Americans need to reject more worthless gun bans.

Making Sense of the Senseless

Across America, most of us join with the parents and friends of the 26 people who were killed in Newtown, CT. last Friday, and we pray that God will give them the strength to endure their loss.  All of us struggle to understand why.  What caused 20-year-old, Adam Lanza to kill 20 first grade students and their teachers in the small Connecticut town, we may never know.  Now, while the sadness and anger are still intense and fresh, is no time to enact knee-jerk national policy.  Nevertheless, the plan to do so has already begun, and we should be ready for the media war that is sure to follow.

Just last Sunday, the NBC television network, predictably trotted out that on-trick pony, NYC Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to rail against gun ownership as the root cause that leads to these kinds of killings, when nothing could be further from the truth.  Bloomberg, you will remember, is that dastardly left-wing political hack who sent agents here to Virginia, in hopes of making illegal gun purchases in order to advance his mindless gun-control initiatives.  Bloomberg has long blamed Virginia, and other southern states, for supplying the weapons whereby New Yorkers violate New York’s idiotic gun ban--idiotic, because bans never work to deter the lawless.  If they did, we would have no illegal drug trade in this country, gay marriage would be unheard of, and children would not be able to view pornography on the internet.  Just last year, 91 people were killed in Norway, which had recently passed a gun ban similar to New York’s.  Connecticut has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, and yet, these laws did not prevent the carnage in Newtown.  Ironically, Connecticut is home to gun makers, Colt, Ruger, Marlin and Savage.

The facts apparently mean nothing to the rabid firearm-phobes like Bloomberg, Obama and US Attorney General, Eric Holder, and sometimes, neither do existing laws.  (Eric Holder, of course, is the man responsible for operation “Fast and Furious” which put 250 guns from the United States, into the hands of Mexicans, in direct violation of current US law.)  The hypocrisy is staggering, and it does not stop there.  We live in a culture that does not value life, and we fill the heads of adults and teens with images of death and maiming.  Video games urge players to become proficient at killing people.

There will undoubtedly be more talks about what the left and the media erroneously refer to as “assault rifles,” the semi-automatic AR-15 style rifle which is roughly the civilian equivalent to the US Army’s fully-automatic, M-16.  There is nothing about these weapons that makes them inherently more dangerous than other rifles, but to the gun phobes they seem to appear more menacing.  The miss-named “assault weapons ban,” passed during the Clinton administration, had no affect on school shootings.  In fact, there are semi-automatic pistols that can hold 16 rounds as they are delivered from the factory.  I own one. 
  
Killings like the one in Newtown, predictable occur in places where gun restrictions are severe, in part, because the perpetrators have no one to fear except the police, whom they can usually avoid.  Switzerland, which has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe, and no school shootings, mandates that every household contain at least one firearm.  And they do not have gun accidents, because everyone knows how to use guns safely.  Gun are tools, and therefore, making guns illegal will not prevent people from using them irresponsibly, any more than banning hammers would prevent people from using them as weapons.

When the Virginia Tech. massacre occurred, I was working for the Virginia State Police, and I realized that the police cannot always protect us from killers like Seung-Hui Cho.  Do we even have a right to expect the police to be responsible for protecting our lives and the lives of our families?  I don’t think so.  Each of us needs to be responsible for our own security, as well as our own health care and our own retirement.  People who are bent on homicide do not obey gun laws, just as users of illegal drugs do not respect drug laws.

We do need to have a dialog about life and death in this country.  Is the life of a 6-year-old child any more valuable than the life of a six-month-old child in the womb?  Our laws say, Yes!  We don’t value people by awarding killers with life.  One of the good things about America, is that we can each decide whether or not our lives are precious enough to be defended with firearms.  The down-side is that others may make a different assessment.  Whatever the outcome of this latest tragedy, we must not allow politicians who have no credibility, to endanger our lives and the lives of our families, simply to make themselves feel safer.