Manufacturing Outrages

Miguel over a Gun Free Zone has been covering the anti-gunner’s latest manufactured controversy, a Republican fund raiser where they raffled off a Glock pistol to raise money for the party. I glossed over the “controversy” because other people were already doing a great job of covering it and honestly I’ve been paying little attention to the ongoings of the anti-gunners as of late. But now that the pistol has been successfully raffled and everybody is still alive I thought a recap would be a good idea just in case anybody every believes that this situation was controversial. First and foremost we need to note something that was well stated in the story:

The model of Glock is not the same as the one Jared Lee Loughner used in the Jan. 8, rampage. The gun used by Loughner was a Glock 19. The weapon being raffled is a Glock 23.

I’m throwing this out there because many of the anti-gunners claimed that the raffle was for the exact same gun that was used to shoot Giffords. Seriously, the verbiage some of those idiots were using would lead readers to believe that a representative of the GOP walked into the evidence room, confiscated the gun used to shoot Giffords, and raffled it off at their fundraiser. What the anti-gunners were trying to twist and mutilate to fit their mission was the simple fact that the pistol being raffled was made by the same manufacturer as the gun used by the psycho who shot Giffords. Guess what? I own three Glock pistols, many of the local police departments issue Glock pistols, many militaries issue Glock pistols, and most people I know have at least one of the damned things. They breed like jackrabbits which is possibly the reason they’re such a popular firearm.

Do you know who else owns a Glock pistol? Giffords:

A gun, by any other name, is just a gun. Unless it’s a Glock semi-automatic pistol raffled off by Republicans in Pima County, which just happens to be the same county where Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people were shot, six of them killed.

Then it’s an outrage.

Or so we’re supposed to believe.

[…]

By the way, Giffords owns a Glock.

Emphasis mine. That’s it, argument over! No, seriously, we’re done. I’d like to thank Snowflakes in Hell for providing the closing argument.

The fact of the matter is Glocks are extremely popular pistols and thus it’s not surprising that they end up being used in crimes from time to time. This wasn’t a case of some GOP crony sitting in the Arizona Republican Party office wringing his hands in glee as he came up with the single most offensive plan he could conjure up to raise money for his party. It just ended up being a case where the GOP wanted to raffle off a firearm to raise money because gun rights is one of the things they pay lip service to periodically. As Glock pistols are popular it made perfect sense to select one to raffle off at their fundraiser.

The simplest explanation is usually the right one as this case demonstrates.