Dear Editor,
I encountered some skepticism last summer when I introduced your readers to the gun snatching bogeywoman, Confiscation Connie, and I feel vindicated now that we have a genuine Connie Catcher advertising on a major city street. I see Connie bait daily in the form of a gun flapping flag and the CC directed dare, “Come and take it.”
Driving by the Catcher and his decoys I’m reminded of my own introduction to Connie. My old man, a sergeant under MacArthur, was in a jovial mood when he mocked the risk of gun confiscation, but he grew somber toward the end of the lesson when he said, “Jess, no man is braver than the one standing up to a non-existent enemy.”
As a pre-Echo Chamber element of conservative propaganda, the gun confiscation myth gives us insight into Original Cynicism: the desire of elites to manipulate the thinking of the common man. For 60 years, slickers, who would faint straight-away deaning a squirrel, who would wet their silk underdrawers worming a hook, have spread dread in the minds of hardworking hunters.