In an article to be published in this week’s issue of Newsweek, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet strongly defended the right of citizens to keep arms while calling for more armed guards in schools and denouncing proposals put forth by President Barack Obama.
“The police do not exist to protect the individual. They exist to cordon off the crime scene and attempt to apprehend the criminal,” Mamet wrote. “We individuals are guaranteed by the Constitution the right to self-defense. This right is not the Government’s to ‘award’ us. They have never been granted it.”
On the idea favored by the National Rifle Association to place more armed guards in schools, Mamet agrees:
“What possible purpose in declaring schools ‘gun-free zones’? Who bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the sign? Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might bring it into the school. Good. We need more armed citizens in the schools.”
Mamet also critcized Obama repeatedly, and singled out one of the President’s most notable gun control policies as a “hoax” and “political appeal to the ignorant”:
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal (as above) for 78 years. Did the ban make them “more” illegal? The ban addresses only theappearance of weapons, not their operation.
