A short time ago I was handed a story from the Ventura Star about a recent vote taken by the Ventura County Fairgrounds Board. The issue: whether to continue permitting gun shows at the Fairgrounds.

As might be expected, an emotional anti-gun bias prevailed, with a 5-3 vote permitting 3 more gun shows this year. Thereafter, a new "policy" threatens an unspecified curtailment of the shows.

I don't know what's worse here, the feverish anti-Second Amendment bias, or the reporting of the meeting.

What has happened to basic journalistic standards? After reading this "story" three times I'm still not certain about the facts. I'm torn between commenting upon the confused subject matter of the Board meeting and the confusion which lies in wait within the minds of those who hate guns. Whether it is the chronic hatred of the person, President Donald Trump, or the hatred expressed by the liberal mind concerning a thing, guns, the two subjects clearly manifest a mental disorder deserving professional attention. Liberals seem to have a free-floating hatred for persons and things they cannot abide. Hating a person can at least be reasonable. Hating a thing, an inanimate object, is profoundly unreasonable. People who go around hating things (like guns) suffer from a condition called paranoia - a condition characterized by delusion - an unreasonable fear of (you name it).

To think that life would be safer without baseball bats, golf clubs, rocks, knives (especially sharp ones) is delusional, though each object has from time immemorial been used to harm or kill people - and to save people from harm. An extreme example of this sort of paranoia can be seen in England, where laws have actually been introduced to curve the tips of kitchen knives to make people feel safer.

As an effort in full disclosure, I have been, and continue to be, a life member of the National Rifle Association for most of my life. I had the good fortune to have spent the first 19-years of my life on a ranch, where hunting, plinking, and shooting contests were most important, as was a love of firearms. I was shooting my little Winchester Model 56 at about six years of age. Target clubs and contests were unremarkably accepted even by my high school. Anti-gunners will be surprised to learn that the distinguished late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shared many of these same boyhood delights (see: Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived").

But times have surely changed, for the worse. Our culture today, thanks to the abandonment of Christian ethics the disintegration of normal family life, parental responsibility, and respect for traditional values and ethics, has all but collapsed.

The American nation has not been so divided morally and philosophically since our Civil War. The issue of Second Amendment rights is at the splitting point of the fight. It's been said in many different ways, if the good guys are deprived of the right to keep and bear arms, the bad guys will destroy this nation.

Inanimate objects remain lifeless and irresponsible. They remain ontologically innocent. So don't blame the gun, the rock, the club or any other lifeless thing for the crimes committed by evil people. The Second Amendment of our federal Constitution expressly and clearly identify the right to keep and bear arms by American citizens. We are the only nation on earth to continue to demand this right. Millions of men and women have fought and died on the field of battle to secure this right. I hope it doesn't take the same effort to maintain that right.