Over the past few days, I have been pondering why Daylight Savings Time was pushed up to March. The official story is that it will help save energy (I guess they think owners of gas-guzzling SUVs won't drive in the daylight hours?) I've also heard that the Barbeque industry is behind this move, to get more people grilling up those buffalo burgers a little earlier. But I have a much more plausible theory. It's all because of the National Rifle Association (the NRA). They probably lobbied for the change so their members can have more daylight hours to shoot their rifles, lobby Congress to dismantle whatever meager gun control laws are now on the books and hoot and holler in trigger-happy euphoria that a Federal Appeals Court just declared Washington DC's ban on handguns to be unconstitutional.
Really, you judges, what were you thinking? As someone who resides in DC, I quite like our handgun ban and sleep a little bit more restfully every night knowing that my neighbors can't keep loaded guns under their pillows. But I guess the rightward-leaning activist judges don't believe in the will of the people to rule themselves (after all DC is the last remaining colony in this country without voting rights) and feel they know what's best: Yup, let millions of people keep and hold handguns so a city that already has a devastatingly high homicide rate can get even worse.
This inspires me to re-imagine and update Cole Porter's lyrics from "Let's Do it, Let's Fall in Love" as "Cops do it / thugs do it / now every person and their pugs can do it / Let's do it...let's own a gun!"
As my friend Gail recently suggested, why not just have the NRA pass out free guns outside of subway stations the way companies pass out free chewing gum or mints? I can hear them hawking their wares now, "Come get your free revolving pistol, your semi-automatic pistol, your derringer here....Let Freedom ring!"
And then, really, why stop at handguns? Let's just pass out assault weapons on every corner, or at baseball games with the peanuts. That's what the NRA wants. The right for all people to carry whatever firearm they wish-- which brings me to another story that caught my eye.
For those of you who missed it, the NRA recently blackballed longtime outdoorsman and gun enthusiast Jim Zumbo because he dared to say that there is absolutely no reason for people to use military-style assault weapons to go hunting. This seemed like a no-brainer to me (for instance, why would hunters even want to use an AK-47 to go after deer and squirrels? Isn't that like playing tennis with a racket the size of a garbage can lid, or playing baseball with a beach ball you couldn't miss? An assault weapon would blow poor Bambi to bits. Where's the sportsmanship in that Mr. Hunter guy?)
But I'm being rational and we all know that the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" NRA is anything but rational. According to the Washington Post, that unfortunate comment from Zumbo stirred "hundreds of thousands of owners of assault weapons" to run poor Jimmy out of town on a rail. He has gone overnight from being a star of the NRA to such an outcast that he has lost his writing and speaking gigs and all the money that supported him and his rifles and his little cabin outside of Yellowstone Park.
If this is what the NRA does to its FRIENDS, imagine what it does do to its enemies -- especially knowing that they have hundreds of thousands of members with assault weapons who now have more daylight hours to protest. Suddenly I am imagining that if the NRA has its way, and the court case is upheld, all my neighbors will be carrying not the little teeny weeny hand guns of the ilk that Nancy Reagan once had -- but new spanking Uzis.
I know gun advocates believe that owning a gun makes people safer. But I think it's going to turn my city, already plagued by too many illegal guns and too much violence, into the wild, wild West. The Citizens of Washington DC have spoken and we want the courts to stay out of our gun laws. I'm telling you, if the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia's decision is upheld, I'm going to get under the blankets in the dark, wearing a bullet proof vest and stay there -- to hell with the new daylight savings hours.