Robyn Ringler Takes Her Ball . . . .

. . . . and goes home.

Robyn opened her "blog" a few months ago with big plans. She was going to bring us all together to find reasonable compromises on common ground.

Her compromises were as follows:

1. Ban all .50 caliber firearms immediately.
2. Require waiting periods and background checks for all gun sales, private and public.
3. Ban handguns, or, if that's not possible, don't let them anywhere near cities or minorities.
4. Ban assault weapons. After that, get right to work figuring out what an assault weapon is.
5. Hunters can keep some of their guns for hunting, but they'll have to be locked up. We'll need a law for that, too.
6. It would be nice if all the gun owners left the NRA and it folded, because the NRA tends to lie to the gun owners and tell them that they aren't all hunters and they won't like the aforementioned compromises--and we can't have that.

You see, Robyn understands the American gun owner, because she lives out in the country on 30 acres in upstate New York. This has apparently taught her that the American gun owner is a hunter who hates .50 rifles, "assault weapons," handguns and minorities. I'm really not sure who her neighbors are, but my guess would be that they make a lot of money and moved to the area to escape the big city.

But she soon hit a few bumps in the road. For one thing, American gun owners seemed to be strangely resistant to "compromise." It was almost as if they wanted to get something in return for giving something up, but any good gun control activist knows that just isn't the way compromise works. Gun owners don't seem to want to accept a ban on handguns, even though she told them it was for the children. They didn't want to ban .50 caliber rifles, even though she told them all about the heartbreaking tale of a woman who was shot with a 7mm. They didn't even want to ban assault weapons, but that wasn't the worst of it--some were so rude, they demanded to know what assault weapons were before they would discuss whether they should be banned!
(Everyone knows assault weapons are like pornography--you just know them when you see them.)

I call it her "blog" because it's not what a lot of people would consider a blog. You see, a blog is interactive; usually, it allows readers to comment on what the blogger writes. This idea clearly made Roby deeply nervous. It wasn't long before she announced that she would be deleting insulting comments; unspoken, but clearly demonstrated in deed, was that only pro-gun commenters would have insults deleted. But perhaps that was only fair, since pro-gun commenters usually outnumbered anti-gunners by at least 10 to 1. Ya gotta be sporting.
Later, Robyn became so alarmed that commenters were using the word "gangbanger" to describe criminals who were members of street gangs that she banned the term. It's racist to call a kid a gangbanger just because he's a Crip or a Latin King, you see.

Now Robyn has exercised the Brady Option and simply done what she wanted to do all along--she's closing the comments and she's just going to write her column. The four or five anti-gunners who actually read her may actually enjoy the column more than the blog; the rest of her readers will probably disappear. I know I have no reason to look at her ramblings if I'm not allowed to comment.

This is a tiny event in the overall scheme of things, but the pattern appears to be holding:

1. Anti-gun blog announced amid much fanfare.
2. Anti-gun blog filled with embarrassingly misinformed misinformation.
3. Anti-gun blog closed for comments.

Well, here's the deal, Robyn. You can decide what to do with your blog, but you've chosen the path of the closed mind. You have zero credibility and no one to blame but yourself. Enjoy your vanity column. If your ideas can only survive in an environment where no one will examine them critically, they're useless.

If that sound harsh and mean, that's only because I tend to be harsh and mean.