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>To me this has nothing to do with our ownership of military vehicles. I
>would think that any of us who own armor would take adequate measures to
>insure it's safety and to keep it from getting into the wrong hands. Just
>like we would for anything else we own.
I disagree. Specifically, this image has been drilled into the heads of the
Fox Network viewers no fewer than 5 times last year. When the public thinks
about military vehicles, they aren't going to think about all of us and our
peaceful pursuits, because we are invisible for the most part. But just let
some Joe McCarthy type get up on a soapbox at the right time and place, and
run that video a few hundred times, swearing that he is out to "protect" the
public from "inappropriate" people like that from getting hold of "military
vehicles," and watch the windseekers (politicians) rally to push a bill
through the house and senate, prohibiting our ownership of such things, or
at least heavily licensing it (to the point that many of us could not afford
the hobby). All it took to do in machine guns was the SDS and the Black
Panthers, and the legislation was passed in 1968, two years before either of
these groups really raised havoc in the US. The legislation was passed with
just the perceived threat of potential violence, and the relative small
population of machine gun owners in the US, who were powerless to influence
the legislation, could not prevent the introduction of a bill which
effectively required the registration of all machine guns in the United
States, and eventually banned the manufacture of them for all except the
armed forces and police use.
I cannot stress enough that you need to get out there with your vehicle and
build positive public image. If there is just one photograph of an M37
rescuing a child from a flood, or driving dialysis patients to their
treatments during a snowstorm, it is worth so much to the public image of
our hobby. Otherwise we risk letting somebody else, like the unfortunate
fellow in the M60, build it for us. Oh, and don't run tank car crushing
events at your rallies- you're just begging to be misunderstood by our
wonderful, objective, corporate-owned press!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 21 2000 - 18:15:03 PST