Considering the source

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

(crossposted from Cobalt6)

I am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be, a member of the National Rifle Association.

That said, many of you who read this blog know that I am extremely pro-Second Amendment.

“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

–Thomas Jefferson, quoting Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishment (1764).

Thomas Jefferson has, on many issues and on many occasions, served as a more than adequate spokesman for me.

Recently, however, I have noted on my Gmail chat list, a number of conservatives have apparently coordinated and set their status messages to feature pro-Second Amendment quotes by the so-called “Motor City Madman”, Ted Nugent.

In that 1990 interview with the Free Press and from information collected from the Chickenhawk Web site, Nugent told about how he avoided the draft: “He claims that 30 days before his Draft Board Physical, he stopped all forms of personal hygiene. The last 10 days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and a week before his physical, he stopped using the bathroom altogether, virtually living inside his pants caked with excrement and urine. That spectacle won Nugent a deferment.”

It says volumes about the character of a man who calls himself the Motor City Madman. The Detroit native went out of his way to avoid the defining experience of his generation, then has the gall to talk about how eagerly he would have killed, “if” he had served…the 57-year-old rocker also “told it like it is” during the Vietnam War. Here’s Ted on what he would have done if he went to Vietnam:

“… if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed, or I’d kill all the hippies in the foxholes … I would have killed everybody,” he told the Detroit Free Press in an interview published July 15, 1990.

I think I’ll stick with Jefferson:

“A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the Body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind . . . Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks.”

–Thomas Jefferson, Letter to his nephew Peter Carr, August 19, 1785.

…because, you see, no one who evades military service by living in his own filth, and years later in a public venue, threatens the lives of United States Senators and Representatives, will ever, ever speak for me.