Ridiculous! Part II

PART II

            Now, for some possible solutions.  First, I direct you to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s address to the California Peace Officers Association.  He is considered the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence.  He compares the attention fire prevention people have given to stop children from getting killed by fires in schools.  When was the last time you heard of any child in this country being killed in a school fire?  He believes it has been 50 years.  Why not apply the same diligence to stop children from being killed by gunfire at school?         Before any school is built, the local fire department has to sign off on the building plan.  In most states, the state fire marshal also has to okay it.  As a result, our children are safe from fires.  I propose the local police departments get involved in the same manner, making sure buildings are designed to offer maximum protection against evil killers.  Why can’t police departments require they approve plans for new schools, as fire departments do?  Why shouldn’t so-called security guards on campuses be armed?  Why don’t schools take active shooter drills as seriously as they do fire drills?  Read the article: http://www.policeone.com/active-shooter/articles/2058168-Lt-Col-Dave-Grossman-to-cops-The-enemy-is-denial/ .

            In a separate article, I was surprised to find out that some very well respected police experts believe at least some teachers/administrators at every school should be armed and trained.  Again, the fire emergency comparison.  Schools cannot have a firefighter at every campus, so equipment to fight fires is strategically placed on every campus, and some personnel are trained to use it.  What if every floor or hallway in every school had a teacher armed and trained to deal with active shooters?  Would our children be more protected?  I believe so.  They certainly wouldn’t be less protected.  Make their armed status known only to the administration and police officials.  However, let it be known to all that every school might have armed personnel in any given classroom or hallway.  Let the bad guys wonder if the person they are going to face is armed or not.  That is one way we protect airplanes.  Armed air marshals may or may not be on a given plane.  The bad guys can’t plan well that way.  What if the security officers already employed to keep an eye on things at some school campuses were armed?  This could have the same effect that arming citizens in some states has had; a lower firearm crimes rate. 

            I have heard and understand the arguments against arming civilians on campuses, the main point being that untrained people don’t have the training police officers receive and, therefore, could be a liability in a confusing and fluid active shooter situation.  So, train them.  I am not suggesting we simply had a gun to people who don’t want them or are incapable of learning how to use them.  I am suggesting we allow those who want to be trained to be trained.  There may also be a little protectionism rearing its head.  Police officers generally want to believe they alone are able to handle those situations.  Those who are so afflicted will have to get over it, just as firefighters and paramedics have to accept the fact that many civilians know who to perform basic firefighting and first aid duties while waiting for the arrival of professionals.  I suspect there is another resistant attitude having to do with many teachers’ general opposition to guns of any kind, anywhere, any time.  They have to get over it.  Gun ownership is here and protected from extinction.  Accept it as you have accepted so many educational changes with which you have disagreed.  Once you have accepted it, you can move on to solving the problem of protecting our children.

            The reason I strongly believe the good guys on campus should be armed is two-fold.  First, the present situation is not working.  In education, materials and methods are constantly evaluated.  When a particular curriculum or learning method is determined to be ineffective, new ideas are tested and implemented.  The modern classroom is not much like it was in Beaver Cleaver’s day.  Blackboards are gone.  Sitting in the corner with a dunce hat is unacceptable.  Lecturing has been replaced with active learning, inclusive learning, critical thinking, cooperative learning, and differentiated instruction.  Every 5 to 7 years the textbooks are updated to reflect the latest educational ideas about what and how students should learn.  So, why are teachers so resistant to a new idea to protect the lives of the children they teach?  We all need to accept the fact that schools are no longer 1950 style safe havens.  What we are doing right now isn’t working.  Burying our heads in the sand and denying that evil people may very well want to desecrate our campuses and kill our children will not change the fact that our children are at risk.  We need new methods of protecting them from people who will disobey any gun laws we may have or put in place.  The same educators who are so intent on protecting students from bullying, either physical or verbal, should be jumping at the opportunity to protect those same students from being shot.

            And where will those evil lawbreakers take the guns they acquire through illicit means?  A 1982 survey of male felons in eleven state prisons gives us some insight into the way these people think.  About 34% of them had been “scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim.”  About 40% had decided not to commit a crime because they "knew or believed” the intended victim was carrying a gun.  About 69% of those surveyed said they knew other criminals who had been similarly scared off.  This is not news.  You’ve seen the television commercials depicting a couple of thieves deciding not to break into a particular house because it had a sign indicating it was protected by an alarm company.  Why choose a protected house when one down the street is unprotected?  When some schools are known to be protected by armed employees, why choose them when another a few blocks away is not protected?

            Since I wrote the above words, vice-president of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, made some headlines, and pretty much stole my thunder.  I agree with everything he said.  How ridiculous to advertise to evil people intent on mayhem where they can shoot people without fear of anyone shooting back!  We protect everything we deem valuable with the presence of guns, everything that is, except our children.  His indictment of the video game and film industry is perfectly correct.  The same liberal voices of our society who decry gun ownership and believe the idea of protecting our children by the presence of guns on campuses are actively involved in producing visual and audio violent stimuli that desensitize children and make it easier for them to act out latent aggressive tendencies.  The media makes evil heroes out of successful mass murderers, propagate lies about weapons and gun control, and preys on the raw emotions of their audience. 

            In closing, to quote LaPierre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”  That has proven to be true in case after case; the recent Clackamas Mall shooter (2012), the church shooter in Colorado Springs (2007), New York Mills, NY (2010), Parker Middle School dance, PA, 1998.  While we await better procedures for identifying and treating mentally ill individuals who are prone to committing mass murders of school children, and while we wait for our current laws to be more aggressively enforced, and while we do what we can to change the culture of violence perpetrated by Hollywood producers and actors, and by money-hungry gamers, and while we wait for parents to accept the notion that they need to be responsible for their children’s behavior and be more active in controlling what they see, hear and do, we need to protect our children at the schoolhouse door.

Sources (for both Part I and Part II)

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats

http://www.policeone.com/active-shooter/articles/2058168-Lt-Col-Dave-Grossman-to-cops-The-enemy-is-denial/

Florida State University criminologist, Gary Kleck, analyzed data from the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey (1992-1998). Describing his findings on defensive gun use, in Armed: New Perspectives on Gun Control, New York:Prometheus Books (2001)

http://extranosalley.com/?p=30307

http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/top-12-quotes-gun-control-sandy-hook-shooting/story?id=17999175#2

Ridiculous!

            I was hoping I could put this off until all the dead were properly mourned and buried, but the anti-gun crowd just can’t resist exploiting the dead for their political purposes, while criticizing the NRA for maintaining silence for at least a week.  Before the blood of those babies had dried on their school room floors, I was confronted with a Facebook posting suggesting I should digitally sign a petition to pressure the NRA to stop blocking “common sense” gun regulations.  I became so enraged, I posted a comment, instead of keeping silent out of deference for the dead and grieving.  I, therefore, feel I must take this opportunity to set before you some sensible actions that could actually achieve what the left say they want to achieve.

            Since last Friday, many insensitive anti-gun representatives have made some ridiculous statements.  Ridiculous, first of all, because none of them had waited for all the facts to be made known before spouting off.  Ridiculous, as well, because once they began moving their lips it was obvious they were merely spewing old, memorized political rhetoric that failed to address the real issues.  Senator Feinstein wants to re-introduced a failed ban on assault weapons.  Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg got behind Feinstein’s plan, as did Rahm Emmanuel, the mayor of Chicago.  Numerous calls have been made to enact laws preventing the mentally handicapped from accessing any guns.  These cries for “common sense” laws regarding the mentally ill began as soon as the Sandy Hook shooter was identified as someone who had some sort of mental deficiency. 

            Let’s take a look at some facts before I offer some sensible solutions to a complex problem.  First, the Connecticut shooter (whose name I refuse to use), did not purchase the weapons he used.  He took them from his mother, who had legally purchased them.  Therefore, no new law restricting the sale of any kind of gun to mentally ill people would have prevented the Sandy Hook massacre.  What may have prevented it is a woman’s more conscientious care for the guns she possessed.  If they had been locked in a safe, and the combination unavailable to her son, he would not have been able to use them.  It is ridiculous, then, to appeal to a nation of people shocked, mourning, and emotionally fragile to “make sure this kind of violence never happens again” by pushing for stricter laws that wouldn’t have prevented this incident.

            However, the lack of access to guns does not guarantee the absence of mass murders.  As talk show host, Mark Levin has noted, “Not a single gun was used in the Oklahoma bombing.”  Just hours before the Sandy Hook massacre, a Chinese man walked into a school in China, where gun ownership is banned, and severely injured 23 students with a kitchen knife.  Liberals seem to think that gun ownership alone is a dangerous freedom that should be curtailed.  Bob Costas recently said as much when he made the statement that if football player Jovan Belcher had not owned a gun, he and his girlfriend would be alive today.  Of course, Bob didn’t mention that just hours earlier a young man in Wyoming had just murdered two people and killed himself, and not a gun was in sight, just knives and a bow and arrow.  I guess if O.J. Simpson had not owned a knife, Nicole would be alive today.  Ridiculous.

            Representative Louie Gohmert (Texas) said he wished the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary had been in possession of an assault weapon in her office, then she wouldn’t have had to attack the shooter unarmed.  In response, Mayor Bloomberg of New York City made this ridiculous statement, “I don’t know what the gun would’ve done…I can just tell you that if you have a gun in your house, you are something like 22 times as likely to shoot a friend or a relative as somebody trying to assault you.  Guns kill people.  They don’t belong in schools.  They don’t belong on campuses.  They don’t belong in the hands of minors, or people with psychiatric problems or people with drug abuse problems, or people with criminal records.”  The mayor doesn’t know “what the gun would’ve done.”  Perhaps I can enlighten His Honor.  It would have killed or wounded the attacker.  And, Mayor, perhaps you should get the facts before repeating ridiculous statements you’ve heard from unreliable people.  For instance, you might take note of a study done by Florida State University criminologist, Gary Kleck, who analyzed data from the Department of Justice (1992-1998).  “Contrary to the myth that using a gun in self-defense is more likely to result in injury or death to the victim or innocent bystanders and fail to successfully thwart the crime rather than the criminal, the evidence, as opposed to selective anecdotes, suggests the opposite.”  His study showed that “less than 2% of fatal gun accidents occur during defensive gun use…that would imply 20 per year.”  That’s 20 people, not 20%, Mayor.  Further, in his answer to the question, “How often do gun owners accidently shoot a family member in the course of defensive gun use?” he came up with quite a different conclusion than Bloomberg.  He believes less than 2% of fatal gun accidents occur in this type of circumstance.  The mayor is a little too liberal with his zeroes.  His assumptions and facts are ridiculous.

            I am simply flabbergasted that Mayor Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago has the audacity to take to the airwaves advocating for more gun control.  His city has had a ban on handguns for at least the past 28 years.  The homicide rate in Chicago in 2011 was 20% higher than the previous year.  The violent crime rate in Chicago in 2010 was more than 148% higher than the national average.  Texas, on the other hand, with some of the most lenient gun control laws, has one of the lowest gun crime rates in the nation.  Yet, Mayor Emmanuel is afraid a recent Supreme Court reversal of the state’s concealed weapons ban will put people’s safety at risk.  Really?  He believes the people of Chicago are not at risk now, with a complete ban on handguns and concealed weapons?  Ridiculous and ignorant.

            Senator Feinstein wants to reintroduce the assault weapons ban, detailing specific makes and models, and magazine design and capacities.  There’s no convincing evidence that gun violence dropped as a result of the 1994-2004 ban.  Yet, the senator seems fixated on a weapon that, in 2010, was probably used to kill no more than 25 people in the United States.  I know 25 people is 25 too many, but how does that number warrant a complete ban while the weapons used in the other 8,000 homicides (approximate number) are ignored?  Estimates indicate that of the approximately 8,800 murders in the U.S. in 2010, about 7,700 were committed with handguns, about 480 with shotguns, 460 with rifles, and about 125 with “other” weapons (knives, baseball bats, fists, e.g.).  While about 25 people are killed with assault rifles each year, about 40,000 are killed in vehicle accidents, but the senator isn’t calling for a complete ban on motor vehicles.  You may not see the connection, but here it is:  If the best answer to one form of death is a complete ban on the instrument used, then the same should logically apply to all other instruments of death.  Ridiculous?  Of course.

            Why focus on assault rifles?  The liberals’ argument is that they are not needed for hunting, as though the second amendment was all about hunting.  Liberals don’t want to admit that our country was founded by a violent insurrection, made possible by the possession of guns.  The precipitating incident leading to the second amendment was the British attempt to seize guns from Concord and Lexington.  They weren’t interested in keeping the colonists from hunting.  They wanted to deny them the use of equal fire power.  We need to protect the second amendment because, as Thomas Jefferson said, there are times in human events when it becomes necessary to throw off oppressive governments.  That is why it is important to preserve the right to possess assault weapons.

            This article has already exceeded the maximum number of words most people feel comfortable reading in one sitting.  So, I will hold off on my suggestions for solutions for a couple of days. At that time I will also include the sources used for the statistics quoted in this article.

C'mon People. Show Some Class

AP Photo

                Those of you who know me know my stand on gun control.  But that is not what I want to opine about here.  And I won’t be posting any pithy pro-gun posters on my Facebook timeline in the near future.

                I am deeply disturbed when, before the blood of those innocent children at Sandy Hook School is dry, people are making political statements about gun control.  I am equally disturbed by those who want more restrictions as those who want more freedom.  Before any news outlet had even determined the correct name of the shooter, I read a Facebook post advocating more restrictions.  The photo above was used by a news outlet in an article about gun control the day of the incident.  We still don’t know much about him, or why he would do what he did, or how he had access to his mother’s weapons, or what state of mental health he was in, or how he got into the school, or just about anything else.  But that hasn’t stopped people from seizing the opportunity to turn this into a political cause.

                I will admit that the first several references to defending our 2^nd Amendment rights were in response to anti-gun remarks.  However, I am now seeing pro-gun remarks appearing as well, apparently not in response to any specific articles to the contrary. 

                Can’t we at least wait until we have most of the facts?  Would it really hurt anyone’s political cause to refrain from comment until we have heard the names and seen the faces of the innocent dead?  Shouldn’t we focus, for at least a week or so, on the grief of those affected by this incident?  Why can’t we stop the polarizing declarations and attacks long enough to mourn together?  Have we really become so jaded that we can trample on the misery of those so deeply affected by such a horrific action just to make some political point?

                My opinions about gun control, freedoms, restrictions, poor parenting, violent games, or drug abuse are irrelevant right now, and my exposition concerning them would be irreverent at this time.  Praying for the families of the dead and the children exposed to this horror seem to be the only appropriate action right now.

Costas Falls Off Pedestal

            Tragically, this past Sunday, Kansas City Chief’s Jovan Belcher took his own life after taking the life of his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins.  These stories are always heart wrenching.  Young people with so much potential both personally and professionally, waste it all, and often choose to take someone else’s life as well.  So many emotions and thoughts surface immediately following an incident like this.  Those who knew and loved Jovan, grieved over his death while harboring anger over his actions in killing a young woman and making a young girl an orphan.  Quarterback Brady Quinn expressed his thoughts at a news conference that day: 

     I know when it happened, I was thinking in my head, thinking what I could have done differently.  When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it?  When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth?  We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us.  Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.

            I applaud Brady Quinn’s analysis.  He spoke with sensitivity and understanding.

            I wish I could say the same for Bob Costas, a sports commentator I have enjoyed and admired for many years.  Sunday, during the half-time break of the Chief’s game, he fell headlong off the pedestal I had provided for him.  Bob decided this was a good time to make a political statement, calling for more stringent gun control.  He mostly quoted from a column written by Jason Whitlock. 

     You want some actual perspective on this?  Well, a bit of it comes from the Kansas City-based writer Jason Whitlock, with whom I do not always agree, but who today said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article.  "Our current gun culture, ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.  Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.  In the coming days, Jovan Belcher's actions, and their possible connection to football will be analyzed.  Who knows?  But here, is what I believe.  If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

            Granted, these are Whitlock’s words, or a paraphrase of them, but Bob Costas adopts them when he praised Whitlock for writing them.  Really, Bob and Jason?  You really believe someone who is bent on killing another person will not find a way to do so if guns are removed from the options?  Do you think Nicole Brown Simpson would be alive today if all the knives were removed from every kitchen in America?  On the same day Whitlock wrote and Costas pontificated, a young man named Christopher Krumm  in Casper, Wyoming killed his father’s girlfriend, then went to the college where his father was a professor, and killed him as well, before killing himself.  Not a shot was fired.  A bow, some arrows, and a knife were the murder weapons.

            In 2010, 67.5% of all U.S. murders were committed with a firearm.  That means 32.5% were committed with other weapons such as knives, blunt objects, and human body parts (e.g. fists, feet).  Whitlock and Costas probably don’t want to be confused by the facts, but here’s just two they should consider:  1) The 31 states with liberal concealed weapons laws also have a 24% lower murder rate than the ones that have the more restricted laws.  2) The 2 cities with as couple of the highest violent crime rates in the U.S., Washington, D.C. and New York City, also have the most restrictive gun laws in the country.

            It would appear that the old adage is correct: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  Neither do knives, swords, rocks or fists kill people.  They are simply the tools of the murderers.  Costas believes “If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”  Well, he must have some sort of crystal ball to know what would have happened if one element of this incident had been altered.  I wonder if he thinks Nicole Brown Simpson would still be alive today if O.J. had not had access to the kitchen knives? 

            Shame on Costas for using his bully pulpit to promote his own misguided political pet peeve on the same day an innocent life was taken!  And disgrace on him for spouting off on a subject about which he knows so very little.