The Walking Dead Returns  by Tom Reynolds

Formerly, Newsweek’s distribution seemed to be primarily in the waiting rooms of doctor’s offices.  So, when Covid removed magazines from those rooms, it was natural to assume that Newsweek had gone out of business.  Imagine my surprise when it suddenly reappeared, risen and walking the earth like some brain-dead zombie in the “Walking Dead”.

In fact, Newsweek’s writer David H. Freedman all but equates the Walking Dead’s zombies to gun owners in his article “Millions of Angry Armed Americans Stand Ready To Seize Power If Trump loses in 2024”.  Apparently, Newsweek’s readers are expected to be just as mindless as those TV zombies were when they overthrew the U.S. government.  

Like Custer at the Little Big Horn, Freedman fights a losing battle, this time with facts and not against arrows.  For instance, he says, “…militias, which have been a feature of American life at least since the Ku Klux Klan rose to power after the Civil War”.  As a liberal, it’s fully expected that he is not familiar with the U.S. Constitution which, famously, mentions militias in its 2^nd Amendment.  Or that militias featured prominently in the Revolutionary War.  Both occurred 75 to 85 years before the Civil War ended. But as a writer, not as a liberal, shouldn’t he do some research before he impugns militias by linking their appearance to the KKK? 

Then he says, “In 2020, 17 million Americans bought 40 million guns and in 2021 we’re on track to add another 20 million. If historical trends hold, the buyers will be overwhelmingly white…”.  But, The Guardian  (and numerous other sources) report, “…approximately half of all new gun owners were female and nearly half were people of color.”  I know he’s a journalist and not a mathematician, but 3^rd grade math indicates that nearly half being people of color doesn’t leave an overwhelming number to be white.    Whatever Freedman believes are “historical trends” certainly didn’t hold true.  So much for journalistic research.  But gun grabbing liberals never let inconvenient facts get in their way.

Freedman then warns how, “America's massive and mostly Republican gun-rights movement…raises the threat of armed, large-scale attacks around the 2024 presidential election—attacks that could make the January 6 insurrection look like a toothless stunt by comparison”.  January 6^th wasn’t toothless by comparison to anything- it was toothless standing on its own!  Or did Freeman miss that not one protester fired a shot or not one has been charged with insurrection or that Biden was confirmed and inaugurated as president?

Then he wonders if the 2024 election might bring, “…protesters and counter-protesters into the street…plunging the country into chaos”.  He also writes, “Nearly a third of Republicans agree that ‘true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.’" Does he mean protesting and resorting to violence like Black Lives Matter and Antifa did in their “mostly peaceful protests”?  I may have missed it, but did Freedman write, in comparable terms, about those protests? I’m going to go out not very far on a limb and guess – not.

He also predicts that any violence over 2024 election results could only come from Republicans and, then, only if Trump loses a close race.  He dismisses any worry about violent Democrat protests by writing, “If Democratic protests include any violence, as was the case with several Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 in mostly isolated instances…”  Mostly isolated instances!  Can you begin to imagine how much damage would have been done if the “mostly peaceful protests” had included more than only “isolated instances” of violence?

Freedman throws out a scare tactic when he states that the Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen could lead “to the overthrow of the U.S. government”, because people will be allowed to carry guns “anywhere”, including while protesting in D.C.  Can you imagine – can you just image – Americans exercising their 2^nd Amendment rights in support of their 1^st Amendment rights?  A liberal’s worst nightmare!  Call out the National Guard and fence off the Capitol before that trend catches on!

Freedman continues in a similar way throughout the article but he does stumble upon one reasonable theory.  The vast majority of guns belong to Republicans and if the radical left pushes the country into a civil war, "One side has about 8 trillion bullets... Wonder who would win?"

Newsweek certainly can be compared to the brain dead for publishing this article.