Lately, President Obama has done more smack talking about gun owners than Rhonda Rousey before Saturday night's title, um, defense.
Unfortunately, our peerless leader doesn't have to defend his title against anything more intimidating than a Washington media corps that's more than demonstrated an ability to hit the canvas faster than any pug brought in to "fight" a contender.
At a time when I'd prefer a Commander in Chief who was working to mandate basic self-defense training for all citizens to repel what many experts now say is an "almost inevitable" terror attack, he has now looked down from his lame duck perch and proclaimed his hopes to make gun control his top issue in his final year in office.
Unfortunately, he's not talking about quick recovery for a second shot should it be necessary on an attacker.
He's talking about controlling guns as in making certain the average citizen (that would be you and me ) doesn't have one - at least if he can orchestrate that happening over the next year.
I first declared Mr. Obama the gun salesman of the year- eight years ago. Yes, before he assumed office.
Now, I feel safe predicting he has a far better chance of leaving the presidency with that title intact than any team in the NFL has of finishing their season undefeated. Or Rhonda Rousey has of regaining her undefeated title.
In an interview published Tuesday in GQ, Mr. Obama explained that the "only variable" between the United States and other developed countries is the easy access to guns. That, he "reasons" means that - while American's aren't any more violent than people in other developed countries- they have "more deadly weapons to act out their rage."
So it seems he's willing to step in and prevent our acting out our rage.
Thanks for offering to step up on this one, Mr. President, but I think I'll continue to desperately cling rather than trust you to protect me.
And I'll continue to labor under my apparently mistaken impression that one of the few things standing between the rest of the world and a motley collection of terrorists, despots and other tin-pot, would-be murderers was…a good guy with a gun. Frequently, those good guys (and girls) are Americans.
They're out there today, defending people whose inability to protect themselves has made them victims of the highest order. If you think I'm exaggerating, I'd point out mass graves regularly uncovered from Mexico to Kosovo. In each of those locations, the only legally armed protection their citizens have is….yikes…their government.
And, in many of those locations, the primary difference between the victims and the victimizers hasn't been their level of decency, it's been their access to the means to eliminate the other side of whatever argument they use as the excuse to slaughter each other.
I'd also point out that, despite significant philosophical differences across vast numbers of our population, the citizens of the United States, despite ready access to a vast array of firearms manage to behave more civilly regarding their differences (Missouri and a few other areas excepted) than those parts of the world that regularly dig - and fill- mass graves with their ideological opposites.
But that's probably just me, and I've been wrong on far more than one occasion.
After all, I don't have access to the wealth of intelligence data that enables me to say we're really not at war with Islam- despite pretty definite indications that Islam's damned certain at war with us.
And I'm pretty certain that radical jihadists/terrorists have been behind the atrocities committed over the past two weeks across the globe, despite the fact that several candidates for the position Mr. Obama is scheduled to vacate in just over a year, simply can't bring themselves to admit that as a possibility.
I'm not picking the final pair of candidates for Mr. Obama's position, but I'm more than prepared to say that until his term of office ends, he's not looking at any serious challenges to his title of "Gun Salesman of the Year."
— Jim Shepherd