Rachel Maddow: Lover of Guns?

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the queen of liberal media Rachel Maddow is “totally into guns.”

For a profile in the current issue of the magazine, editors brought Maddow back to her old stomping grounds – the Westside Pistol & Rifle Range – to snap some photos of the left-wing wonk with gun in hand.

In a promo clip for profile piece, Maddow fondly recalls the time she spent at the range, “I used to bring my radio producers [here],” she says cheerfully.  “Everyone here’s really nice.”

The article itself also highlights Maddow’s casual affinity for guns, albeit briefly.  Rolling Stone scribe Ben Wallace-Wells described the scene in which Maddow first courted her partner Susan Mikula, a “54-year-old artist with a hippie aspect and a big, willing laugh”:

Maddow and Mikula met in 1999. On their first date, they went to an NRA event, which was only partly ironic: They both like to shoot firearms. (“Susan has the hand-eye coordination,” Maddow says. “But I can’t control my movements.”)

So, does Maddow really like firearms?  Or was this mainly a promotional stunt by Rolling Stone executives to sell magazines?

The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in the middle.

With respect to guns, Maddow’s no Ted Nugent, but she’s no Rosie O’Donnell either.  And execs probably figured they could exploit her tenuous connection to guns as a means to reinforce the ‘iconoclast’ and ‘rogue’ angle of the story, Wallace-Wells labels her as an “outsider” about a half-dozen times throughout the piece.

That said, her views on guns reflect the way a lot of liberals I know feel (I live in Los Angeles).  That is, they’re at once both pro-gun and pro-gun control – which leads them to tout the merits of what they call “common sense” gun laws.

The problem with this position is that it fails to acknowledge certain truths about guns and their relationship to violence.  This is primarily because liberals often take a reactionary and myopic approach to gun violence.

For example, in the video below, Maddow rants about the failure of lawmakers to regulate high-capacity magazines in the wake of the Tucson shootings.

“I thought after Tucson we could have one tiny little tick toward regulation, just the size of the magazines for ammunition in handguns. As a tiny correction for a nation that was shocked by the horror. I was wrong.”

As smart as Maddow is, she was a Rhodes Scholar, she doesn’t seem to realize that banning high-capacity magazines will not stop someone like Jared Lee Loughner from doing what he did, which if we’re at all serious about stopping gun violence should be the main concern, i.e. stopping violent people before they commit violent acts in lieu of regulating the means by which they plan to commit those acts (using the logic of the latter, we’d have to ban box cutters and automobiles and AN-fertilizer, etc.)

Nevertheless, suppose for a moment that prior to the Tucson shootings high-capacity magazines were illegal for civilians to possess.  Okay – does the mere fact that they are illegal prevent a sociopath from obtaining them on the black market for his murderous rampage?

Don’t think so.  The reality that Maddow and co. cannot grasp is that the toothpaste is out of the bottle.  Banning firearms and their accessories only keeps them out of the hands of law-abiding people.  Short of destroying all guns, there’s little one can do to keep firearms from falling into the wrong hands.

Don’t believe me?   Just ask New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has ushered in some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation.  The result of his efforts?  Shootings are on the rise in the city.

Maddow and her liberal pals need to recognize that what precedes ‘common sense’ is an objective review of the facts.