If a gun fires and no one catches a bullet, does it really have any meaning?

Anyone who believes that most hips are better off unencumbered by guns needs to read a story in the Chesterfield Observer which focuses on Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. On second thought, maybe not. You probably don't need the agita. It came out just as Cheney's mess was escalating but the interview obviously took place before the vice president shot his friend on a quail shoot in Texas. Van Cleave was responding to Jack Reid's accidental firing of his pistol in his General Assembly office. Van Cleave flippantly dismisses the fuss over it: "You're never happy about an accident, but no one was hurt." Writer Charles Batchelor says, "Van Cleave said it was a meaningless accident..." There were no quotation marks around "meaningless accident" so I don't know if those are Van Cleave's words or Batchelor's. The message is clear though. I wonder how meaningless the people who work on the other side of Reid's office door thought it was. And if it was meaningless because no one got hurt, does that make Cheney's accident a meaningful one?

Van Cleave goes on to say that the Reid incident was only a big deal to people "who don't like guns anyway. If he had had a car wreck, you wouldn't be talking about cars."

Oh, my. Van Cleave, of course, doesn't acknowledge the flip side -- that the only people who were blase about the incident were the people who are already in love with guns. Which is why most people did think it was a big deal.