I noticed something interesting about the “Major Caudill” version of my essay quoted in the Front Sight newsletter.
It’s missing the word “gay” in front of the word “guy” in this sentence:
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound
woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year
old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang
banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a
carload of drunk guys with baseball bats.
That’s the only word that was excised from the otherwise word-for-word copy of my essay. I don’t know if this is the Front Sight Special Remix, or whether that nasty little word was removed in a previous email forward, but it seems that someone thought the reference to homosexuals legitimately defending themselves sort of distracts from the message of the essay.
With allies like these, who needs enemies?
That’s ’cause Four Weapon Combat Masters don’t talk about no queers.
This is me, rolling my eyes…
The “gay guy” reference has been removed in other stolen copies that I’ve seen.
Which is a darn pity because, stolen or not, the idea of a gun being put to use in preventing a “hate crime” is exactly the thing needed when talking to fence-sitters to get one’s foot in the door for a meaningful discussion on the topic.
The other way of looking at it is that qualifying ‘guy’ with ‘gay’ makes it more exclusive. Maybe they thought heterosexuals have a right to legitimate self defense too.
Regardless, that article of yours is a classic and their adaptive use of it sans permission is not defensible.
[...] They attribute the writing to the wrong person (not the first time it’s happened with that piece) but they also omit one single word from the essay: gay. [...]
Damn, and I was thinking about taking one of their classes. I almost got suckered in by the Joe Penny endorsement. Say it ain’t so, Joe!