For gun enthusiasts, Adolph Obama is just around the corner

A world class right-wing Plain Dealer columnist once warned me  that  if America became a dictatorship,   journalists would be the first to be throttled.   Indeed,  imprisoned or worse. What could I do to calm his fears?  Nothing, really.  He had long concluded that the country was drifting into the hands of oppressors and feared that we are ignoring the threats to our way of life.

There's a lot of that going around today in the debate over  gun control.  U.S. history has suffered through these things before in full technicolor.   There was the Yellow Peril, so vividly covered in Barbara Tuchman's Zimmermann Telegram; the Red incursion  of the McCarthy Era, and now the Black threat, which by extension, derives from the presence of an African-American doing a second turn in the Oval Office.

No stronger evidence of the baloney attached to the ranks of the gun defenders - a sort of mix-and-match catch-all for handguns and assault weapons - than  the shouted fears by such tetchy guys as Matt Drudge, who wants his crowd to shiver from the thought that a reincarnated Hitler or Stalin will be in the Rose Garden before you know it.

 Speaking of shivers, did you see the explosive meltdown of conservative radio host Alex Jones on the Piers Morgan show?  Jones  insisted that assault weapons were critically needed to fight a  sinister  force running the government - when that horrific  day arrives.

I wish I knew what happened to my BB gun that my parents gave me after the docs took out my tonsils when I was 6.  From what they tell me these days, every little weapon will help in the approaching clash between good and evil.