Most days I feel like I’ve seen about everything from the media that’s worth even commenting on, but sometimes they outdo themselves. Such an example can be found in this editorial from the Middletown Press:

Yet gun-rights activists have successfully intimidated stores in Maryland and California into not selling the iP1. The gun-rights movement is treating the expansion of consumer choice not as free enterprise, but as treason.

It takes quite a lot of gall to suggest we’re fighting “the expansion of consumer choice.” We’re fighting smart gun mandates which would essentially create a sweeping gun ban across a large percentage of the population of the United States. This could have been about consumer choice, but people like the Editorial board of the Middletown Press, Bryan Miller, and other anti-gun nitwits made another choice.

Few industries need innovation as desperately as the gun trade. As Mauch writes in his essay, which appeared in the Washington Post, “Firearm safety has not meaningfully advanced in the past century.” Automobile safety, by contrast, has progressed so significantly in that same period that guns are poised to pass auto accidents as a cause of death.

And what do you idiots know about innovation in the gun trade? I’m always amazed at the arrogance of journalists willing to opine about topics they know absolutely nothing about. That seems to go double when the topic is firearms. Come to SHOT one year, and then argue there’s no innovation. There has been a lot of innovation. There has even been a lot of SAFETY innovation. Virtually all modern firearms are drop safe. That wasn’t the case even a few decades ago.

So maybe a compromise is in order: If New Jersey allows the marketplace to dictate the fate of smart guns, will the NRA and its followers be willing to do the same? That’s a deal worth making.

You put your cards on the table already. No deal. We fight the technology because we know what will be coming next. We simply do not trust you not to mandate the technology once it hits the market and you, the people who know nothing about firearms or firearms safety, decide it’s working well enough to impose on those people who do know about those things. Sorry, not accepting the firearm market being controlled by clueless journalists, sniveling politicians, and pearl clutching ninnies. That’s what we’re inviting if we give in to the smart gun technology.