by one of their own. In 2012, the editor of Recoil magazine said that a gun was “unavailable to civilians and for good reason.”
He was pressured to step down. He no longer writes about guns.
In 2007, another author wrote that military-style rifles were terrorist weapons. His deals were canceled. No more writing, no television and endorsement deals.
Kaput.
Since when did compromise or even the idea of DISCUSSING an issue mean you were a pariah? When we can’t even talk about an issue without being fired, voted out of office or becoming the victim of hate mail, then there is something seriously wrong.
As Metcalf put it in his interview with The New York Times, “Compromise is a bad word these days. People think it means giving up your principles.”
It is the very idea that he was trying to make sure our regulated right to bear arms remained free – within any reasonable person’s idea – that he ended up without his other freedoms – the right to talk and to hold his job.
And that’s a true shame.
