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.