A dummy's perspective on guns

Ted Streuli, The Daily Record Newswire

Edgar Bergen, best known as a ventriloquist, and his main sidekick, Charlie McCarthy, were a radio staple from the 1930s through the ‘50s and made a successful switch to television.

Charlie McCarthy’s character was a precocious 11-year-old, albeit one dressed in tuxedo and top hat and sporting a monocle. He routinely sparred with W.C. Fields and got away with racy repartee in routines with Mae West. Since Bergen’s death in 1978, Charlie McCarthy has resided at the Smithsonian.

Although Charlie McCarthy was Bergen’s most common co-star, he wasn’t the only doll in the case. Dim-witted country bumpkin Mortimer Snerd joined the act in 1938, and the man-chasing Effie Klinker was added to the cast in 1944.

I was reminded of Mortimer Snerd this week as the memes flew in the wake of the Orlando massacre. One of Bergen’s one-liners popped into my head.

Bergen: Mortimer, how can you be so stupid?

Snerd: Well, it ain’t easy. I got a fella helping me.

Country music star Ronnie Dunn wants to help. On June 12, Dunn posted a meme on his Facebook page that read:

“If a madman wants to kill innocent people he will find a way. Killers don’t need guns to kill people. Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer. 9-11 terrorists used box cutters and planes. The Nazis used cyanide gas. Taking guns from innocent people will not protect innocent people. The problem is not guns. It is a Godless society.”

Mortimers responded with nearly 700,000 likes and more than 1.2 million shares.

Let’s analyze those eight sentences.

1) If a madman wants to kill innocent people he will find a way. Agreed. Can’t argue with that.

2) Killers don’t need guns to kill people. Absolutely true. But it’s really, really hard to kill 49 people in a single incident using a baseball bat or a knife.

3) Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer. Yep, he did. Almost everybody else used an assault rifle.

4) 9-11 terrorists used box cutters and planes. Uh-huh. And that’s why you can’t take a box cutter onto a plane anymore. Since innocent people keep getting killed by people with assault rifles, maybe we should consider restricting their use, too.

5) The Nazis used cyanide gas. Yes, but the victims — Jews and gays — didn’t just hop on the trains for fun. The Nazis used guns to force them. Suggesting that Nazis didn’t need guns for the Holocaust is like saying we didn’t need a rocket to get to the moon because we walked on it once we got there.

6) Taking guns from innocent people will not protect innocent people. Of course it would. Ninety-one people die by gun every day in the United States. Seven of them are children. Two hundred people per day are injured. The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation increases the woman’s chance of being murdered fivefold. But I’m not advocating taking away your deer rifle or the pistol in your nightstand; I just think if we can regulate box cutters for the public’s safety, maybe we should consider doing the same with assault rifles.

7) The problem is not guns. The U.S., home of the least restrictive gun laws, has a death-by-gun rate 25 times higher than any other developed country. Of course the problem is guns.

8) It is a Godless society. Nope. We’re pretty God-filled. More than 77 percent of Americans affiliate with a religion, almost all of them Christian, and we lead the world in gun-related deaths. In Japan, 75 percent of the population considers religion unimportant, yet they have the lowest rate of gun deaths.

You don’t need that fella helping you, Mortimer. Think for yourself. Get off that guy’s lap and look up the real data.