keyboards should be licensed

Well, for all those people who are firmly convinced that Tennessee is just a bunch of hillbilly rednecks humping their guns and clinging to their Bibles, I have news for you – we also have our fair share of liberal idiots. Time to see if I have enough endurance to do a line-by-line fisking…

Recent gun shows in and around Knoxville seem to be exploiting fear of gun control by the incoming president.

Ok, bucko, how do you come to this conclusion, exactly? Are you somehow surprised that, oddly enough, there are guns at gun shows? Do you not understand the logics of supply and demand well enough to realize that when an item is being threatened with banning, its inherent value increases? Make no mistake – I am more than a little annoyed at people pricing their AR-15 lowers at $400 at gun shows, but the fact is, if someone purchased the lower at that price, then it was obviously worth it. What we have here is nothign more than your typical liberal, erroneously replacing the word “capitalizing” with the word “exploiting”… cause, y’know, capitalism is evil and all that.

According to patrons at these shows, the AK-47 carbine rifle brings up to $1,600.

Congratulations, you are well on your way to becoming an “authorized journalist”, what with the whole omission of your patrons’ names… “according to sources”, eh? Yeah, your credibility just found the downward slope… and its descent only gets faster in the second part of the sentence. First up, strictly speaking, the firearms in question are not exactly AK-47s, just like AR-15s are not exactly M-16s – in both instances, the former firearm lacks the “cyclic rate of fire” that the latter posses. To put it simply, the firearms at these shows are solely semi-automatic – one bang per trigger-pull, no matter how long you hold it down. Furthermore, $1600 is not really that much higher than the highest price for an AK-47-pattern rifle I can find online after a few seconds’ search (I am sure there are higher-priced items out there, I am just too lazy to look). So… were you trying to point out your ignorance of firearms, or your ignorance of the firearm market with that sentence? Both? Well, you were successful at that, at least.

These type weapons serve no purpose in a society with a professional army and local police departments.

[sneeze]bullshit[/sneeze] Sorry. Unfortunately, I am allergic to logical fallacies, like the need fallacy I have debunked in the past. To make a long story of it, if you cannot see purposes for these types of weapons, you have no imagination. For instance, one could use them for target practice (a physiologically challenging but psychologically relaxing endeavor), hunting (the bullet the AK-47-pattern rifle spits out is the same diameter as, and only a little less powerful than, most hunting rounds used today), three-gun competitions (which are undeniably challenging and entertaining), home defense (though I would recommend frangible rounds, in that case), and countless other purposes. Your narrow-mindedness is not my problem, sorry. And, discounting the “need” argument in its entirety, and to rip a quote off Heinlein, there is a name for states wherein only the police and military have firearms – a police state. Do you really want that? (Wait, given your letter to the editor, please do not answer that question…)

Fully automatic carbines and pistols are not sporting weapons.

Yes, they are. In fact, fully-automatic rifles are actually a blast, literally and figuratively, to shoot. However, who the hell are you to tell anyone what is or is not sporting, considering your copious ignorance of the topic at hand?

The primary use of these weapons is superior fire power over the police and army.

Fail. The primary use of these weapons is to turn money into noise. Quickly. And to perforate lots of paper, metal, wood, and other non-human materials at short- to medium-range. Quickly.
If you ignore the misused phrase of “assault rifles”, and try to look for crimes committed by actual fully-automatic weapons, you come up almost completely empty (And, if you do include “assault weapons”, those only account for approximately 1% of all crimes committed with the assistance of a firearm… yeah, that is substantial, and obviously indicative of their “primary use”.). Application-wise, fully-automatic weapons, when used in fully-automatic fire, tend to be significantly less-accurate, harder to control, and less effective than their semi-automatic compatriots (or than themselves, when used in semi-automatic mode). In fact most militaries seriously frown on using automatic fire from anything except hard-mounted weapons, and sometimes not even then. In short, automatic fire really yields no positive gain, save possibly psychological. So explain to me what their “primary use” is, again, and how you drew that idiotic and fallacious conclusion?

Too often, these weapons fall into the hands of thugs, the mentally ill or rural terrorist types.

First, are you talking about fully-automatic weapons, or just weapons that look like fully-automatic weapons? Your modifiers are getting misplaced. If the former, double-fail. Fully-automatic weapons have been regulated, controlled, restricted, and taxed for more than 60 years now, to the point where new ones cannot even be imported/manufactured for the purpose of selling them to civilians. What firearms enthusiasts have is a fixed pool of automatic weapons that is only going to decrease over time, thanks to entropy, or people deciding to just lay them up for the forseeable future. Do you honestly think that someone who has forked over the tens of thousands of dollars, gone through the background checks, and completed the necessary paperwork necessary to own a fully-automatic weapon will just leave the bloody thing laying about, where anyone can pick it up and wander off? More often it is police departments that misplace fully-automatic firearms, and those are the only people you would have us trust with them!
Second, what the hell is a “rural terrorist type”? Do they wear flannel and strap bombs to their chests? I think I am just going to throw out that phrase as discriminatory, politicized fear-mongering.

We are guaranteed the right to own our pistols and rifles by our Constitution.

Excuse me, but what do you think fully- and semi-automatic pistols and rifles are? Gerbils?

But it is out of control now.

Only if you do not maintain a firm grip on the stock. I recommend three-shot burst, as opposed to fully-automatic.
But, seriously, what is out of control? Your misplaced modifiers are running amok. If you are referring to fully-automatic weapons, then, as I already mentioned, the pool of those is fixed, and is only going to decline in the future. If you are talking about firearms in general, what happened to that “guaranted the right” bit you just wrote? Or was that just more double-speak?

I guess the only bleeding hearts are the innocent victims left lying at the crime scene.

Oh for the love of God… and here I was hoping we could get through this idiocy without any pointless, vapid, inane emotional pleas. What about “assault weapons are only used in 1% of crimes executed with the assistance of a firearm” do you not understand? Yes, that 1% is undeniably tragic (as is the other 99%), and I am as interested in seeing it go away as the next firearm owner… but I will be buggered if I will let nimwits like you abridge and infringe on my Constitutionally-protected rights in a misguided and inherently flawed attempt to do so.

Our legislators should avoid lobbyists of these gun profiteers and stand up for the police and all innocent victims murdered with these weapons.

Your English teachers should be ashamed of themselves for giving you passing grades in their classes. I am not saying mine would be particularly happy with my current writing style, but, for Heaven’s sake man, what the hell are you talking about? Are “these weapons” fully-automatic, semi-automatic, pistols, rifles, carbines, what? Or, as I suspect, just all firearms, of any shape, size, and variety? It really does help to be clear in your writings, otherwise no one is going to have a bleeding clue what you are talking about.
However, discounting your tenuous grasp on the English language… what the hell are you talking about? Is making profits somehow a bad thing? And what makes you think that the lobbyists of the firearm manufacturers are not as interested in decreasing crimes and deaths caused by guns as you or I are? Furthermore, how dare you draw a connection between buying or manufacturing firearms, and murdering people or attacking police officers? Your insinuations are disgusting, your basis is fallacious, and your biased emotionalism is clouding whatever point you might have had.
Speaking of, what, exactly, was the point of this letter to the editor? This entire thing was massively vague and poorly constructed, and seemed to lack any theme whatsoever… apart from “Guns is EBIL!!11!!!!1!” If your goal was to confuse and infuriate people, consider yourself successful.
In closing and summation, Jim Winston, I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.