Over the years the Washington Post has lurched steadily leftward in both the news and opinion pages, with its Sunday Outlook section leading the way. The October 18 edition evidenced a new level of liberal inanity featuring a piece by a California writer named Steve Elliott who proudly cut up his Ruger pistol, took a picture of the destroyed handgun, and then wrote a song -- oh I mean an article -- about it.   Since I am not a liberal and do not anthropomorphize guns, I am not going to cry or cheer over the cut up hunk of metal and plastic depicted on page B4, but as a cheapskate, I am offended at the waste of an asset. Couldn’t Elliott have just sold the gun on Gunbroker.com and given the proceeds to the Brady Foundation?  But that would make too much sense, I guess. 

As best I can figure Elliott’s logic – apart from finding a way to get published in the Post -- he cut up the gun so that the NRA can no longer take advantage of him as a responsible gun owner. Except that Elliott, according to the article, is still the owner of several long guns. So is he no longer the responsible owner of those? Or does he believe the NRA only defends the right to own a handgun?  

Anyway, I’ve always heard that if you accept the premise of a madman that he usually follows in a logical fashion from there. As in “My skin is covered with crawling, biting purple termites, so that’s why I doused myself in acid.”  Mental illness seems to run in Elliott’s family since his consciousness about the danger of guns was raised by the unfortunate and unusual propensity of various relatives to either kill themselves with guns or try. So for Elliott, getting rid of his gun probably was a move in the right direction, but what that has to do with taking away mine? 

In any event, in the spirit of the madman’s logic here are some further recommendations to Elliott to salve his guilty liberal conscience:

1. Cut up your car, even if it’s electric -- it is still a pollution emitter.
2. Cut up your clothes -- they were probably made in China and took a job away from a poor illegal immigrant
3. Cut up your lawn -- it’s a water waster.
4. Cut up your house -- it’s greenhouse-gasser.
5. Cut up your knives -- somebody somewhere is probably stabbing somebody else with one.