The tools of liberty?

The color photo, published on page A-10 of the March 18 Wall Street Journal, focuses over the shoulders of two camouflage-attired African troopers in red berets, watching as two corn-shuck stacks of perhaps 200 rifles each go up in roaring orange flame.

“Kenyan police watch a pyre of confiscated weapons in Nairobi on Tuesday,” reads the Journal editors’ caption. “Thousands of weapons that were used in criminal activities across the country have been rounded up and burned by the police since 2007.”

Not “alleged by the corrupt and tyrannical government of election-rigging President-for-Life Mwai Kibaki to have been used in criminal activities,” mind you. 

The weapons being burned in the photo are rifles, not handguns. Do most “criminals” of your acquaintance use long arms? Who says those weapons weren’t “seized from freedom fighters”? If someone were to submit to The Wall Street Journal an old photo of Nazi storm troopers, back in 1936, identified by the source as showing “German police burning confiscated weapons that were used by Jews and Gypsies in criminal activities across the country,” do you suppose that photo and caption would be published verbatim, without any editorial attention?

How about if the caption-writer celebrated a “bonfire of dangerous and subversive books and newspapers,” instead? Still no problem?
Or is someone’s hoplophobia showing?

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