UPDATED: Gun owners in Massachusetts, and beyond its borders, are outraged over remarks by a Democrat Bay State legislator who said Thursday that “it is a privilege to have a gun license,” causing one conservative online news site to declare that she needs a civics lesson.
The offending remark by State Rep. Marjorie Decker, a Cambridge liberal, is spreading across social media like a California wildfire. According to the New Boston Post, Decker was at a meeting of the Public Safety Committee, which was discussing the use and regulation of firearm suppressors (“silencers”) when she remarked, “It is a privilege that we allow individuals to hold onto something that causes harm and death. It is a privilege to have a car license, it is a privilege to have a gun license.”
Listen to Decker’s remarks at 8:34 on the audio.
But the New Boston Post editorial board late Thursday came out swinging. In an editorial headlined “Civics Lesson for State Rep on Guns,” the publication declared, “State Representative Marjorie Decker’s claim that having a gun license – which, regrettably, is currently needed to own a gun in Massachusetts – is a privilege as opposed to a right is not only wrong. It’s outrageous.”
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The editorial stated bluntly, “It takes a civics lesson to become a citizen. Maybe we ought to start requiring one to become a state rep.”
That these words would be spoken in Massachusetts is especially ironic to Second Amendment activists because that’s where the Revolutionary War began, essentially because of what might be considered gun control. British troops were sent to Lexington and Concord to seize militia weapons and the Colonials resisted.
After the initial confrontation at Lexington, where a handful of the militia members were killed or wounded, the British found themselves facing more than a thousand angry farmers and Minutemen by the time they arrived at Concord. The march back to Boston was bloody as the Colonials kept the Redcoats dodging musket and rifle balls throughout the day.
Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners Action League in Massachusetts, told Conservative Firing Line, “She kind of surprised everybody when she made the comment that she did.”
Noting that she represents Cambridge, which he described as “the furthest possible Left city in Massachusetts,” Wallace noted that, “The people that she represents for the most part think like her.” He suggested that her anti-gun remarks would “make her look like a hero” to those constituents.
Wallace said her comments are now all over social media.
