Communitarian Ivory Tower suggests animal abuse and cruelty

From their Web page at http://www.gwu.edu/~ccps/pop_disarm.html. Their exact words, not mine.

"Hunters might be allowed (if one feels this "sport" must be tolerated) to use long guns that cannot be concealed, without sights or powerful bullets, making the event much more "sporting."

O.K.- let's be fair. These people are so far up in their ivory tower that they can't see reality. I am sure they did not mean to suggest hunting practices that would be considered inhumane by any ethical hunter (one who kills only for food, who hunts safely, and kills cleanly). What this shows, however, is how divorced the signatories to "The Case for Domestic Disarmament" are from reality. Here is proof of their ignorance:

Not using sights makes it more likely that the animal will not be killed cleanly, thus resulting in unnecessary suffering.

A hit in the animal's stomach or intestines not only causes a lingering death, but also can make the meat unusable, thus wasting the animal's life. Ethical sportsmen and sportswomen do not want to hunt wastefully; they want to kill cleanly and eat (or share) whatever they kill.
Other non-instant kills may result in the animal's escaping only to die later, with its meat again going to waste.

Use of low-powered bullets also is likely to result in unnecessary suffering. Do these people advocate, for example, deer hunting with .22 rimfire ammunition?
Regarding their opposition to hunting- how many of the signatories eat meat? Maybe they think steaks and hamburgers grow in fields or on trees... Robert A. Heinlein said that the person who buys meat is partner to the butcher.

Here's another good one from their page (I haven't waded through their whole manifesto yet)- remember the story of the mice who voted to bell the cat?

"Perhaps the best way to proceed, if nationwide domestic disarmament cannot be achieved immediately, is to introduce it in some major part of the country, say, the Northeast. ... The rapid fall in violent crime sure to follow will make ever more states demand that domestic disarmament be extended to their religion."

It's already been tried! Try gun control paradises like New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC. Those places have exactly the kind of gun laws these people want!- and they have some of the highest violent crime rates in the country, rates higher than many Western and Southern regions that have little gun control. Now for the next laugh...

"True, violence has many sources. However, none can be as effectively and rapidly removed as the technology of violence."

If you believe that, there's a bridge I'd like to sell you. Here are examples of "removing the technology of violence":

The Washington Treaty limited battleship construction by the U.S., Britain, Japan, France, and Italy. Guess what carried the airplanes that bombed Pearl Harbor? That's right, the Japanese converted the battlecruisers Kaga and Akagi into aircraft carriers. (In fairness, U.S.S. Saratoga and Lexington were orignally battlecruisers.)
The Hague Convention banned poison gas- gee, how much of an effect did this have on the First World War?
The Kellogg-Briand Treaty (get this one, folks!) outlawed war.
Efforts were once made to ban the crossbow...
I recall a "scrap of paper" that guaranteed Belgium's neutrality.

Hmmm, "Communitarian" sounds like something else- collectivism or communism, a Utopian paradise on paper that, when tried, was not a paradise, but a hell on earth. More about the Communitarians:

Communitarians, Neorepublicans, and Guns

"It Takes a Militia"